Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I want to apologize to Dawn Dawson. Ms. Dawson is a thoughtful young woman who was engaged in a lawsuit involving a charge of discrimination based on sexual orientation. An organization in the dispute we had about the scope of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, in my judgment, misquoted the holding in that lawsuit. In the course of refuting that, I quoted some passages which reflected somewhat negatively on Ms. Dawson. I should not have done that. There is no reason to make any negative inference about her. It was in a legal context which does not support factually any negative response.

Ms. Dawson called me after that, came to see me. I was impressed by her grace, by her thoughtfulness, and by her commitment to working for a better America for all of us.

So I want to express my regret that I brought this young woman into this dispute for no good reason. She deserves much better from me, as she deserves from all who are concerned about fairness in this country. And as I said, I apologize to Ms. Dawson. I continue to believe that the organization with which I was disputing misinterpreted her lawsuit, but that was not her fault.

Mr. Speaker, I am impressed by the sincerity of the gentleman from Washington's advocacy on people who are transgender, and I hope that as we contemplate this strategy today people will fully examine that.

I regret the fact that there do not appear to be the votes in this House to include people who are transgender. And I am struck by the eagerness, frankly, of some people to use that group as a weapon with which to defeat the whole bill because these are people who are opposed not only to the inclusion of people who are transgender, but who have historically been opposed to including any protection for people at all.

I will yield to the gentleman.

I take back my time. That's all the gentleman said, but the effect would be to try to undermine the bill. When people who are opposed to the basic bill and opposed to the amendment lament the chance not to vote on an amendment which would undermine the bill, people should understand where we are.

I filed the bill that included people who are transgender. And earlier this year, I was very proud when this House passed a hate crimes bill which explicitly included people who are transgender. My recollection is the gentleman from Washington voted against that.

We are in the following situation in this country: We have had prejudices of various sorts. Sadly, prejudice increases as difference increases. We have made progress in, I believe, disputing the prejudice against people, like myself, who are gay. We have not, lamentably, made as much progress in people who are transgender. I agree that the argument is there for including everyone. I agree that there was an argument for including legal immigrants in the SCHIP bill.

The question we have is this: If we do not have the votes to go forward with as much as we would like to do, do we then abandon any effort? And do we allow those who are opposed to any progress at all in the anti-discrimination fight in this area to use a particular group as a way to prevent progress?

Mr. Speaker, I've been voting on anti-discrimination measures for 35 years when I first joined the legislature, and I have voted repeatedly to extend the protection to groups of which I am not a member, based on ethnicity, based on race, based on disability, based on age. I am now a beneficiary of the age one, but I wasn't when I voted for it. And I wish we had the votes in this House to ban discrimination of all sorts. I also wish that I had as much energy today as I did when I voted to ban AIDS discrimination when it wasn't eligible. I wish I could eat more and not gain weight. I wish a lot of things. But I will not act on my wishes irresponsibly.

I hope we will go forward today and do as much as we can. I believe that if we are able to muster the votes to tell millions of Americans who are gay and lesbian that they are not bad people, that it is not legitimate to fire them simply because of who they are, the message we send to those people, the message we send to high school students who go to school each day fearing the kind of torment that they will confront, that that will be the most significant advance we have made in fighting prejudice since the Americans with Disabilities Act. I wish we could do more. And if we are able to do this, I will continue my efforts to do more.

I am glad to see more recruits now to the effort to protect people who are

transgender. I wish they were there when many of us were fighting many years ago.

I will make this prediction, that if we go forward today and adopt legislation that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation but does not ban discrimination based on gender identity, some of us will continue to fight to protect people based on gender identity, and many of those seeking to use that issue today will be our opponents as we go forward trying to do it.

Will the gentleman yield?

I simply wanted to point out that this proposal that we be allowed to vote on this issue comes from people who are opposed to it in all regards and who understand that the effect of that procedure would be to undermine our ability to make any progress at all.

Will the gentleman yield?

Yes. The rule gives the opportunity to the supporters of including transgender inclusion the right to make that decision, not its opponents.

I am grateful for the obscurity of the opposition's argument.

I first filed a bill 35 years ago to say that you couldn't fire someone because he was gay or she was a lesbian, and at the time people were very straightforward about their opposition. Times have changed. It is no longer fashionable to say that you ought to be able to discriminate against someone based on his or her sexual orientation, so we now get other arguments.

Let me say this: I have heard a number of people raise this argument that the real problem is that it says ``perceived.'' I do not believe that a single one of them would change his or her position if we were to remove that. They are opposed to the notion that gay men and lesbians, people like me, should be allowed to prove themselves in the workplace without discrimination, but that's not a good argument to make. So we get ``perceived'' as the argument, and it is not a serious one.

In the first place, it's arguing about having to defend a negative; it's wrong, both legally and factually. The burden of proof is on the complainant. No employer has to prove a negative. It is the complainant who has the hard job of proving the positive. That's why historically statutes like this, every time we try to protect some people against discrimination, we go through two phases. First, beforehand, we get the most absurd exaggerations of the chaotic impact it will have. After the fact, they are rarely, unfortunately, enforced very vigorously. And by the way, if this ``perceived,'' if this were a problem, we would have examples of it. Nineteen States have laws like this on the books, and how many examples have you had of the poor, befuddled employer who is so unable to perceive that he is put on the dock? None. This is a made- up issue made up by people who don't want to confront the real issue.

And here is the real issue: there are millions of our fellow citizens, Madam Chair, gay or lesbian, who live in fear that they could be fired because they live in States where there is no such protection. And we have had real examples of that. And what we say today is, no, you can't be fired because of that.

Why is ``perceived'' in there? Because otherwise you're opening a big loophole. By the way, this notion of ``perceived,'' it is so unusual that it's in the American Disabilities Act and has been interpreted by several judges, Justice Alito, Judge Mukasey and Poser, three radicals who have enforced this.

So, let's not hide behind this semantic. That is not the genuine motivation for opposition to this bill on the part of anyone in this House. What they are saying is, we don't want to protect working men and women from this.

Madam Chair, I was accused in the last campaign by a former Member of this body of pursuing a radical homosexual agenda. Well, here it is in the House today, working, getting a job. That's what we are asking for, the right for people to go to work and be judged solely on how they work. Let's get rid of the semantic obscurantism.

Madam Chairman, we have these laws in 19 States. Nothing like that fantasy has ever come forward. There is a saying that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it doesn't exist, you can't fix it.

They have made this up. We have had the experience for over 25 years with laws exactly like this in 19 States.

Parliamentary inquiry.

Is it in order to demand a roll call before the Chair has put the voice vote?

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Before I begin, I have an inquiry: If I could yield to the gentleman from Virginia, the proponent of the motion, would he consider my making a unanimous consent request to change this to a ``motion of forthwith,'' so the House could simply adopt this ``forthwith'' and go to dinner?

Well, this is now clear. This is a motion to do this promptly. ``Promptly'' means at the speediest nine calendar days, because it does not, as the Parliamentarian has informed us in writing, waive any of the rules for committee meetings, for Rules Committee, et cetera. So the purpose here, the intent, perhaps not the purpose, but the unmistakable intent would be to put this off until after we are due to adjourn November 16. And for what purpose? For the purpose of restating what has already been stated.

It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, and I take some encouragement from this, that opponents of the principle of nondiscrimination don't want to debate it on its merits. We haven't heard any defense of discrimination. We just have a parliamentary maneuver to protect it.

This is not about marriage. In fact, this is not a recommit. It is a statement. It says ``nothing in this act may be construed.'' Correct. No one who reads English could think to the contrary.

But, just to make sure, the gentleman from California offered a motion, and the minority tried to have it not be roll-called, and you voted for it, Members of the House. It says, ``As used in this act, the terms `married' or `marry' refer to marriage as defined in section 7, title I of the U.S. Code, the Defense of Marriage Act.'' The Members of the House just voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm that definition.

So what do we have? A motion now simply to delay by reaffirming the last vote.

The gentleman from Indiana thought there was some other language that might lead to a marriage problem, so we adopted that. So this is the third effort to say the same thing. It is not to say the same thing, but to defeat it.

I would say this. I would recommend to my friend from California, who has done such a good job on this, once we have concluded this, report this out as a separate bill, this third reiteration, if it gives people some comfort.

I asked the gentleman to make it ``forthwith.'' If there was a real need to do this, it would be now part of the law and we would be voting. It is ``promptly'' because it adds nothing to the bill, nothing, literally nothing; it subtracts nothing. It is simply a motion to delay.

I now want to address that. I want to address the motion to delay.

Mr. Speaker, we say here that we don't take things personally, and usually that is true. Members, Mr. Speaker, will have to forgive me. I take it a little personally.

Thirty-five years ago, I filed a bill to try to get rid of discrimination based on sexual orientation. As we sit here today, there are millions of Americans in States where this is not the law. By the way, 19 States have such a law. In no case has it led to that decision. The Massachusetts law passed in 1989, that did not lead to the decision in 2004. Unrelated.

But here is the deal. I used to be someone subject to this prejudice, and, through luck, circumstance, I got to be a big shot. I am now above that prejudice. But I feel an obligation to 15-year-olds dreading to go to school because of the torments, to people afraid that they will lose their job in a gas station if someone finds out who they love. I feel an obligation to use the status I have been lucky enough to get to help them.

I want to ask my colleagues here, Mr. Speaker, on a personal basis, please, don't fall for this sham. Don't send me out of here having failed to help those people.

We have already today twice voted overwhelmingly to repudiate any suggestion that this had anything to do with marriage. What you have is a ploy by people who want to keep discrimination on the books, who want to deny protection to so many vulnerable victims of discrimination, but they at least understand that is not something you can say explicitly. So they give us this sham.

I ask, I ask again, would the gentleman allow us to adopt this forthwith? I would yield to the gentleman for that purpose so we can make that forthwith.

I asked the gentleman a simple question.

The response is ``no.'' I was ready to yield to make this ``forthwith'' so this extra language which does nothing could be added. But if you don't do that, as they won't, and you vote for this, you are killing this bill. Understand that. Nine days later it is too late for this bill and we are out of this.

So I will close with this. Yes, this is personal. There are people who are your fellow citizens being discriminated against. We have a simple bill that says you can go to work and be judged on how you work and not be penalized. Please don't turn your back on them.

Mr. Speaker, on October 9 I delivered a speech in the House regarding, among other things, my involvement in advocating for civil rights protections for transgender individuals. Following those remarks, I inadvertently failed to submit for the Record several documents to which I had made reference during the speech, specifically excerpts from testimony I gave before an Education and Labor Committee subcommittee last month in support of including full transgender protection in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and from two other speeches addressing transgender issues that I offered during previous debates on the House floor. In order to give a fuller picture of my views on these important topics, I ask that the documents be printed here.

Excerpt From Testimony of U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, Subcommittee on

Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, ``The Employment Non-

Discrimination Act, H.R. 2015,'' September 5, 2007

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. . . . And then we have the

issue that my colleague so ably discussed of the

transgender--and I understand that this is a new issue for

people. There are people who were born with the physical

characteristics of one sex who strongly identify with the

other. Some of them have a physical change, some of them

don't. Let me make a plea to all of my colleagues--these are

people--think what it must be like to be born with that set

of feelings. Think what it must be like, think what stress--

what agony you go through--to defy society's conventions to

the extent where you make that kind of a statement. This is

something people are driven to do. Is there any reason why

any of us should make the lives of those people more

difficult than they already are?

Obviously these are people who are coping and things are

getting better. Things are better in many ways. When I was

younger, a lot of things were difficult that are less

difficult today. But what we say here is if someone has these

feelings--if someone is born with one set of characteristics

and strongly identifies the other way--should you fire him?

You deny him a promotion? You say no matter how good your job

is, that makes me uneasy so out you go. That we say in here

you can make rules that those people have to abide by. That

they dress in a gender consistent way . . .

There is another issue we . . . have to talk about. What

happens when they're all in the shower together--you know you

can segregate bathrooms, but in showers it's a little

difficult. This says no, people don't have the right to go

into open places where people are unclothed in a way that's

to embarrass people. That we talk about an accommodation,

again people will say, ``well you didn't do that well

enough.'' There's room for some fine-tuning there, but on a

fundamental principle--particularly for those people who are

themselves made the most uneasy by the transgender issue--and

I must say having worked with a lot of transgender people, I

would tell my friends you get over it pretty quickly. Because

what you find out is you're dealing with human beings like

all the rest of us--normal human beings who have the same

emotions and needs and strengths and weaknesses all of us

have. But for those who are not yet at the point of comfort

with them, do we really feel driven to make life harder for

these people?

By the way, I just want to deal with this choice issue. No

one I believe in the history of the world has said, ``you

know what, life's too easy. I think although I was born a

woman I'm going to act like a man. I think that would be a

real lark. I think I'll just go through life that way and

invite physical abuse and invite all kinds of ridicule.''

So that's all we're saying. And let me say here--a final

appeal--if there's any institution that ought to

understand this it's here. Let me tell you what I know.

This institution--we as Members--are very well served by a

large number of gay and lesbian employees. And many of my

colleagues on the Republican side know that and have, to

their credit, employed them.

I wouldn't have said this a couple of years ago, but after

the recent incident it's now public. For years the Clerk of

this House was a gay man, a Republican named Jeff Trandahl,

whose orientation became public because he behaved in a very

honorable and admired way in the issue of our former

colleague, Mr. Foley. And the Ethics Committee saluted Mr.

Trandahl. You know, Jeff Trandahl is an example and I know

Jeff well and he's a friend whom I respect and admire and

given the role he played, how much easier it would have

been--maybe some troubles could have been avoided if there

were legal protections that he and others would have had so

they would not be subject to prejudice.

I'll acknowledge--yes--as Mike Carney's example will show

and my own example will show--people say ``well you know some

of these gay people are misbehaving.'' Yeah, living a life

that you were trying to hide from others is not a

prescription for model behavior. And you do dumb things in

the closet sometimes. It's not an excuse. It's your fault

when you do them. But it's in society's interest to diminish

that pressure. And you can do that today. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, for many years I have had the honor of sharing with our colleagues information about a very important event not just in greater Boston, but from a national perspective. It is the annual dinner of ROFEH International--New England Chassidic Center. Under the leadership of Grand Rabbi Levi Y. Horowitz of the New England Chassidic Center, ROFEH International does extraordinarily important work in the medical field. Rabbi Horowitz is himself a distinguished authority on medical ethics, and plays an important role in helping medical professionals in Boston deal with the ethical issues that modern science encounters. Project ROFEH also plays a very important role in helping provide access to the medical care that is available in Boston to people around the world.

Annually, under the leadership of Rabbi Horowitz, these organizations have a dinner in which leading citizens who have contributed to the work that they do are honored. Without exception they are men and women of great distinction and generosity. This year the awardees are Dr. Kenneth C. Anderson, who receives the ROFEH International Distinguished Service Award, and Keevin Geller, who receives the Man of the Year Award.

Madam Speaker, I was pleased to receive biographies of these two distinguished leaders and I ask that they be printed here along with my congratulations to the people who do the important work of ROFEH International and the New England Chassidic Center, under Rabbi Horowitz's leadership.

Kenneth C. Anderson, MD ``ROFEH International Distinguished Service

Award''

Dr. Anderson graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School,

trained in internal medicine at John's Hopkins Hospital, and

completed hematology, medical oncology, and tumor immunology

training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is the Kraft

Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and

serves as Chief of the Division of Hematologic Neoplasia,

Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, and

Vice Chair of the Joint Program in Transfusion Medicine at

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

He serves as chair of the NCCN Multiple Myeloma Clinical

Practice Guidelines Committee; as a Cancer and Leukemia Group

B Principal Investigator; on the Board of Scientific Advisors

of the International Myeloma Foundation; on the Board of

Directors and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the

Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation; as well as on the Board

of Directors and Chair of the Leadership Committee of the

Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium. He is a Doris Duke

Distinguished Clinical Research Scientist and has had long

term RO-1, PO-I, and SPORE NIH funding.

