Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, we are seeing it again in another large city. This time, it is in Los Angeles, where what the media sometimes terms ``a mostly peaceful protest'' is burning part of the town down.

Indeed, it is lawless chaos. Streets are blocked. Law enforcement is under attack. Foreign flags are being waved while American flags burn. Businesses and vehicles are going up in flames. It is less like a demonstration and more like a foreign invasion.

California officials, though, have stood by and done virtually nothing. The Los Angeles police chief says that his department is actually overwhelmed. Other officials in California are outraged that the National Guard was deployed to clean up the mess that they have refused to address. Governor Gavin Newsom told people to resist ICE and then acted surprised when things got worse.

My colleagues can see this little gem right here written on the side of the car. We had to clean it up a bit for public viewing.

These riots should be stopped immediately. Those doing it should be arrested. Those who are aiding and abetting it, including elected officials, need to be dealt with very sternly in this process.

I fully support our National Guard, Department of Homeland Security, and law enforcement on the ground for doing the job that Governor Newsom and Los Angeles city officials simply won't do.

Law and order do matter.

Mr. Speaker, 81 years ago today, American troops, along with British and many others, stormed the beaches of Normandy.

They faced intense gunfire, landmines, and the real chance they wouldn't make it home. Actually, over 4,000 didn't, as witnessed by the beautiful cemetery that oversees those beaches in France.

Of course, it took grit, sacrifice, a deep belief, and an incredible assembly of materiel and the ability to keep it secret when all that machinery and materiel was assembled just above the White Cliffs of Dover in England.

If anyone has ever watched the movie ``Saving Private Ryan,'' there are actual soldiers who were there at the time who say that that was one of the most accurate descriptions and depictions one would ever see of how nasty and how bad that was.

Mr. Speaker, can you imagine that front door of that landing craft opening and the hail of gunfire that was put upon those guys? Yet, they went anyway because they were required to, because it was a duty, and because they had to turn back one of the greatest threats that the world had ever seen in what Nazi Germany had been foisting upon the world for 5 years up to that point.

We owe them so much.

As Captain Miller said toward the end of that movie to Private Ryan himself: ``Earn this.''

We all, as citizens, will remember this day on Memorial Day to be good citizens and to uphold what the Founders gave us with this country. We earned this.

Mr. Speaker, recently two Chinese nationals were arrested in Michigan for having smuggled in a pathogen that would be greatly harmful to our agricultural crops, livestock, and even the human use for these crops.

A fungal pathogen, known as fusarium graminearum, was identified in scientific literature as being a potential agroterrorism weapon. This is what the two Chinese nationals, Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, brought into the country.

They smuggled this pathogen in via their electronic devices, which also contained evidence of Chinese Communist Party membership. The different methods with which they brought the pathogen in were hidden in devices or in tissues. There were various ways of smuggling it past customs.

We can't imagine what kind of a threat this would be toward our agricultural production in this country if something like this was allowed to get loose. They tried to get into the University of Michigan through their test labs and through the work that the university does through agriculture.

What did they want to do? Maybe they wanted to infect everything that was going through Michigan and coming out in the new crops.

Some of the effects of it on certain grains would be devastating, for example, to wheat, barley, grains, and rice. Indeed, the world's most important staple crops would be infected during their flowering stage.

The grains would often appear shriveled, bleached, or pinkish, making them unusable. Also, with these mycotoxins in here, it would cause toxicity to humans and animals. It would cause them to vomit or experience even worse effects in the livestock or people that would happen to use it.

What would the possible impact be? It would mean billions of dollars in crop losses globally each year due to lost yields, contamination, and rejection in the market. As I mentioned, these mycotoxins would cause vomiting, liver damage, immune suppression, and reproductive defects in both humans and livestock.

This is pretty nasty stuff that the Chinese Communist Party is sneaking into this country by one means or the other. In this case, it is at the University of Michigan.

It is known to be funded by the Chinese Government, though the University of Michigan states it has received no funding directly from the Chinese Government for this work. It points out that we need more clarification and more clear knowledge of the status of who is funding the research, who is funding the colleges, and who is funding the universities for things like this.

This is a bigger threat than we could imagine to the American food supply with what we produce, both domestically and those it would support around the world.

