Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to thank the people of the Third Congressional District of Arizona, who put their trust and faith in me to represent them in the 112th Congress. The people of our district are good, hardworking Americans. They value their family, their country, and their freedoms. It was an absolute honor to serve them in this Congress.

I would also like to thank my family and friends for their unwavering support throughout my life. Without them, I would not be here today.

Mr. Speaker, I'd also like to thank my tireless staff both here in Washington and back home in Arizona. Their dedication to our district and to our country was something that was amazing to watch. And over the course of 2 years, working day and night, they became a lot more than just people I work with. They became extended family. And I thank them for that.

Mr. Speaker, I want to finally thank, more importantly, my wife, Tiffany, who, a few years ago, made me the luckiest man on the face of the Earth when she said ``yes'' to be my wife. I want to thank her for all of the sacrifices that she has made so that I could be in this House. She has held down a full-time job, all the while playing both mom and dad to our daughter, Evie, when I was away from home. I can never thank her enough for all that she has done.

Mr. Speaker, the past 2 years have been an interesting ride, primarily because it was highly unlikely that I would ever speak on this floor. You see, Mr. Speaker, if you had asked me 5 years ago if I would ever run for public office, I would have said ``no.'' And not because I don't value and honor public service. I certainly do. But it's because the environment that I grew up in, I saw the bad side of politics and I didn't know if I wanted to put my family through the same trials and tribulations. However, that all changed as I witnessed our country continuing to stray from its founding principles, and if it didn't reverse course, we were going to lose countless generations because of lost opportunities.

So, Mr. Speaker, I ran for office not for a title, not for some unhealthy desire to be the center of attention, but to serve my fellow citizens and to be a part of a movement that would reestablish the belief that our country's greatness comes from its people and not from the government and to make sure that America remains the last great hope on Earth.

Two years ago, we sat out to accomplish those objectives. We didn't succeed--not for the lack of trying. We did take steps toward solving the biggest and most severe issues that we face. We must build on this and not shrink from solving the fiscal disaster that awaits us if we do nothing.

Mr. Speaker, as this Congress comes to a close in the next couple of weeks, I'm confident that the Members of the next Congress will rise to the occasion and provide the solutions to a worried Nation. However, my confidence is not limitless. If petty politics drives policy decisions, if one group is pitted against another for political gain, if personal destruction drowns out personal accountability, then, sadly, the legacy of our great Nation will be forever altered and the world will be a dimmer place.

I hope and pray this does not happen, Mr. Speaker. But as I said, my confidence is not limitless.

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week the House voted on H.R. 3803, the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that was introduced by my colleague from Arizona, Representative Trent Franks. This bill would generally prohibit abortions, except in cases where the mother is at risk, 20 weeks after fertilization, the point at which studies have shown an unborn child has the capacity to feel pain.

I strongly believe that we have a moral obligation to protect life and defend those who cannot defend themselves. Recognizing the gruesome nature of late stage abortions, nine states, including my home State of Arizona, have enacted laws to restrict this procedure.

While I'm disappointed that we failed to secure the two-thirds vote necessary to pass H.R. 3803 this week, I was heartened that a majority of my colleagues in the House stood to protect the unborn. This week's vote has only strengthened my resolve to continue to advocate for pro- life polices to hasten the day when all life is valued and treated as a gift.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Jobs Creation Act.

Now, time and time again, when I talk to small business owners in my district, they say that the number one challenge holding them back from expanding their business and hiring more workers is uncertainty in regulation and taxation.

The current pro-regulatory administration has issued nearly four times the number of regulations as the previous administration. The administration's own numbers show that U.S.

businesses spent over 8.8 billion hours complying with Federal paperwork requirements. To put this into perspective, this is equal to 1 million years of filling out government paperwork.

Mr. Chairman, one of these costly regulations that the EPA is currently imposing is the Regional Haze Rule that could close down power plants across the country, all for aesthetics. This regulation affects the Navajo generating station in Arizona, which could cost $1.1 billion in initial compliance costs, hundreds of Arizona jobs, and cost $90 million a year, increasing the cost of electricity and water across the State of Arizona.

And what does $90 million a year get us?

Well, according to the administration's own study, they found inconclusive evidence that these regulations would improve visibility at all.

Across the country, pro-regulatory environment groups are suing the EPA and forcing these haze requirements through settlement and consent decrees. In my home State of Arizona, the EPA entered into a consent decree with nine environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, which will affect the emission control technology at coal-fired power plants throughout the State.