His numerous awards including the 2001 Charles C. Lund

Award of the American Red Cross Blood Services, the 2003

Waldenstrom's award for research in plasma cell dyscrasias,

the 2004 Johnson & Johnson Focused Giving Award for Setting

New Directions in Science and Technology, the 2005 Third

Annual International Myeloma Foundation Robert A. Kyle

Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2007 Joseph A. Burchenal

Award for Clinical Research from the American Association for

Cancer Research. His paradigm for identifying and validating

targets in the myeloma cell and its bone marrow milieu has

already provided novel therapies, and offers great promise to

improve patient outcome in hematologic malignancies and solid

tumors as well.

Keevin Geller, ROFEH International New England Chassidic Center Man of

the Year Award

Keevin Geller, has been proud to call the Bostoner Rebbe,

his friend for over thirty years. Mr. Geller is the owner of

Barney and Carey Lumber Company since 1978.

In addition to his lumber business, Keevin is a real estate

developer and owner. He was one of the first property owners

to convert a Back Bay townhouse into condominiums, and went

on to complete over twenty-five such projects there and on

Beacon Hill. He built and restored many homes in Milton, also

creating that town's first condominium complex in the

buildings of a former estate. A serious conservationist, he

has specialized in the redevelopment of existing structures,

while protecting the surrounding land. He was honored with

the Commonwealth Award for land preservation.

Keevin was one of the founding members of the Simon

Wiesenthal Center. He is a thirty-year member of the Hundred

Club, and a life member of many conservation organizations.

He is a graduate of Boston University, with a major in Latin.

His wife, Cynthia, also a BU alumna, is the granddaughter of

the late Max Oransky, one of the Rebbe's father's Chassidim.

Cynthia and Keeven reside in Sharon, Massachusetts, where he

serves on various town committees.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material on H.R. 2895.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, this is an historic day. This is an important piece of legislation, broadly and eagerly supported by virtually every organization in this country seeking to expand the supply of affordable housing for low-income people, and also from the leading business groups that understand the need for an increase in the housing supply. So from the Low Income Housing Coalition and all the homeless groups, over to the National Association of Homebuilders and the National Association of Realtors, this is a day they have long waited for; and I submit the following for the Record:

National Association

of Realtors,

Washington, DC, October 9, 2007.

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Representative: On behalf of the 1.3 million members

of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS', I urge

your support of H.R. 2895, the ``National Affordable Housing

Trust Fund Act of 2007''. The number of families facing

critical housing needs is significant and growing. Today, one

in seven U.S. households--both owners and renters--spend over

50% of their household income on housing. A dedicated fund to

produce, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing could

make great strides towards addressing this crisis.

NAR has consistently maintained that homeownership serves

as a cornerstone of our democratic system of government. We

believe that homeownership continues to be a strong personal

and social priority for most Americans. Living in one's own

home is a measure of security and success in life. The

homeownership rate fell slightly during the recent housing

market slowdown. Despite modestly lower home prices in many

regions of the country, many deserving American families

continue to face obstacles in their quest to own a home.

NAR has equally and forcefully maintained that rental

housing has an immediate and beneficial effect on the

prosperity of a community. Rental housing provides a range of

housing options that not only attract top employers but also

generate local taxes, fees and income that benefit local

economies. Sadly, the stock of affordable and available

rental units is declining. As a result, approximately 25% of

renters spend more than half of their household income on

housing costs. Perhaps even more sobering, there is no

location in the country where a household headed by a single

minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom rental

apartment.

The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS' recognizes

that accessibility to safe, decent and affordable housing at

all levels must be one of our nation's highest priorities.

NAR strongly endorses H.R. 2895 and urges your support of

this important legislation.

Sincerely,

Pat V. Combs,

2007 President, National Association

of Realtors.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My friend from Alabama said that there are 30 programs that this would duplicate. I know of one program which helps build family affordable housing. That is what this does. I would yield to the gentleman. Would he name some of the other programs?

The question is, what are the 30 programs that help construct, not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and FHA, he said there were 30 HUD programs that help build affordable family housing.

I would yield to the gentleman if he would tell me what they are.

I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, I take back my time. I yielded for a specific purpose. He has as much time as I do. I asked him, and he has had time to get the list from people: What is the list of programs that build affordable family housing? Construction.

And I will yield.

Mr. Chairman, I take back my time. I think the gentleman doesn't have 30; he doesn't have three.

Would the gentleman please abide by the rules.

He made a statement, and I am yielding my time. He has equal time. I don't think there are 30 programs. I don't think they can come up with them.

The HOME program, I agree, there are reasons why this must be in addition to the HOME program.

Community Development Block Grants are not supposed to be primarily a construction program. Mayors and city council members and others all over the country will be appalled to be told that they are supposed to put CDBG primarily in housing construction; they aren't. It is for a whole variety of programs. People know that.

We do have programs to build housing for the elderly and for the disabled, but there is simply not a list for housing construction.

Secondly, the gentleman from Alabama says, Why don't we fix these programs? Of course, the Republican Party was in control of both Houses of Congress and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for 6 years. Apparently, they didn't do anything.

He then says, Why don't we fix FHA and GSE? Well, I was surprised by that, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman knows that this House has, in fact, passed bills that do make reforms in both the FHA and the GSE. For him to say why don't we fix FHA and GSE when he knows we have passed bills to do it seems, to me, strange because we have done that.

Here is the point. We do have the HOME program. It is subject to annual appropriations. And we do have local

housing trust funds. It is the local housing trust funds that want this bill. The gentlewoman from Illinois mentioned the Low Income Housing Coalition. They are the major driver behind this bill because they understand its importance.

We want to supplement the funds. What is the problem with the one program that builds affordable housing, the HOME program, there is not enough money. It competes with other appropriated funds.

By the way, the argument that somehow we are being unfair to the elderly, in this bill, unlike what happened during the Republican rule, we limit the fees that can be charged to the elderly under the HOME equity mortgage program. We do that. They didn't. We limit what the FHA can charge for mortgage insurance. OMB ordered HUD to raise the fees so they would make even more of a profit. We said you can't do that. We authorized some additional activity. We have limited the fee increases, and we have taken some of the money from the additional activity, not from fee increases.

The fact is this: The Republican Party has opposed any funding for affordable housing construction. They inherited the HOME program. They haven't been very good to it in the appropriations process. This says we need to get back in the business in a major way of helping build affordable housing. There is no 30 programs that build affordable housing for low-income people. That is not what CDBG is intended to do, and it is not what CDBG largely does. Most of the money goes for other things.

This list of 30 programs is mythical. I await its reality, but I don't have any high expectations.

Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia for a colloquy.

First, there was allusion by the gentleman from Alabama to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the bill we passed, which we did do some reforms in, we did say that they should in their secondary mortgage activity be supportive of people at 80 percent of median. We have given them the affordable housing goals, and people who understand this issue understand that there is a distinction, as the gentleman from Virginia understands. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have primarily and historically been aimed at helping people in the more moderate income range. We have actually lowered it to 80 percent of median. This gets to people much below that in general, which is why there is no overlap between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and this program.

Secondly, to the gentleman's argument, what we want to do here is give as much flexibility as we can to the local communities. That is why, yes, we are not creating a Federal bureaucracy here. The Federal Government will largely be passing this money through to the State and local housing trust funds who can focus on the needs of their own community. They would have the ability, with the 15 percent, to spend it where they think best. If they thought it was needed for the lowest income people, they could do that. But if they felt, as in the gentleman's area, this needs to go to people at 60 percent of median, and ultimately when we get the fund up to 80 percent of median, they would have the ability to do that. So the 15 percent is within the discretion of the local communities.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to underline an important distinction that appears to have escaped the gentleman from Alabama: There is a difference between a section 8 voucher program which gives people money to pay their rent on a year-by-year basis and does not encourage the construction of any housing, there is a difference between that and a program to help people build affordable housing. The gentleman now has disclaimed the list to some extent. He says it is not his list; it was when he first mentioned it, it seems to me. Now it is HUD's list.

It is a list that he very carefully reworded, the phraseology, I think. It is a list that assists people who are poor with housing. Yes, it builds shelters for the homeless. That is probably one or two of the programs. It gives section 8 vouchers.

The HOME program is the only one of that list that helps build affordable housing. It helps build it. So the gentleman's list, and he doesn't want to read it, and I understand why. He mentioned Community Development Block Grants. No one familiar with Community Development Block Grants think they are primarily for housing construction. That is not what it does. There are programs that help build housing for the disabled and the elderly. But other than the HOME program, there aren't programs that help build affordable housing.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now aimed at helping people at 100 percent of median and above. We say that should be dropped to 80 percent of median, not 100, but it doesn't help people in the lower income categories. There are no such programs. And so that's the answer to what the gentleman said.

He keeps talking about, Well, we should fix the programs. Of course for 6 years with a Republican President and a Republican-led Congress, they didn't do much.

There are fixes this year. The House did try last year on the FHA. We have repeated that. So we do improve the FHA program. We improve the GSE program, and we also take additional nontax dollars and make them available.

Again, I await this list of programs that help the construction of affordable rental housing. I think I will wait a very long time.

The only other point I make is that I regret we have limited time. I was sorry that the Ways and Means Committee didn't yield time to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling) since he talked about trade and taxes, none of which have anything to do with this bill. So maybe Ways and Means owes us a few minutes, and when their bill comes up later, maybe I will come talk about housing to offset the gentleman from Texas talking about trade and taxes.

I now yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

How much time remains, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute just to say that the assertion that this is ignoring the private market would be more persuasive to me if it were not for the fact that every organization that is engaged in the private market building of housing disagrees.

The National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders, neither of which are known for its socialist tendencies, have written letters in support of this bill exactly as it has been presented. They who fully understand the market, and we don't just use boilerplate rhetoric to describe it, understand the importance of interactivity between some public sector participation and the market, and this creates no new government bureaucracies.

This funds existing State and local housing programs. The Federal role will be for HUD by a formula to distribute it. It is a funding mechanism for the State and local authority.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Al Green).

Yes, in decades. I thought the gentleman said 30 years. I would not claim that it was the largest in 30 years, but it certainly has been the largest since the Republicans took power 12 years ago since they tried to kill them all.

I would say 20 years.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island, my neighbor, Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

How much time remains, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. Chairman, I regret to say that my colleague from Alabama does not appear to be familiar with the bills. I will say, this argument that, oh, how can we do this and create a housing trust fund at the moment that we have a subprime crisis has no validity, it's purely tactical, because exactly the same arguments were being made before the subprime crisis. There's an ideological objection to getting the Federal Government in the business of helping build affordable housing.

The gentleman finally named some of the programs: Building intermediate nursing home facilities, housing for people with AIDS.

My question to him, repeated and ultimately unanswered was, where are the programs that help build affordable family housing? It is not an annual section 8 voucher program which doesn't help build housing. It's not intermediate nursing home facilities. It's not help for people with AIDS. It's none of those programs. HOPE VI, yes. It exchanges some kind of housing for others. HOPE VI has not resulted in any net addition to housing. We're trying to prevent it from being a net diminution.

He then says, well, you're taking money from the FHA and they won't help low-income people. Totally and completely false, portraying a total misunderstanding of the bill. In fact, it is the bill that we passed, unlike the bill that passed under the Republicans, that prohibits the FHA from raising mortgage insurance premiums on people and give that money to the Treasury. That was the Republican approach. We capped those fees.

Here's where the FHA money comes from. We take the limit that the Republicans allowed to stand for years on the number of home equity mortgages the FHA can insure. We also, unlike the Republicans, limit the amount that the elderly can be charged for the first time under those by the servicers, and we are told by CBO that as we increase the volume of FHA home equity mortgages at a lower price for the elderly than existed under the Republican rule, we will generate money.

Now, if we didn't pass this bill, this administration would take that money and put it into the Treasury so it could go help fund the war in Iraq; it could go help fund highway projects, agricultural subsidies.

That's the choice. Do we, having created an additional revenue stream for the FHA, while limiting fees, let it go to the Treasury for agricultural subsidies and the war in Iraq, or do we put it into affordable housing?

With the GSEs, until we talked about helping build affordable low- income housing, my Republican friends were very critical of the GSEs on the whole. The stockholders were getting too much money and too much return for too little.

Nothing in this bill will increase the amount that people have to pay on the mortgages any iota. What it says is that out of the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we're going to make them divert some of this for these public purposes. So in direct contradiction to what the gentleman says, there are not 34 programs that help build affordable housing. There is one, now there will be two, and I hope the bill passes.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I don't believe any of these are controversial.

The first thing we do, we had in the committee an adoption of an amount, a minimum amount that would go to each State. Remember, this is largely a distribution to the States. It's not an existing Federal. This would not be administered at the Federal level. It would be sent to the States.

And some of the smaller States raised a question, and the smaller communities that they might be excluded. Indeed, while this is not exactly what the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) had wanted to offer, which I thought was perfectly reasonable, it comes close to, it touches on the same area. So this would make sure that no State would go without, and at least one community in every State would get some funding.

Next, we had a provision that really didn't make sense requiring a mixed income requirement in elderly projects. We didn't think that was reasonable, and we take it out.

We have a clarification involving the number of units that go to people who are below 50 percent, and we say that applies to all units.

And finally, in response to concerns in the House, we had language that could be better worded. It was somewhat hastily added at the last minute, and I hope it will be improved as we go forward, which seeks to say that no one who is in the country illegally should be allowed to be a resident of one of these projects.

That's the manager's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time with gratitude to my colleagues.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman from California, in consultation with a number of groups, put this forward, and it's to give more flexibility to the recipients.

I yield to the gentlewoman from California who will explain the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, as the designee of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee), I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Washington has been a strong advocate of energy efficiency and reducing excess energy costs. He approached the committee and argued that it would be very useful to have in the bill the language of this amendment, which says that you will take into account, in making the grants, the extent to which the money would reduce utility costs for residents. This would, of course, have the dual advantage of making it less expensive for these low-income residents and also conserving energy. So it seemed to us an entirely reasonable approach, and I was glad to tell the gentleman from Washington that I agree with him and, in fact, to serve as his designee in offering it.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, as the designee of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey), I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman from California, representing a high-cost area, Marin County, especially, in California, confronts the problem that many others confront, but she has it particularly in her district where workers in a municipality can't afford to live in the city in which they work.

So what her amendment does is to propose that with one- to four- family owner-occupied housing, the grantees who receive this money can give preference to public safety officers, teachers, et cetera.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) so that she can speak for herself.

Mr. Chairman, as the designee of the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, we have in our committee been working hard to try to incorporate pro-environmental, energy- saving measures, measures that would reduce global warming. And this is an amendment offered by the gentleman from Rhode Island that is very much in tune with this.

Mr. Chairman, for further elaboration, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is absolutely right. And that same issue, as he knows, is arising in the context of our work on HOPE VI. We want to do the green building standards. We want to do them in a way that will be sensible and reasonable.

Let's be very clear. There aren't enough law enforcement people in the world to make this work if there isn't a willingness on the part of those involved to do it. If people think it is too rigid or inflexible, it's just not going to work as well. I think we have a wide willingness now on the part of the homebuilders and others to be participating in this.

And, yes, we will make this very much a collaborative enterprise. Of course if the gentleman's substitute were to pass, it wouldn't be relevant. But in case it didn't, we will work together.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, as the designee of the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen), I offer the amendment that is now in order.

Mr. Chairman, this is a very reasonable and thoughtful amendment from the gentleman from Maryland. What it says is that we hope this program is established, we hope that there will be entities that will be repeat applicants. We just want to make explicit that if people have gotten a grant and now come back for another one, they be very explicit about what they have done with it. It is, I think, a very useful kind of oversight that's built into the program. It may seem obvious, but we sometimes read about people getting renewed programs when they haven't done a very good job in the last one. This won't make that absolutely impossible, but it will make it less likely. I think it is a very useful amendment by the gentleman from Maryland, and I hope it's adopted.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, this is an unusual amendment. The actual author offered it, and the Member rising in opposition actually opposes it for the first time today. And I appreciate the cooperation we've had.

