Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my sincere congratulations to the Employee Benefit Research Institute as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Since I began serving the state of North Dakota in Congress, I have supported public policy that would encourage the growth of health and pension plans among private employers. I continuously turn to EBRI for the nonpartisan data I need in order to make legislative judgments in this area. To this end, I am especially thankful to EBRI and its superb, responsive and hard-working professional staff.

EBRI, led by Dallas Salisbury, is widely regarded by both political parties and the press as a knowledgeable and substantive source of information about employer-sponsored health and welfare plans. As Congress faces the monumental task of trying to sustain our employer- sponsored health and pension systems, I salute EBRI on its 25th anniversary, thank them for the important work they have performed over the years and recommend them to my colleagues who seek a deeper understanding of the policy options we confront. Congratulations. We will need your analysis even more in the 25 years that lie ahead.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Frelinghuysen).

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of full funding for the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). Congress made a commitment to election reform with the passage of this Act last year and should provide the funding required for HAVA-mandated improvements.

An amendment offered by the Honorable Alcee Hastings to H.R. 2989 would have increased HAVA's funding to its authorized level of $727 million. This was offset by eliminating $165 million from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) information system funding. While I support efforts to increase HAVA funding, necessary maintenance and improvements to the IRS' information system are critical. For these reasons, I was compelled to vote against H. Amdt. 357.

I look forward to considering further legislation regarding HAVA funding in the future. Election reform is important to democracy in our country and in North Dakota. It is my hope that Congress will find a way to fully fund HAVA without reducing support for the necessary work of the IRS.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to vote for these two trade agreements, H.R. 2738 and 2739. I firmly believe that these trade agreements will provide exciting opportunities for the United States, including U.S. agricultural producers. For example, under the Chile agreement, more than three-quarters of U.S. farm goods will enter Chile duty-free within four years, and all tariffs will be phased out within 12 years. Many North Dakota agricultural products, such as soybeans, durum wheat, feed grains, corn, and potatoes will have greatly improved market access.

I am not, however, without concern regarding these, or future trade agreements. Chile and Singapore are examples of countries with laws that reflect core international labor principles. As such, the ``enforce your own'' laws provision that is included in these agreements is tolerable, although it would be preferable to have additional and independent enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of many of the countries and regions with which the United States is in the process of negotiating trade agreements.

For this reason, I will not support future agreements that do not open markets for United States agricultural products; that do not require adoption and enforcement of the basic prohibitions on exploitive child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and guarantee the right to associate and bargain collectively; or that provide greater rights for foreign investors than Americans in the United States. I look forward to working with my colleagues and the United States Trade Representative in ensuring that these important ideals are honored.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 2210, the Majority's plan to reauthorize the Head Start program. While this bill makes a number of bipartisan improvements to the program, I am gravely concerned that the block grant pilot project included in this plan is the first step toward dismantling the successful Head Start program that we know today.

Over the last few months, I have traveled throughout North Dakota and heard compelling stories from Head Start teachers, volunteers and parents attesting to the success of this program in my state. More than just teaching children valuable early literacy skills, the program also encourages self-confidence, spontaneity, curiosity and self-discipline in its young pupils. In addition, Head Start recognizes the important role of parents and families in a child's empowerment by focusing on the educational, vocational and material needs of the entire family. While these aspects of the program are not easily quantified, they greatly enhance future learning potential, as well as overall development.

The plan before us today gravely endangers these comprehensive services that are--in my view--key to Head Start's success. Block granting Head Start to the states would result in a patchwork of untested state preschool programs across the country, many of which may lower educational standards, minimize comprehensive services, and provide less oversight and accountability. As it stands now, there is not a single state preschool program in the country that provides comprehensive services in accordance with Head Start standards. Equally alarming, states that are struggling with their own budget crises right now may be tempted to divert scarce Head Start dollars toward other programs once placed in their hands.

Mr. Speaker, I am convinced that we have a real opportunity with this reauthorization process to effect some positive changes for this exceptional program. We should concentrate on proposals that improve and build upon this tried-and-true program--like increasing access or enhancing teacher qualifications. I urge my colleagues to join me in taking steps to ensure the integrity of this program as the reauthorization process moves forward.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Chairman, I begin by an expression of my strong respect for the chairman of the Foreign Ops appropriations subcommittee. I disagree with him on the amendment before us, which states that basically the funding of our Trade Representative shall be applied towards negotiating agreements that protect against piracy of copyrights, open markets for United States ag products, open markets for our high tech and other manufactured exports, and that provide for basic labor agreements in the countries we are negotiating with.