Regulations have costly and job-killing implications, and it is important that the rulemaking process is not written behind closed doors by activist groups and regulatory agencies.

I am pleased that a bill that I have sponsored is included in this package, H.R. 3862, the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act. This legislation provides transparency to these sue-and-settle agreements and consent decrees, which are used by activist groups to dictate regulations behind closed doors, and often contrary to congressional intent, if an agency misses a statutory deadline.

My bill ensures that interested parties will have an opportunity to provide comments and requires courts to consider the impact on States and tribes. Additionally, my bill makes it easier for future administrations to modify consent decrees as circumstances and facts dictate.

This legislation is increasingly necessary as more statutory deadlines slip due to the large number of rulemakings that were mandated during the previous Congress, notably in ObamaCare and Dodd- Frank.

I urge my colleagues to support this pro-growth bill.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Our friend Mr. Tipton from Colorado was talking about some of the President's comments about business owners and people who created businesses, when he said that, you know, if you have a business, you didn't build that.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I have news for the President. They did build that. They built it on the sweat of their own brow, their hard work, their determination. Sometimes they failed, but most of the time they succeeded. And they didn't succeed because of government; they succeeded in spite of government because of all of the regulatory burdens they put in front of small businesses to grow, all of these things that they have to comply with, and the rules change on a daily basis.

I was reading an article--actually, an interview--with former Secretary of State George Shultz the other day in The Wall Street Journal, and he had a very appropriate analogy when he said that, if you take a sports game, whether it's football or baseball or what have you, and you're asking a team--here, it's going to be businesses--to get involved, get on the playing field, which is exactly what people are saying right now when people are holding back their cash if they've been lucky enough to have that success.

But the problem is you don't ever want to go onto a football field if you don't know what the rules of the game are, if the rules are going to change, or if you have a referee, like this administration, who is not going to faithfully execute the laws based on what is written rather than what they believe should have been written.

And so that is a huge difference, and it's a huge problem that's facing our job creators right now. They don't know what the rules are. They're constantly changing, and they don't have a referee that's going to call balls and strikes just as balls and strikes and not just make things up as they go along.

Our friend from Colorado (Mr. Tipton) mentioned that $1.75 trillion of annualized costs are dedicated to regulations. If you break that down, that's about $10,585 per employee for the average small business. I don't know about you, but that is a huge cost that is an annual cost that they pay every single year, and it's choking the ability for small businesses to take that money, take that capital, invest it, grow it, hire new people. Instead, they're using that for compliance costs. Instead, they're using that to push paper.

Those are the things that we're trying to get rid of. Those are the things we're trying to streamline so that we don't have the red tape that's going to continue to stifle economic growth in this country.

And if you look at what's coming down the road, my goodness. You have Taxmageddon that's coming up on January 1, where we have the Democrats in the Senate say that they're willing to go over the fiscal cliff in order to get after some of the best job creators and tax them, basically to Armageddon.

And then you have the regulatory environment that continues to stifle economic growth. And if you look at what the Obama administration has been able to do, just in 2011, they added $231.4 billion in new regulatory burdens. They added 82,000 pages to the Federal Register. That is an insane amount.

But this week we're going to be fighting back. That's why the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act is so vitally important for the economic future of our country.

Now, I have a bill that's entitled Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlement Act of 2012, and that's a piece of this bill. And what it does, it kinds of goes into an area that's not really talked about that much, but this is basically regulation via litigation, and it's extraordinarily damaging.

What happens is, if you have an interest group, they lobby Congress for a rule, for a statute, and having one of the agencies write a rule by a certain specific date. Now, the date is artificially short so they can't actually comply and go through the normal rulemaking process. So then that date lapses, and then that special interest goes and sues that agency. The DOJ comes in and tries to defend it, and sometimes-- and most of the time--we get a more stringent regulatory burden that is placed on our businesses, and they don't even have a chance to respond. A lot of times they file the complaint the same day as the settlement agreement, and it is virtually impossible for a subsequent administration to actually change that because they have to go through the whole judicial process rather than going through the normal agency process.

So this starts to bring some transparency to that, brings the stakeholders to the table so they can have a say in what's going to happen in the regulation that's going to directly affect their business.

