Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on energy-efficient buildings--we're talking about schools, factories, department stores, shopping centers, any type of a large building or even a small building--and the money they can save and the manufacturing jobs that energy-efficient initiatives can create.

This week, architects, code officials, designers, and others involved in making buildings more energy efficient celebrate High-Performance Building Week. This annual event features briefings, meetings, and other educational outlets designed to showcase and promote the good work being done to provide better buildings and mitigate the impact on the environment.

Building owners and operators continue to find creative ways to minimize the effect that rising energy costs have on their operations and productivity. These owners and operators are beginning to find that better designs of new buildings and smart retrofits of existing buildings free up capital and allow managers to commit more resources to the core operations rather than to utility bills.

The State of Montana decided to make its buildings more energy efficient. They brought in engineers to do the study, and they found that over 7,500 pipes needed to have mechanical insulation. These are pipes that needed to be wrapped.

And so they undertook that project. And what's interesting is that the payback was less than 4 years. But each year the State of Montana saves 5 to 8 percent in energy costs on those buildings. That's a massive savings of energy in this country.

One of the easiest, most cost-effective ways to improve building performance is to ensure the mechanical insulation systems are properly installed. While most of us think that insulation is only for walls and attics, mechanical insulation is a vital component for commercial and industrial and educational applications.

Working with my colleagues, I introduced H.R. 2866, the Mechanical Insulation Incentive Act of 2011, last year to help commercial and industrial facility owners make their facilities more energy efficient and put people back to work.

Improved insulation for piping and mechanical components in commercial and industrial settings will help save businesses more than $4.8 billion a year, according to the National Insulation Association. These improvements will also save resources to the tune of 82 million barrels of oil or 19 million tons of coal each year. And it's probably more than that.

I ask my colleagues to consider supporting H.R. 2866. It's a commonsense bill that will save money, improve facility operations, put people back to work, and help our buildings perform to a higher standard.

Mr. Speaker, I want to close by saluting the hard work that our Nation's architects, engineers, and building professionals do to improve the condition of our homes, schools, and businesses.

I also want to ask my colleagues to participate in some of the events being held this week in honor of High-Performance Building Week.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, President Reagan taught us you don't negotiate from a position of weakness.

There are over 80 foreign government export credit agencies that vigorously support their local companies in winning export sales. We cannot unilaterally disarm our manufacturers by ending Ex-Im. That will only empower our competitors to snatch away export and job opportunities from our companies. Some of these businesses are critical to our defense industrial base and need commercial sales to support their national security work. Reagan recognized this reality. That's why he supported Ex-Im Bank.

When I chaired the Small Business Committee, I had the opportunity to establish the small business desk, or division, at the Export-Import Bank. A constituent of mine was able to obtain an $11,000 loan in order to start her exporting business from a very tiny company.

So I would urge my colleagues to vote for the reauthorization in order to be a part of helping our manufacturers sell their products abroad.

Mr. Speaker, I missed votes today to attend to official government business in Illinois. If I had been here, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 172; ``yea'' on rollcall No. 173; ``yea'' on rollcall No. 174; ``no'' on rollcall No. 175; ``no'' on rollcall No. 176; and ``yea'' on rollcall No. 177.

Mr. Speaker, I missed votes this week because of the primary election in Illinois. If I had been here, I would have voted ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 111; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 112; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 113; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 114; ``Nay'' on Rollcall No. 115; ``Nay'' on Rollcall No. 116; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 117; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 118; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 119; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 120; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 121; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 122; ``Nay'' on Rollcall No.123; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 124; ``Nay'' on Rollcall No. 125; ``Yea'' on Rollcall No. 126.

Mr. Chairman, I had the honor to be part of the Republican Congress that produced the first balanced budget in nearly 30 years. Part of that effort included providing the President line- item veto authority. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled the line- item veto unconstitutional. After the dot-com and 9/11 recessions, the deficit reemerged. Again, Republicans were making progress towards eliminating the annual budget deficit, reducing it down to $161 billion in 2007. But when the Democrats took over control of Congress, we now have a monthly deficit of over $90 billion.

Since 2007, I've voted more than 700 times to cut over $2.6 trillion in spending, over 150 times in 2011 alone. This bill represents another effort to rein in spending and get our fiscal house in order. It will withstand constitutional scrutiny, and I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, we have something very interesting going on in this administration, and it's called ``Who's in Charge?'' At one time, we believed that the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency, NHTSA, as part of DOT was in charge of regulating the corporate average fuel economy standards. In fact, it's always been that way. Well, then, all of a sudden the EPA gets involved, gets its nose under the tent and decides that, well, because there are emissions that they're going to get involved in it. Then along comes the California Air Resources Board and says, No. If you live in California, these are the standards.

So we have the automobile manufacturers taking a look at which agency is in control, if any, and what they have to follow, although they have been forced to follow the standard that's been set down by the EPA to have this amazing 54.5 miles per gallon fuel economy for model years beginning in 2017.