I think the American taxpayer has a right to understand that there are some governing principles behind the way we approach these trade negotiations. And I would like to focus specifically on agriculture for a minute.

Some might think that if it is agriculture that is exported, then trade agreements are good. It depends on how those trade agreements are negotiated. We presently are locked in a regimen, for example, with Europe where they have very significantly higher export subsidies, and we are looking at a WTO run where they are basically evaluating whether or not to bring each of them down an equal percentage, still leaving in place an essential disparity between the subsidies that Europe provides their exports and we provide ours.

We have a trade agreement with Canada that protects the operation of their state trading monopoly, the Canadian Wheat Board, a monopoly trading enterprise that we believe provides subsidies illegally to the Canadian farmers. So our farmers are not competing against Canadian farmers; they are competing against the Canadian Wheat Board and its government. They could make that clear by opening their books, but they have adamantly refused to open their books.

We have sued them. We have tried all kinds of things. And now we have a case pending in front of the WTO, years of delay, disadvantage to our farmers, lost markets, all accomplished under these trade agreements that were supposed to bring us new markets.

So it is important that we have a very clear vision, going in, that we are advancing our interests, we are advancing it compatible with our values. And that means opening markets. And that means labor protections.

This comes into sharp focus as we are on the eve of potentially voting on and maybe approving agreements that have previously been negotiated for Singapore and Chile.

We had a vote last week in the Committee on Ways and Means. I voted for each of those trade agreements, and I intend to vote for them on the floor. But let me make it very clear, a vote for those agreements does not mean that that is somehow a template, some kind of stamped form agreement that we can apply to countries that are fundamentally different from the advanced countries of Singapore and Chile with the functional labor protections and other protections.

This is an important resolution before us. I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I would like to engage the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hobson) in a colloquy.

Mr. Chairman, water is a treasured resource everywhere in this Nation. For my constituents, degraded water quality in the Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta stemming from increased salinity is a growing problem. The fiscal year 2003 omnibus appropriation bill recognized this growing problem by dedicating $2 million for planning studies to enlarge the Los Vaqueros Reservoir. The omnibus bill also dedicated Central Valley Project storage feasibility funding towards Sites Reservoir, the Upper San Joaquin River and Shasta Dam in California.

All of this funding was the result of many years of debate and compromise and serves as one strong step towards fixing California's water supply problems, and I appreciate the help in this effort of the gentleman from Ohio.

Today's appropriation bill thankfully continues this step, but a very large piece of the puzzle is missing: Los Vaqueros funding. With the fact that the Senate version of this bill contains $1 million in funding for this important water quality mechanism, I would like to ask the gentleman for his commitment in funding this important project in the conference report.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the Chairman's hard work in helping to resolve California's water problems, and I thank him for his tireless effort and his help on this issue.

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition, and I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Taylor), the chairman of the subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Rahall), the ranking member on the Committee on Resources.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

When it comes to water issues, it knows no party lines, knows nothing ideological lines. It has basically one rule, upstream versus downstream; and the problem with the amendment that would be offered is that it takes no account whatsoever of the upstream interests.

In North Dakota, when they built the Pick-Sloan projects and flooded the Missouri River, it took an area of our State the size of Rhode Island and put it under a lake bed. And now, as if that was not tough enough, they want to say, by the way, the size of this lake is going to gyrate dramatically, preventing them from making recreational development or any other use of that State of Rhode Island-size lake because we have got to keep all of the tension on downstream waterflow. We do not care about upstream. We have got to float our barges.

Time moves on, and the economic interests of upstream eclipses downstream. The only thing that does not eclipse downstream is votes in the House.

The courts have ruled on this matter, and they have ruled in inconsistent ways. It is going to the Supreme Court. It is not to be decided by an amendment before the House.

Point of Order

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening on behalf of 13,000 families that I represent in North Dakota representing 25,000 children in those families. It is my plea this evening that we would pass the motion to recommit, get the House in line with the Senate and put in place the necessary statutory changes we must make so that those households earning $10,000 to $26,000, the working poor of this country, the working modest-income families of this country, that they and their children will be able to receive the same kind of support for their children that we will be mailing to households in the $26,000 to $110,000 income ranges just in the weeks ahead.