Now, some of the most onerous regulations that have been passed recently have been passed via this regulation via litigation, whether it's the Boiler MACT, the Cement MACT, the Utility MACT that's coming down. Some of the ones that affect Arizona especially, we're having one that came out that's going to affect the Navajo Generating Station that could cost hundreds of jobs, drive up Arizona energy prices by 20 to 30 percent, our water costs by 20 or 30 percent, and the compliance cost for the Navajo generating station is $1.1 billion.

This came through regulation by litigation. These are the types of things that this bill, which we're going to be debating in the next couple of days, is going to stop. It's going to put an end to it so our small businesses can grow again, so we can get our economy moving again, and so we can get people back to work.

I thank the gentleman for highlighting this issue and for leading on this issue.

No. I think Ronald Reagan said the scariest words you can hear are: ``I'm from the government. I'm here to help.'' I think that that is basically what our small businesses are saying right now, that if you have the government knocking on your door, it's not a good thing.

You're exactly right. Because of all the different agencies that there are to respond to, they're worried that, if they actually challenge the ruling or challenge the regulation that is being put upon them, then they will actually have further burdens placed upon them, further ramifications placed on them so that you have a constant living in fear because they're going to still have to report to that agency. Then, if they actually try to combat what just happened, they're going to have the full force of this

agency going down their throats. That is a huge issue.

2011.

I very much agree with that.

One thing that Mr. Gardner from Colorado was talking about in terms of actually taking into account in the cost-benefit analysis is the impact on jobs. I've talked to a number of businesses, and they say that with all of the new regulation that has been coming out of this administration, that they've actually had to replace somebody in a productive part of their company, in R&D, research and development, with somebody on the administrative side just to be able to comply with the regulations.

If you look at that, it's a net zero for job creation or job loss. The problem is that that person who is involved in R&D, they have the ability to get new products on the market that are actually going to expand their company. Somebody who's actually just pushing paper and trying to comply with regulations is never going to put in some sort of measure where they're actually going to be able to expand their company. That's the big thing that we're talking about when you're saying that for every regulation you have 1.5 jobs for whatever million dollars. That's just hogwash. It's ridiculous that they're pointing to that. I've heard other Members say that increased regulation increases jobs. It does not. It increases paperwork. We don't want a bunch of paper pushers. We want people who are going to provide products and services that are going to be expanding the economic pie that we have in the United States.

You know, it is kind of a shame that we actually have to pass something like this. But so much power has been amassed in the executive branch that we need pieces of legislation like the REINS Act, like this bill.

But the thing is is that if the President would just pick up the phone and call his agency heads and say, Cut it out; don't pass these rules and regulations that are going to keep putting a damper on economic growth. I mean, they believe that they have executive discretion for just about anything. But my goodness, the one thing that they should be using some sort of discretion for is not putting more burdens on small businesses that are trying to grow.

So the President needs to just pick up the phone. That could lead to the biggest economic growth that could happen in this country if he picked up the phone and told every agency head, Hey, let's cut off all these new regulations that you guys are trying implement.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I oppose this amendment, because it would have allowed ideological special interest groups to block mining permits through lawsuits funded by taxpayer dollars.

The Equal Access to Justice to Act of 1980 is a law in need of reform. Recognizing the Federal Government's vast resources, it was intended to help protect small businesses, charities and ordinary Americans from unreasonable litigation or administrative proceedings.

To this end, the EAJA allows individuals with a net worth of under $2 million and businesses worth less than $7 million to collect attorneys' fees up to $125 per hour. Last year the Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial and Administrative Law held a hearing on the need for EAJA reform.

The subcommittee learned that particular groups, particularly environmental organizations, are aggressively exploiting the EAJA. The EAJA exempts all not-for-profit organizations from the net worth cap, and it allows attorneys' fees over $125 per hour if a special factor justifies such an award.

Well-heeled environmental organizations take full advantage of these provisions to collect large awards for attorneys' fees. For example, the Center for Food Safety recently awarded more than $2.6 million under the EAJA, with its lead counsel compensated at a rate of $650 per hour. It's a good gig if you can get it.

Simply by reviewing public court records, a witness of the subcommittee's hearing found that 20 environmental organizations collected $5.8 million in fees between September 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010.

The EAJA was meant to help give small businesses, charities, and ordinary citizens a fighting chance against the Federal Government. Considering the pressing need for reform, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2012 was wisely written to prevent any organization or straw man plaintiff who was a member of and whose attorneys may be paid by such an organization from slowing down the permitting process or advancing its ideological agenda in court using public money.

