Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged resolution and ask for its immediate consideration.

Our Nation is facing some of the worst economic conditions in decades. By the end of next year, our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity. That is a loss of $12,000 of income for every family in America. We cannot continue on this same economic course. Congress must take bipartisan action in the coming weeks to improve our economy both in the near term and down the line.

Economists tell us that we must act in bold terms--that we must invest in new technologies and, most importantly, that we must invest in the American people.

Congress should work with President-elect Obama to craft a targeted and fiscally responsible economic recovery package that invests in the middle class families by providing them with tax relief during these uncertain times.

Madam Speaker, it's going to take time to turn this economy around, but we should start the process immediately so that all Americans can once again live the American dream.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And to my friends, Mr. Hensarling and Dr. Price from the Financial Services Committee, you raise some legitimate points. But I think three questions have to be asked, and if they're answered in the affirmative, then I think we must go forward and pass this bill.

First, do you believe that the domestic auto industry is essential to America, whether it's for jobs or national security? I think the answer is ``yes.'' But that doesn't answer the whole question.

The second two questions are, are you throwing good money after bad, or can you restructure these companies so that they can be competitive and succeed going forward? I think the answer is ``yes.'' We've received reorganization/restructuring plans from them that show really an ability to compete and to bring technology that leapfrogs Japanese technologies and other technologies into the future for our companies. So we can restructure these companies.

And the third, can we protect the advances, the loans, that are made by the United States to these companies for the next hundred days? And the answer is ``yes.'' And in fact, we've gone about as far as we can go within the bounds of the Constitution and say that such loans shall be senior and prior to all obligations, liabilities, and debts of the automobile manufacturers, and we will take all available security and collateral.

So we've done those three things. Is it essential? Yes. Can they be restructured? Yes. Have we secured the taxpayer? Yes.

So we are making a loan for 100 days until a reorganization plan is approved by the President's designee. If in fact during that time there is no reorganization plan or one that is not viable, that designee can call the loan.

So this is a step for 100 days to protect an industry that is essential to this country. I've thought about this a lot. We have done what we can to limit executive pay, to stop dividends or distributions during the period of the loans.

So we are taking steps to protect taxpayers for an industry that is essential to this country, and we will see over the next 100 days whether they can be restructured.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to enter into the record a ``yes'' vote for rollcall vote 671. I was present in the chamber on September 29,2008, and thought my vote had been cast on the rule but was not counted.

Madam Speaker, I would like to enter into a colloquy with the chairman.

Mr. Chairman, there has been a lot of discussion about making sure that businesses, homeowners and farmers all over this country have access to credit to buy inventory or finance a new home or purchase seed for next year's crops. We have several agencies within the Federal Government whose mission it is to provide credit directly to Main Street, to small businesses, to homeowners, to farmers and to people all over this country. Those agencies include the Small Business Administration, the Federal Home Loan Banks and the Farm Credit Administration.

Mr. Chairman, will those agencies be utilized to make sure that some of the funding or credit provided by this legislation will go directly to Main Street?

Mr. Speaker, third-quarter data released yesterday highlighted the decrease in home values in 24 out of 25 metropolitan areas, and jobless claims rose to a 7-year high. Our economy is struggling, and people across America are having trouble selling their homes and buying inventory for their businesses.

While no one likes the situation we are in, we must do what we can to help America and its families. So I support the financial legislation which has been proposed and is coming to us from the Senate.

I encourage the Treasury to work through the Small Business Administration, the Farm Credit Administration, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board so credit flows to people living in Colorado and across the country. This is one of the most important pieces of economic legislation we have had in decades. And, clearly, the fluctuations in the markets over the past few days and the credit crisis we face must demonstrate we cannot give up on a solution. I believe this is a plan that will help stabilize the market and protects taxpayers, and I support it.

Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration with its neocon philosophy either cut back, opposed, ignored or choked off restraints on the markets, especially those of Wall Street, while borrowing billions of dollars from China and Saudi Arabia to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans and while prosecuting the war in Iraq.

The borrow-and-spend approach and the party atmosphere cannot go on forever, and the bailouts, takeovers and bankruptcies of the recent weeks demonstrate that the party is over.

Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is asking Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars to compensate for market excesses and wants the money within a week or two to restore confidence to the financial markets. I will listen to Mr. Paulson and his plea on behalf of the Bush administration about this immediate infusion of cash and the purchase of billions and billions of dollars in bad loans to take the burden of this bad debt out of the markets, but I must say I have my doubts about the foxes guarding the hen house or giving the Bush administration any more authority over anything. Thank goodness we did not privatize Social Security.

