Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I was listening to his comments about talking with his constituents back home and about how many doctors are not seeing Medicare patients, not seeing new Medicare patients, or are not seeing the patients that they currently provide services to.

I know, like the gentleman from Arkansas, he does a lot of teletown halls and town halls just like I do. The other week I was on a teletown hall with my constituents back home, and there were a number of people who raised the concerns that their doctors were not going to provide them the medical services that they had in the past because they were uncertain about the payments that the Medicare system would be giving them.

This is a constant refrain that we hear back home from our seniors, that they are consistently getting turned down by their physicians because of the lack of payment from Medicare. This is a system that we need to fix. This is a system that we need to make sure that we keep the promises to our seniors and reform it for future generations so that it will be there to protect them when they reach the retirement age.

If you look at ObamaCare, it is really filled with provisions that confer arbitrary power, that raise costs. It cuts benefits, it harms access, and it restricts choice. Against this really sorry backdrop, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, has the dubious distinction of being one of the absolute worst provisions in the entire health care bill. Indeed, this single provision causes all the problems that I just mentioned. This board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats would have the power to impose price controls that will cut senior access to care. To make it worse, this board would not have to meet in public or listen to public input. Amazingly, ObamaCare even leaves the door wide open for IPAB members to receive gifts from lobbyists. In other words, the public has no right to talk to IPAB, but lobbyists willing to shower them with gifts do.

President Obama claims his rationing board will solve the real problem of Medicare's rising costs. It doesn't. The only mandate the board has to cut costs is by restricting payments to doctors that provide health care. It is already the case that 12 percent of doctors will not take Medicare patients due to the unreliability of government payouts. That is twice the number of doctors who refused to see Medicare patients in 2004, which is a frightening statistic on how quickly that is rising. Additionally, a recent survey showed that 60 percent of doctors have or will restrict their medical practices as a result of ObamaCare. Of those doctors, 87 percent said they would be forced to restrict the amount of care they offered to Medicare patients.

ObamaCare utterly ignores the laws of economics in this instance. You can't cut the cost of a service by cutting the number of people supplying it, and that's exactly what IPAB would do. By forcing doctors to turn away Medicare patients, the costs will go up as fewer and fewer doctors see to the needs of the growing number of seniors. Either that, or IPAB will directly ration care. It is astounding that the President would look at an important issue like caring for our seniors and decide that the best way to handle rising costs is by attacking senior access to health care and the doctors who provide it.

Medicare does need reform, as my friend from Arkansas knows, and has been on the floor numerous times talking about the reforms that are necessary. It needs real structural reform that protects access for our current seniors and fixes the system for future generations. As with so many other issues, the President punted on making these needed reforms. Instead, he chose to give us a rationing board that would make the problem worse.

Let's repeal IPAB and give our seniors the care they deserve.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 3606, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. This bill will do just that, jump-start our small businesses by removing costly, outdated compliance requirements so businesses and community banks can grow, invest, and hire again. I want to thank Chairman Bachus for including my legislation, H.R. 4088, the Capital Expansion Act, in the JOBS Act.

Our economy is being held back by onerous and outdated regulations that keep small community banks from expanding. By making it easier for banks to raise capital and invest in our Nation's small businesses, our entire economy benefits. This legislation is essential to small businesses and will allow them greater access to necessary capital. Community banks make up 11 percent of the banking industry's assets in America, but they provide 40 percent of all loans to small businesses.

Currently, community banks with 500 or more shareholders must register with the SEC, and in so doing, submit to the costly compliance requirements. The 500 shareholder threshold hasn't been updated since 1964. This bill would raise the threshold and lower compliance costs for our community banks.

Under this act, a bank would be able to expand to 2,000 shareholders before having to register with the SEC. This will lower compliance costs for the average community bank by $250,000 annually. That $250,000 can be lent to small businesses or used to expand its operations.