I want to say that I appreciate, not just that, but the gentleman from Texas, who has been a very constructive member of the committee. We have some differences. That's why we have different parties. But we have a great deal in agreement. And the gentleman's expertise in the homebuilding field has been very helpful as our committee has gone forward. And here is, perhaps, a philosophical difference between us.

The main difference here is that the gentleman's amendment, recognizing, as he does from his own experience, the value of additional housing construction, would do away with our two funding sources. Now, we chose to go in addition to the HOME program, which is the one program where there is a parallel, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the HOME program is, of course, subject to annual appropriations, and that's appropriate for most government work. But we did want to have in the government a program for housing construction that had a little bit more assurance for people than an annual appropriation. Appropriations get caught up in omnibus issues, CR issues. The trust fund will be outside of the kind of deadlock that we have had in the past and may, we hope not, but may have in the future. If you're trying to build housing, the notion that your funding has been slowed down because there has been a fight over some unrelated issue, like the debate about the Iraq war funding, could slow you down, we want to avoid that, so we keep the HOME program. But we have an additional program, and again, it's for the construction of affordable housing, unlike any other program, except HOME, and we want to give it some assurance to operate in a trust fund. And this is, to some extent, modeled after the highway trust fund. It is a trust fund that will still be subject to work by the Appropriations Committee, but it won't be bogged down as the rest of the government gets bogged down, and that's important when you are doing construction when you have an ongoing situation.

Secondly, we do have two additional funding sources. Now, there is some debate about that. I do want to stress, in the FHA bill, which was already voted on by the House, we say in the first place that if any question arises about the solvency of the fund, if the FHA fund should appear to be in trouble, not a penny can go into the affordable housing fund that year. Only after the HUD Secretary has certified that the money won't be needed to hold down premiums or prevent insolvency will this go forward.

We have said that by the creation of a new funding stream, namely, allowing an unlimited amount of home equity and mortgages, we get a lot of money that CBO made available. And I should note, by the way, that some of that money, as the gentleman from Texas, among others, have suggested, has gone to upgrade the computer system of the FHA. Some of it will go for a great increase in counseling to homeowners, which is, again, supported on both sides. A good chunk will be left over, we're not sure exactly how much, we hope it will be $200 million a year. But it only goes to the housing trust fund if it would otherwise have gone to the Treasury. There is zero chance, the way this bill is written, for it to force that kind of an increase. That, by the way, is why CBO gives us a flat score on this. There is no budget deficit situation here at all.

Similarly, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and here I have to say some of my Republican colleagues have been a little inconsistent, the administration, some of them, they've been critical of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They've said, you know, we give all these advantages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a line of credit, some people think they're government-run, there used to be government members on the board, although we will not have that if our bill passes, and here they are, they're making all these profits and they're not doing enough for public purposes. Well, in our Fannie and Freddie bill, we amend that to some extent by increasing the housing goals they have by dropping the credit they get from 100 percent to 80 percent immediately. But we also say, you know what? You've been doing pretty well, you're making a lot of money and your sales are doing well, so without in any way impinging on your mortgage functioning, we are going to take some of the profit you've made and put it in the affordable housing trust fund.

By the way, I find it a little odd that people who have said that we should basically reduce the portfolio of Fannie and Freddie and make them securitize more, which they believe will do more damage to their ability to function

than anything else, that now they become very concerned when we talk about a housing trust fund. I should be clear that that does not describe the gentleman from Texas, who understands very well how best to help Fannie and Freddie. And I think we put through a bill that will enhance their ability to function while better regulating them.

So, in other words, we have 800 or $900 million, we hope, in the first year, and we hope it will go up. And this is the main difference between us, it doesn't come from appropriated funds. And I believe we have written it so it will not interfere with either Fannie and Freddie or FHA's ability to function. And we do not create a new bureaucracy. We distribute it to the State and local housing funds. Indeed, many of the amendments that we've adopted here in agreement by both sides, and some that we adopted in committee, I was looking it over, in committee we adopted a number of amendments, more from the Republican side than the Democratic side because I don't have to worry about other people telling me where we are on that. We have, in every one of these amendments, increased the flexibility for the local housing trust funds.

So with that, I hope that the substitute is defeated and that we will continue to improve this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I rise to try to save the bill from this effort to kill it.

Yes.

First, if this were a serious effort to put on a work program, it might have been offered as an amendment to the bill. It wasn't offered before the Rules Committee.

Secondly, it would have said ``report back forthwith,'' and it would have been voted on and it would have been

added. It says ``promptly.'' Now it is true that if we were to adopt a motion to recommit that says ``promptly,'' it would go back to the committee.

Our committee is a fairly busy one. We have the subprime issue before us. We have credit card reform issues. House floor time is fairly busy. I am told there are Members who don't think working here on Friday is the best thing that has ever happened to them. We are getting towards the end of this session. We have the appropriations bills. So the choice of ``promptly'' rather than ``forthwith'' is clearly motivated by animus against the bill.

Having failed in several tries to kill the bill as a whole, they now say, let's do it this way. And on its own merits, here is the problem. I have not been a supporter of the work requirement within the public housing area, but at least in public housing you have administered a framework where it can be applied, although I think inappropriately.

Here we are talking about a program whereby the Federal funds will be distributed. And by the way, they are not mostly taxpayer; they are shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dollars in the largest amount. But what we are going to do is distribute this money to hundreds of local housing funds, State and local funds. You talk about unfunded mandates. This says to all of the grantees, the Catholic Church in some places, or B'nai Brith housing or other local housing groups, Habitat for Humanity or any of the others, you must, in addition to building the housing, undertake to administer this kind of volunteer work program. Lest anyone think this is something that they can do easily, read the third page of the recommittal motion.

``Administration. A grantee providing assistance with Trust Fund grant amounts may administer the work activities requirement under this subsection directly, through a resident organization, or through a contractor having experience in administering work activities programs within the jurisdiction of the grantee.''

This takes some of the limited amount of money that would be available for housing and creates another new set of contractors. Maybe Blackwater will lay down their guns and come over here now when they get run out of Iraq and so a whole new set of contractors will be dealing with this. And the organizations that get this money, they are religious organizations, they are nonprofits, they are homebuilders. They will now have this new mandate to go and make people work, and it becomes a complicated one.

Here's what it says. For example, if you are ``a single custodial parent for a child who has not attained 6 years of age,'' then you have to go out and do this volunteer work for 20 hours a week, unless you can show that you couldn't get child care. You've got to show that it's unavailable. There are three different kinds of paragraphs. It's a very complicated thing to administer.

So you say to people, you know what, thank you for helping build affordable housing, thank you to the archdiocese, thank you to the Methodists, thank you to Habitat for Humanity, thank you to these charitable groups. Oh, and by the way, you are now in charge of making the parents of small children go to work unless they have first shown to you the unavailability of child care, and you have to go out and hire somebody to administer this for you.

So, even if it were ``forthwith,'' I would be opposed to it, but ``promptly'' means that the people who are opposed to using funding to help build affordable housing want to at best delay the bill, and maybe if they're lucky enough, because they can combine this with other filibusters, kill it.

This is a very difficult program to administer. It is not one for which there has been any demand. I guarantee you it will be strongly opposed by all of the organizations, the charitable and nonprofit organizations, that will be told to administer this housing. It is an unfair imposition on some of the best-motivated organizations and people. It doesn't give them any money to do it. It gives them this very difficult task. It delays the bill at best, and I hope it is defeated for what it is meant to be, an effort to derail a bill that can't be derailed in a more straightforward fashion.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Parliamentary Inquiries

Parliamentary inquiry.

Madam Speaker, is there anything in this recommittal motion that would allow me, as chairman of the committee, to ignore the rule that requires a 3-day notice before there is a markup, which would seem to me to make it impossible for me to report it tomorrow, on the day of a funeral, very sensitive, but is there anything in this amendment that would waive the 3-day requirement for a markup before we could proceed?

Well, then, let me ask in general. Does a recommittal motion waive the rules----

Further parliamentary inquiry. Is there anything in this process that would allow the chairman of the committee to waive the requirement in the rules that there be at least 3 days before there can be a markup in committee?

So much for tomorrow, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, can the standing rules of a committee be waived by actions on the floor?

Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, let me do what I think you cannot do under the rules and reassure your constituents in Florida that you have not become a Tennesseean when they weren't looking. I believe the gentleman from Tennessee left the chair, and we do now have the gentleman from Florida in the chair.

Mr. Speaker, I want to address today a very important issue that is generating an intense discussion among a fairly small segment of people who follow things, and it seems to us it's not healthy and that we ought to have a broader discussion, both of the specific issue, which is a question of how to protect people against discrimination based on their sexual orientation and at some point I would hope their gender and their gender identity, and also how do political parties relate to those in the population who are the most passionate, the most committed and the most legitimately zealous about their feelings, often on one particular issue to the exclusion of a broader set.

Before I came to Congress in 1981, former Members, the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Abzug), gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tsongas) and others, in the House filed legislation to make it illegal to discriminate against people in employment based on their sexual orientation; that is, they would have made it illegal in the same way that the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal based on race, but in a different statute for a variety of reasons, for people to be fired, for people to refuse to hire people, for people to be denied promotions or in other ways discriminated against in the job based on their being gay or lesbian or bisexual. That was, and has been, the number one legislative goal of gay and lesbian, bisexual people for more than 30 years.

In many States subsequent to that enactment, that introduction, laws were adopted to do that. Wisconsin was the first in 1982; Massachusetts, the State I represent, the second in 1989. Many States now have it.

As we kept that fight up in the face of a good deal of opposition and as we began to educate people as to why the prejudice against people based on our being gay or lesbian or bisexual was, in fact, invalid as a grounds for economic discrimination, movement expanded to cover people who are transgendered, people who were born into one sex physically but who strongly identify with the other sex and who, in fact, choose to live as members of the sex other than the one they were born in, often but not always having surgery to enhance that new life.

We are at a differential stage in public understanding of these issues. We've been dealing explicitly and increasingly openly with prejudice based on sexual orientation for almost 40 years, since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and since then.

The millions of people that talk openly and to take on the prejudice against people who are transgendered is newer. It is also the case that prejudice begins with people reacting against those who are different from them in some way. People are rarely prejudiced against their clones. So we have this situation where there is more prejudice in this society today against people who are transgendered than against people who are gay and lesbian, partly because we have been working longer at dealing with the sex orientation prejudice; partly because the greater the difference, the greater the prejudice is to start, the more people fail to identify, the more they are put off by differences, especially when those differences come in matters of the greatest personal intimacy.

We should be clear that as we talk about matters of human sexuality or the human sexual characteristics we touch on the most sensitive subjects that human beings will deal with.

So where we are today is that earlier this year, after years of our introducing the bill which we call ENDA, the Employment Non- Discrimination Act, to ban discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation, we added this year for the first time a provision that would also have banned discrimination based on gender identity as we have designated it, i.e., against people who are transgendered.

We began dealing with the transgender issue earlier in the context of the hate crimes legislation, and legislating against hate crimes, it's easier to do than sexual orientation. It is less intrusive, and it is easier to make the argument that assaulting people and destroying their property is wrong than it is to say that refusing to hire them is wrong. I think they're both wrong, but obviously, there is a distinction in this society. One is a serious criminal issue; one becomes civil.

We originally encountered difficulty in broadening hate crimes to include people of transgender. I first talked about that in 1999. I remember having to explain to people what we were talking about.

Recently, we were successful earlier this, under the leadership of the Speaker of the House, in getting legislation through the House that expanded the hate crime protection, not just based on sexual orientation, but based on people being transgender. The Senate followed suit; although one of the leading senators engaged in that effort noted that whereas, when the Senate voted on that dealing solely with the sexual orientation issue, there were 12 Republican supporters, this year there were only eight. Eight turned out to be just enough to get us 60 votes to break a filibuster, but there was a fourth or one-third of Republican support even on hate crimes which is the easier one.

Despite that, we thought we were in a position this year, under the leadership of the Speaker who had committed early to myself and the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin), my colleague, to bring these issues up, hate crimes first and then employment nondiscrimination, we thought we had the votes to pass it.

In fact, on September 5 of this year, when the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), a great supporter of opposing discrimination for all sorts, had a hearing in his subcommittee on the issue, I personally spoke more about the importance of including people who were transgendered than any other witness.

I know, Mr. Speaker, that there are today people who are unhappy with my position because I believe, to get to the central point here, that we have the votes to pass a bill today in the House that would ban discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation, but sadly, we don't yet have it on gender identity. And I differ with some as to what we do about that.

But one of the problems we have today, both on this issue, and as I will discuss in a little bit in general, is people in our society, the most deeply committed, who believe that when a politician tells them an unpleasant fact, he or she must somehow be embracing that fact. Because I have been one of those who has felt the obligation to tell my friends in the transgender community that prejudice against them is greater than prejudice against gay men and lesbians for some of the reasons I talked about, I have been asked why I am so opposed to fairness for people of transgender.

I will submit for the Record statements that I made officially, either in committee or on the floor, two in committee and one on the floor, in September 2004, when I said on the floor of the House: Yes, there are people who are transgendered in our society, and they are sadly often victimized.

They're often victims of violence. Yes, I think it is a good idea to come to their aid, and if the gentleman thinks it is a mistake to go to the aid of people who are transgendered, who are more often than others victimized or who were put in fear of that, then we do disagree. September of 2004.

September, 2005, again in the hate crimes context: I should add, too, that we've recently seen more of an outbreak of this sort of violence against people who are transgendered, and it is important for us to come to people's aid.

And on September 5 of this year, when I testified at that point in favor of a bill that I hope we would have the votes to pass only a month ago, that was fully inclusive, I said: And then we have the issue that my colleague so ably discussed of the transgendered, my colleague being the gentlewoman from Wisconsin who often talks about this.

I said: I understand this is a new issue for people. There are people who were born with the physical characteristics of one sex and strongly identify with the other. Some of them have a physical change. Some of them don't. Let me make a plea to all of my colleagues. These are people. Think what it must be like to be born with that set of feelings. Think what it must be like. Think what stress, what agony you go through to defy society's conventions to the extent where you make that kind of statement. This is something people are driven to do. Is there any reason why any of us should make those lives of those people more difficult than they already are? Obviously, these are people who are coping, and things are getting better. Things are better in ways. When I was young, a lot of things were difficult that are less difficult today. But we say here is, if someone has these feelings, if someone is born with one set of characteristics and strongly identifies the other way, should you fire them? Do you deny them a promotion? Do you say to them no matter how good your job is, you make me uneasy so out you go?

I spoke in hopes, on September 5, that we would have the support to do this. To my dismay, not entirely to my surprise but to my dismay, I found that we did not yet have the votes to pass a bill that would protect people who are transgender. As I said, I have discussed this issue, I think, as much as any Member of Congress and more than most. I am determined to try to diminish that prejudice, as I was determined when I started my political career to diminish the prejudice based on sexual orientation.

Let me add one point here. I am, myself, of course, gay, so when I talk about passing legislation against sexual orientation discrimination, it's fair for people to say, well, you think about yourself. But I first got elected to a legislature in 1972. In the intervening 35 years, I have worked very hard for legislation further banning discrimination based on race, discrimination based on ethnicity, based on gender to protect women, based on age to protect the elderly, based on disability.

At the time that I voted to protect people against those forms of discrimination, I was not, myself, a victim of any of them. I was not a beneficiary of banning discrimination against women or against African Americans or against Hispanics or people who were disabled. I was not when I voted for it one who was protected against discrimination based on age, but I now am, but I wasn't when I voted for it. I have just been around long enough to do that.

