Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Israel Independence Celebration in my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, that took place on Sunday, May 7. This event honoring the establishment of one of our nation's greatest allies was made possible by the hard work of Jewish Charities of Huntington and Christ Temple Church of Huntington. I thank Linda Klein and Pastor Chuck Lawrence for their steadfast leadership as well.

Just like West Virginia, Israel's greatest strength is the resolve and resilience of its people. I witnessed firsthand the importance of the relationship between our two countries during my recent visit to Israel, where it was evident that the nation is under threat like never before. That is why I will continue to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs so that it will never be able to obtain a nuclear weapon. I have also been a vocal supporter of placing stronger sanctions on Iran until it no longer financially supports terrorist groups that pose a threat to both Israel and the United States, and to providing aid and support to Israel to help it defend itself.

Israel will always have a friend in the United States, and in me. I congratulate the citizens of Israel on 69 years of independence and look forward to many more years of friendship between our people.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize my constituent, Lonnie Carpenter. Lonnie, a lifelong Wayne County resident, served his country as a seaman onboard the USS Ault destroyer during the Korean War.

After his service, Lonnie returned back to his home in the beautiful hills of West Virginia and started a family with his wife of more than 63 years, Edna Davis. Together they had three wonderful children, and Lonnie provided for them through his career in the banking and finance industry. Lonnie is a proud Mason, having been conferred the 33rd Degree, and chronicled the history of Freemasons in many articles for the Scottish Rite.

Lonnie also served a term as a councilman for the town of Ceredo and volunteers his time for numerous organizations that have improved the lives of the people of his community. I thank Lonnie for all he has done for the people of West Virginia and for his service to our nation.

Mr. Speaker, time is running out to do right by our miners, their families, and their widows.

At the end of the month, the benefits they worked their lives for will expire. For families across West Virginia, that would be nothing short of devastating--families like Teresa Anderson of McDowell County. Her father, Donald Richardson, worked his whole life in the mines of West Virginia.

Teresa shared with me what these benefits meant to her father and to her mother, Mary.

Here is what she wrote:

``I remember from a young age listening to him tell me and my brothers stories about the mines and teaching us about his United Mine Workers benefits and to let no one take advantage of this most precious insurance that he fought and worked so hard for.

``He would say, when I'm gone, you need to still protect these benefits that we worked for. This is how your mother will make it when I'm no longer here to provide for her.''

Mr. Speaker, Donald is no longer with us. He passed away back in 2012. Now his wife, Mary, and his daughter, Teresa, are asking us to keep his promise, to keep our promise, the promise the Federal Government made to our miners more than 70 years ago.

I urge my colleagues to act and to protect these vital benefits.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot let the clock run out on our miners and their families. They kept up their end of the bargain. Now it is time for us to do the same.

Mr. Speaker, due to unforeseen travel delays, I was forced to miss Roll Call Vote Number 209. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 209

Mr. Speaker, coal communities in my district and across America and across Appalachia are struggling. The war on coal has decimated many small towns and left thousands of hardworking coal miners without jobs.

Help is on the way--the RECLAIM Act, introduced by Congressman Hal Rogers. I am proud to be a sponsor with him.

The RECLAIM Act will send $1 billion in Federal funds to Appalachia to revitalize and diversify coal communities and to create new jobs. For West Virginia, that means nearly $200 million over 5 years to invest in our coalfields. This money will allow us to redevelop abandoned mine lands, bring new companies and industries to West Virginia, and provide more jobs for our people.

Now, the RECLAIM Act doesn't mean we are giving up on coal. Far from it. Coal is our heritage and must play an important part in our State's future. But while we are bringing back our coal jobs, we must also look at how we can redevelop these former mine sites.

Many of these sites are currently sitting vacant, and our towns and counties just don't have the funds to redevelop these sites so that their job-creating potential can be unleashed. The RECLAIM Act will prioritize hard hit States like West Virginia and help employ hundreds of laid-off West Virginians to prepare these sites for new developments and new industries.

In addition, once these sites are open for business, new employers will create hundreds, if not thousands, of good-paying jobs. The RECLAIM Act can be and should be part of the solution to revitalize our coal fields.