I've been concerned about these issues addressed by this act since I came to Congress, and it is gratifying to see these solutions being put forward. I'm particularly grateful for Mr. Fincher for his leadership on H.R. 3606, which addresses the high cost of compliance with section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley. As I've been meeting with small businesses within my district, I've been engaged in trying to roll back the costly regulations on our start-ups imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley.

I urge my colleagues to support the JOBS Act.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I really want to thank him for his leadership on this issue and for working with me to put in similar provisions within the Homeland Security Reauthorization, which we hope will come to the floor in August because it's a serious issue. As the gentleman from Utah was talking about, the amount of destruction, both on the environmental side and just on the human side, from these drug smugglers and human smugglers in very environmentally sensitive areas in the Sonoran Desert is devastating.

If you think about the amount of carnage that has happened just south of the border--you have over 30,000 people that have been killed by drug cartel violence in the last 5 years. Last year, I was with other members of our Arizona delegation. We were going down to the border and seeing what was going on, and we were at the Douglas point of entry. And the night before they had videos of this, which was about 70 yards from the border, where a fake police cruiser that was disguised by the drug cartels stopped just south of the port of entry, entered into an establishment, unloaded hundreds of rounds of ammunition in there, killing a handful and wounding dozens of people.

Now these are the same types of people who are taking advantage of the weak spots within our border. If you look at Arizona specifically, the Arizona border, there are about 305 miles of Federal lands in Arizona. About 83 percent of the 370-mile Arizona-Mexico border is Federal lands.

Right now, the Border Patrol agents do not have the ability to actually go onto those Federal lands unless they abide by the Memorandum of Understanding, which says they have different definitions of when they can actually go and apprehend somebody. But the fact of the matter is that these drug cartels, these human smuggling operations, are nimble. They are watching every move that our Border Patrol agents are making. They are noting where the weak spots are and where the surveillance equipment is. And for our Border Patrol agents to actually go and move it to areas where the traffic has increased, they have to go to the Department of the Interior to get prior permission. There's a GAO study that said at one point in some instances that could take up to 4 months--4 months for our Border Patrol agents to actually move a piece of surveillance equipment or to move motorized vehicles onto various areas of Federal lands.

Now, I understand the need to protect the delicate Sonoran Desert, but it is getting decimated--absolutely decimated--by these human traffickers and drug traffickers, who do not care about

it. I personally believe that our Border Patrol agents and customs officials will do a much better job in actually being sensitive to these areas while trying to actually protect the citizens of this country from the violence that's going to be streaming across the border.

This is such a big and serious issue that not that many people know about, and Mr. Bishop of Utah has really taken the lead on this, and I commend him for it. I look forward to working with you on these issues going forward because we need to get a handle on our border, and the violence is going to spill over. In order to do that, we have to allow our agents the ability to have the unfettered access to our Federal lands so they can actually do their job and protect the borders.

Again, Mr. Bishop, thank you very much.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 1, rule I, I demand a vote on agreeing to the Speaker's approval of the Journal.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. Speaker, in just this past year approximately 79,000 pages of regulations were printed in the Federal Register. The cost to comply with our regulatory enterprise exceeds $1 trillion per year.

Now this past August, the Department of Labor issued its final rule governing the non-displacement of qualified workers under service contracts. Under this rule, when a government contract is given to a new firm, the company is required to first offer employment to the previous contractor's workers.

The administration claims this rule will help government efficiency, but it gives a preference to union employees and limits the ability of the firm to negotiate and hire the workers that it actually wants. This rule will impact thousands of employers and billions in government contracting.

By piling on new hoops for employers to jump through, we are simply increasing costs that are passed on to taxpayers. Regulatory compliance costs are a hidden tax borne by us all. The administration must stop this myriad of job-killing regulations.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about a very happy occasion for every member of the Arizona delegation. I'm proud to have introduced H. Con. Res. 100, which invites the entire House of Representatives to join with the Arizona delegation in commemorating Arizona's centennial.