In the district that I'm proud to represent, Chrysler has a plant in Belvedere that's going to house the body shop for the new Dodge Dart. I saw that automobile at the auto show here in Washington this past week, and it's a beauty. It's beautiful. It represents more than a $600 million investment in the community and workforce in northern Illinois, and Chrysler had more than 1,600 production workers at the same assembly plant started in July when they had the third shifts. This is another signal of the increase in automobile sales that we're seeing in this country from the zenith of 17 million that were sold years ago to where we are now.

But this car starts at $16,000, and with the average price of a vehicle to increase by $3,200 and the source of that is the government itself, I just don't know what these people are thinking. In fact, if you take a look at the EPA rule, that says the estimate is that the mandate will cost $157 billion, which always means the number is vastly greater. That's a lot of money. That's a huge amount of money. I mean, this is classic Obama EPA.

But you ask yourself, What is the $157 billion for? The great scientists, mathematicians, and bureaucrats over at EPA said, well, this is the cost that it's going to take in investing in new technology. I hear those words, ``investing in new technology,'' as if people that don't even know the sweet smell of machine oil who sit in offices in Washington, D.C., can sit there with their calculators and their green clerks hats and come to an estimate of what it's going to cost to increase the technology to come up to that 54.5-mile-per-gallon standard.

We all know government figures are wrong. I mean, $157 billion, that's a huge amount of money. I think the total amount of the bailout, if anybody was interested in that, was around $15 billion. Now, this is 10 times the amount.

You ask yourselves, where is this money coming from? Obviously, if manufacturers have to gear up for this major expense, they're not going to wait until 2017. They're going to start doing it now. And so the increase in prices of automobiles will be directly related to this new mandate from the EPA.

So to the gentleman from Texas, I want to thank you for having the courage of speaking out here, and I thank you for the opportunity to help explain to the American people of the folly of this latest EPA action.

Mr. Speaker, today we recognize the Roe v. Wade decision and its aftermath. In 1982, my wife and I had the opportunity to work to start what became the seventh crisis pregnancy center in the country. Now they are known as pregnancy care centers. The work that we did in Rockford, Illinois, spilled into Freeport, Illinois, and DeKalb, Illinois. We set up these centers so we could be there to minister to the women who had very difficult decisions to make.

The pregnancy care centers throughout the country offer all kinds of service, from ultrasound to social services

to working with the women and with the fathers involved in a very difficult situation.

We commemorate that today we honor those who worked so hard for these crisis pregnancy centers. My wife and I are proud to have been two people who helped start the one in Rockford, Illinois.

Madam Speaker, any vote to raise the debt ceiling should be tied to restraints on spending.

This is the voting card, America's most expensive credit card. During my time in Congress, I voted nine times against raising the debt limit because it was not tied to spending controls. This is another time to say ``no.''

Last August we were hopeful that we could have gone beyond the $4 trillion mandate in the Budget Control Act, but it did not happen. Unfortunately, the supercommittee could not come to a consensus, and we've been drifting ever since. We are now projected to add $2.1 trillion to the national debt since August, with the President's most recent request.

I've voted over 700 times against 2.6 trillion in spending over the past 5 years. That's a good place to start to find the savings that we need to get serious on debt reduction.

We need to vote ``yes'' to disapprove raising the debt limit yet again so we can get to work to cut the spending.

Mr. Chairman, I often hear complaints from farmers back home about the numerous regulatory burdens placed on them by the government. In fact, this whole past summer we worked with the farmers who have been in a real brouhaha with the EPA concerning the runoff from their stockyards, and even small ones at that.

These are life-threatening types of regulations to continuing their farming. And now we come up with another one, this one on dust.

EPA is in the process of reviewing its dust standards. In 2009, EPA said farm dust ``likely is not safe'' and could cut the allowable dust levels in half. Because of the furor this has created, the EPA said last October they would not regulate farm dust. First they said they would regulate it; now they said they won't regulate it. So to codify this understanding or these contradictory statements by the EPA, I'm sure that all of my colleagues will have no problem in voting for this bill.

H.R. 1633 will prevent the EPA from imposing new Federal regulations on naturally-occurring dust in rural America. It will allow States and localities to regulate farm dust as they see fit based on sound science. Farmers in Illinois already struggle to comply with current standards. If Washington imposes another one-size-fits-all solution to farm dust, this could mean even more unemployment in rural areas throughout Illinois and the Nation.

I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1633.

Mr. Chairman, this is one of the most important bills that we will pass in Congress.

I'm just amazed at what I hear from the other side--we're over here endangering safety; we're poisoning water; we're doing everything we can in the workplace. That's not what this is about. All this bill says is, when you put in a regulation, at least have some type of basis so the people impacted by it know where to go from there. Have some good, sound science. Let's have an economic impact study.

Let me just give you five instances specifically. Talk to the doctors today about all of the regulations impacting them, and you'll hear complaints about spending more time on paperwork than with their patients.