It is important we pass this motion so that this might be done immediately. Otherwise, we will have made a terrible and embarrassing mistake.

This Congress will leave town in a little more than a week. The Members of this Chamber will scatter to their districts all across the country. Many will board airplanes for fancy congressional trips to the far reaches of the world.

We do not want to be taking this departure from our duties here in Washington without responding to the need of this group, again in my State 25,000 children that ought to be getting the same kind of support that families in the $26,000 to $110,000 income range will be getting.

To suggest, as has been suggested on the other side, that these families do not pay taxes is flat-out wrong. Every dollar of this modest-income group is subject to those payroll taxes. Every month when they look at that pay stub that does not cover what they hoped it was covering, they will see the painful withholding for the payroll tax. We can help them with a check amounting to $400 per child, just like those other families are going to be getting.

And you do not think that is meaningful to this group? This could make all the difference in the world. This could be food and shelter, maybe something a little more frivolous, maybe a new bicycle. Maybe some of these children would actually be able to get new school clothes for the coming school year.

So we do not want to be flying out of town across the country and across the world leaving these families without the opportunity to get this kind of help. We have to take this action.

The Senate in realizing or having exposed, one way or the other, that we passed this massive tax cut, massive tax cut, on top of an earlier massive tax cut amounting to nearly $2 trillion worth of tax cuts, they realized that it just was untenable to not take this $3.5 billion and add it for these working poor families. So with a vote that had but two dissenting votes on the floor of the Senate, they passed a measure to fix this problem.

The House needs to take the same action. The House passed a different version. We put some other stuff in that cost $80 billion. I believe that we needed to fast track and vote there for the Senate bill. The House did not do that. It went to conference committee.

What has happened in the weeks since? Nothing. Nothing has happened. And nothing will happen before we leave town. That is why we need to revisit this issue. We need to pass the version that aligns perfectly with what the Senate passed so we get this bill to the President where he has said he will sign it and get these working families the relief they need with this child tax credit.

There is one other group we desperately need to attend to, and I do not think any of us could look our constituents in the eye if we do not attend to this one. This is another aspect of the problem that I really want to talk about. It involves the combatants on our behalf in harm's way tonight in Iraq and other combat zones in the country.

Believe it or not, the way this works is that combat pay, pay in a combat zone, is not subject to tax. By virtue of that, all enlisted people in Iraq getting shot at this afternoon are not going to qualify because their incomes are going to fall in this $10,000 to $26,000 category. Can you imagine that?

I looked at this week's Newsweek, and right across the top of the story line on what is going on in Iraq is picture after picture of a beautiful young American person killed since peace was declared, since the war was successfully concluded in Iraq. This is a very dangerous place, and our people are serving in harm's way, thousands of miles from their families, on our behalf today.

Are we, as Members of Congress, comfortable in this air-conditioned Chamber, prepared to look them in the eye and say, you don't get the child tax credit because the House of Representatives was too balled up in partisan nonsense to pass what the Senate passed almost unanimously, fixing this problem so your children can qualify for the tax credit? This would be a disgrace on this Chamber and a shame on every Member in it if we do not respond to the families of the combatants on our behalf in Iraq today.

Let me just give you the particulars. An E-5 or E-6 sergeant, 6 years of service, two children, paid $29,000 a year. If he does not serve in combat, both of his children qualify for the credit, get the $1,000 credit. If he is in combat for 6 months, his credit would drop to $450, and the Senate bill helps these people.

This is a terrible problem. We have got to fix it. The Senate bill fixes it. The House bill does not. For these families I represent and for the families of our combatants, pass the motion to recommit, fix this problem, and go home with our heads up for the August recess, not our heads down in shame.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I thank the ranking member and chairman for their support of this issue, a resolution important to the State of North Dakota.

Since 1964, Congress has entertained the statues advanced by the States and allowing their positioning throughout the Capitol. Without question, they enhance the atmosphere here and remind us of truly the history that has gone on before us, both in this Capitol and throughout the country, as leaders of each of the 50 States have made their indelible imprint on our collective history as a Nation. Yet we found in North Dakota that we only had a single statue. Unlike the two per State, we were one of four States that had a single statutory representative, former Governor and Treasurer John Burke.