I reject the notion that somehow I have only been concerned with the category in which I am a member. I will say this, every time I voted for one of those, I was voting to protect one group of people and not another. Because at the time when we voted, that was all that we could do, that was all that we could get the votes for, because a fight against discrimination is an incremental fight. I wish it wasn't.

Some of my colleagues, some of my friends, I say to my colleagues in the gay community, maybe I will do a little stereotyping, maybe they have seen the Wizard of Oz too often. They seem to have Speaker Pelosi, a wonderful dedicated, committed supporter of human rights, confused with Glenda the good witch. They think if she waved her magic wand she could somehow change things.

I have seen this woman work as hard as it is humanly possible to do to achieve results, but there are limits to what any human being could do in the face of difficult reality. You can move reality, you can chip away at it, you can try to shape it, but you can't just wish it away.

What I have learned in the past month was that we weren't yet at the point where we could wish away this prejudice against people with transgender. Yes, we have an overwhelming majority of Democrats for that, but not all of them; and we have very few Republicans, although we have some of them. By the way, I wish this wasn't partisan. People said, don't make it partisan. I wish it wasn't partisan. I also wish I could eat more and not gain weight, and I wish I was as energetic today as I was when I was not protected with age discrimination.

But this is one of the central points. Denying reality not only doesn't change it; it makes it harder to overcome it. That's where we are.

On September 5, I testified in favor of including people of transgender. We then learned from conversations with our colleagues that we didn't have the votes to do it.

Let me say, and I love being in this House and many of my best friends are Members of Congress, but we are sometimes, those of us in elected office, loath to tell people the truth when it will make them mad. We don't often lie directly, but we have ways of sounding more agreeable than we, in fact, are. We detect that in each other. We know when someone is being verbally more accommodating than he or she is likely to be when it comes time to vote.

I am afraid that some of my friends in the transgender community and the gay and lesbian community and the advocate community in general were misled by what we used to call in Massachusetts ``the wink and the nod,'' the smile, the oh, of course, I strongly sympathize with you.

People thought we had the votes. I hoped we had the votes. I wasn't sure. We do not have the votes. That has been confirmed.

The majority whip, a man whose own life has been one of dedication to overcoming prejudice, did a check, not of every single Member on the Democrat side, but a large number of Members who were likely to be problematic. What we have found was, and I have confirmed this in my own conversations, here is where we are after years of advocacy on the sexual orientation question, a few years of advocacy on the transgender issue.

I am convinced that we have the votes to pass in this House a bill that has been the number one goal of the gay and lesbian and bisexual community and our allies for many years, a bill to ban discrimination based on employment. I think it will be an extraordinarily good thing for America if we are able to do that.

I don't expect the President to sign it, but it has always been the view of advocates, including my gay and lesbian colleagues, that we don't get deterred from pushing ahead by the threat of a veto. It's important to get those votes and to get people on record and show your strength so you can move forward and set the stage for an enactment in 2009. After all, I don't expect the President to sign the hate crimes bill; he says he won't, although he doesn't always remain unchanged.

But no one that I work with said let's not pass the hate crimes bill, transgender inclusive, by the way, because we aren't sure George Bush is going to sign it or we think he might veto it. You push ahead.

So this is the question we now face. I am convinced that the votes are there to pass a bill that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment. I am also convinced that if we were to put up a bill that included people of transgender, that part would be stricken on a vote, and, unfortunately, a fairly heavy vote. Because what happens is when a tough issue, and the transgender issue is a tough political issue now, and if I have fought with colleagues, it is for not being honest enough with people. And people who would mislead you, I would say, Mr. Speaker, to those who come before us as advocates, people who would mislead

you and let you think your task is easier are not your friends. They are undercutting your ability. Underestimating your enemy is the surest way, not only to lose, but to lose so bad it is hard to come back.

I had hoped that we would have a vote upon a transgender-inclusive bill and win. Getting a large vote in this body to say no to transgender inclusion will make it harder in the future to change that situation, partly because my junior Senator, as the Presidential candidate, was unfairly pilloried. His remark was caricatured about his vote on Iraq. He quite sensibly voted for one version of funding for Iraq and then voted against another. He phrased it inartfully. What he did was correct.

But because of that, the fear that Members of this body have and of the other body of voting one way and then later changing has been magnified. People now pay an unduly high price if they change their mind. So if you go ahead and get a negative vote on the transgender issue today, that will make it harder for us at some point, and I hope that point comes within the next few years, to change things after we have done more education.

If we simply put the bill forward, and these become parliamentary intricacies, but they are irrelevant, if we simply put the bill forward and there was no amendment in the committee and it came to the floor of the House and it included the transgender inclusion, then you would see a series of very clever moves from the Republican side, motions to recommit, that could lead to the indefinite postponement in a repeated set of votes that would keep us from passing this bill.

Now, people have said to me, what's the message you send if you pass the bill banning sexual orientation and not transgender discrimination? Before I answer that question, I want to pose another.

What will be the message to this country who are not following all the intricacies of transgender inclusion? What will be the message that we will send if Nancy Pelosi, as strong an advocate of human rights for all people who has ever held high public office in the United States, if she is portrayed in the headlines as someone who says, I give up, we can't pass the gay rights bill this year.

If, after Nancy Pelosi ascends to the Speakership with her record of advocacy and after many of us, and I include myself in this, who have long been supporters of fairness, if we now are in a position of leadership in this House and we collectively say, sorry, you know that goal that you have had for over 30 years, that we have had, speaking for myself, of banning discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation? You know this message we wanted to send that it's wrong to do that all over the country? Not now, can't do it. Why can't we do it? Because we can't do it perfectly.

Now, the notion that you do not pass an antidiscrimination bill protecting large numbers of people until you can protect everybody, in my judgment, is flawed, morally and politically. It is flawed morally because I am here to help people in need. That's why I serve in this job.

If we can get a sexual orientation ban enacted, we will be protecting millions of people in this country who live in States where there is no such law. There are laws in some States and not others. The States that have the laws are probably the place where prejudice is most active.

I do not accept the argument that I am somehow morally lacking if I say, you know what, I would like to protect everybody, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, I am only at this point able to get a vote passed that protects the millions of people who are gay, lesbian and bisexual; but I will withhold from them that protection until I do anything. Because any time you insist on doing everything all at once, you will do nothing.

I think my favorite way to look at American history is to look at some of those wonderful principles that were set forth in the Constitution of United States, extraordinary declarations of basic human rights at a time when those were really quite unrealized in the world.

But as people pointed out, Thurgood Marshall most eloquently, there was a great gap between those wonderful universal principles, the rights of all, and the practice. Yes, everybody had rights on the paper, and rich white Christian men had rights in reality.

What we have seen over 200-plus years, in my judgment, is successive efforts to take those marvelous principles of freedom and equality and democracy and fairness that were set forward in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and apply them to more and more people, to diminish the exclusion. We have done it on race, we have done it on gender, we have done it in a number of other areas.

The last remaining barrier is sexual orientation and people who are transgender. We cannot do it, I believe, all at once. I have tried, and I will say that I have tried as hard, I quoted several statements I made. I will say this as an aside, I will get to this later, that one of the things that does bother me, to be honest, is that people who are now demanding that we kill a bill to protect people against sexual orientation and discrimination because we haven't done enough to protect people of transgender were silent on the issue awhile ago.

When I testified on September 5, I wasn't the head of some large movement. I was speaking out personally. I had been begging people for months. We knew this was coming up. It has been published since earlier this year that we would be voting on this bill now.

People are now having Web sites; people are bursting forward. Where were they when we needed them? I will talk about why we did not see them then and we see them now.

But the moral issue is, do you deny protection to millions of people because you can't give it to millions plus several hundred thousands? It's not the numbers that counted. More is always better; and, again, the notion that we shouldn't have helped blacks until we could help women, as somebody pointed out in an editorial, I think it was in the Washington Blade, constitutionally black men got the vote long before white women.

Now, I wish everybody had gotten the vote back at that time. There were suffragettes back then, but wouldn't it be fair to say we are not giving anybody the additional right to vote until everybody can? That's the issue. There are people who can test this and say, oh, if you had really tried, you could have gotten the vote.

They are simply wrong. I will tell them that I and many others, Speaker Pelosi and many others, have tried very hard to get those votes. They weren't there.

It's partly because some of the people who are now lately to this fight weren't there helping us through the lobbying. But even if they were, we probably wouldn't be there yet because we have been later to this game, and we have a deeper hole to fill. I believe we will get it done.

Now, there is one argument, let me actually hit two arguments, that people will say as to why we shouldn't go ahead now. One, they say, well, you know what, it's strategic. The President is not going to sign the bill anyway. Why go ahead with sexual orientation now without transgender?

But that argument is not being made honestly, because the argument is not that we shouldn't go ahead and pass the bill that George Bush would veto. The position taken by the various groups that want us to kill the gay rights bill now, because we do not have the votes to include transgender, are people who say to us, never pass the bill, even if you get a Democratic President who would sign it in 2009, and you get a House and Senate majority ready to pass it in early 2009, do not protect millions of people in this country against discrimination based on sexual orientation until you can protect everybody now unprotected.

I don't think that's morally a valid position, but let's be fair. It's not a tactical issue about whether you do it now or then. It's do you ever do it.

One other argument we get is, well, if you pass a sexual orientation, antidiscrimination law, you won't be protecting even gay and lesbian people, because people will then be able to fire gay men on the grounds that they are effeminate, not that they are gay. They will fire lesbians for being too masculine and that will take away the protection.

In fact, many States in this country still have laws that protect only against sexual orientation, including

New York State, which passed it a few years ago with the strong support of many of the people who now tell us that Congress dare not do what New York did. How people think we are going to get more votes, we are going to get more votes for a better bill in America than they got only in New York, I don't understand, if they really think that the United States is a more favorable theater for these kinds of rights than New York.

But I have challenged people to give me one case in which in a State which protects only against sexual orientation, and most States had that originally and it was that way in many States for a while and it's still that way in a lot of other States, is there one case where a person was fired because of her sexual orientation, and that firing was upheld in the teeth of the law that said you couldn't do that because she was too masculine?

There are no such cases.

And I asked Lambda Legal which may decide to give me a case. They have the one case that they allude to. They don't give the citation often because it is so clearly not supportive of that position. It's Dawson against Bumble & Bumble. No, that was not out of Dickens. Dawson against Bumble & Bumble is a case from the State of New York. Its cite is 398 F.3d 211. And what the three-judge panel says here affirming a district court judge is very simple. The woman who brought the claim wasn't able to show that she was discriminated against on any ground. In fact, the argument was, you know, you didn't have transgender protection in the New York State law; that's why she was fired. It was mostly a case about title 7 of the federal law, which doesn't even mention sexual orientation, and much of the case comes up with her trying to get sexual orientation into it. But in fact, as the judges point out, let me read what the three-judge court said, and this is a claim from Lambda Legal, that this shows that you could fire a lesbian on the grounds of her being too mannish because she didn't have gender identity protection. Listen to who fired her. The district court found it to be particularly significant that Connie Voines, the manager of the salon and the individual who ultimately decided to terminate Dawson, is a ``presurgery male to female transsexual who, at the time of the events in question, was transitioning from appearing male to appearing female.'' She was fired by a transsexual. How in the world would having sexual gender identification protection have kept her from being fired by a transsexual? She was fired because she was a lousy haircutter. I don't say that negatively about her. I'd be a pretty lousy haircutter. But that's why she was fired. Dawson's performance was erratic. Sometimes she performed well, other times she did not. Over time, her performance and the educational program declined until it was unacceptable.

Now, she does say with regard to New York State law, the Federal law doesn't even have sexual orientation in it, so it's totally irrelevant. Under New York State law, which has only sexual orientation, she did say that, yes, it was a problem because a couple of people had made remarks to her about being a dyke. You know what the Court found? That they didn't fire her; that the people who insulted her had no power to fire anybody. She was fired, this woman, in a place that was about 50 percent gay and lesbian, by the way. The notion that this was a pretext for getting rid of gays and lesbians, it was a hair salon. This wasn't the backfield of the New York Jets. It was a place where most, half the people were themselves openly gay and lesbian, and she was fired by a transsexual. And they say that this shows that a sexual orientation law doesn't mean anything.

It's sad to see a legal organization for which I have respect making that kind of an argument because what they're doing is they are loading the gun against us. Because I will tell you this: If in a future case, anybody fired a gay man and said ``Well, I didn't fire him because he was gay; I just fired him because he was too effeminate'' in a State which had a sexual orientation law, if someone tried to cite this case as an argument for firing that person, Lambda Legal would say ``Of course not; you've misread it.'' Please don't distort the case now for rhetorical purposes when you may be putting this weapon in. Fortunately, this case is so completely off the point, a woman was fired for being a bad haircutter by a transsexual, and we're told, ``Oh, if there was only gender identification protection, this wouldn't have happened.'' That's not good argument. What people really believe is, and it's not tactical. He's not going to sign it. It is not this principle. Do not pass a law that protects some people until you can protect everybody. Now that's a valid argument. I think it is terribly wrong. I also believe, by the way, from the standpoint of protecting people who are transgender, and as I've said I've listed my comments in favor of inclusion of people who are transgendered. I think I've got as good a record on this as others. And by the way, in listing what I've done on behalf of helping transgender people win, I will cite some of the arguments that people have taken issue with because I have told them how hard it's going to be. Yeah. A lot of people have been yessing people to death. And a lot of people, both in the gay and lesbian community and the broader advocacy community, and here in the Congress, people don't like to say no to people. You know, we Caucasians get all ethnocentric. We impute to people of Asian descent an unwillingness to be unpleasant face to face. Most people don't like to be unpleasant face to face. Most people tend to shade things. They tend to, you know, one of the things you learn here if you're in the whip organization, if you're counting, please discount by a very significant percentage what people say to you because that's a natural human tendency.

And I remember once when I was in high school reading, the New York Times had an article about a Member from the Midwest who was very angry at a New York Member of Congress. He said, you know, ``You told me you were going to vote with me and you didn't. You broke your word to me.'' And he said, ``What do you mean? I never told you that.'' And he said, ``Well, I asked you if you were going to vote with me and you said, `Yeah, yeah.''' And the guy said, ``Don't you know that in New York `yeah, yeah' means no?'' I mean, often that's where we are. That's the issue.

So again, there is a central issue here. Do you withhold protection from millions of people who live in States where they are now unprotected from discrimination based on sexual orientation? We had the case of a lesbian who was fired by Cracker Barrel who was a lesbian in the State of Georgia. They don't have a law. I think that's the morally flawed position. I reject the notion that when I want to extend protection to millions of people. And I want to go back. Am I protecting myself? Not anymore. Sure, there was a time when I was vulnerable. I'm now chairman of the Financial Services Committee. I really am very unlikely to be discriminated against. This is not a personal thing with me. But I remember what it was like to be young and gay and worried about the job. I know what it's like today when I talk to young people who are afraid, not in Massachusetts, not in California, not in Wisconsin, not in a lot of the States that have the law, but in many States that don't have the law there are people who are afraid. And again, we are being told by a very strongly motivated group, and it's not don't do it now because he's going to veto it. It's not don't do it for tactical reasons. It is very clear in what they say. Never pass a law that will protect people against discrimination because they are gay or lesbian or bisexual in their employment unless you pass a law that covers people who are transgender as well. My view is that we should try very hard to extend it to people who are transgender. I want to do that. But if I can't do everything, I don't want to be told to do nothing, because that is a way never to do anything.

And by the way, even Martin Luther King understood that. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act covers race, but it didn't cover all subjects. It didn't cover housing, didn't cover voting rights. And we've had people who said don't pass ENDA. It doesn't include everything, doesn't include housing, etc., etc. Well, neither did the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When we voted to protect people in the American Disabilities Act, we, in fact, protected people who had AIDS and

people who are HIV positive. But we didn't protect people who weren't. That was a distinction among gay men. If you can show me that by helping some people I am making other people worse, then I won't go forward.