One of the two nationals has been accused of multiple smuggling attempts from 2022-2024. Again, I mentioned hiding samples of whatever they might be carrying in boots or mailed in, in a textbook.

What will we do about it? Are we going to tighten up the restrictions on what is coming in through China and have closer checks of who is being allowed to import things and what is happening at our universities?

Are we going to just let this go and have our food supply devastated by the constant threat of people trying to undermine and break down our country?

We can't have these contaminated harvests. We can't have the continued threat to the confidence people in this country and our exporters have in the American food supply.

We can't overstate what this means for agriculture, what it means for the U.S. economy, and what it means for our national security with the food supply we grow and the overall health of U.S. citizens.

We need to do a much better job, whether it is going to be what is smuggled through our airports; who is allowed to bring things into this country; what their research consists of, and who is funding it. Mainly, in this case it is the Chinese Communist Party and their government.

Mr. Speaker, it is a dead serious issue. We better take it seriously, or we are going to be in big trouble.

Mr. Speaker, California's Governor and legislature are at it again. The annual gas tax hike that already is in place is going to raise the gas tax another 2 cents to a staggering 61 cents per gallon. It is already squeezing families, small businesses, farms, and everything.

New clean air rules are expected to take effect alongside this gas hike, which could push prices even higher.

When State Republicans tried to stop these costly regulations, Democrats blocked that effort without even a debate, showing little concern for how hard Californians are already being hit and struggling with these high costs of electricity, fuel, and everything else.

Meanwhile, controversy is swirling around California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph, who recently admitted that her agency does not analyze how its rules and new taxes affect prices for everyday drivers. They don't even analyze what the effect is going to be. They just go ahead and raise the gas tax.

CARB wields too much unchecked power without accountability. CARB is proposing a new fuel standard that will further increase the cost of fuel by another 65 cents a gallon for Californians.

With two oil refineries set to shut down due to high regulations, it is going to really increase the gas prices to probably $8.43, according to a USC study.

Mr. Speaker, who the heck can afford this?

Mr. Speaker, what began as a concept to connect California's two largest cities with high-speed rail has become a national embarrassment and one of the most expensive boondoggles in modern infrastructure history.

After more than 17 years and $6.9 billion in just Federal money, and overall $17 billion raised over 17 years, not a single mile of high- speed rail track has been laid, just a few bridges built.

A report released today by Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and the Federal Railroad Administration confirmed what many of us have been saying for years and years: This project is not viable. It is riddled with mismanagement, massive cost overruns, missed deadlines, fantasy- level ridership projections, and even promising 1.1 million jobs in the process. After they got pinned down in committee at the State legislature, they finally admitted it was 1 million job-years.

If you do the math on that, Mr. Speaker, they claim 10,000 workers there currently, so that would mean about 100 years to equal 1 million job-years. They seem to be right on track for 100 years in building this project.

It is still $7 billion short just to build a sliver of this segment between Merced and an almond orchard somewhere outside of Bakersfield, hardly the world-class system voters were promised back in 2008.

The original vision for the project from S.F. to L.A. also included spurs to Sacramento and San Diego possibly, which would have been about an 800-mile network.

Now, well after a decade, what is left is simply the 119-mile stretch through the Central Valley I just mentioned, which doesn't really connect any major metro areas. That segment is years behind.

The whole project should have been done by 2020. They are hoping to get that Central Valley Project done by maybe 2030.

That project, the Central Valley part by itself, would be $38.5 billion. The original concept of the whole thing was $33 billion from S.F. to L.A.

The total estimated cost today is a staggering $128 billion. As I mentioned, over a 17-year period from 2008 to now, they have raised only $17 billion. They are short $110 billion. They think they are going to come to the Federal Government and ask for that here? Are they going to hit the taxpayers for more? Are they going to pass more bonds to raise $110 billion--what?--five or six times more than what they have already raised over 17 years?

There is no serious plan to even secure that kind of money. There is no credible timeline to finish the construction. There is no evidence that the California High-Speed Rail Authority is even capable of delivering or operating the system. The authority has failed to meet even the most basic terms of its Federal grant agreement.

That is why I am so pleased that Secretary Duffy has taken a good hard look at this and has come up with the conclusions they have.

