Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, we are going to support this legislation, but let us understand something: this legislation is a monumental insult to our Guardspeople and our soldiers.

What we are telling them is we invaded Iraq, and now they have to invade their savings, that they have to invade their retirement plans and their savings to subsidize this war effort. Because their families are under serious economic stress to keep from losing their home or losing their car or defaulting on a loan, they must now invade their savings, contrary to every bit of piece of advice that they get from Merrill Lynch, from Goldman Sachs and everybody else about how you build a retirement account, that you do not invade it.

Many of these people do not have incomes that will allow them to restore the savings that they take out of here. So they are getting penalized. They are getting penalized by destroying their long-term retirement future to subsidize this war because we could not come up with a plan, this administration, to get them out of Iraq on time or to give them notice about how long they were going to spend there so their families could make adjustments.

What these sailors and soldiers and Marines need is they need some additional pay. They need interest-free loans. They do not need to invade their savings to subsidize this war. It is an outrageous thing that we would do this to these individuals, because so many of them are not going to be able to pay this money back.

Mr. Speaker, just a few minutes ago before the House finished its legislative business, we passed legislation that would allow National Guard members and Reserve members to take money out of their IRA accounts and not have a penalty on those individuals. When they do that under current law, if you invade your retirement account, you pay a penalty if you do that because we are trying to encourage people to keep their savings intact so they can build a retirement fund.

It is outrageous that the best we can do for these National Guard and Reserve families that are under incredible economic strain because members of their family are serving longer tours in Iraq than they had planned to, that those who are scheduled to get out of the Reserves in the Army cannot get out because of the stop order.

So those people have been without those incomes for many months now, they have not been able to meet the obligations of their families. Their home mortgages are threatened. Their car payments are threatened. Loan payments are threatened. And we are telling them that they must invade their retirement savings in order to continue to subsidize the war in Iraq. It is unbelievable that we would do this.

So the Reserves and the National Guard members from my area, from the San Francisco Bay area, are being told that after we invaded Iraq they must invade their savings because we need them to continue to serve in Iraq. So the penalty they pay is that they are going to lose their retirement benefits down the road. Many of those people in the Reserves, many of these people in the National Guard do not have the kind of incomes that will let them then replace the 5, 10, 15, $20,000 that they wanted to borrow from their IRAs. So for the sacrifice they have made to defend this country in Iraq, they have to lose retirement benefits in the future years. It is unbelievable that we would think that this is an answer to their problem.

This government could extend them interest-free loans. This government could give them additional pay if they are kept in the service beyond their contract date. If they are kept in Iraq beyond the original time frame, we could provide them additional pay.

At the same time we are giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in this country, we are asking our service people who are in harm's way, who are getting killed, who are getting maimed, who are getting injured in so many ways that they have to invade their savings so that they can keep their families together while they are protecting this country.

I cannot believe that that is the response of the Republican Party in this Congress, that that is the benefit that we are going to provide these families and these soldiers who are making this sacrifice on our behalf. Now, mind you, all of the advice that these soldiers had when they started their IRA accounts from their employment, from Goldman Sachs, from Merrill Lynch, from Charles Schwab is do not ever touch your retirement savings because the sooner you start and the longer you do it, the better chance you have at retirement where you will be secure. But because, unfortunately, they have joined the armed services or because, unfortunately, they cannot get out of the armed services because of the war on Iraq or because they have been sent to Iraq to fight the war for longer than they have anticipated or they were told was going to happen, they must now take their savings and try to support their families with that.

I cannot believe that is what a grateful Nation would do to these individuals; but that is the bill that just passed. We all voted for it. We want to do whatever we can to help them, but that cannot be the response of this Nation to these military families that find themselves in this kind of economic stress. How cynical of an approach that somehow we cannot help these families out beyond saying they will not have to pay the penalty for destroying their savings. Well, the minute they touch those savings, they are being penalized because they are giving up retirement benefits in the future.

This Congress owes our National Guard members, our Reserve members better than that, and we owe their families better than that. And we ought to correct this and correct it immediately because these families, the financial stress is continuing because of this war on Iraq. And we ought not to have them go into financial ruin because they have defended this country, because they have served this country, because they answered the call of this President.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to begin by thanking the chairman, Mr. Boehner from Ohio, for trying to conduct a fair conference committee on this bill, H.R. 3108, the Pension Funding Stability Act.

Regrettably, however, I must oppose the conference report before the House today. However, I strongly urge support for the Andrews motion to recommit because it provides urgently needed relief for multi-employer plans.

The conference agreement was significantly weakened after intense lobbying by the Bush administration to strike provisions that would have protected the long-term stability of multiemployer pension plans.

While this conference report provides significant relief to many single-employer pension plans, it is outrageous that it does not provide relief to the many multiemployer plans across the country that need relief, plans that include many small businesses and others that need short-term relief. As a result of this deficiency, I oppose this bill.

Last week, House and Senate Democrats and Republicans on the conference committee had an agreement that the final bill would include pension funding relief for the 20 percent of multiemployer pension plans hardest hit by the recent economic and financial market downturn.