Mr. Speaker, while years of deregulation policies have caused the biggest financial crisis in decades, Senator McCain is touting himself as the greatest deregulator.

The Senator has called government regulations unnecessary and burdensome, and has said they should be eliminated. Now he wants to extend his deregulation agenda to the health insurance industry, writing in an opinion op-ed this month, that, ``Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of State-based regulation.''

For 8 years now, the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to all the trading, lending and borrowing that is now responsible for the Wall Street crisis.

Senator McCain now wants to extend that same strategy to the health insurance industry? Our Nation's health care system has enough problems, and we don't need to exacerbate them by implementing Senator McCain's dangerous new deregulation idea.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize two members of one of my Colorado offices, Hannah Warfield and Jenny Barringer. These two are world-class athletes from my alma mater, the University of Colorado. They recently competed in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Oregon; and in Jenny's case, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

I want to start off by saying a few words about Hannah, a native of Sydney, Montana, who competed in the women's javelin competition. Her work ethic is extraordinary; and despite the rigors of working a full- time job and recently graduating from the University of Colorado, she maintains a training schedule which begins at 5 a.m. in the morning and would humble even the most dedicated among us.

This work ethic propelled her to become the 2007 NCAA Women's Big 12 Champion in the javelin event, a distinction not achieved by a University of Colorado athlete in 20 years.

She is one of the most pleasant, organized and courteous individuals I have ever had the opportunity to meet. And although Hannah came just short of making it to Beijing, words cannot express the amount of pride and inspiration she brought to our office and our community with her dedication to the pursuit of her dreams. Hannah's positive attitude and tenacity should serve as an inspiration to all of us.

Next, I would like to take to moment to speak about Jenny Barringer from Oviedo, Florida, who competed in the women's 3,000 meter steeplechase event. Jenny is a true pioneer in the sport which made its inaugural appearance at the 2008 games.

Prior to the Olympics, she shattered the American record in the women's steeplechase with a time of 9:22:73. If that were not enough, she maintains a 3.7 GPA, serves as a sign language interpreter, volunteers with the Ronald McDonald House, Habitat for Humanity, and the local adopt-a-road program.

I can attest that Coloradoans watched her with excitement and anticipation as Jenny made her Olympic debut and competed in the Beijing games where she once again made history by breaking her own American record with a time of 9:22:26. This was a 9th place finish in the world. Jenny made our community and Nation proud.

But what impresses me most about Hannah and Jenny is that for as great as their athletic ability, they are even better people. Active in their communities, great students, combined with a desire to go above and beyond what is expected, they serve as a positive example of what can be achieved with hard work and a positive attitude.

As a father of three young women myself, all of whom are athletes, I can attest Hannah and Jenny represent the pride and hope every parent feels when they drop their own daughters off at an athletic practice.

It is an amazing honor to see two of our own in Colorado rise to this level, especially knowing it could not have happened to two better people. Hannah Warfield and Jenny Barringer embody the best our country could hope for in the next generation of Americans, and I am privileged for the opportunity to have come to know these two remarkable individuals.

Mr. Speaker, this country was really founded upon sacrifice, investment and opportunity for all, but over the last few years, we've seen the focus being on the wealthiest 1 percent in America to the exclusion of the rest of us, and that House of cards has come tumbling down on Wall Street over the last couple of weeks with the failures of the biggest corporations in America.

The policies of this administration not to regulate and the policies to only borrow and spend are causing this country turmoil, and the hardworking people in the middle are going to have to pick up the pieces. It is time for renewal. It is time for a change. The policies of the Democrats and of Barack Obama are going to change the direction of this Nation and make it stronger and make it the Nation that it can be.

I thank my friend for yielding. It's a pleasure to be here with the 30-somethings, even though I don't fit into that category and haven't for some time. But this subject is so important, what you two are talking about tonight.

We have a regime in place, in the personalities of George Bush and Dick Cheney, that can't be described in any other way than radical because we've got to go back to some basic principles of our country, some basic values, the basic values that we were founded on, of thrift and sacrifice, of investment, of opportunity for all.

But instead, what we've seen in the last 8 years that this administration has pushed and promoted was a greed and gamble, immediate gratification, the theory that I want it now, and I'm not paying for it; my kids or your kids or somebody else is going to pay for it later.

To have these tax cuts and prosecute a war immediately turned this country's budget upside down. So you start with that failure. And we've been running behind ever since.

Then you forget about the lessons of the past. Now these guys wanted to reverse everything that's happened for the last 70 years, since the thirties. We came through the roaring twenties. We had our Calvin Coolidges, we had our Herbert Hoovers, and we paid dearly during the thirties because we understood at that point that we're going to give up a little bit of the upside so that we don't have the misery of the downside. But those lessons were lost on our friends in the White House.