It occurred to me that we could not do better to have as the second representative of North Dakota Sakakawea, and not just any statue of Sakakawea, but an identical replica to the statue Sakakawea that has graced our Capitol grounds for nearly a century. The statue, initially sculptured by Leonard Crunell from France, is a statue whose model was Sakakawea's granddaughter, Hannah Leavings Grant, also known as Mink Woman. Extraordinarily enough, at a recent July 4 celebration on the grounds of the State Capitol as we viewed the statue that will come under this resolution to represent North Dakota in this great place, there were relatives of Mink Woman present.

So this is an act that has such immediate relevance to especially the Native Americans and the three affiliated tribes, but also to all of us in the State of North Dakota. Sakakawea, I believe, was an actual person, but one of almost legendary and mythical dimensions. She was integrally linked to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, an expedition whose bicentennial we are recognizing in these days.

Hers is an extraordinary story. She was the young wife of a fur trader that signed on to be the expedition's guide, but Lewis and Clark found the real value of this was the role Sakakawea went on to play in the expedition. She served as translator. She served as guide. She served as a representative of the peaceful nature of the expedition as they encountered Native American tribes through the balance of the journey. She even rescued the journals of Clark. When the canoe swamped and the men bolted for safety, it was Sakakawea who saved the journals from ruin and contributed, therefore, to history. To think about a young woman making this contribution to an expedition entirely composed of men is remarkable enough, but the fact that she carried with her her 11-month-old infant, John Baptiste, is even more remarkable.

My colleagues will like this statue. It is a dignified and beautiful rendition of Sakakawea.

We like to think that the statue speaks even beyond the contribution of this remarkable woman, to the experience of the expedition with Native Americans in North Dakota as a history of cooperation. It was a history of teaching. In fact, many suggest that Lewis and Clark would not have had the successful expedition they had but for the learning of ways of hunting, navigation, and winter survival that they acquired in the winter of 1804 in North Dakota, living with the Mandan Indians. It means a great deal to us to have this statue, the first Native American woman to represent a State in this Capitol; and I urge my colleagues' favorable consideration of this resolution.

The resolution also sets the date of October 16 as the day we will recognize and unveil the statue in the rotunda. It is a date I would urge my colleagues to put on their calendars to hear a more full exposition of this through the Native Americans from North Dakota who will be present at that time.

I thank the ranking member, I thank the chairman, and I thank my colleagues for their consideration.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to this Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill. While I applaud many of the funding provisions in this legislation, I also believe that this bill makes unacceptable spending cuts to education, health care, worker training and other critical initiatives at a time when we should be investing more in our nation's future, not less.

There is absolutely no higher priority for our families than providing a quality education for our children. While I support the intentions of last year's education reform promise to leave no child behind, I am also convinced that the success of this new law will be determined in part by the investment made in this historic reform effort. I am deeply disappointed that this funding plan falls more than $6 billion short of the resources promised for low-income and disadvantaged school districts, translating to a $19 million shortfall in North Dakota alone.

This bill also breaks a promise made earlier this year to put us on a path to fully funding the Federal Government's share of the cost of educating a special needs student. Further, it shortchanges educational funding for military and Indian children in federally impacted districts, under funds after-school learning programs, freezes funding for teacher quality grants, and eliminates vocational and career guidance funding in my State.

Not only does this bill fall short on critical funding for education, but it also includes inadequate funding for rural health care programs, including outreach grants and research, and slashes funding for the State Offices of Rural Health by more than 50 percent of last year's level.

Certainly, this bill includes provisions that I support. I was pleased that the Rural Education Achievement Program received a $2 million increase to help rural districts manage the No Child Left Behind Act's new accountability requirements. I was also pleased that this bill contains important funding increases for disease research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), as well as critical increases in funding assistance to states for Medicaid funding.

I remain hopeful that we can work on a bipartisan basis to develop a fiscally responsible funding plan that provides adequate resources to strengthen our schools, address our public health needs, and support our nation's workers.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to say that I cannot support this bill. I do support nearly everything in the underlying bill. It is mostly the product of a bipartisan effort to address taxpayer rights issues and those provisions should be enacted. Unfortunately, the addition of ``poison pill'' language into this bill prevents me from supporting this legislation today.

This bill has many good components, including provisions I worked on personally with Mr. Houghton. There are several excellent provisions from members of both sides of the aisle, in addition to a number of important recommendations made by the Taxpayer Advocate at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to improve services of the agency and protect consumer rights. Most of these provisions are broadly, if not unanimously, supported.