But there's a great concept in economics, there used to be. Maybe they changed it. They changed a lot of things since I studied it. It was called pareto optimality. Pareto Optimality meant, named for the sociologist Vilifredo Pareto, pareto optimality recognized, being sensible people, that you can never make everything better at once. Pareto optimality is if you make some things better and nothing worse. And that, by the way, is considered an unattainable ideal in economics. To be able to make some things better and nothing worse is unattainable. To make everything better and leave nothing behind is unthinkable. It's beyond unattainable. And I think we are at pareto optimality when we say to millions of gay men and lesbians, blue-collar workers, young people, other people who live in the majority of American States where they're not now protected against discrimination, we will protect you. And I wish we could protect people who're transgender.

And by the way, from my standpoint, there are three options now. We could go forward with the bill that included people with transgender. That would lose. I am convinced it would lose. We've looked and worked hard on this. And I'm someone who's been an advocate. The Speaker's been an advocate. Chairman Miller, the gentleman from California, the Chair of the Committee on Education and Labor, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), advocates who said they were trying. We don't have the votes for it. It is not, in my judgment, in the interest of succeeding ultimately and including people who are transgender in this protection to have them lose by 50 or 60 votes today. And I started to say this before. What will happen is this: They will lose. We know that. And once they've lost, people who were ready to support them will say, you know what, they're losing anyway. I think I'd better not vote for them, because what's the point of taking a hit when it's not going to be of any use.

So we could go forward with the vote and have them lose and maybe lose the whole bill because of procedural maneuvering, or we could let the whole bill die and people say what message are you sending the country if you protect against sexual orientation and not transgender? Well, my view is the message we are sending is we are at a point in our fight against prejudice where we have made these gains but not those gains, and we will consolidate the gains we made and move forward.

And the alternative is, the Democrats took over the House and they have the Speaker from San Francisco and they've got a chairman who's gay and they've got all these other people who tell gay and lesbian people they're friends, and they couldn't even pass a bill to protect people. What message does that send to gay and lesbian people in all those States who are not now protected? So I think we should go forward. Do the best we can.

Now, I said we're going to lose. I hope I'm wrong. After we did our count and found that we didn't have the votes, all of a sudden, the cavalry mounted up. But they're coming from a long distance. I have been pleading with people in the gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender communities to lobby for us. Instead, they want to strategize, many of them. Some, no. Some have done a very good job. But many of them weren't there. And now they have announced, in the last couple of weeks, and they asked for a postponement. The Speaker correctly said sure, take a couple of weeks. It's hard to do that in a couple of weeks. Maybe they can turn it around. I will say this, Mr. Speaker, if at some point it looks like our count is turned around, I don't expect it to, but I hope it does, and we have the votes to include transgender, I'll be for that vote being taken. But I doubt very much that people will be able to undo months and years of inaction and of talking only to each other and not doing the hard lobbying within a couple of weeks.

So I will say this. If a week from now we've reached a point after this delay that was granted to advocacy groups where we have, as we did before, have the votes to protect millions of currently unprotected people against a form of job discrimination, but not everybody who's being discriminated against, then I say it's immoral not to go forward. And again, I understand that we may not get the bill passed this year. But I understand also that what we're debating this year is a proxy for when we do have the votes to get this passed, because we will be told whenever we are in this situation, and I don't think we're going to turn this around in a year. I wish we could. But if we have a President ready to sign the bill and a majority ready to pass it, we will again be told, no, you may not. You may not protect millions of people against discrimination because they're gay or lesbian or bisexual until you can also protect people with transgender. I have to say to my transgender friends, why would you want to say that? Why would you want to say until you can protect me, don't protect anybody else? I've never said that. I never said don't protect people against racism until you can protect me against homophobia. Don't protect some people against ethnic discrimination until you can protect other people because they're lesbians. That's just not the way we'll get there. We have got to get there working together.

And in fact, the best way to improve is this, there are irrational fears about what will happen if we pass a bill protecting against sexual orientation. You know what's odd? There are people who think the real fight in this world is whether or not we can include transgender. They kind of take for granted that we can pass sexual orientation. The fact that we are on the verge of passing a bill to protect people against discrimination based on sexual orientation is a wonderful breakthrough in this country. We've been fighting for it for over 30 years. A year ago, when we were trying to fend off a right-wing effort to ban same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and retroactively cancel the marriages of thousands of people, I don't think people were confident that we would be on the verge of passing a sexual orientation antidiscrimination bill. That's a wonderful moment as we make advance after advance in civil rights. And I will not allow people without my dissenting to turn that great breakthrough into some mark of weakness.

It's a great thing to be able to go forward, and it's also the prerequisite for going even beyond that, because if we are able to establish in 2009 antidiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation, within a year we will have alleviated many of the fears. We always have excessive fears about antidiscrimination. People always think antidiscrimination measures will cause chaos when they don't. And once we have done that, it will be easier to add people who are transgender rather than to say we're never going to do anything until we can do everything. That is not the way legislation has ever worked. That is not the way social advance has ever worked.

Now the question then is, and I think this is worth pondering in my closing minutes here. How did we get to the point, we certainly weren't there a year ago, where an announcement by a Speaker who has spent so much of her life fighting against prejudice, her announcement that she will bring to the floor a bill in which we will get a majority in the United States House of Representatives which would ban in the entire country discrimination based on sexual orientation, how did that get transmogrified in the minds of I believe only a few people, but a few very vigorous people? How did that become a bad thing? How did one of the great advances in civil rights protection since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 get labeled as somehow a sellout? And here's the problem. And it is a problem both parties face, and in some ways, this issue, do we go forward with a bill achieving a decades-long goal of for the first time getting either House to vote to ban sexual orientation discrimination, something gay and lesbian people have been fighting for a long time? And I do suspect there are some people who it's precisely because we're on the verge of victory that they decided they better not think it's such a good idea, because they are vested in the notion that we'll never win and that we must always be fighting.

But how do we reach the point where this is a negative in the minds of some? Well, here is the problem, and it is a problem, as I said, for both parties. It is how do you relate, those of us who hold positions of responsibility who have been elected by broad majorities and given a responsibility to govern, to govern in pursuit of our values? I'm not here as some neutral administrator. I am here because I have a set of values. I have a set of views about what I want this society to look like. And I'm here to try to move this society in that direction. And I do that as part of a broad coalition, and included in that coalition are some people who are fiercely motivated.

Now, this is the issue: Does a political party say to its most militant, committed, ideologically driven believers in purity that they have a veto over what the party does? And I say that procedurally because substantively I agree with them. I have spoken on this floor and in committee for including people of transgender. I have argued that with my colleagues in private. I have argued that with the Democratic Caucus. But I also believe that I have a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group and my job is to advance the moral values that I came here to advance as far and as fast as I can and not voluntarily to withhold an advance because it doesn't meet somebody's view of perfection. And the question is, how do we relate to those people? And it has become an increasing problem for both parties.

Frankly, until recently I have felt that one of the advantages we Democrats have had over our Republican colleagues is that we were more willing to be responsible, less susceptible to the most committed minority of our party having a veto. I think from the days of Terri Schiavo and before and since, the Republican Party has suffered from that. I don't want the Democratic Party to suffer from it. Not because I want to protect the Democratic Party as an end in itself, but because the Democratic Party is the means by which these values I care about are most likely to be advanced.

And let me talk about this ideological faction that we have. There are some characteristics that they have that I think led them to this profoundly mistaken view that the greatest single advance we can make in civil rights in many, many years would somehow be a bad thing because it would only include millions of people and leave some hundreds of thousands out. And I want to include those hundreds of thousands. I have done more to try to include them than many of the people who say we should kill the whole thing, but I don't understand how killing the whole thing advances that.

But here are some of the characteristics: first of all, they tend to talk excessively to each other. One of the things when you are in this body is you talk to people all over the country. You talk to Members of Congress from every State. And I have this with people who can't understand why I am not introducing legislation to impeach the President and the Vice President, and I find that this is a characteristic that these are people who do not know what the majority thinks, who do not understand the depths of disagreement with their positions on some issues. And that doesn't mean a majority that says George Bush is wonderful. That isn't there anymore, but a majority who would be skeptical of impeachment.

But let me get back to this. There are people who talk excessively to each other. They don't know people of other views.

There is another characteristic of these people who are so dedicated. They do not have allies. You can take an elected official who has been with one of these groups day after day for years, but let that individual once disagree, and it's a betrayal. It's a failure of moral will. And lest anyone think I am here being defensive about myself, let me be very clear: I will be running for reelection again. The likelihood that I will be defeated by someone who claims that I am insufficiently dedicated to protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation seems to me quite slender. I am not worried about my own situation, and let me also say that I have said that my colleagues suffer sometimes from the unwillingness to tell people bad news. It has been suggested that I may suffer from the opposite direction. It's not that I like telling people bad news, but I do think that you should when you have to.

I am not worried about myself, but here is what I'm worried about: I am worried about people from more vulnerable districts because not only do people talk only to themselves and not understand the differences that exist and not accept anybody's bona fides ever, that they will turn on anybody the first time there is an honest disagreement, but there is also the single-issue nature. That is, there are people who say, okay, you know what, I don't care about your survival to fight for any other issue.

Let me put it this way: there are people who say to me, wait a minute, when you say you don't want to take a vote on transgender because it might lose and it would be politically difficult, you are letting politics enter into it. Let me make a very blanket statement here in the first place for those who want to live in America or France or England or anywhere else. If you want a decision to be made without any regard to politics, do not ask 535 politicians to make it. That's called democracy when you like it; it's called politics when you don't.

But here is the issue: there are people in this Chamber who come from districts much tougher to win in than mine, districts which I could never have won. And I treasure their being here because they help us on the children's health program, on raising the minimum wage, on defending civil liberties and fighting racism, and, hopefully, in getting us out of the war in Iraq. Yes, I do take into account the likelihood that my colleagues with whom I agree on so many issues might be jeopardized in a fight that we are going to lose anyway.

And, by the way, I say to my gay and lesbian friends, there are people here who voted with us against a constitutional amendment that would have retroactively wiped out marriages in Massachusetts. They are ready to vote with us to get rid of the ban on gays in the military when we get a President who will sign that. They voted with us on hate crimes. They are ready to vote with us to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, which we have cared about for so long. They are ready to do other things that will be helpful to us.

I will not abide by people telling me that I have to totally disregard my interest in their continuing to be here on every single issue, and that's the problem with the single issue. You are willing to disregard progress on any other issue. So to demand 100 percent on the one issue and to scorn people giving 90 percent and to say I don't care whether they win or lose when they are with us on so many other issues, that is irresponsibility.

And I say this is a moment of truth for the Democratic Party. I wish it weren't the case. I apologize to my colleagues. It is awkward for me here. I have been pressing people for years. And, again, I want to stress a bill that bans discrimination and employment based on sexual orientation will be, I believe, the biggest single advance in fighting prejudice in many years, certainly since the American Disabilities Act; maybe since, in numbers, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And I know that is a tough vote for some people to cast. And I have got people saying, I don't care if it's a tough vote to cast. If they are not also willing to do it for transgender, then they are my enemy and I don't want it to go forward.

I am sure of this, Mr. Speaker: I have been here 27 years, and the longer I get here, the less I know about everything else than what is here. My mind is not expansive enough to do much when the day is over. So I think I know a lot about this place and increasingly little about everything else. What I am sure about this place is this: if we listen to the most dedicated, most zealous believers in purity and kill this bill that would be such a great advance in civil rights, we will be a long time in getting back to anything. People who think that if they are successful in killing this one and in attacking people and demonizing people who want to deliver, as part of a movement, this big advance that they will then be able to get more than that live in Oz, in not only a fantasy world but a nonexistent fantasy world and a dream. It simply will not happen.

Let me close, Mr. Speaker. I am a great believer in free speech. I often am one of only two or three Members voting against telling people they can't read this or say that or look at such and such on the Internet. If I was inclined to ban forms of expression, it wouldn't have much to do with sex. I would make it a misdemeanor to use pragmatism and idealism as if they were opposing views. And that's what we have here. People say, well, you're going to be pragmatic and pass a bill that protects millions of people against discrimination based on sexual orientation, but, me, I am an idealist. I am for no bill at all because if I can't protect everybody, I don't want to protect anybody.

Let me put it to you this way, Mr. Speaker: of course you should start with ideals. You don't belong in this line of work making rules that other people have to abide by unless you are motivated by a genuine idealism about how the world should be. But the more committed you are to your ideals, the more you are morally obligated to be pragmatic about achieving them. What good are your ideals if they're never achieved and all they do is make you feel pure?

If we kill the gay rights bill this year and set back for some time to come the possibility of going after any of these forms of discrimination, there will be people who will be very proud of themselves. See, I didn't let those politicians compromise. I didn't let those politicians settle not for half a loaf but for about 85, 90 percent of a loaf. I insisted on absolute solidarity and absolute purity, and I feel much better about it.

And they probably will. But millions of people will be worse off because they will have been denied by this preference for purity a real legal protection.

Mr. Speaker, I filed a bill in 1972, in December, and my former colleague Jim Segel here who was with me as one of the few supporters of that, and we pushed for that. My colleague, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey), was one as well. We pushed for that. For 35 years I have been trying very hard to protect people against discrimination, and the people who are the victims of discrimination, they tend to be the most vulnerable people in places where there is the most hostility. And we are on the verge in winning in the House of Representatives an extraordinary historic victory, the passage of a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. And people say don't do that because you can't protect everybody.

I should add, Mr. Speaker, I talk a lot to gay people, gay men and lesbians. I find the view that we should not do anything until we can do everything very much in the minority. I understand the passion of those who are in organizational positions. But, you know, we talk about politics here. There are politics in organizations too. There are people who I have privately discussed this with who have said, yes, we wish you would go ahead, but I can't say that. I can't stand up against this organizational consensus.

Well, idealism by itself is going to be pretty fruitless, and idealism that is empowered by pragmatism is the way in which we make progress, and that is what we are called upon to do here. And so I am asking my colleagues, Democratic and Republican because there is bipartisan support for this, please do not be dissuaded by those who say do nothing until you can do everything. Look at the history of civil rights. Look at the fact that we helped one group here, we dealt with a certain form of discrimination there.

Even here, by the way, we are talking about employment discrimination. We are not talking about marriage here. There was an effort to try to put civil unions and partner benefits in the bill. It was a mistake. We'd get rid of it or it would kill the whole bill.

I do not believe that the majority of gay men and lesbians in this country want to take the position that nothing shall be done to enhance legal protection against the prejudice from which they suffer until we can do the job perfectly. I also believe that from the standpoint of including people who are transgender, for which I have and will continue to work, we will not accomplish that nearly as quickly. Maybe in 50 years it will all get done. I'll be dead; so tell me anything. I won't be able to argue with you.

But in the interim, we will get there much more quickly if we continue to follow the sensible strategy of working with allies, of accepting support that is overwhelming but not complete, of understanding political reality, of moving forward, of alleviating some fears by taking some partial steps. We are a lot likelier to get there.

So we have two choices today: we can say until we are able to do everything, we are going to abandon this effort; and I believe the consequences of that will be profoundly negative for any effort to revive this. People will say, wait a minute, those are the people who tell me not to do that. God knows what they're going to ask me for the next time. For 30 years they told me they wanted this. Now when I want to give them this, no, that's not good enough. They want that. I can't go through this again.

Or, we can take one of the biggest steps forward in the anti- discrimination march, in the march to make the American Constitution's wonderful principles fully applicable with everybody, we can take a major step forward on that issue. And having done that, we will be, in my judgment, better able to take the next step. That is the choice. And I hope, both for the substance, and for giving people a lesson in responsible governance in defense and in advancement of our values, my colleagues, especially on this side, but in the whole House, will opt for sensible and real progress that serves the interests of the majority and rejects the counsel of those who say that, absent perfection, we should leave everything as it was.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), pursuant to House Resolution 717, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, October 10, 2007, at 10 a.m., as a further mark of respect to the memory of the late Honorable Jo Ann Davis of Virginia.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 3121, and to insert extraneous material thereon.