Talk to the banks. I was talking to a small banker, only 19 employees. Two little banks in my district, they have to hire a full- time compliance officer just because of Dodd-Frank, and that bank didn't do one thing wrong to bring about this economic collapse.

And now the farmers. EPA is going to regulate cow manure under CERCLA, as opposed to the present rules.

Several years ago, this House passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. One of those was something called the employee commute option that said that counties around Chicago had to have something called an employee commute option that was forced carpooling. Well, one of those counties was McHenry County, which is still a rural county. And I had to work with Henry Waxman for 2 to 2\1/2\ years to come up with a reasonable interpretation and corrective language in order to make sure that the people of that county were not strapped with that incredible mandate and at the same time we did not compromise the quality of the air.

The Hope Scholarship reporting requirements that said that the 7,700 schools across the country had to report who it was that gave them the money--turned them into some kind of a supercomputer. And I worked with the 7,700 schools and with the commissioner of the IRS--this was a $100 million mandate upon all of these schools in the country because nobody took the time to say, what impact will this regulation have upon the schools of this country?

This before me is one day of regulation, just one day in America. Just one day in Washington, just one more day when the small business people have to read through 500 pages of 9-point type dealing with air particulates.

And then I hear today that oh, you don't need any relief, it's not necessary. Regulations are good. And then we take a look at the impact that this has, the financial impact that it has on the small businesses today.

This is a great bill. It's long overdue. And as a former chairman of the Small Business Committee, I say it's about time, and our colleagues on the other side should all vote unanimously for this bill.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

First of all, the doctors that I talk to--the experts themselves, not the lobbyists in Washington--I talk to them on a continuous basis. They're very upset with more regulations. And NFIB is behind the bill.

Will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, there are over 10,000 Federal programs and counting. No one quite knows how many there are.

I do most of my work in Congress on manufacturing; and for 12 years, I've been working on a chart to identify every agency, every bureau that is involved somehow in manufacturing. And it continues to grow and grow and grow. And my objective was to find a way with a common portal to be able to access via the Internet exactly what's going on, but it's impossible. And that's the problem with this government. People run to Congress and say, I have got a program for this and for that.

Well, you know what, it's time to start eliminating programs around here. It's time to just keep those programs that are absolutely necessary, and the best way to do that is to have the fiscal restraint imposed by a balanced budget amendment. No longer is it a matter of going to the backroom and simply printing money to cover this program or that program. We need to come to the realization that Washington doesn't have the answer for everything. And the best way to cut back on these 10,000 programs is to have the discipline of a balanced budget amendment so that the Members of the House and Members of the Senate can realize you really can't spend more than what you take in.

Mr. Speaker, I missed rollcall Nos. 854, 855, and 856. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I missed rollcall No. 857. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. Speaker, I hear complaints from our small business constituents back home about the difficulty in raising capital. Today we have an opportunity to fix one aspect of this problem so that our Nation's small businesses can obtain the funds that they need to hire workers.

Current law bars companies from raising capital through unsolicited advertisements. Requiring potential investors to have an existing relationship with a particular company limits the pool of potential investors and hampers the efforts of small companies who have a great idea to raise much-needed capital to expand and hire workers. This bill would make an exemption in the advertising ban for accredited investors. H.R. 2940 will make it easier for companies to raise capital without putting less sophisticated investors at risk.

As a former chairman of the Small Business Committee, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 2940. The bill will help small gazelle firms raise capital during these difficult economic times.

I rise in support of the rule and the underlying bill.

Instead of going after tax delinquents, the law punishes everyone for the failings of a few. When I chaired the Small Business Committee several years ago, I saw a lot of harm and injuries taking place to small business people. This is a tough one. H.R. 674 would repeal that.

The 3 percent withholding rule disproportionately hurts small businesses. I met with several electrical contractors in my office recently, and the first thing on their minds and their hearts was the fact that this should be repealed because it simply does not make sense.

The bill would repeal the onerous law to the benefit of farmers and others who sell goods and services to the government at all levels, but also it repeals an unfunded mandate imposed upon State and local governments that requires them to be the tax collectors for the IRS. This bill would free up precious financial resources so businesses have the flexibility to hire more workers to complete the task at hand. I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan bill.

Madam Speaker, I rise in support of all three market- opening agreements.

Over the past 3 years, the United States posted a surplus of over $70 billion in manufactured goods with our free trade agreement partners. These three free trade agreements that we're discussing have the potential to generate more exports to create or sustain 250,000 jobs.

Last year, the Brookings Institute released a study that the Rockford, Illinois, metropolitan area, with a population of 350,000, exported a whopping $3.3 billion in 2008, making Rockford the most export-intensive city in all of Illinois. Over 16,000 jobs in the Rockford area are directly related to these exports.

With the passage of these three free trade agreements, we can have even more exports coming from northern Illinois to the rest of the world.