Now, of course, they can still bring suit, but not on the taxpayers' dime.

For these reasons, I oppose this amendment.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, 2 weeks ago, the Supreme Court voted to uphold ObamaCare. This decision confirms that the repeal of ObamaCare must take place in the very body in which it began. This decision reminds us that there is no greater calling, no higher honor than the defense of our constituents from the tyranny of government overreach.

We have seen what socialized medicine and endless entitlements have done to Europe. Well, let me be very clear: ObamaCare is no more than a Trojan horse inserted in the global epicenter of freedom. It is bad for our doctors. It is bad for our patients. It is bad for our economy. It is toxic to our middle class. From its insidious taxes to its strangling regulation to the oppressive mandate that lies at its core, ObamaCare is bad for America.

This bill gives us all a chance to vote to defend the values upon which our great Nation was founded. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and to repeal ObamaCare.

Mr. Speaker, today, I would like to honor Stephen Arthur Dymarcik, Sr., who honorably served our country in the Army from 1966- 1967 in Vietnam. The son of Polish immigrants, his family remembers him as a deeply patriotic and proud American who taught them to be proud of their Polish heritage, while being grateful for the opportunity to live in America. He told his son, ``America is the greatest country in the world. We aren't perfect . . . but we are pretty close.'' Mr. Dymarcik was rated 100 percent service-connected disabled by the Veterans Administration and passed away in August 2003. His loyalty to his country, patriotism and integrity are not forgotten by his family. To Mr. Dymarcik and his family, and to so many others who have honorably served our country, we appreciate your bravery, your service and your sacrifices.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, today's vote is long overdue. For months, my colleagues and I have worked to uncover the truth about Operation Fast and Furious, which cost the life of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in my home State of Arizona.

Congressional efforts to get to the bottom of this tragedy and bring accountability to those responsible were met with derision by Attorney General Holder. At hearings, when we questioned Mr. Holder, he evaded. When we requested documents, he obfuscated. When I questioned Mr. Holder on June 8, he looked me in the eye and stated plainly that there was nothing whatsoever in the wiretap applications that suggested the existence of a gunwalking program. Yet, all I had to do was review those same applications to see that what the attorney general had said to me, my colleagues, and to the American people, was nothing but a boldfaced lie. Mr. Speaker, I will repeat that again. It was a boldfaced lie.

Today, let Congress' vote be a signal to Mr. Holder that dishonesty on the part of administration officials will never be tolerated.

Today, let this vote be a signal to President Obama that the security of the American people must always come before his own job security and the job security of his Cabinet officials.

Let this vote be a reminder to Mr. Holder and to President Obama that despite their executive overreach, there are, in fact, three coequal branches of government.

Let this vote demonstrate that Congress has not forgotten its right or its responsibility to provide oversight and to bring accountability.

I urge my colleagues to support the rule and the underlying resolution.

Mr. Speaker, at a time of record-breaking debt and deficits--or really anytime for that matter--it boggles the mind that the Obama administration would spend $20 million of taxpayer money to pay for propaganda on behalf of ObamaCare. Yet that has happened. Mr. Speaker, I have seen these commercials that attempt to explain the supposed benefits of ObamaCare, but they are just poorly conceived campaign ads.

It's bad enough that American taxpayers are on the hook for this massively expensive boondoggle which does nothing to solve the underlying problems in our health care system. It's bad enough that many Americans are losing their health care coverage because of this bill, and that the bill is causing more and more doctors to drop Medicare patients. It's bad enough that Americans will see their tax bill go up because of ObamaCare. Now the Obama administration expects the American people to pay for ads touting the law that did these things.

Rarely does a day go by where we don't hear of a new negative effect of this disastrous legislation. This week, we learned that many students are seeing their university-based or individual health care premiums rise dramatically. Some colleges have either dropped their student health plans entirely or are planning to do so as ObamaCare mandates kick in that force students to purchase health plans that in most cases go far beyond what is necessary.

Then yesterday, we saw an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Steven Greer, who was involved in a grant approval process for an ObamaCare program. Through this op-ed, we got yet another dismal view into the twisted bureaucracy that is implementing this disastrous legislation. Mr. Greer recounts one case in which a $1.9 million grant was given to George Washington University for a program which is expected to produce merely $1.7 million in health care savings.