For the past 100 years, Arizona has stood as a beacon of opportunity for millions of individuals who came to the State to make a better life for themselves and their families. They came to Arizona and built the State we know today, a State with rich diversity, a soaring optimism, driven by an innovative spirit. They came because they know that Arizona embodies what's best in America.

I can't imagine a better place to live, and I'm proud to call Arizona home. I'm proud that it's the place that I've chosen to start my family, and representing this wonderful State is an honor beyond words.

Arizona has had 100 great years. We start the next 100 with the same spirit of optimism and determination that made our State great, and we still possess that same fierce independence needed to keep it great.

Madam Speaker, a couple of weeks ago, the President was in Florida and announced new tourism initiatives with a particular focus on increasing visits to U.S. natural treasures. Unfortunately, once again, his rhetoric doesn't match his actions.

For example, the National Park Service is currently considering new regulations to be implemented by the FAA that would further restrict air tours above the Grand Canyon National Park in an attempt to reduce aviation noise. If implemented, these regulations would devastate the Grand Canyon air tourism industry that is responsible for $104.3 million in economic activity. It would reduce the industry's employment by 10 percent. Flight operations would go down 14.7 percent, and passenger volume would drop nearly 12.8 percent.

The Grand Canyon is a national treasure to us all, but 70 percent of the park is already off limits to flights, and the industry has already invested millions in quiet technology. This is yet another example of the administration's consistently inconsistent policies.

The administration must stop needless regulations that will destroy jobs.

Mr. Speaker on rollcall No. 39, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, it has been more than 1 year since the tragic death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was killed using weapons that were purposely walked to deadly drug cartels in Mexico as part of Operation Fast and Furious. Since Agent Terry's death, the responsible Federal Department, the Justice Department, and its leader, Attorney General Eric Holder, have obfuscated every attempt to get to the bottom of what went wrong with this disastrous operation.

Despite the best efforts of the Justice Department to hide the facts, we now know many disturbing things about Fast and Furious. This ill- conceived operation began in November of 2009. Since that time, the ATF has sanctioned the sale of thousands of weapons to straw purchasers who transported these weapons across the United States' southern border and into the hands of Mexican criminals.

The ATF lost track of these weapons until they began turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico. As a result of Justice Department incompetence, the United States actively armed dangerous cartels that have wreaked havoc in Mexico and put our own Federal agents directly in harm's way. Our hard-won trust and the relationships we've built with the Mexican Government as both countries seek to combat the cartels has been severely strained, which has harmed our efforts to get drug-running under control.

Operation Fast and Furious hasn't just been a failure; it's been a tragic failure. It is believed that hundreds of Mexicans have lost their lives through the use of these weapons, and at least one U.S. Federal Agent, Brian Terry, has lost his life.

When an operation goes so horribly wrong, it is important to find out why and who was responsible. The Congress has acted on its oversight responsibility; and in doing so, we've asked Attorney General Holder directly about the operation. On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee. When asked when he first knew about Operation Fast and Furious, he stated, ``I'm not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.'' However, we now know that weekly memos addressed to the Attorney General, which included briefings on Operation Fast and Furious, began crossing his desk nearly a year before that.

When it became clear that his May 3 testimony was untrue, the Attorney General later revised the timeline in which he claimed to have knowledge of the operation. On November 8, 2011, Attorney General Holder claimed that he had in fact first learned about the operation at the beginning of 2011, which, again, is belied by the fact that he was receiving memos about the operation much earlier than that.

But we now know that even that revised and extended time frame is incorrect. Just days ago, the Justice Department finally released documents, which included a December 14, 2010, email exchange between the Attorney General's chief of staff and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, stating that the Attorney General had been alerted of the shooting and death of Agent Terry on the day of the shooting.

A troubling picture has emerged of the Holder Justice Department. From the Attorney General's own testimony, it would appear that he is either frighteningly unaware of major operations taking place in his own Department or that he did know about Fast and Furious, did nothing to stop it, and refused to take responsibility when it failed.