I want to say thank you to Leader McConnell and Senator Capito in the Senate for their leadership on this measure as well.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues in both the House and the Senate to join us in supporting this important legislation and helping Appalachia.

Mr. Speaker, I met last week with a group of West Virginia coal miners who are worried about their future. They are worried about their pensions and healthcare benefits that will expire soon, benefits that they worked their whole life to earn, benefits the Federal Government promised them more than 70 years ago.

During our meeting at the UMWA Career Center in Beckley, I met Preston Thomas of Raleigh County. He spent 36 years in the mines before retiring in 2010. Preston relies on the healthcare benefits he earned to provide prescription drug coverage for his wife. If this coverage is allowed to expire in April, his wife will no longer have access to the medications she needs.

Mr. Speaker, Preston is asking--I am calling on--Congress to keep the promise we made to him, to his fellow miners, to their wives, to their husbands, to their widows. We must pass legislation I have cosponsored to protect these hard-earned benefits.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation and protecting the hardworking miners like Preston. We owe it to all of them to keep our word.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say thank you to

Mr. Frelinghuysen for the outstanding work and effort that he has put into this critically important piece of legislation, and I thank Chairwoman Granger for her strong support in advancing this much-needed legislation.

The people before me have talked so eloquently about our responsibility as Members of Congress to defend and protect our Nation. We have talked about national security. We have talked about troops. We have talked about battling terrorism. And that is what this bill does.

I want to take a slightly different approach and say something about what this bill does in all of our communities, not just distant lands around the world, but in our home communities. I want to highlight one area that will make a real difference in all of our communities, and that is the National Guard's Counterdrug Program.

This program is essential in detecting, disrupting, and curtailing drug trafficking. It provides resources to almost every State and territory to help train personnel and run counterdrug missions. The National Guard supports almost 60,000 requests a year for assistance from local law enforcement agencies.

In fiscal year 2014, National Guard counterdrug programs took almost $12 billion in illegal drugs off the street. This minor investment is paying major dividends. During NDAA consideration, I helped secure an amendment to increase funding for this account by $30 million because this program works.

This legislation under consideration today also increases funding for this vital program by $135 million more than the amount requested by then-President Obama. This is a critical moment in combating the drug crisis, and we must fully fund every program that will help us solve it.

Mr. Speaker, my home State of West Virginia has almost 20,000 coal miners. Tens of thousands more worked in the mines and are now enjoying a well-deserved retirement.

They proudly mined the coal that powers our Nation, and it puts food on their table. These miners worked hard each and every day, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

Our Nation made them a promise to take care of them if they developed black lung disease. And for decades now, the Federal Government has guaranteed black lung benefits, and the so-called Byrd amendment 7 years ago reiterated that commitment to our miners.

As we draft healthcare reform here in Congress, I urge my colleagues to maintain these essential black lung benefits for our miners and their families.

I have introduced legislation to affirm our commitment to protecting the Byrd amendment and these critical black lung benefits. I introduced it last Congress, too, and I am committed to continuing to fight for it because we cannot let our miners down.

While mine safety continues to improve, we must guarantee that our miners have the benefits they need in case they are diagnosed with black lung disease. These benefits provide critical support for our retired miners and their families. For some disabled miners, it may be the only income they have. In West Virginia, almost 5,000 families rely on these benefits.

This is a promise we made to them, and it is a promise that we must keep. Just as we have relied on our miners to mine the coal that built the skyscrapers and won world wars, our miners should be able to rely on us.

I urge my colleagues to support the protection of black lung benefits and to honor the hard work of our miners.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the legacy of Dr. Carter G. Woodson and to celebrate his legacy with all of you at Marshall University. We are proud to call Dr. Woodson one of our own in Huntington, West Virginia, and to celebrate his work to honor and remember the achievements of African Americans. During Black History Month, it is only fitting that we stop to remark on the life of the Father of African-American History.

Dr. Woodson dedicated his life to educating others, becoming one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in history from Harvard University. He returned to his alma mater in Huntington, Douglas High School, where he became the principal and shaped the lives of countless West Virginians. He also documented the important contributions African Americans have made to our nation's history and ensured their accomplishments were not forgotten.