However, what started as a good bipartisan bill has been tarnished by the addition of an anti-consumer provision that is troublesome enough that I cannot vote for it. Language was added to this bill to strip essential consumer protections for those purchasing health insurance using tax credits granted under the Trade Assistance Act (TAA). These existing, carefully negotiated consumer protections are in place to ensure adequate coverage for those using the tax credit. They are enjoyed by every member of this Congress, and they are critical to providing meaningful health coverage.

Proponents of removing these consumer protections call it ``consumer choice.'' But as a former insurance regulator, I can tell you that families facing unemployment and possible loss of health insurance due to U.S. trade policy need health insurance that is both affordable and provides adequate coverage. They should not be forced to ``choose'' one over the other.

Under current law, insurance companies who agree to offer coverage to displaced workers under this program are substantially limited in their ability to turn down applicants, charge excessive premiums or otherwise seek to cover only the healthiest individuals. Without these requirements, the promise of help for most of these people and their families would be meaningless. Understand, however, these are not special protections. These are standard protections and they are being stripped in this bill.

Making coverage cheaper by restricting it to the healthy undermines its purpose--health security for those who need it most. It's like making automobile air bags out of tissue paper--a tactic sure to make cars cheaper for all and hurt only those few who are in accidents-- those whose goal it is to protect in the first place.

Only healthy people can afford to ``waive'' the protections. If the waiver is available, the insurance industry would likely gladly enter into arrangements to cover only the young and healthy displaced workers and walk away from those who need help most. This would make a mockery out of the agreement the members of this House voted for in passing the

Mr. Speaker, on June 23, 2003, due to flight delays, I missed rollcall votes Nos. 297, 298, 299, and 300. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on all four votes.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the comments of my colleague about the crisis in small employer health care; but as we address this issue, I think we have to ascribe ourselves fully to the Hippocratic oath, First, do no harm.

The AHP proposal before us would do a great deal of harm. I would recommend to my colleagues, study this issue before you vote, it is very serious. If there is not enough time to get into the technical details, just look at who is against this bill. This bill could be called a wonderful, unifying force because it has brought together people who do not agree on anything, but they do agree this is bad policy for this country. The Republican Governors Association, the Democrat Governors Association, 41 State attorneys general of both political parties, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, again representing regulators of both political parties have reached their conclusion based on several fundamental facts.

We have spent a lot of time in this Chamber debating the Patients' Bill of Rights worrying about protections. I guess we could call this the ``Patient Bill of No Rights'' because it literally exposes those who would be insured under these mechanisms to whatever might be written with no consumer protections and no State insurance department to go to for those protections.

There is a nice populist argument which has been used this afternoon that if big companies can do it, little companies ought to be able to do it, too. I represent North Dakota. That is the place of small employers. The difference in a fundamental one. IBM can self-insure. They do it themselves. They basically pay themselves. A small hardware store in an AHP would be joining an association, sending their premiums not to themselves but off to others, and that is why we need the check. We have tried this before. What happens is promoters come up with these schemes, the employer goes for the lowest premium, they ship their hard-earned dollars off to provide the coverage for their employees, and someone makes off with the money. It has time and time again.

The protections protect coverage, but they also protect to make sure the plan is solvent so they can pay the health claim when the insured needs it. We have seen this tried before under the guise of multiple employer trusts. They went bankrupt; there was a slew of scandals. We have seen it now under multiple employer welfare arrangements. There were scandals, busts, uncertain insurance framework for our consumers.

Madam Speaker, now they want to call them AHPs, but the result will be precisely the same.

If it were simply a benign issue of let the buyer beware, it would be one thing; but it is much worse than that because this makes the premiums go up for all who remain in existing insurance pools. Small employers insuring through insurance companies are not viewed just on their own little group, they are part of a pool. Well, as AHPs would take off smaller healthy groups, those left would be older, sicker groups. Premiums would go up, coverage would be diminished, or dropped altogether. It has been estimated that as many as a million people would lose their coverage.

Again, do not take my word for it, look at what the Congressional Budget Office has written on this, or consider the quotes by the Mercer Consulting Group in analyzing this proposal, Health insurance premiums would increase 23 percent for small employers that continue to purchase State-regulated coverage. This would result from AHPs' ability to attract healthier-than-average firms out of the small, regulated market. This makes the problem worse.

First, let us do no harm. We need to address small employers. The substitute to be presented has a better approach in that regard, but the underlying bill is a stinker, and let us beat it.