Mr. Chairman, preliminarily, I recognize myself for 1 minute just to say that I want to be very clear that I regret the decision not to allow a number of amendments offered by members of the minority to this bill. And I will give them my word that as this legislative process goes forward, I intend to seek out opportunities to give them fair consideration.

I must say, Mr. Chairman, I'm never happy when I see my colleagues on the Republican side being a little obstreperous, but when they're being obstreperous with good reason, I really find that hard to tolerate. So I did want to make clear my view and my hope that we can deal with that.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as she may consume to the Chair of the Subcommittee on Housing, from which this bill came forward, who has done a great job all year on this legislation, the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I agree that we should have had an amendment that would have allowed us to debate whether or not to strike the wind addition. I would have vigorously defended it as I will do now.

The problem is that we now give the insured and the people who administer insurance an impossible task. It is to evacuate a home on the notice of a hurricane and to return to that home some period of time later after there has been devastation from a hurricane and decide with some degree of certainty what damage was caused by water and what by wind, because the Federal Flood Insurance Program protects against water damage. Wind damage is under the auspices of private companies. In some cases, of course, the same company would be involved, and some of the adjusters would have an interest in whether or not it was water versus wind. The more it was water, the less they would have to pay. But even aside from that conflict of interest, it is inherently difficult, in fact impossible, to decide, if you go back and there is all this devastation, was it the wind that blew the roof off? Was it the flood that did it? Was the window broken by a wind-driven projectile? It is impossible to tell. We give people this impossible decision.

Now, the way the wind program works under the bill, in the first place, it is not a complete expansion. You only would be eligible to buy wind insurance if you already have flood insurance. It will lead to no new insureds. That has to be very clear. No one who is not now taking out insurance, not just eligible, but taking out insurance, will be allowed to take this out, because it can only be an adjunct to your water policy. It is aimed at trying to avoid having this impossible arbitration between wind and water damage.

Secondly, and CBO scores it this way, it is subject to PAYGO. The mandate in the legislation is that it has to be actuarially sound. And people have said, well, the previous flood insurance program wasn't actuarially sound. True. It wasn't subjected to that statutory mandate. It wasn't subject to PAYGO.

We have in here language that mandates that the wind coverage be actuarially sound. CBO has certified, and as Members know, we don't always get from CBO what we think is the right answer, but in this case, CBO has certified that this meets PAYGO and that wind will be there.

So what we are saying is that if you already have water and you are in an area where you are likely to have a combination of wind and water, we will allow you to buy wind as an adjunct so that, and you will have to pay the going rate for it, the actuarially sound rate, but then you will avoid this terrible, intractable problem of arbitrating wind versus water.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. Chairman, I yield an additional minute to the gentlewoman from Florida.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

I must say, Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman asks for my word, and I am tempted to assume a cultural pose which I haven't always had and simply say, ``Word.'' But I am not sure that is still in vogue. I'm sometimes behind in my fashionableness.

I will say this to the gentlewoman; she has been very constructive and we have been able to work together on this and other matters, including on the most recent legislation involving floods. Certainly I will do everything I can to see that this is given very serious consideration.

Now I should add, the recommendations may mean a curtailment of the program or an adjustment of the program. If the argument is that FEMA is not well structured, the response might be to try to improve the structure of FEMA. But I take this report very seriously. So she has my word that we will take this very, very seriously. In fact, I would say when we get the report, the first thing we will do will be to have a hearing on it and then go from there.

Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time, and so I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes to take up the suggestion of the gentleman from Georgia. He said that the insurance companies should be required, I guess, to live up to their social responsibility. I agree.

The committee of which I'm the Chair has the jurisdiction on that; and if he has any recommendations about what we can do, I'd be glad to do it, but not in that way right now.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

It is not in our power to tell them not to take a walk. They are a private sector

entity. So unless there was to be some legislative change, there's simply no power, particularly at the Federal level, because insurance has historically been a State issue; but when the gentleman says we shouldn't let them walk away, I might be inclined to agree with that.

There's nothing in the Federal Government now that would allow us to stop them from walking away, and our committee is available if anybody has any proposals to increase the role of the Federal Government, and I yield to the gentleman.

I'll take back my time to say that's irrelevant. We weren't talking about the history of the flood program.

The gentleman said we shouldn't let the private companies walk away from their social responsibility. I wish he would tell me how he thinks we can do that. I will be glad to yield to the gentleman if he wants to get back to the subject, but not when I'm still posing the question, because he apparently didn't understand it.

He said if they're not living up to their social responsibility, we should make them do it. I don't know how we can do that. If he wants to suggest to me new powers it would seem to me for us to take to do that, I'll listen.

I yield to the gentleman.

I will take back my time, Mr. Chairman, to say that simply isn't accurate today. Others know it better than I, but we've had insurance companies withdrawing from offering policies that are not covered by Federal flood insurance. The Federal Government covers only flood insurance.

So I would repeat to him, his history is interesting; but he says we shouldn't allow them to walk away, and I don't know any way we can prevent them.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute to say that simply isn't true. That's not the causality.

The notion that it was the Federal Government trotting them out is simply not accurate, and again, the phraseology of the gentleman is not that we should allow them to do it, we shouldn't let them walk away. I don't know any way to not let them walk away.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor).

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

His point about the flood insurance not being actuarially sound is right; but in this bill, because it is subject to PAYGO, we have a more stringent standard. So it is not totally valid to say, oh, look, it was supposed to be actuarially done. The wind program here is written to a much stricter standard.

But not according to CBO, I would say to the gentleman.

Mr. Chairman, I submit the following exchange of letters regarding H.R. 3121.

National Association of Realtors',

Washington, DC, September 26, 2007.

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Representatives: On behalf of the more than 1.3

million members of the National Association of

REALTORS' (NAR), I ask for your vote in favor of

H.R. 3121, the Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act

of 2007, when it is considered by the House of

Representatives on Thursday, September 27.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) offers

essential flood loss protection to homeowners and commercial

property owners in more than 20,000 communities nationwide.

The bill, as written, will help protect homeowners, renters

and commercial property owners from losses sustained from

flooding. NAR strongly supports the following changes to the

NFIP contained in the bill including:

Extending the NFIP for five years;

Ensuring that the 100-year flood maps are updated as

expeditiously as possible;

Increasing coverage limits to $335,000 for residential and

$670,000 for commercial properties;

Supporting education of tenants about the availability of

flood insurance while providing flexibility to property

owners and mangers in the manner of providing such notice;

Adding coverage for living expenses, business interruption,

and basement improvements;

Extending the pilot program for mitigation of severe

repetitive loss properties; and

Studying the impacts of eliminating subsidies on

homeowners, renters and local economies.

It is critical that flood insurance remain accessible for

all individuals who own or rent property in a floodplain. I

urge you to vote in favor of H.R. 3121, the Flood Insurance

Reform and Modernization Act of 2007, on Thursday.

Sincerely,

Pat V. Combs, ABR, CRS, GRI, PMN,

2007 President, National

Association of Realtors'

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment unanimously supported, I believe, certainly strongly supported by both majority and minority committee leadership and staffs. It incorporates a number of other amendments, and I am pleased to be able to say that at least here we were able to get some bipartisanship, because one of the amendments of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. LaTourette), it improves the program in terms of mapping and other technical ways, and I believe that there is general agreement that this improves it.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is welcome. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, it might be superfluous, but I would want to point out that the speech we just heard has no bearing whatsoever to the amendment that is pending.

The gentleman, I hope, would wait to be recognized. But in case anybody is trying to follow the debate and the rules, I would want to point out that we are debating a manager's amendment. And while the gentleman didn't know, what he was so expansively saying is, of course, unrelated to this particular amendment.

First of all, I agree. I thought he was talking about the Federal Government when he said ``we.'' And he is right, States have some power; the Federal Government does not. But even there, I believe he overstates the States' powers. And in fact, particularly in the Graham-Leach-Bliley bill, we gave some insurance companies the power to leave States, which we shouldn't have done. But States can be required, if they are going to do something, to do other things. But they can leave altogether, and the State insurance commissioners generally don't have the power to do that.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

If the gentleman would yield.

I just double-checked with the staff, and there is no discount available for wind. It's in the bill.

The language is, in the case of any area that previously was not designated as an area having special flood hazards because the area was protected, it becomes designated as such an area, and it's all about flood. Here it is: the chargeable premium rate for flood insurance under this title shall be, et cetera. So if the gentleman would look at the bottom of the amendment, I'm trying to answer the question.

If the gentleman would yield to me one second, lines 18 and 19, the chargeable premium rate for flood insurance under this title shall be 50 percent.

The law is the law. The amendment would change things. In that sense the gentleman is right: it is silent. It's silent on the wind part, which means it doesn't change it. It explicitly changes the flood part only. And look at lines 18, 19 and pages 1, 2 and 3, and it specifically restricted the flood.

Oh, no. The gentleman is wrong. The gentleman should yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.

Mr. Chairman, at a meeting of the committee, I thought the gentleman was present, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite) asked if I would join in a letter to the GAO asking very many of the questions he asked. I have the letter, dated August 9, 2007. And earlier in the general debate, Ms. Brown- Waite asked me to engage in a colloquy and commit to taking seriously the recommendations. So we have already asked the GAO for a study, and I believe that study will be going forward.

And if it hasn't already been done, at the appropriate time I will place the letter that the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown- Waite) and I sent to the GAO into the Record.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Financial Services,

Washington, DC, August 9, 2007.

Hon. David M. Walker,

Comptroller General of the United States, Government

Accountability Office, Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Walker: We request that the Government

Accountability Office (GAO) initiate a review into a variety

of questions regarding the expansion of the National Flood

Insurance Program (NFIP) to include an optional wind

insurance program. The results of your review will assist

congressional understanding of how such a program could be

implemented and to what extent it would affect the private

market.

As background, Section 7 of H.R. 3121, the Flood Insurance

Reform and Modernization Act of 2007 creates a new program at

the NFIP designed to enable NFIP participants to purchase

both wind and flood coverage in a single policy, A key

provision of Section 7 requires that rates charged for this

new, optional, wind coverage be risk-based and actuarially

sound, so that the program collects premiums sufficient to

pay all reasonably anticipated claims. In so stating, H.R.

3121 specificaI1y departs from the method of determining

actuarial rates currently used by the NFIP.

Under H.R. 3121 the NFIP would provide optional wind

coverage in communities that already participate in the NFIP

and that agree to adopt and enforce building codes and

standards designed to minimize wind damage. In order for you

to better understand the details of the new wind insurance

program we have enclosed a copy of H.R. 3121, Section 7 with

this request.

In addition to any issues you deem appropriate, we would

like the GAO to initiate a comprehensive analysis and

determination of the following:

1. The ability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

(FEMA) and the NFIP to implement an actuarially-sound (i.e.,

with rates priced according to risk, or as defined by

standards and methods generally accepted by the actuary

industry, incorporating up-to-date modeling technology, and

taking into consideration administrative expenses) wind

insurance program, including: whether FEMA's current staff

and resources enable it to efficiently and effectively expand

the NFIP to offer optional wind coverage; how actuarial rates

for such coverage could be determined; the likelihood that

consumers would purchase coverage at these rates; how this

new coverage would be underwritten and sold; how claims

arising from this new coverage would be adjusted and paid;

whether FEMA's staff and resources are sufficient to be

prepared to implement this new wind insurance program on or

before June 30, 2008; what additional staff and

administrative costs are necessary in order for FEMA to

effectively implement and administer this new wind insurance

program; and how the availability of optional wind insurance

through the NFIP could affect the enforcement of the NFIP's

mandatory purchase requirement for flood insurance.

2. The effects, if any, this program could have on existing

State wind pools, including capitalization of, and

participation in, the wind pools.

3. Whether expanding the NFIP to provide optional wind

coverage could: affect the availability and affordability,

over the long-term, of wind coverage nationwide; influence

the development in private sector markets, including the

surplus and non-admitted markets, for multiple peril

insurance, or alternatives; result in adverse selection,

whereby the wind insurance program could be under diversified

and particularly vulnerable to large events; and lead to the

development of lower, yet actuarially sound rates for wind

coverage similar to wind coverage offered by the private

sector, in the same geographic area.

4. To what extent, if any, the new wind insurance program

could expose U.S. taxpayers to loss, including but not

limited to the case of program deficit.

5. Are alternative methods available to provide NFIP

participants with better wind coverage options.

6. To what extent, if any, gaps in coverage may still

exist, between the coverage included under most homeowners

policies, and the flood and wind coverage provided by the

First, Mr. Chairman, I hope the gentleman from Texas will remember this problem about spending when we again debate the proposal to spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending a manned spaceship to Mars, which I have been opposed to, and I hope he will join me in that unnecessary expenditure and oppose it.

Secondly, CBO says he is wrong. The wind part is written, unlike the flood part, to require actuarially sound policy premiums to break even, and CBO certified that it's there. So the notion that this is adding trillions or even billions to our debt is simply wrong, according to

As the gentleman knows, I was opposed to the Rules Committee's decision to keep out several Republican amendments. I now regret that even more because if the gentleman had a real amendment to argue for, he wouldn't be making these badly strained irrelevant arguments on this particular poor little amendment. It really doesn't deserve all the rhetoric it's getting.

Mr. Chairman, to answer the direct question by the gentleman, no, I would not say this is the greatest development bill. But I would also say he says he was puzzled. Not as puzzled as I am in trying to figure out what in the world this had to do with the amendment we are dealing with. Maybe it is considered, I don't know, stuffy to deal with the amendment under consideration. I always prefer it as a method of debate.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

In the first place, the flood part environmentalists strongly support because it restricts where people can go and raises the fee. As to the wind part, it's not a subsidy.

If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

The amendment that you are talking about specifically did not encourage anybody to move. It dealt with people who are already there, having moved there previously, found subsequently they were in a flood area. But the general thrust of the bill on flood, strongly supported by environmentalists, is to increase the amount that's charged in many cases and to restrict the building.

As to wind, there is no subsidy. It is required to be actuarially soundly financed. So, yes, it's a government program, but one without any subsidy to the homeowner on the wind part.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Virtually every piece of legislation we deal with, because this legislation has two parts, one part which will reduce an existing liability, that is, there is already out there a flood insurance liability. This bill, unanimously agreed to by all in the committee who worked on it, will reduce that in the flood part.

With regard to water, this will raise premiums and restrict placement. With regard to the new part, the wind part, it will create no liability, because as I have said several times, the bill strictly says that premiums will have to be actuarially sound. And CBO has certified that that is accurate. So CBO has certified this will, over time, produce no new liability on wind and save money on water.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

The mistakes the gentleman makes are these; the basis on which the flood insurance policies are set is different. The one in this bill, the wind policy, it is a much tougher requirement to be actuarially sound. And CBO, unlike the gentleman from Texas, can read the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman, and I regret to say the entertainment value of what was not an exciting subject from the beginning appears to have gone down because the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson) has left the floor. I thought his method of argument, which is the frequent repetition of error at increasing volume, added a certain panache to the proceedings. But since the last time he reiterated those errors, I thought it would be useful to correct them.

First of all, this bill and this amendment not only doesn't add to the Federal Government's liability, it diminishes existing liability. The flood program was allowed to get deeply in debt. This bill with respect to flood says that there will be higher premiums and there will be fewer buildings in the floodplain areas. So it clearly reduces. It is supported in that respect by environmentalists and taxpayers.

The wind part does add a new program. It adds a new program subject to the PAYGO rules, and it requires that it be strictly actuarially sound. Now, the gentleman from Texas could not seem to understand the basic distinction. He said, ``Well, the flood program was supposed to be actuarially sound and it isn't.'' True. That is why when we did the wind program, we wrote a much more specific and binding set of instructions that it be actuarially sound.