It has been more than a year since the death of Agent Terry, Mr. Speaker, and we still don't have the answers the American people deserve and Agent Terry's family deserves. We know we won't get these answers from a proper internal investigation from the Justice Department. Far from the Department investigating itself, it has covered up for itself.

A year of delay, denial, and obfuscation is enough. A year of nighttime document dumps full of blacked-out pages and redacted information is enough. A year of senior Justice Department officials pleading the Fifth is enough. It's time that we get to the bottom of why Fast and Furious happened and restore accountability to the Department of Justice. That's why I introduced H. Res. 532, which calls on the President to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Operation Fast and Furious as well as the Attorney General's role in it.

Without a special prosecutor, the only other way to get to the truth is through impeachment proceedings and the investigations that come with those proceedings. With all of the vital work before this House, it would be far better to avoid the distraction and the cost that impeachment proceedings would bring. I hope the President agrees.

I urge my House colleagues to support this resolution so that we can finally get to the truth and ensure no more innocent lives are lost due to this Attorney General's failure.

I thank the gentleman, my good friend from Colorado, for yielding.

Back home in Phoenix, Arizona, in my home district, one of the big things that we worry about is the cost of gasoline. I went to the pump the other day and it was about $3.60. It's about twice as much as it would cost back before President Obama was elected. And if you look at the statistics, in 2011, the average American household spent a record $4,155 at the pump. This is equal to 8.4 percent of the median family income. So this is a huge issue, that we need to continue to find stable sources of oil so that we can have a secure source of oil and we can make sure that we have more supply of oil so that we can start to bring the prices down for gas at the pump.

Back before the President made his decision, I would go around and talk to people around my district and I would say, What if I told you that with the swipe of a pen the President and his administration could create 20,000 immediate jobs and over 100,000 jobs over the long term and there wouldn't be any taxpayer dollars put at risk or expended; what do you think we should do? Every single one of the people that I talked to said this President should sign that as soon as possible and let's get to work making sure that the Keystone pipeline gets put into effect and get people back to work.

And then something funny happened. The administration decided to placate the radical fringe element of their party, and the President punted to 2013--didn't even make the decision whether a yes or no, just pushed it down the road. But House Republicans decided that we were going to give the President a second chance, a second opportunity to do the right thing, an opportunity to realize that the State Department had already done an environmental impact study that showed that there was very little chance for any environmental damage to some of the sensitive areas where the pipeline would be going. Maybe we could have the President realize that this is not the time to play politics; this is the time to get American people back to work. And that's exactly what the Keystone pipeline would do. And yet, once again, the President punted.

Now, we can't give him too many more chances. We've already given two chances for this one already. But when we all sat here at the State of the Union and we heard him say that we were going to adopt the all-of- the-above approach, as some of my colleagues mentioned earlier, we actually realized that that's not really the case, because it seems as if there are only favored sectors that actually get some attention from this administration. You have companies like Solyndra.

Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee from the government as well as nearly $15 million in severance money for its employees when that company went bankrupt. A total of nearly 550 million taxpayer dollars were squandered. This is a risk that the American taxpayer should never have taken. And there is very little chance we're going to get any of that back because our rights were actually put lower than people who were giving loans after the American taxpayers.

Now, then, we have another company, Ener1, received $118.5 million in stimulus grants before going belly up just a few moments ago.

According to The Washington Post, Obama's $38.6 billion green job loan guarantee program has created just 3,545 permanent jobs. That's a cost of $5 million per job, $5 million per job in a favored sector. You know how many taxpayer dollars would be spent to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for

the Keystone pipeline? Zero. And yet the President couldn't sign a simple sheet of paper to get this done. This is a no-brainer, as many people have said.

So I hope that the President will reconsider. I hope that the House Republicans will continue to push this issue because this is something that we can do right away. It is shovel ready, to borrow a phrase, and this is something that will make sure that we are looking towards the future for our energy security.

And I thank the gentleman from Colorado for addressing this important issue and for starting this conversation tonight.