They have not acted in good faith. They have downplayed the risks. They have run out of time and money. Basically, the voters--the people, everybody--have been lied to in order to keep this project alive.

Even Governor Newsom, about the first week or two he was in office as Governor, for a moment there he said, you know, maybe we need to relook at this thing because it is not going very well. He must have got a hot set of phone calls from some angry donors, or somewhere in the system in Sacramento, because he got right back on track, so to speak.

The Trump administration is right to put this project on notice, claw back whatever Federal money is still unwasted in that, and make sure that not a single dollar goes toward this boondoggle.

As a Californian, I can see plenty of other needs that California has that are grave, such as our water infrastructure, our electricity infrastructure, our highways, and our levies that prevent floods. I would probably dwell mostly on the water supply situation, as more and more of it seems to be devoted to fish, running it right out to the Pacific Ocean. Less and less agriculture is being planted and operated in California, including the issue in the San Joaquin Valley where more acres are taken out, which creates a higher dust situation, which contributes to more of what is known as Valley fever, a big problem. Instead, they want to put so-called solar farms--calling solar panels ``farms'' is an insult anyway.

So much of the Nation's food supply comes from California, the specialty crops: tomatoes, almonds, pistachios, so many things that America consumes. Many of these crops are 100 percent grown in California or 90-plus percent grown in California. Yet, they still want to keep wasting money on this high-speed rail boondoggle that, as I said, is $110 billion short of today's projections of finishing this thing when they have only raised $17 billion over 17 years.

Certainly, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has shown that it can't deliver on this project. Shift the money to something else. California could build 25 large dams and store enough water to grow everything it could ever want to grow in California. It is time to focus on infrastructure that really makes a difference for Californians, the American people, and keeping food on the table.

Mr. Speaker, it keeps on happening. Girls' and women's sports are under threat. In my home State of California, in just the last few days, a male won in a division in State track championships for CIF.

A male athlete competing in the girls' divisions took top finishes, taking opportunities away from the girls in sports and women in sports.

Only afterward in this case did CIF revise the results and hand out medals to the girls who were pushed off the podium, which really tells you all you need to know.

Now, the Department of Justice is stepping in. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has given more than 1,600 California schools a deadline: Reject this bylaw that allows athletes to compete based on gender identity rather than their biological sex, or they will face legal consequences. There is, indeed, a physiological difference between the two.

We have seen this disadvantage in the Olympics, in boxing, volleyball. Mr. Speaker, there are so many examples in sports where girls who have trained hard have had their dream of getting to the Olympics or playing in college taken away because of these crazy policies.

We need to stop this and have that ruling take place to reverse that trend. The Equal Protection Clause is what we need.

Mr. Speaker, many regulations are being enacted so often in California due to CARB, California Air Resources Board, or even federally with previous iterations of the EPA.

One of those features is the start-stop feature on newer automobiles, which is when you stop your car and the engine shuts off.

This is a design, in theory, to save gasoline or diesel, whatever your vehicle is powered by. Yet, most drivers or the vast majority of drivers you talk to and survey are really annoyed by this feature because they pull up to a stoplight, a stop sign, or just merely wish to stop somewhere for a moment, and their engine shuts off.

Mr. Speaker, you can point to this button bypass that many of the cars have--some don't--that you can bypass and shut off the feature that shuts off your car. Yet, a lot of people will forget to turn it off. They get in their car,

pull up to the stoplight, and the darned thing shuts off.

They are really annoyed that their government treats them that way and that they can't decide on their own how to operate their vehicle. What you see is that the vehicles also have to build in extra technology and extra heavy-duty equipment in order to accommodate this.

For example, when you stop and start your car all the time, you are going to wear out your battery more, so they have to have a battery with an extra-heavy-duty build to it, as well as the starter itself, in order to accommodate many, many more frequent starts using these systems.

One of the things mechanics will talk to you about is that when you shut an engine off, your oil pressure goes back down to zero. Each time you start your engine without the oil pressure, you gain a little extra wear on your bearings--your crank bearings, your connecting rod bearings, and even in the cylinders--because the oil has settled back down between starts. There is a lot of extra wear involved with the engine wear and engine component wear.

Then, reading up on how the factory has to accommodate this so that it lasts 100,000 miles and doesn't become a warranty problem, they have to build in extra-heavy-duty wiring harnesses so that the extra load from the starter, from the battery, and all of that can be accommodated over a longer period of time so the car will last longer.