The fact is that the flaws that led the water program to be in debt are corrected in this bill. That is not simply the opinion of the author, the gentleman from Mississippi, or this committee. It is CBO, the Congressional Budget Office's certification. So the notion that this adds to liability is simply wrong. It will reduce the outgo with regard to the water program. With regard to the wind program, it is actuarially sound, and in this bill, if it begins to run into deficit, the program cuts off.

So an analogy between the wind funding and the water funding is flatly wrong. They are written differently. We have learned from our mistakes. And that is true of this amendment, too. The gentleman has offered an amendment that would increase coverage subject, again, to the very strict rules that say we will be actuarially sound.

Now, I have no particular hope that this is going to sink in everywhere, but it does seem to me to be useful to have the fundamental facts out there on the record.

Mr. Chairman, this is actually a very conciliatory amendment by the gentleman from Mississippi because previously, and I know the gentleman has left the floor, he's been here very diligently, I don't mean anything critical, but the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston) said why don't we try to make the private companies live up to their responsibilities and stop them from walking away.

This amendment is the first chance we get to do that, because what this amendment does is not extend Federal coverage, but try to hold those companies which are voluntarily participating with the Federal Government to a reasonable standard with regard to their own coverage. So this is a chance to hold the private companies to their social responsibility.

Mr. Chairman, I just want to thank the gentleman for taking this up. I want to stress what we are doing.

People have said, well, you are giving people breaks. No. The amendment that the gentleman from California (Mr. Cardoza) offered earlier and this one deal with people who having lived somewhere, now will find themselves in a floodplain not because they moved, but because the designation is different.

This does not exempt them from having to pay the insurance. It does in certain cases, the gentleman from California's case. And this one that has to do with remapping, new maps or updating maps, it allows them to phase in. The result will be more people paying in and more people living in a floodplain who will be having to pay flood insurance. The remapping means there will be more restrictions on future building there.

I did want to stress that we did not in this bill and not in any of the amendments give any reductions to people already covered. But we have said, again, where people did not move in but found themselves where they had previously been living now included in the zone, we give people some leeway in the phasing in of the policy charge.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve a point of order.

No, Mr. Speaker, I do not press the point of order.

I am opposed to the motion. I would press, instead, a point of logic, more appropriate here.

And the logic is this: we have a proposal that came forward, brought forward by the gentleman from Mississippi to add a program to the National Flood Insurance Program that says that if you have national water insurance, you can, at your option, add wind insurance. Remember, no new insured are eligible here. You have to have water and then you can get wind.

The argument that the gentleman from Mississippi has made irrefutably on this House floor is that you simply cannot, days after a storm has damaged, try to sort out what was wind and what was water.

Now, unlike the flood program, the gentlewoman from Minnesota is right, the flood program is in deep debt. We inherited, from our Republican colleagues, a flood insurance program that is hurting. They had control of that program, House, Senate and President; and it went into debt.

As the gentlewoman says, we have a bill, and we had it last year in the House too, but not in the Senate, that makes it better. Everyone agrees that our bill, everyone who has read it agrees that our bill reduces the financial problems with flood, but it doesn't wipe them out. There's a large problem there. Billions of dollars.

Here's the illogic. The gentleman from Mississippi has put forward a proposal for optional wind insurance which will have to be actuarially sound. When the flood insurance program was passed, there was no PAYGO. Flood insurance is hurting. They're supposed to be actuarially sound, but it's very loose.

We have written into this bill, with regard to wind, requirements that it be actuarially sound, that it break even for the Federal Government, that the Congressional Budget Office certifies as perfectly good. So there is no argument possible that the wind program will add to the danger. CBO has certified that it is sound. So we have a new wind program that will be actuarially sound; CBO certifies that. And the bill says that if the program starts to run into a deficit, it cuts off. Automatic.

We then have the water program, which the Republicans left us as their inheritance, which is deeply in debt. They are saying that the fiscally sound wind program that's in this bill, certified by CBO, cannot go into effect until we've solved the problem they left us in the water program. They are saying that. They don't have anything to say bad about the wind program. They're saying that you can't do the wind program until you've solved the water problem. And the water problem is billions.

How would you solve it?

Well, you'd substantially raise people's premiums.

I should note, Mr. Speaker, that no one on the Republican side has proposed to try to make it actuarially sound. We are trying to get in that direction. But no one on the Republican side thinks it's reasonable to immediately wipe out that huge debt.

They don't like the wind program. They don't want to take it on head on, so they have come up with this scheme which says, the fiscally sound, CBO-certified, actuarially-legitimate wind program can't go forward until we clean up the $19 billion problem they left us in the flood program. I do not think that is very logical.

The gentleman from Mississippi, as I said, made the case for the wind program. So this becomes a case for the wind program.

Here's the deal: you're told to leave your house because a hurricane's coming. You come back a few days later and there's devastation, and you have to figure out what was caused by wind

and what was caused by water because if you have a wind policy from a private company, they will argue, in many cases, that water caused all the damage, and you are very hard pressed to find it out.

If you then, instead, have a combined wind and water policy from the Federal Government, you then don't have to go through this metaphysical exercise. You simply get the payment for your damages.

Now, that's the logical point that the gentleman from Mississippi put forward. And it is going to be, as CBO said, break even for the Federal Government.

So here's the recommit: the Federal Government cannot go to the aid of people facing that dilemma of trying to decide wind versus water, which has been certified as fiscally neutral by CBO, until we solve the problem that we got in the water issue.

It really is not a logical thing to do. It is simply a way to try to kill the wind program. A more straightforward way would have been to simply kill the wind program. I'm sorry they didn't get an amendment to do that. But they could have done that straightforwardly in the recommit.

So I hope that Members will vote ``no.'' The only issue here is should we initiate a voluntary program whereby people who have Federal water insurance can also get wind insurance in a manner that is certified by CBO to add nothing to the deficit, to do nothing to hurt the Federal flood insurance program, but to be actuarially sound.

I hope the motion is defeated.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Clerk be authorized to make technical corrections in the engrossment of H.R. 3121, to include corrections in spelling, punctuation, section numbering and cross-referencing, and the insertion of appropriate headings.

Mr. Speaker, there are several aspects of this. One is, of course, whether or not we should go forward with a renewal of terrorism risk insurance.

There are, in our midst, people who believe in the free market so firmly that they believe in it the way other people believe in unicorns. They believe in it even when it does not exist. There are people who oppose terrorism risk insurance from the outset and continue to because they say it should be up to the market. No one involved in the market thinks that makes sense. Indeed, we received a letter from the head of Goldman Sachs in 2005 saying there is no evidence that this can become a market item. His name was Henry Paulson, and he quite clearly said at the time the market wouldn't do it. We then proceeded with a bill that took that into account.

By the way, if the market could do it, it shouldn't because here is what the market would do, and we are talking about the insurance market: If you left this to the market or if you try to phase this out so the market would take it over, the principle of insurance says it should be more expensive to do business in those parts of the country which are likeliest to be hit by terrorists than not because that's the insurance principle. If there is a higher risk, you charge people more. We should not allow murderous fanatics who seek to damage this country to dictate what the cost of doing business is in different regions. That's not a market decision; that's a national security decision. I don't want it to be more expensive because of the murderers who would try to undermine this country to do business here or there.

It is also the case that one of the principles of insurance is that you give it and you give incentives to the insured to reduce the risk and you price in a way that gives those incentives. People can't avoid the risk. There is nothing you can do to stop the terrorists as private citizens from attacking you.

So we were going ahead with the bill. Now, we had a set of markups in subcommittee and committee in which there were some disagreements but some agreements. A number of amendments offered by Republican Members were adopted and the bill had a very large vote coming out of committee.

We then ran into a surprising obstacle. The Congressional Budget Office issued what seems to me an intellectually quite weak opinion. They said this is going to cost $10 billion over the next 5 years. Now, a $10 billion terrorism attack is not within our contemplation. I could see their saying it is not going to cost anything for this period or that it is going to cost hundreds of billions. Apparently they calculated the probability of a terrorist attack and imputed that cost. There will, in fact, be no costs until there is an attack.

My own view, frankly, was that this would have justified an emergency waiver under PAYGO. If being attacked by terrorists, if September 11, 2001, was not an emergency, then I don't understand what the word means.

We have been forced now to try to deal with this in other ways, and I understand that. It has been forced on us by CBO. The notion that we can say something now and leave it to future Congresses, the gentleman from Texas said it was unconstitutional. I am aware of no Supreme Court decision that would invalidate what we have

proposed here. And it couldn't be binding. Nothing is binding of one on a future one. I think that would be a very high degree of probability.

So we do have this approach which came up suddenly. It came up suddenly. It wasn't debated in our committee because the issue of the CBO estimate hadn't come before us in the committee. So we now have Members on the other side complaining that the rule was too restrictive.

Mr. Speaker, when I hear Members of the Republican Party who ran this House in the most blatantly undemocrat fashion for so many years now complain about a lack of democracy, I feel like I am in a motion picture theater and I'm watching an Ingmar Bergman dark movie which features the Three Stooges. The incongruity of these masters of authoritarian legislative procedure now complaining because there isn't enough democracy is one of the great conversions of all time. And I would have to say to my born-again believers in an open process that in this case at the committee level, we had a hearing, we had a subcommittee markup and a committee markup, and we dealt very much with those issues.

My own preference would have been to allow a few more amendments, but the fundamental issues have been debated, and the key issue is, unfortunately, the one that has troubled them, is how do you deal with the CBO. Now, either you do a waiver of PAYGO or you make cuts now of $10 billion in programs on the possibility of there being a terrorist attack. It seems to me that is a great favor to terrorists. Let them cut programs now by just threatening to blow us up. Or you try to come up with some set of procedures that say we really intend to do this but we can't make it absolutely binding.

I do not think the set of procedures we have here will be the final say. It was a difficult situation that we found with that, I thought, CBO estimate. And the CBO estimate basically says here is what we say but it's probably not going to be this way. And I hope, as we go forward, there will be meetings with industry. And, by the way, industry is not just the insurance industry. It's the commercial building industry. They are the ones who are at risk here. The insurance industry can walk away, but if they walk away, we won't get commercial buildings built, particularly in our big cities, which is why the mayors of the big cities are so concerned and others are concerned about economic development.

So we need further work to see how we can deal with this CBO issue, and I think we have a reasonable first cut. It is one where, it is true, we did not deal with it in our committee. What we dealt with in the committee in great detail with a number of amendments and a lot of compromise were all the other factors. And we now get this new issue. This is a good-faith effort to deal with the new issue but not in a way that is final. So I hope we can go forward.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 2761 and to insert extraneous material therein.

Mr. Chairman, this is a continuation of a program that the Congress adopted in one of the previous Congresses to provide insurance in case of a terrorist attack. We had, obviously, the terrible murderous attack on America in 2001.

Substantial damage was done. Obviously, the overwhelming cost of that was in the human lives caused by these murderers, but we also had property damage. And I believe that it is unrealistic to think, and in fact inappropriate to urge, that the private insurance market, which functions very well in this country and serves us well, that that ought to be used in response to terrorism. We bring a bill forward that would provide both for life and property insurance from the Federal Government worked out in various ways.

There are two arguments for continuing this on an ongoing basis. Everybody agrees that it needs to be extended for a while. Some have said phase it out, let the private market ultimately take it over. I believe there are two reasons why that is not a good idea.

First, virtually no entities that are in the private insurance market believe that the private market could handle this well. Not only do the insurers believe that, but the customers of the insurance believe it. And primarily, by the way, the customers here are commercial real estate developers. People who are going to build large commercial buildings with tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs cannot build without a bank loan, and the banks will not lend and would not be allowed to lend by the regulators without fully insuring against all risks, including the risks of the terrorism that we wish were not around but clearly still is.

We do not believe, based on extensive conversations with virtually everyone in the marketplace, that this will work. In fact, I submit for printing in the Record a letter from the head of Goldman Sachs in 2005, that very important financial institution, clearly an entity that knows a great deal about the market. And in 2005, only 2 years ago, after we had TRIA for a while and the question was coming up about whether or not to continue it, he wrote to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Baker), then Chair of the Capital Market Subcommittee, that:

``Current data suggests that reinsurance, and consequently insurance, participation in the terrorism insurance market will decline if the Federal backstop is left to expire.

``Some have suggested that private markets for terrorism can successfully utilize risk transfer mechanisms such as catastrophe bonds.

``There is no evidence to suggest that the rating agencies or capital markets investors will be able to quantify the risk.''

And what he says is that he does not believe the market can do this.

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.,

New York, NY, July 26, 2005.

Hon. Richard Baker,

Chairman, Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and

Government Sponsored Enterprises, House of

Representatives, Cannon House Office Building,

Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Chairman: On behalf of The Goldman Sachs Group,

lnc., a leading global investment banking, securities and

investment management firm, I am writing to express my

support for maintaining a federal terrorism insurance

backstop.

The federal terrorism insurance program, enacted by the

Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA), has helped

provide the underpinning to a robust economic recovery

despite the ongoing threat of terrorism. Notwithstanding

Treasury's conclusion that TRIA has achieved its original

purpose, we are not aware of any meaningful evidence showing

that private terrorism risk insurance or reinsurance markets

have developed ample capacity to rationally price and insure

against terrorism on a scale that would adequately protect

our nation's economy. In fact, current data suggests that

reinsurance, and consequently insurance, participation in the

terrorism insurance market likely will decline significantly

if the federal terrorism insurance backstop is left to

expire.

Some have suggested that private markets for terrorism risk

can successfully utilize risk transfer mechanisms such as

catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) that transfer risk from

insurers to capital markets. Such securitization vehicles,

however, represent a minor percentage of the overall

insurance market and have been used mainly for natural

disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. There is no

evidence to suggest that the rating agencies or capital

markets investors will be able to more effectively quantify

the risk of terrorism than insurers or reinsurers. As such,

CAT bonds and other risk transfer mechanisms are unlikely to

offer, at this time, the broad capacity necessary to insure

America's businesses, workers and property owners against the

risk of terrorism.

With less than five months remaining in the current

program, American businesses soon will be forced to compete

for portions of a severely constrained private insurance

market and risk the possibility of being left with inadequate

levels of terrorism insurance. In short, we simply cannot

afford to let the private sector be economically exposed.

I appreciate your attention to this very important matter.

Sincerely,

Henry M. Paulson, Jr.,

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs who signed this is a very distinguished expert, Henry M. Paulson, Jr. He is no longer the chief of Goldman Sachs; he is now the Secretary of the Treasury and has somewhat different views, but this is a letter that he sent in late July 2005.

So we don't think the market can handle it. But I want to argue that even if you thought the market could handle it, we shouldn't ask it to for this reason: If you insure against risk, you ultimately pass the costs along to the people who are at risk. Insurance allows you to spread that risk out among those who are at risk. But the more you are at risk, the more you pay in insurance.

If we were to adopt a purely market solution, that would mean that those parts of the country which were calculated to be likelier targets of terrorism would pay more. That is the insurance principle. If you are more likely to be the victim of terrorism, then you should pay more.

I do not think we should allow vicious fanatics who hate this country and seek to inflict severe physical damage on us to decide where it should be more expensive to do business in our country and where it should not. But if you use the private insurance mechanism, that is what you get.

There is another problem with the private insurance mechanism, not a problem, a good facet, that doesn't apply here. What you can do with private insurance is to say to these entities: You know what, if you lower your risk, we will lower your insurance costs. But people who have large office buildings cannot significantly lower their risk of being attacked by terrorists. If they could, we wouldn't want them to be. We wouldn't want people in

America in the business sector to be told, well, why don't you try to appease the terrorists so they don't blow you up. So it ought to be a public program.

Now, we have had significant debate in the committee. We had in the subcommittee and committee two full markups, an unusual degree of attention. A number of amendments were adopted from both parties. It is a different and, I believe, better bill now than it was when it was introduced. There are still some philosophical differences.