They said, no. Let's not have any kind of regulatory, any kind of constraint on the system.

Yes.

Debt does matter. And my friend from Pennsylvania was talking about how each of us has to live with the debt that we develop, or our borrowing affects us. It affects this Nation. This Nation has been on a drunken stumble through Wall Street down Main Street.

Instead of doing the sacrifice and the thrift, we've been borrowing and spending. And I say we. George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Republican Congress established this kind of an approach, and it has set our country back so that we are a Third World Nation, borrowing from China, borrowing from the Middle East, borrowing from our friends in Europe. And we really are behind the eight-ball because when they don't loan we have trouble, a la, we've had AIG which we've had to bail out; Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and on down the line. Bear Stearns.

We've had a radical regime. We can't have this radical kind of an approach anymore. But John McCain wants to subscribe to what George Bush and Dick Cheney have been pushing on this country for the last 8 years. This country can't handle that anymore.

We have to have a change. And we have to have a future that really looks at new ways to develop our economy and understand that there have to be

some constraints. The free market isn't perfect. It works well, but it isn't perfect because we all have some tendencies that go against those basic principles of sacrifice and thrift and investment and opportunity for all.

So what I look forward to, and Barack Obama intends to develop, is a new energy economy. That will put a lot of people back to work, and it'll help us so we aren't hooked on one product and subject to ransom when we go to the gas pumps.

We've got a lot of work to do ahead of us because these guys, in 8 years, have turned this country upside down. We can't allow it anymore.

We need a change and we need a new direction, and we need it right now. Luckily, we've got an election coming in 40 days or 48 days. And this country can renew itself, can rejuvenate itself. That's the promise of America, thank God. That's the promise for America.

Would my friend yield for a second?

But that goes to another basic value that they have that just is wrong. They want to focus on the wealthiest 1 percent. They don't care about the 99 percent of hardworking Americans who are affected by this. It's hardworking America that are going to have to pick up the pieces after this administration. And really it's going to take all of us, in concert, together, pulling together, like only Americans can do, to deal with the shambles that we have, whether it's the way people were treated with Katrina, the fact that we have bridges falling down in Minneapolis, I mean, this is a time when we all have to pull together, and we have to look forward.

We can't go with the same old policies, the same old approaches of the Grand Old Party. It just doesn't work. We're in a new century, and it is time for some new ideas because we've got to move forward.

I'd just like to make two points. And it is the administration that is choosing who lives and who dies. I mean, this really is about winners and losers, and this administration is choosing Bear Stearns, does not choose Lehman Brothers, chooses Fannie Mae, doesn't choose Merrill Lynch, chooses AIG.

It is not a congressional action. These are happening within the administration. They're making these choices. Now, maybe we would agree, but we're not given that chance. They're doing these things overnight.

Now, there's a Latin saying, ``Res ipsa loquitur.'' Now, many might say, what the heck does that mean? It means, the thing speaks for itself.

What's happened in this Nation with these two guys, these two oilmen in the White House leading the charge, this country has turned upside down. And they may want to spread the blame to whoever. You know, Harry Truman had the old saying, ``The buck stops here.'' Those guys would like to spread the blame. They're the leaders, and they've led us down this path.

John McCain wants to follow that Bush path. He's trying to run away from it now, but his votes were with the Bush administration over 90 percent of the time. We have to have a change.

And the best firefighters you can have.

What I was going to say is we are in a predicament, and there is a crisis of confidence, both domestically as well as around the world, because of so many steps that this administration has taken, whether it's to go into Iraq, whether it's, you know, how we dealt with Katrina, all of this mismanagement and unregulation or nonregulation or anti-regulation of the financial markets.

The good news, the good news about our country, the good news about America and Americans is that, with good leadership, we can do anything. Times of crisis are also times of opportunity. With good leadership, we can have this new energy economy, we can innovate, and we can be ingenious, and we can imagine things that will really transform this country and this world.

That's the kind of vision that is necessary, and we're not going to see that with the other side. Those are old policies. Those are old answers. That's the old way.

And they couldn't do it. In fact, they did just the opposite.

I just think one last comment I'd like to make is that there has been a transfer of wealth the likes of which we've never seen in this country. Whether it's to the big oil companies or to some of the Wall Street firms and to other nations, that has come out of the pockets of middle America.

And it is time that we come up with new ways to power this Nation. It is time that we, this country, instead of living on a borrow-and-spend philosophy, which is what has been the Bush administration's approach and is what McCain wants to pursue, that we start remembering the values that made us so strong, of thrift and sacrifice and investment, and opportunity for all, not just a select few at the very top.