When you have these systems in place, this adds to the cost of a new car by having to make heavier batteries, heavier starters, and heavier wiring harnesses on that, all for the concept that you might be saving a little bit of gasoline.

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting when you ride around here in D.C., for example, when you have to take an Uber downtown to go to some meet-up or what have you, by the time you get through all of the blankety-blank stoplights in this town--and they are all on timers instead of even on sensors like some of them are at home--that you are riding with somebody and you hear the car shut off, then it starts up again 2 seconds later, if the light happens to change.

For me, who is mechanically inclined, it kind of drives me crazy listening to that because it is such abuse on the car and the engine system, all because somebody dreamed up the idea, if we shut off the engine at stoplights all the time, it might save a little bit of gas.

On some engines, it actually takes a little bit of extra gas to restart it versus just letting it run a few extra seconds. What is seen is that statistics have shown that, maybe over the lifetime of the car, you have saved a few gallons of fuel. Yet, in that process, you have had to buy more batteries, replace starters more often, and build a lot heavier components which are more costly and require more resources, as well.

Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called for changes to this feature. Since it may be perceived as a mandate, I know the auto dealers are afraid to shut it off. If you take it in and say: Would you just disable this thing for me. They say: Well, it is an emissions thing.

If you don't like the gong going off on your seatbelt all the time, they can't shut that off because it is a safety thing. You don't really have the choice of how you are going to operate your vehicle.

For those of us who drive around in a rural area or on our own, if you are a farmer on your fields and such, you have to listen to the gonging of the seatbelt all the time or have it shut off every time you need to stop to irrigate in your field, for example, or if you remember to shut it off with the silly button. Yet, I understand there are bypass systems you can get for that if you want to bootleg it a little bit.

I understand that if you open the hood on certain vehicles, it disables that, so they have a little hood bypass mechanism you can get to bypass that. Mr. Speaker, maybe they just don't need to put the stuff on to begin with and let people decide for themselves if they want to shut their car off at the stoplight every time.

Mr. Speaker, what do you get? When you stop at the light, you get a hesitancy to go again. You can read anecdotes of how people are getting ready to pull out into traffic but the car stopped on them, so they lose their opportunity. They lose their moment to pull out and they have to wait longer.

These silly mandates that come along, people generally don't like them, such as the auto start-stop feature on automobiles. I am pleased and will continue to work with Administrator Lee Zeldin on things like that to give people more car choice on what they want.

Mr. Speaker, once again, I am here to address the situation of California's wasteful spending. A new bit of information has come out that the interim segment of high-speed rail is going to be built between a town called Merced down to another one near Bakersfield called Shafter. This segment would end in an almond orchard out there in the middle of nowhere. The price for that segment has gone up to about $38.5 billion, just for this segment, which is going to be in a low-population area comparatively when the whole concept of California High-Speed Rail was one that would go from San Francisco to L.A., the population centers.

The original cost, I will remind you too, when it was placed on the ballot in front of the voters, was that it would be $33 billion to build the entire system from San Francisco to L.A., not just that 150- mile segment between Merced and Shafter.

Who is being shafted in this deal? Those being shafted, of course, are the taxpayers, as always, since in their quest to not let this go, to not let it die, they are going to continue to seek more and more money for this project.

Now, in the 17 years since this was passed and placed on the ballot in front of the voters--and it won by a very narrow margin, 2 or 3 percent--it was to have an initial $9 billion bond of State money to go towards the $33 billion, and then the rest would be raised from the private sector, that price is today seen as $128 billion. In those 17 years, they have only managed to raise $17 billion or so towards the project, in 17 years. Since the project is about $110 billion or so short, where are they going to get $110 billion more when it took 17 years to raise $17 billion? Where is that going to come from?

California has a scheme called the cap-and-trade tax that taxes the privilege of making carbon dioxide if you are a manufacturer or some other large entity that produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct of your industry. Let me remind you, carbon dioxide is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.

All of these things are being done to cut carbon, including this whole rail project itself, which is supposed to be a big carbon saver, yet they are chasing a goal that is incredibly small and incredibly out of touch.