Mr. Speaker, it's not too often that a President of the United States has the opportunity with one swipe of his pen to increase private sector jobs by thousands of employees, while at the same time increasing our energy independence and our energy security. But that's exactly what's going to happen with the Keystone XL pipeline.

Unfortunately, the President, earlier this year, punted on that decision and punted it past 2013, even though his own State Department said that there would not be a significant impact on the environment. But we gave him another chance.

Unfortunately, there are reports that he will reject the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The thing that's confusing, Mr. Speaker, is that he's been saying that we can't wait for job creation. But with this decision, he's saying that we can wait for thousands and thousands of private sector jobs here in the United States and that we can wait for energy security. Mr. Speaker, this is the wrong decision at the wrong time. We need better decisions from the administration.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove my name as a cosponsor of H.R. 3261.

Mr. Speaker, 1 year ago today, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry lost his life doing what he had done his entire life: serving his country. A native of Detroit, Brian Terry served with distinction in the U.S. Marine Corps and then as a police

officer back home in Michigan. In 2007, Agent Terry was offered a job with the United States Border Patrol--a job he'd always dreamed of.

Agent Terry lost his life during a shootout with armed thugs in Rio Rico, Arizona--just north of the Mexican border. Shortly after his death, his sister, Michelle, told the Associated Press, ``His dream all his life was to be a Federal agent. It was always, `I want to be a cop. I want to get the bad guys.' It was his life. He said it was dangerous, but he loved what he did and wanted to make a difference.''

Mr. Speaker, we will never forget Agent Terry and the sacrifice he made. We will continue to keep his family in our thoughts and prayers.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise in support of the rule and the conference report of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The NDAA includes a long-term reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. I was proud to serve as a conferee for this important bill.

SBIR was originally signed into law by President Reagan and has been an effective tool supporting innovation among our small business community for nearly 30 years. Since its inception, this competitive grant program has enabled more than 100,000 research and development projects across the Nation and has helped spawn familiar companies such as Qualcomm, Sonicare, and Symantec.

Although this reauthorization of these programs isn't perfect, it improves them in a number of ways. It opens up the program for more small companies to participate. It increases

the emphasis on commercialization of new technologies. Finally, it significantly strengthens the data collection and oversight requirements of the programs.

In my hometown of Phoenix, we have a thriving tech community. By passing today's bill and providing long-term reauthorization, we will provide our small businesses the certainty they need to continue to innovate and grow and create jobs.

I would like to thank Chairman Hall and Chairman Graves for all of their work in ushering through this agreement.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 10 because greater congressional scrutiny of major regulations ensures that the Federal Government is more accountable to the American people.

Poll after poll of small business owners and of medium-sized business owners will show you that major regulations are holding back their expansions and the ability for them to hire more workers. Yet you don't have to rely on polls. You can just go down and talk to the local businesses in your districts. I had a job forum the other week. Time and time again, the constant refrain we heard from these business leaders was that the overly burdensome regulatory environment is holding back their expansions.

Several months ago, in the beginning of the 112th Congress, I had some hope because President Obama issued an Executive order that required agencies to review their regulations to see if we could have a less burdensome regulatory environment. Unfortunately, what happened was that those were just words, and were not followed up by actual action, for, since then, the administration has continued to introduce new regulations at a rapid rate.

In this year alone, over 73,000 pages of new regulations have been added to the Federal Register at a cost of $67.4 billion. Mr. Chairman, I have right here the amount of paper that has been added to the Federal Register in one week. This is last week's regulations. It's pretty hefty. Actually, it's 8 pounds, 13 ounces. There are 2,940 brand new pages of Federal regulations that would stretch, if you laid them end to end, 2,695 feet.

At this time, there are more than 4,000 new regulations in the pipeline. Of those, 224 are major regulations that will have an economic impact exceeding $100 million. So, at a minimum, the annual economic impact for these new regulations will be $22 billion.

We need to change this. Some of these agencies act outside the statutory authority granted by Congress, and we must stop this. The REINS Act is the way to do it, and I strongly urge my colleagues to support this measure.