Mr. Speaker, even before full implementation, ObamaCare has been a costly disaster for the American people. This arrogant, taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign just adds insult to injury. And like ObamaCare, the ad campaign should end immediately.

Offered By: Mr. Quayle

Amendment No. 3: Page 66, after line 10, add the following

new section:

Sec. 519. None of the funds made available by this Act may

be used to implement, administer, or enforce the final rule

published by the National Labor Relations Board in the

Federal Register on August 30, 2011 (76 Fed. Reg. 54006).

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I'm offering this amendment with my good friends and colleagues, Mr. Scalise, Mr. Stearns, and Mr. Woodall. It would block the new EEOC enforcement guidance that limits employers' ability to look at criminal records in their hiring decisions by prohibiting the use of funds for the implementation of this guidance.

Now, Madam Chair, it seems like every day, whether it be an Agency or a Commission, they come out with some new rule or guidance that really puts burdens on our small businesses and companies that are actually trying to expand and hire new workers.

Now, this guidance is particularly troubling because it sets up a lose-lose situation for our small businesses in my home State of Arizona and across the country. You see, these businesses are going to have two choices.

One, they can either not actually go through with a criminal background check, which would open them up for a claim of negligent hiring if a worker actually goes and commits a crime on the premises; or they're going to open themselves up to litigation from the Federal Government, from the EEOC or the DOJ because they believe that their objective use of actual criminal background check is going to actually have a disparate impact.

Now, I don't think that that's the choice that our businesses should be given. They have to have a different choice, a choice that allows them to expand, allows them to hire more workers, and allows them to put forth the proper procedures so they know they're hiring people that are not going to have criminal activity.

The reason this one thing came to my attention was I spoke to a constituent of mine who owns a hotel in my district, and he says, Look, I have to have criminal background checks for my employees because some of them are going into rooms of the guests to clean, to check on things, and they have valuables there. Now, if I don't do a criminal background check and they actually go in and steal something and they did have a burglary rap against them or a robbery rap, these are the things that they would actually get sued for for negligent hiring.

So this amendment makes sure that no funds will be used to implement this new guidance. And it is especially important to do because the EEOC has recently been very, very litigious, and there have been two recent Federal court cases that actually smack down some of the EEOC's claims for a frivolous lawsuit and gave back millions of dollars to these companies who were charged by the EEOC. So this is why this amendment is important.

This is actually going to get rid of some of the burdens and some of the uncertainties that are placed upon our businesses, and I think this is the time to do it. We don't need to put any more burdens on companies that want to expand and hire because, if you're going to put this into place and enforce it, you're actually going to just lead to people not hiring because you're going to set them up for failure.

So I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I do agree with the gentleman from Pennsylvania that we need to make sure that we are allowing people to get good jobs. And that's the biggest problem that I have with this guidance is that, when you're setting up other companies where they have a lose-lose proposition of whether they're going to either have the possibility of litigation from the Federal Government or the possibility of litigation because they have a negligent hiring, you're actually setting up a situation where they just won't hire. They won't hire anybody because they're not going to want to put themselves in that situation.

And the other thing that we've been seeing is that this got a lot of concern from the Appropriations Committee in the Senate as well, saying that we have to look and make sure that there are not these unintended consequences where we're going to be putting up businesses to fail, and that we're actually putting on these burdens that are not going to let companies expand, that are not going to let companies hire. And these are the sorts of things that continue to put this uncertainty in the private sector.

It seems day in and day out that the Federal Government does this, whether it's an Agency or Commission, and that's why I think this is a very important amendment.

Mr. Chair, on rollcall No. 235 I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Stated against:

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, this amendment would strike the new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia, also called AmTech, and apply the $21 million that was provided in the bill to the spending-reduction account. This new program is intended to establish a public-private partnership initiative that would provide Federal grants to identify and support research projects focused on long-term industrial needs.

We all recognize the importance of advanced manufacturing and the value of collaboration and innovation policy. My hometown of Phoenix has a strong high-tech base and great research universities. I also serve as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Technology Innovation, which has jurisdiction over NIST. Our committee has a long bipartisan record of support for NIST and its contributions.

That being said, in the current budget environment, I simply do not believe it is appropriate to be establishing and funding a new program. Even without the new $21 million Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia, this budget is still nearly 8 percent higher than was provided last year.