The Carter G. Woodson Lyceum at Marshall University will carry on his legacy and provide Black History Month events for the Marshall and Huntington communities. I wish you well as you celebrate the life of Dr. Woodson and the contributions of African Americans during the month of February.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution. Like so many folks, I have been fighting this misguided rule for years. Miners have been fighting this rule for years. And States--bipartisan, Democrat and Republican--have been fighting this rule for years.

Stopping this rule matters to West Virginians, to our miners, to our families, to our consumers. We produce 95 percent of our electricity from coal. It is reliable and it is affordable. Coal employs 20,000 West Virginians, and tens of thousands more make their living related to coal.

The loss of a coal job and the closing of a coal mine affects us all. Its severance tax revenues help to fund our schools, pay for our police and fire departments, and put money in the coffers of our local governments.

This rule would cost cities and counties $6.4 billion in tax revenue over a year, with the decline in coal mining. That means even more cuts.

When we lose coal jobs, we lose other jobs as well. When coal families lose a paycheck, they aren't able to buy goods and services like they used to. That hurts small businesses, our shops, and our restaurants.

It is estimated that this rule would kill 281,000 coal jobs and related jobs in other fields. My State can't afford to lose any more jobs, and I know that goes for other coal States.

However, despite these facts and the objections of more than a dozen States, the Office of Surface Mining adopted a go-it-alone approach. They ignored input that contradicts their agenda. They withheld information on the rule and restricted States from reviewing it. Well, that ends today.

I thank Chairman Bishop, I thank the House Natural Resources Committee, and I thank the leadership of the House for their support on this resolution. Thank you, Senator Capito and Leader McConnell, for your leadership in the Senate. We also have the support of the White House on this resolution.

With a simple majority vote in the House and the Senate, we will end this rule and stop this job-killing, anticoal agenda.

I urge support on this joint resolution.

Mr. Speaker, the ACA, ObamaCare, or whatever you want to characterize it as, is broken, and we are here to fix it. We want to empower patients. We want to bring health care back to the American people.

Let me talk about access to insurance coverage. People have less access today to insurance coverage than at actually any time in the past. Instead of competition to bring down and drive down insurance costs, one-third of the counties in the United States have only one choice of an insurance carrier, which is no choice at all. No competition. Insurance carriers are pulling out of the exchanges en masse, citing unsustainable costs because of ObamaCare.

The American people are demanding change. Enough is enough. They want relief. They want competition. They want lower costs. They want better quality.

We are here to fix ObamaCare and honor the promise to the American people to empower the patients of America to give them the choice, the quality, and the cost control they so desperately need and that ObamaCare robbed them of.

Amendment II:

``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''

Mr. Speaker, we are about to vote on the REINS Act, which will hold our agencies accountable to the people of America. I am a proud cosponsor of this regulation, this legislation. If a regulation has a high economic cost, then the people, through Congress, have to approve it before it goes into effect.

The REINS Act is one of several bills we will be considering this week to stop business as usual in Washington. We will be saying ``no'' to the overregulations of the last 8 years, ``no'' to the radical anti- coal agenda that has closed coal mines and cost my State of West Virginia thousands of jobs, ``no'' to a Federal Government that won't even come to West Virginia to hear how their regulations affect us.

West Virginians have had enough. They want change. They want their voice to be heard. They want to work hard and put food on their table.

I am here to stand up for West Virginians: families, miners, and small businesses. I urge my colleagues to support the REINS Act.

Mr. Speaker, in this new year, we must make things right for our miners and their widows. We must act now to keep the promise. We must honor their work in the mines by protecting the pensions and healthcare benefits they worked their whole lives to earn.

We must pass legislation I have cosponsored to protect these hard- earned benefits for families like Rita Blankenship of McDowell County who wrote me asking for help. Here is what she said: ``My husband was promised healthcare coverage in 1975 when he went to work in the mines and joined the union. I am asking if you could do everything possible to get this passed so we will have health care,'' she wrote.

These miners and their families deserve no less than what they worked their entire lives to earn: the peace of mind that comes with a pension and secure health care.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting legislation to protect our miners, their widows, and their families. We owe it to them to keep our word.

Mr. Speaker, on roll call no. 51, due to inclement weather, I was unable to vote on H.R. 361, Medical Preparedness Allowable Use Act. Had I been present, I would have voted Yea.