The focus has been on the top 1 percent. It needs to be on the rest of America. And when it's there, that's when we're strong. That's when we are that shining light at the top of the hill, the beacon at the top of the hill.

We are a great Nation, and we have stumbled because of bad leadership over the last 8 years. But come November 4th, things are going to change, and we will have a new direction.

Mr. Speaker, it's great to be here this morning to talk in favor of a Comprehensive Energy Act that we're going to bring up on the floor today.

My friends on the other side have been complaining for weeks that we don't have a comprehensive energy bill. We've passed bill after bill really designed to focus on new ways to power America. We can't be hooked on just one commodity anymore. We're hooked on oil. We are beholden to eight countries, most of which don't like us, and five oil companies. So we're always sort of at risk, and we've seen that this year with the price going straight up.

So we've got a bill that talks about energy efficiency, renewable energy, and incorporates domestic drilling all over the place, quite frankly, coal, a whole variety of things.

It's going to take our coming across the board with new policies with respect to energy to break our dependence on foreign oil. That's what this bill does.

And I always say, is it any wonder with two oilmen in the White House that the price of oil went straight through the roof?

Thank you, Mr. Rahall, for bringing this bill to the floor, building this bill and spending a lot of time over the last 2 months to bring a compromise piece of legislation. And I want to focus first of all on the part of the bill that Mrs. Biggert was talking about, which is the Green Resources for Energy Efficient Neighborhoods (Green Act), which is a bipartisan section of this bill designed to make housing, commercial and industrial properties more energy efficient.

Now, how anybody on your side of the aisle could complain about energy efficiency is way beyond me because a barrel of oil saved is a barrel of oil earned, a Btu saved is a Btu earned, and how anybody could complain about that section of the bill, which Mrs. Biggert didn't, is beyond belief. She is a cosponsor of the Green Act out of Financial Services. But it creates a green mortgage market, it upgrades 50,000 units of HUD to energy efficient standards. We've seen and heard in our committee that HUD's utility costs have gone from $3.5 billion 4 years ago to $4.6 billion this year. We need to come up with different ways to power our country and be more efficient in how we do that. So there are all sorts of energy efficient measures that are a bipartisan portion of this bill.

But my friends on the Republican side of the aisle want to come up with the same old complaints, the same old arguments, the same old answers and the same old results. And it's all about oil. The problem is if we're addicted to one commodity, one fuel that is controlled by eight countries and five oil companies, we're going to have these problems all the time.

And I would like to say that our friends had the opportunity several years ago to come up with their energy bill. And the Majority Leader at that time, John Boehner, said the GOP energy bill would bring down prices. He said, ``So what is being done to bring gas prices down? The Energy Policy Act of 2005 is a balanced bipartisan bill that will ultimately lower energy prices for consumers and spur our economy.'' (8/19/05).

It couldn't be farther from the truth. Gas prices have just gone up, so we've got to have a comprehensive approach. It can't just be about oil, although this bill does expand domestic production by a lot.

We have all sorts of opportunities for additional drilling, offshore and onshore. And my friend from Colorado couldn't have been further from the truth when he said there was nothing in there about oil shale. Oil shale is part of the opt-in process here.

This is a comprehensive bill that includes coal, includes renewables, includes energy efficiency, includes domestic production. This is the kind of thing that we need to break ourselves from the dependence upon oil from foreign countries. But with two oil men in the White House, what would you expect about gas prices? Gas prices are going straight up, and that is just what the Grand Old Party wants.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to enter into the Record votes I would have cast had I been present for rollcall votes

585 through 588. I was absent on Thursday, September 11th due to a family event.

If I were present I would have voted, ``aye'' on rollcall vote 585, ``aye'' on rollcall vote 586, ``aye'' on rollcall vote 587, and ``aye'' on rollcall vote 588.

Mr. Speaker, you can put lipstick on the failed Bush- McCain policies, but they are still the same old Bush-McCain policies. And those Bush-McCain policies have led our Nation into a recession. Americans need a new direction and a change.

Since taking control of Congress last year, congressional Democrats have been working to rebuild the Bush-McCain economy and help families struggling to make ends meet. We started by enacting the first increase in the Federal minimum wage in almost a decade, directly helping an estimated 5.3 million Americans and setting a new wage floor for another 7.2 million lower wage workers. When it's fully phased in, the pay raise will place an additional $4,400 in the paychecks of these workers. This year we extended assistance to unemployed workers who are having a difficult time finding a job in a Bush-McCain economy that is simply not producing jobs. Now we are preparing to introduce a new economic package that will invest in America and create new jobs.

Mr. Speaker, Congress cannot afford to wait to jump-start this economy. We must act this month.