But then, 2 days later, the White House started to make clear to the Republicans that it did not want any help for multiemployer pension plans included in the agreement.

Not for any substantive reason--just political reasons, plain and simple.

The White House's opposition stemmed from the fact that multiemployer plans are administered jointly by employers and unions. And the Bush political appointees did not want any agreement that would help those unions.

Even if it meant they would hurt the tens of thousands of small and large employers that are unionized and contribute to these plans.

Even if it meant they would hurt the hundreds of thousands of working men and women and their families whose retirement security depends on the financial viability of these plans.

This is pure and simple hardball politics of punishing unions and undermining workers who earn decent wages and benefits. The Bush administration is doing everything it can to destroy middle-class America.

This is the same administration that is about to promulgate regulations that would take away overtime pay from millions of workers.

Let us remember that this administration has done nothing to protect workers' pensions.

I wrote the administration in July 2002 to take action when pension deficits skyrocketed from $26 billion to over $100 billion. It failed to act.

Now, over a year and a half later, the problem is substantially worse. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation says that pension

plans are $400 billion in the red nationally, the largest liability in history, and the PBGC itself is reporting an $11.2 billion deficit as of December 31.

The General Accounting Office is so concerned that it has placed PBGC on its list of Federal programs that are at high risk of failure.

The Bush administration and Congress' failure to take decisive action on pensions, their failed economic policies and neglect of our manufacturing industries and the failure of some companies to honestly estimate their pension liabilities have together precipitated one of the largest underfunding of private pensions in history.

The conference agreement before us today is a short-term fix. Everyone recognizes that. And I agreed at the outset of this process that given the absence of any viable alternative at the moment, a short-term fix was better than nothing. But this conference report does nothing to reform defined benefit plans to ensure their future soundness. And as I have said, the final report fails to provide relief to the broader universe of plans that need it.

The conference agreement provides $80 billion in short-term funding relief for the largest corporations by letting them use higher interest rate assumption to value their pension plan liabilities. And it permits a handful of struggling airlines and steel firms to delay for 2 years their underfunded pension plan contributions.

But the conference agreement does almost nothing to help multiemployer pension plans that do not benefit from the other two provisions. The conference agreement only provides temporary funding relief to multiemployer pension plans that can meet five conditions. According to the respected Segal consulting company, almost no multiemployer plan could meet all of these five conditions.

The Republicans will claim that the conference agreement does provide some limited relief to multiemployer plans. But, they cannot cite a single plan or company that will be covered.

Once again, the Republican majority is exercising its political muscle at the expense of hard working Americans.

Mr. Speaker, the administration must get serious about pension reform. The retirement security of millions of Americans depends upon timely actions by this Government. What we do here today is important to provide this relief. Companies need to shore up their pension obligations. But the American people's anxiety about the future of the retirement security is highly justified in light of this administration's and this Congress' failure to seriously address the problems in our pension system.

Once again, I appreciate the hard work of Chairman Boehner to try to accommodate the many interests in this bill and to try to conduct a fair conference meeting. But the final product does not fairly address the many pension plans left without any relief here today and for that reason I regrettably oppose the conference agreement.

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to call my colleagues' attention to an important development in our country's approach to trade. For years, businesses have recognized that markets only work when the rules are applied fairly to everyone. Corporations have pushed our government to enforce international trade law governing intellectual property, state subsidies, and pricing, because violations of these international rules hurt American businesses and American workers.

Now, for the first time, workers themselves have filed a petition, arguing that systematic abuse of workers' rights in China have displaced hundreds of thousands of American jobs. This historic petition filed by the AFL-CIO describes how the Chinese labor system artificially lowers wages and brutally represses its workers, and therefore constitutes an unfair trade practice under Section 301(d) of the Trade Act because it ``burdens or restricts U.S. commerce.''

I commend to my colleagues the following opinion piece from Harold Meyerson, who notes correctly that this petition could result in our trade law finally being applied to the benefit of workers as well as shareholders. In addition, the unabashedly free-trade editorial page of the Washington Post wrote that the ``administration should agree to consider [the AFL-CIO's] petition.'' Simply put: it is not protectionist to argue that free markets and a free economy cannot be based on human-rights abuses.

For too long, American trade policy has failed to promote even minimum labor standards. The International Labor Organization's core labor standards simply articulate basic political freedoms, such as the freedom to associate, the abolition of forced labor, and the elimination of the worst forms of child labor. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has failed to include even these internationally- recognized standards as a framework for trade negotiations. Yet the ILO's report on Central America confirms that none of the CAFTA countries is in compliance with basic standards of health and safety or freedom of association.

If free trade is going to improve the quality of life for Americans without putting downward pressure on labor standards internationally, we must ensure that every country is playing by the same rules. I urge my colleagues to read the attached articles.

[From the Washington Post, Mar. 17, 2004]

China's Workers--and Ours

(By Harold Meyerson)

Until 10 a.m. yesterday, U.S. trade law belonged to big

business. Corporations routinely petitioned our government to

threaten other countries with sanctions if their products

were being knocked off or undersold by foreign manufacturers

with state subsidies, and our government frequently complied.