Madam Chair, when you look at the amount of debt that we've accumulated over the course of many years and you look at the budget process that we're going through right now, this AmTech was actually requested for the funding last time around when we were going through the appropriations process, and we rightfully did not fund this new program. There are already programs in place for manufacturing, and there are other places that we can go in the private sector to be able to deal with that in the research and developing new ways to be innovative in advanced manufacturing. It is not the time to be wasting another $21 million in spending that we don't have in order to put forth a new program.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in favor of this bipartisan amendment that I'm offering along with Congresswoman Eshoo, Congressman Thompson, and Congressman Broun.

H.R. 3523 is designed to increase the sharing of government intelligence and cyberthreats with the private sector and allow private sector companies to share threat information on a voluntary basis. The bill is consistent with our founding principles and our Constitution. Indeed, as the nature of the threats facing our Nation change, I believe this legislation is vital to protecting our country.

Every day our military intelligence communities work to counter traditional threats like nuclear and biological weapons in order to prevent a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil, but today's security threats are becoming less traditional. Four nations have chosen cyberspace as an area of particular

vulnerability for America and are targeting critical military and economic cyberinfrastructure.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lists cyberattacks as one of the top threats facing the United States. Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta warned that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems.

This legislation not only protects our national security and intellectual property, it also provides private and public entities to voluntarily work with the government to protect every individual's personal information from nation-state actors like China, Russia, and Iran, who are determined to use cyberattacks to steal from us and weaken us.

This bipartisan amendment will further solidify protecting the homeland from foreign nation-states wishing to do us harm, while protecting civil liberties.

This amendment significantly narrows the bill's current limitation of the Federal Government's use of cyberthreat information that is voluntarily shared by the private sector. Specifically, this amendment strictly limits the Federal Government's use of voluntarily shared cyberthreat information to the following five purposes: cybersecurity purposes; investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crimes; protection of individuals from danger of death or serious bodily harm; and protection of minors from child pornography, any risk of sexual exploitation, and serious threats to the physical safety of a minor; finally, protection of the national security of the United States.

If the government violates the use limitation, the bill provides for government liability for actual damages, costs, and attorney fees in Federal court. These provisions together ensure that information cannot be shared with the government or used under this bill unless there's a direct tie to cybersecurity.

Cyberterrorists work fast, so Congress needs to work faster to protect America. Enabling information-sharing between the government and private sector is the quickest and easiest way to prevent a cyberattack on our Nation. Our amendment ensures we can accomplish this goal while also protecting the privacy of all Americans, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

I yield 30 seconds to the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Rogers.

I just want to thank the chairman and the ranking member and their staffs for working tirelessly on this bill. It's a good bill, and this amendment, I believe, strengthens it.

I urge my colleagues to support it, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his work on this important piece of legislation.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 5, the PATH Act, because our country is in urgent need of medical malpractice reform. Currently, we have a jackpot justice system that is not based in reality, and it's badly damaging our country's health care system. Profiteering attorneys know this. And that's why the number of malpractice suits has been precipitously rising year after year.

Back in the 1960s, one out of seven physicians would have had a malpractice claim over their entire lifetime. Today, it's one in seven physicians are sued each year. That is an astronomical jump in the number of claims that are being put on doctors. And the doctors are now being forced out of the profession even when they haven't done anything wrong. The practice of defensive medicine is harming the quality of care and pushing up costs. The enormous expense of ensuring a doctor against liability is making health care inflation much worse, not to mention the fact that the current system is damaging the doctor-patient relationship. It damages it in a way because every doctor has to see every interaction with the patient as a potential lawsuit. That is not what the doctor-patient relationship should be built on. It should be built on mutual respect and trust. And until we have something that actually addresses the medical malpractice problems that we have and we get the reforms that are much needed, that actual relationship is never going to improve.

So I urge the House to pass the PATH Act because it will do two vital things to get health care costs under control: First, it would eliminate ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board and thereby keep a board of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from restricting senior access to health care. It also brings medical malpractice lawsuits under control by capping noneconomic damages and limiting attorneys' fees so more money will actually go to the victims rather than overzealous trial lawyers.

These reforms will save taxpayers over $40 billion over the next decade. Everyone knows that we need to do something about rising health care costs, and this bill and taking care of the medical malpractice problems that we have will go a long way in getting those costs under control. This bill will give every Member of this House the opportunity to be part of the solution.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on H.R. 5.