Here we are. They are going to come to Washington asking for more and more money. So far two Democrat Presidents have given the project about $3.5 billion on one occasion each. They are going to fall far short of raising $110 billion more since cap-and-trade, as I mentioned, in California only brings in about a billion per year on taxation on CO2. If they manage to get a couple $3.5 billion segments from the U.S. Government, it is a long ways from getting done.

We should be solving other issues in California instead of building this dream rail system running through the middle of communities, having to take so much land by eminent domain, messing up farmland, messing up the middle of the cities that it is going through, having to take out a high school in one case, and a rendering plant in another case. These are all things that are making it actually worse for people, just so they can have the idea of, oh, we have to be like China and have a high-speed rail system.

It isn't working out in California. It won't work out. The price is horrendous. The tickets themselves for people to be able to ride the train are going to be a lot more expensive than what they are trying to tell us they will be, especially when you have low-cost airline tickets like Southwest and others going back and forth pretty often.

Why don't we solve other problems, like California's water issues, the water supply? For that kind of money, you could build 26 new dams that would hold who knows how many acre-feet, how many millions of acre-feet. Let's just try and build two or three dams that will hold 3, 4, 5, 6 million acre-feet and solve California's water problems, solve California's continued transfer of agricultural water to fish supplies. We could actually get something useful done.

People that use the roads and the highways and freeways would probably like to see some of the potholes fixed, for example, that always get worn into the right lane of a freeway. Maybe we could get some of those fixed. Maybe we could add lanes here and there where there is more dense traffic with a fraction of that money.

No one is going to ride this thing for the cost and for the time it takes to still get back and forth between San Francisco and L.A., and they don't have a car at the other end. You might as well take the airplane and save money and get there even faster.

Mr. Speaker, of all the things we could be investing in, whether it is water supply or managing our forests better so we don't have to burn them down every year and suffer with air quality that we have--each year there is a million-acre fire, including the Dixie Fire in my district about 4 years ago that hit this town. The smoke plume hit this town because we don't manage the forest.

There are so many other things we could be doing besides high-speed rail.

Mr. Speaker, once again, the California Air Resources Board is trying to jam through a gas price hike under the cover of its so-called low carbon fuel standard. After the rule was blocked earlier this year for being unclear and poorly written, CARB is now racing to make it effective by July 1, just months after quietly approving it right after the election and in time for summer travel for people on vacation, et cetera.

Even their own staff at CARB admitted it will raise gas prices. Californians already pay the highest gas prices in the country. This will just make it worse.

This is set to add at least 65 cents per gallon by this move. Combined with a couple of closed refineries in California, by the time that kicks into place, a USC study indicates it could be $8.40 per gallon. Let that settle.

That is exactly why I acted at the Federal level and led the charge to rein in California's Clean Air Act waiver authority, the same waiver CARB uses to push these costly, unchecked regulations onto the rest of the country. No agency should have this much power to raise costs without public input or accountability. This is bureaucratic overreach.

We voted here to contain CARB on forcing electric cars and trucks under these waivers. We should give them no more waivers and allow that or other radical policies that raise costs for families and everybody else.

Mr. Speaker, California's budget could be a bellwether for the rest of the country if we pay attention.

Governor Newsom is planning to spend $11.4 billion in the 2025-26 budget to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants, which virtually matches the State's $12 billion deficit that it is running. He could balance the books by ending that program. Instead, they will be cutting services for seniors, foster youth, and people with disabilities just to keep this giveaway going to illegal immigrants. That is exactly why we need Medicaid reform.

States shouldn't be allowed to game the system by expanding benefits to those who are here illegally while sticking taxpayers with the bill or cutting others. Hardworking Americans are paying more and getting less, while illegal immigrants cruise in and get more coverage. That is really, really backward.

At the Federal level, we must draw a line. Medicaid should be for citizens and legal residents only. If we don't act, California's disaster could become a pattern and a national disaster for the rest of us.

Mr. Speaker, this week is National Police Week. It is always time every day to remember and give thanks to those who put on the uniform and stand in the line of fire for all of us.

I don't want to recite the number of officers killed and injured on duty. I want to talk about the upside of what they mean to us and what they mean for keeping us out of harm's way. They are there for us 24/7.