There is one issue, though, that came up after the committee consideration, and to our surprise the Congressional Budget Office said that this is going to cost a certain amount of money. I will get the estimate. I think they said $10 billion over a period of 10 years. That is a very odd thing to say. A terrorist attack will cost hundreds of billions if it happens; it will cost nothing if it doesn't. They apparently used some calculation of probability, which I think is in itself kind of dubious. Nobody, I think, can realistically talk about the probability of a terrorist attack, to give us the number that it will cost $3.5 billion over 5 years and $8.4 billion over 10 years.

One thing we know for sure is that these estimates are wrong. It will either cost a lot more, or nothing. CBO did its job, I don't think very well. Maybe that is because of the constraints they operate under. I don't make a personal criticism of them. But we have this PAYGO rule.

I will say that my own preference as an individual Member would have been to grant an emergency waiver, because if a terrorist attack is an emergency, then we shouldn't have that in there. I do not represent the thinking of the majority as of now on this or the Democratic leadership. That is an open question to evolve. So we did the next best thing, which is to adopt a set of procedures to deal with what will happen if the Federal Government has to make a payout under this.

I will say that I think that was a good effort, given the time frame. And I think it is important, given the potential expiration or the expiration date, that we should move forward, and maybe it will encourage our colleagues across the Capitol to act.

I do not believe that what we have in here will be the final answer. We have one possibility: Maybe a consensus will develop on a waiver. I can't say that I have confidence in that, but I certainly will advocate for it. If we can't get a waiver, we will within the framework of the PAYGO requirement, $3 billion over 5 years, try to work something out. And I know that is what the Democratic leadership has assured the Members from New York in particular, that they will do their best within the context of PAYGO to work this out. And I believe we can improve on where we are. We will reduce the risk that there won't be payment to the minimum amount possible, and then maybe we share that risk.

So I do not believe that what we have in this bill will be the final version. I think it is important to move this process along. I think this is as good an effort to do it as we could now. We will have to be consulting with the various parties in interest, including the cities, including the insurers, including the insured and others, and we will move forward on that. So I do believe it is very important to move forward now.

The only reason to vote against this bill at this point is not because of disagreement on some of the specifics. They will evolve as we go forward, particularly in the PAYGO response. But if you believe this is something that should be left to the market, and I do not believe that the market can or should be asked to handle terrorism. Adam Smith is one of the great intellectual contributors to thought in this world, but I don't think he knew much about terrorism, luckily for him. I do not think that the free market was adopted or is adaptable to murderous attacks of the sort we had on September 11.

So I believe this is the best we can do at this point. It is a very good bill, I believe, not perfect, with regard to the PAYGO fix, but that is something that I believe will evolve. I have every confidence that we will be able to do it better as we go forward, and I hope the bill passes.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself first 30 seconds to note that I was impressed when the gentleman said he was going to vote against this bill because of this new amendment. But he voted against the bill the last time, so apparently my friend from Alabama intends to vote against this bill twice, because he voted against it in committee. So no one should think that the effort to deal with PAYGO is the reason he's voting against it.

Secondly, no one is asking anybody to accept any blank checks, and that is a misrepresentation of the legislative process. Changes will be made, I hope, in an open way. There will be an open conference, in total contrast to the way in which his party operated. I guarantee Members, as chairman of this committee, that we will have a conference committee, it will be a legitimate conference committee, and everything will be done openly, and votes will be taken. So no one is asking anybody to do anything in secret.

And again, the gentleman, having already voted against the bill, there are only so many bases you can claim on which you vote against the bill. He says he's not going to vote for the bill. We never thought he would. He voted against it the last time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Ackerman).

Absolutely.

Let me just say, first of all, having grown up in New Jersey, I'm used to complaints from New Yorkers. But in this particular case I believe they are entirely legitimate and justified, and I can assure the gentleman that we will work together in an open way to resolve it.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes now to a senior member of our committee, the Chair of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, someone who has worked a great deal on this, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. Chairman, I now yield 2 minutes to another member of the committee, whose district in Jersey City is as close to the site of the terrorism attack of 2001 as any, other than the district in which it happened.

Mr. Chairman, I will give myself 15 seconds to say I was waiting for the gentleman to tell me he voted against the war in Iraq. He talked about all these things he voted against. Added together and doubled, they don't add up to the war in Iraq, the continuing indefinite drain. Hundreds of billions of dollars have already gone, and they are committed to spending hundreds of billions more to make us worse off.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy).

I yield 15 seconds to the gentleman from New York to make a response.

I yield 3\3/4\ minutes to the gentleman from

Pennsylvania, the chairman of the subcommittee who guided this bill through a very thoughtful bipartisan markup.

(Mr. KANJORSKI asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

I agree with the gentlewoman on both points. First, there is nothing in this language, and I should say that this issue of preventing unfair denials of life insurance, she was the one who brought it up. She brought it up in the prior Congress. And now that we are in the majority, we are able to accommodate it.

I appreciate the fact that the gentlewoman worked with us as we worked with the life insurance companies. I believe we have an acceptable set of principles. She is right that this language does need a little bit more, I think, refinement on conflict. I think there's a conceptual agreement. I agree with her as to the need for definition.

As a preemption, that is very simple. I am a strong believer we should not be preempting unless we say so explicitly. There has been an excess of subtle preemption. By itself, this bill does not do that. Insurance has been primarily a State issue. This is a Federal statement, but it is not at all meant to be preemptive.

Before I yield to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch), I would just point out that when we voted on this in committee before we had the PAYGO glitch, the vote on the Republican side was 19 opposed, 14 in favor, so it was hardly a one-sided partisan bill. It partly reflects the work that the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kanjorski) did in accommodating a lot of the concerns.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont.

Yes.

Get to the question.

If the gentleman would yield, he has pointed to a very important issue. We did try to make some accommodation with the small insurers, but I don't think we have finally done that. But I would say, you know, the notion that a bill that comes to the floor is not graven in stone shouldn't come as a surprise to people. We have a Senate. We have a genuine conference. It will be an open conference.

I should say I understand why some of my colleagues on the Republican side were somewhat puzzled at the notion that we might go to conference and, in an open way in conference, further amend the bill. They didn't believe in that. They didn't have any. So for them, that was all done in secret.

We will have an open conference to address these. And this is one of the issues. I do believe that it is legitimate. We will be meeting with, and the staffs will be meeting with, the smaller private insurers. To the extent possible consistent with the purpose of the bill, we will seek to improve on the accommodation.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin).

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I recognize myself for 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, this is an agreed-upon set of amendments. As I said, it was a bipartisan process, to some extent, in drafting. This makes technical revisions and requires Treasury to promulgate rules to clarify the nuclear, biological, chemical and radiation certification process. It provides that there be indexing, which is, I think, in accordance, there are some copayments, et cetera, and these will be indexed. It applies the reset mechanism to the deductible for nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological, and it makes technical and conforming changes. I believe, as I said, this represents a consensus.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking member. We were able to work out a number of these things. I would just want to return to a couple of broader points. I want to make two points. One, I don't think the market will work and neither does any participant in the market either as an insurer, or any significant number, or as the insured. But even if it could, it does not seem to me that it should. If you did this purely in the private market, you would give to the vicious attackers of America the power to decide that it would be more

expensive to do business in some parts of our country than others. You could have another video from the despicable Osama Bin Laden in which he could threaten that he would take action against this area or that area, these facilities or those facilities, and their insurance premiums would go up.

Yes, the private market should govern all those things which it deals with, with fire and with other forms of casualty and even with natural disasters. But to put in the hands of America's enemies this economic power is a grave error. Should the taxpayers pay for it? Yes, because it is a matter of national defense. It is a matter of homeland security. We are not talking about insuring people against the risk if they built a commercial building of liability to injury, of fire, of theft, of improper or inadequate construction. We are saying that, no, if you are in business in America, you should not have to insure against an attack on this country based on hatred of us.

So that is why I believe that we should do this as a public policy matter.

Mr. Chairman, at this point, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina, a member of the committee who is one of our most thoughtful Members to discuss the general principle of the bill.

I join the gentleman in opposition, and I want to address this charge that we heard from one of the Members that this is a typical liberal Democratic big-spending program.

I will include for the Record a strong endorsement of H.R. 2761 from the Coalition to Insure Against Terrorism. It is composed of such traditional liberal groups as the American Bankers Association, the National Apartment Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation, the National Restaurant Association and the National Association of Industrial and Office Property. Virtually every business involved in this, the Financial Services Roundtable, led by that radical, our former colleague, Mr. Bartlett of Texas, every business group from the insuring and insured part says this is not for the market.

I would add also a letter from the National League of Cities strongly urging on behalf of the cities of America passage of this bill as it was reported out of committee.

Finally, from the American Insurance Association, a strong argument. In particular, it thanks us for including nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological.

Those who said the market can do it, it says two separate government studies have concluded what insurers already knew, that outside of State mandates, there is virtually no private insurance market capacity for NBCR. ``For this and other reasons,'' they like the whole bill, ``the American Insurance Association and its more than 350 property casualty insurance companies strongly endorse H.R. 2761 as it was reported out of the committee.'' They have got some concern about the reset, and we will talk about that and we agree with them. But here is this strong endorsement.

Yes, it is true that this is something that some liberal Democrats support. And here is the signer on behalf of the American Insurance Association, Governor Marc Racicot, I believe a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. I want to congratulate my Democratic colleagues. To have insinuated a liberal Democrat into the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee is a degree of flexibility I didn't know we have.

So this notion that this is some liberal invention and that the market can do it is repudiated by everyone who knows anything about the market. I hope the amendment is defeated and the bill is passed.

Vote ``Yes'' on H.R. 2761

The undersigned members of the Coalition to Insure Against

Terrorism (CIAT), a broad based coalition of business

insurance policyholders representing a significant segment of

the nation's GDP, strongly urge you to vote ``yes'' on H.R.

2761 Terrorism Risk Insurance Revision and Extension Act of

2007 (TRIREA).

American Bankers Association; American Bankers Insurance

Association; American Council of Engineering Companies;

American Gas Association; American Hotel and Lodging

Association; American Land Title Association; American Public

Gas Association; American Public Power Association; American

Resort Development Association; American Society of

Association Executives; Associated Builders and Contractors;

Associated General Contractors of America; Association of

American Railroads; Association of Art Museum Directors;

Babson Capital Management LLC; The Bond Market Association;

Building Owners and Managers Association International;

Boston Properties; and CCIM Institute.

Campbell Soup Company; Century 21 Department Stores;

Chemical Producers and Distributors Association; Citigroup

Inc.; Commercial Mortgage Securities Association; Cornerstone

Real Estate Advisers, Inc.; CSX Corporation; Edison Electric

Institute; Electric Power Supply Association; The Financial

Services Roundtable; The Food Marketing Institute; General

Aviation Manufacturers Association; Helicopter Association

International; Hilton Hotels Corporation; Host Hotels and

Resorts; Independent Electrical Contractors; Institute of

Real Estate Management; Intercontinental Hotels; and

International Council of Shopping Centers.

International Franchise Association; International Safety

Equipment Association; The Long Island Import Export

Association; Marriott International; Mortgage Bankers

Association; National Apartment Association; National

Association of Home Builders; National Association of

Industrial and Office Properties; National Association of

Manufacturers; National Association of REALTORS';

National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts;

National Association of Waterfront Employers; National

Association of Wholesaler-Distributors; National Basketball

Association; National Collegiate Athletic Association;

National Council of Chain Restaurants; National Football

League; National Hockey League; and National Multi Housing

Council.

National Petrochemical & Refiners Association; National

Restaurant Association; National Retail Federation; National

Roofing Contractors Association; National Rural Electric

Cooperative Association; The New England Council; Partnership

for New York City; Office of the Commissioner of Baseball;

Public Utilities Risk Management Association; The Real Estate

Board of New York; The Real Estate Roundtable; Society of

American Florists; Starwood Hotels and Resorts; Taxicab,

Limousine & Paratransit Association; Travel Business

Roundtable; Trizec Properties, Inc.; UJA-Federation of New

York; Union Pacific Corporation; and U.S. Chamber of

Commerce.

I would say yes, the taxpayers do pay. It is a matter of national defense. Where people are building and incurring risks, they should pay for it themselves. I accept that point. We are talking about how we respond to Osama bin Laden or other murderers who would attack this country.

I think it is appropriate that the country as a whole respond, and not allow the terrorists to pick and choose which Americans will have to suffer disproportionately.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion to recommit.

First of all, of course it says ``promptly.'' Members make a choice. The purpose of this is terrorism risk insurance expires the end of this year. We are on a reasonable timetable but not one that has a lot of water in it.

Yesterday, on an important bill that goes before the Committee on Financial Services, they said ``promptly.'' So the notion is that they can make the Committee on Financial Services a revolving door and then complain when we can't get the work done when we will have to do it two and three times.

Secondly, Members on the other side, and I don't know where the gentleman from California was on this, but in Committee, before the PAYGO problem arose, while we got substantial Republican support, 14, 19 Republicans, including the ranking member, voted ``no.'' So the Republicans had taken an opposing position in the majority. The administration is in the majority against it.

And what are they telling us? That a bill that the Republicans on the whole are against doesn't do enough for the people who want the bill. This is people intervening on behalf of people who don't want their intervention.

It is true that there is some ambiguity that I hope will be resolved; but the American Insurance Association, and that is the group that, despite the Republican's argument that this can be done by the market, says no, the market can't handle it. And, in a letter signed by a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Governor Marc Racicot, president of the AIA, they say please go ahead with the bill. And they say: We have concerns about this fix. We hope we can go forward and work on it as opposed to delaying it further.

We got a letter today from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, the Bankers, the League of Cities, being aware of the problem and of the first cut at fixing it, that say please go forward.

Now, if the people who were expecting to be the participants in this program said, wait a minute, this can't go forward, they would be, I think, entitled to be listened to. When people who have on the whole been opposed to the whole program and who voted against it before this arose now appear to say, oh, my goodness, this poor program, you are not doing enough justice, when they want to kill it, I don't think have a lot of credibility.

So, yes, this does need some work. There are a variety of suggestions that have been made. We do have a Senate to go forward and we have a conference process.

And I will say to the Republicans, I understand their skepticism about a conference process, because when they were in the power, they didn't have any. They did a lot of backroom, okay, we will do this.

We will have a conference. I am chairman of this committee. I can promise, and I have talked to the leadership, we will have an open conference and there will be debates and discussions.

I am explaining it because the Republicans, some of them, the newer ones don't know what one is. It will be the

House and the Senate, and we will talk about it. And so we will address this particular issue.

And, again, all of those who are in favor of this program as it was drafted, all of them want us to go forward as we continue to make this final fix. Most of those who are saying, oh, no, you can't go forward, it is not perfect, didn't like it in any case.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

I thank the gentleman, but I take back my time. He will vote in favor of the legislation after it is sent back to committee, after it is wide open again to an amendment process, after members of the committee on his side of the aisle will offer a whole lot of new amendments. And so weeks could go by before we are able to get floor time again and do it. There are a lot of things on the floor, and they are complaining that we didn't pass other things.

So the gentleman will vote for it in the sweet by-and-by if we send it back. There is an alternative: We go through the regular process. The Senate votes on this, aware of the CBO. We go to an open conference. We debate it, and we bring that to the floor.

I will yield again to the gentleman.

I know turf is more important to some Members than anything else.

It is rather odd to proclaim yourself an institutionalist while violating the rules.

The fact is that I understand turf makes some people jittery. And I will certainly advocate that the Rules Committee be included in the conference report.

Again, the Republicans have forgotten how conferences work. Conferences can have more than one committee, so the Rules Committee can get representation on the conference.

Again, everybody who is for this bill in the House and the private sector, people on the whole and the cities, the representatives of the public affected, want us to go forward and say, in good faith work, this out.

People who have been on the whole opposed to it, not entirely but on the whole opposed to it, have found this hook to try and hold it up. I don't think they are trying to hold it up to make it better when a majority of them wanted to kill it in the first place.