The number of officers we do lose should impact all of us greatly, but they are indeed the front line. This week, we can show at least some level of appreciation by passing legislation that will help them do their jobs.

One of these bills tracks violence against officers so we can respond in a meaningful way with meaningful action for them. Another is to help the retired officers keep the weapons they train with. Another one gives qualified officers more flexibility to carry their firearms. Indeed, it is a commonsense step.

Mr. Speaker, the badge doesn't completely come off when the shift ends. During this week, we ought to show our thanks, as we do every day.

Mr. Speaker, in California, they are going at it again. Gavin Newsom and the legislature want to extend California's cap-and- trade tax for another 15 years.

This is a tax that was created by really creating a fake currency of selling the right to make CO2 for manufacturing plants and power plants in California.

All this does is jack up the price for fuel, electricity, et cetera, and pass it along to families who have to pay for these things.

What will this go for?

A portion will go for at least a guaranteed $1 billion per year for the boondoggle in California known as the high-speed rail. I call it the high-cost fail because it has been failing for many, many years and is projected to be probably 25 or 30 years late if it ever gets completed. It has wasted many billions of dollars so far with nothing to show for it.

He wants to lock in this cap-and-trade funding through 2045, all while Californians are paying more and more to keep their lights on and keep gas in their car. It is projected by some of these actions to be as much as $8.43 per gallon according to a USC report.

Get that, Mr. Speaker, $8.50 per gallon for these schemes. We need to fix roads and do a lot of other things besides high-speed rail and sticking taxes on more people.

Mr. Speaker, there is a fund called the Secure Rural Schools. It was enacted by Congress decades ago to replace the timber receipts we used to have when we had a strong forest industry, especially in the West. It has been run out by a lot of environmental policies that turned out to be erroneous, see the spotted owl.

In Congress, we have had to put forward this Secure Rural Schools funding in order to backfill what local counties, local school districts used to have from timber receipts.

The good news is that this piece is in the House Agriculture reconciliation bill, so it is good news for these rural counties that have been waiting for a long time, since it has already expired back in March. It is a lifeline for many areas in rural America where the Federal Government controls so much land.

In some States, it is somewhere between 40 and 80 percent of the land that counties can't collect property taxes on when the timber harvest isn't happening anymore like it used to. For some reason, the United States is the number one importer of wood and wood products. Instead, we burn millions of acres every year in the West. SRS was created as a promise. If Washington is going to tie up these lands, it needs to help fund the basic services these counties still have to provide.

Madam Speaker, in California, we have this high-speed rail project. I call it high-cost rail because it has become a symbol of runaway spending and is, indeed, a complete boondoggle.

Back when the original bond was passed in 2008 by a narrow margin by the voters of California, it was about a $9 billion bond. The rail was supposed to be a total cost of $33 billion from San Francisco to L.A. It has ballooned up to $130 billion in projected costs, and that was 17 years ago. So far there is hardly any infrastructure that has been built.

What do you have? Over 17 years they have managed to raise about $17 billion from cap-and-trade tax in California and two different disbursements from Democratic Presidencies. In 17 years--check this-- they have raised $17 billion. They are short $110 billion to complete the project. Not only that, they are at least 25 years behind. It was supposed to have been done by 2020, and now they project, maybe we will have the first segment from Merced to a town called Shafter, somewhere near Bakersfield, done by maybe 2035 or 2040.

They are going to come back to D.C. for more money. Not a chance. This thing needs to be stopped and put it into infrastructure that people need, like freeways and stuff like that.

Mr. Speaker, the House Natural Resources Committee is doing exactly what we said and what President Trump has called for. We are unleashing American energy and using our own resources to build a stronger economy.

Through budget reconciliation, we are generating over $18.5 billion in savings and new revenue by getting Washington out of the way and letting Americans do what we do best, which is work and produce.

We are expanding clean, safe energy production here at home and ramping up mining for critical minerals so we are not relying on China. We are cutting the red tape that blocks progress.

We are also protecting taxpayers by managing our forests and public lands better, so we are not paying out billions later in disaster response, wildfire costs, and cleanup. We are reversing the Biden policies that locked up land, killed jobs, and handed too much power to Federal bureaucrats.

Mr. Speaker, the plan is really about energy, jobs, and putting America first. It is long overdue.