The solicitude the Bush White House and its predecessors

showed for shareholders, however, was nowhere in evidence for

workers. Profits depressed by unfair trade practices were an

official object of concern; wages and employment levels

depressed by unfair trade practices were none of the

government's business.

This double standard was the heart of modern trade policy.

Yesterday morning, that began to change. For the first time

ever, the AFL-CIO filed the kind of unfair-trade petition

that corporations commonly file, alleging that China's

repression of workers' rights has displaced at minimum

727,000 U.S. jobs, and calling on the President to threaten

China with tariffs until it stops artificially lowering its

workers' wages.

The idea that our trade statutes protect American workers

from competition with repressed workforces overseas will

surprise just about everybody, but in fact, these laws were

enacted by Congress in the 1980s and signed by Ronald Reagan.

For the past 15 years, unions have taken no action under the

laws, because the U.S. job losses were hard to quantify.

Over the past year, however, Mark Barenberg, a Columbia

University law professor, and Mark Levinson, chief economist

for UNITE (the clothing and textile union), concluded that

changes in the global economy were so huge that such a

calculation was now possible--and necessary. In particular,

there was the loss of nearly 3 million U.S. manufacturing

jobs over the past 3 years, the concurrent explosion of

Chinese manufacturing, the ballooning of the U.S. trade

deficit with China and the abundant if largely ignored

documentation of China's semi-Stalinist labor system. All

these things combined to make a trade-law appeal on behalf of

U.S. workers eminently plausible.

The 103-page AFL-CIO petition runs through an array of

statistical analyses to come up with its figure of 727,000

displaced American manufacturing jobs. But its foremost

achievement may be to encapsulate the vast literature that

describes the part-feudal, part-communist labor system in

which Chinese peasants must labor when they go to work in

China's export-sector factories. Under China's hukou system

of household registration, citizens must live and work in the

place where they are permanently registered, normally their

place of birth. Every household is designated as rural or

urban, a distinction on which a caste system has been

erected.

Urban workers are free to apply for and leave jobs; they

are entitled to state housing and pensions. Rural workers,

however, need state permission to seek work in towns and

factories. Once employed, they enter a bonded-labor

arrangement in which they cannot quit unless they can pay

their employer an amount plainly beyond their means. The

hukou system forbids them to compete with urban workers for

higher paying jobs, and migrant workers without jobs are

subject to arrest by the state's public security bureau.

By state design, then, these workers have no power to

affect their conditions of work. Though productivity in China

has skyrocketed, they are routinely paid rural-level

subsistence wages--as little as 15 to 30 cents an hour--when

they are paid at all. Employers tend to recruit childless,

young, single women, whom they pack into cement-block

dormitories to which the women are commonly restricted when

they're not on the factory floor. They cannot leave. They

organize at the peril of imprisonment or torture.

China has 160 million workers in manufacturing and mining,

nearly 12 times the U.S. total. The Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development estimates that 20 million

peasants will enter the urban workforce every year for the

next 20 years. This is, make no mistake, the planet's

proletariat--and it in no way resembles the kind of free

labor force we take for granted in the United States. Those

U.S.-based corporations that invest in Chinese factories--a

long list headed by Wal-Mart--owe some nice chunk of their

profits to a workforce toiling, to resurrect a line from Mao,

under ``the barrel of a gun.''

Critics will doubtless call the AFL-CIO ``protectionist''

for filing this petition. And if it's protectionist to demand

that millions of Chinese women have the right to leave their

jobs and apply for better ones, or to unionize their

workplace or be allowed at least one day off a year, if it's

protectionist to demand that U.S. workers not lose their jobs

because they cannot work as cheaply as these repressed

Chinese workers, then the AFL-CIO should absolutely plead

guilty. What I'd like to hear from the critics--and from

George W. Bush--is why they're protecting the deal between

U.S. corporations and China's neo-Stalinist state to extract

profits for them both at the expense of tens of millions of

desperate young women.

Madam Speaker, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice should testify before the 9/11 Commission. She can no longer hide behind the right of executive privilege. Both she and the President should waive their rights to executive privilege in this case. The executive privilege can still be preserved for President Bush and for future presidents in other matters.

There are few matters in our Nation's experience as sobering as the tragic terrorist attack of 9/11. It was the worst homeland attack on our security since Pearl Harbor, and we need a full accounting from the administration about what happened prior to 9/11.

The National Security Advisor has tried to have it both ways. She has commented on the proceedings of the Commission to the press, she has questioned the evidence presented to the Commission, and challenged the integrity of the witnesses testifying under oath, but she refuses to testify in public under oath to the Commission and to the families about what she knew about the events leading up to 9/11, about our efforts to stop terrorism, about our efforts to protect our national security.

The families and the Nation need to know and want to know what exactly happened prior to 9/11. We need Mrs. Rice's testimony under oath to reach a full accounting, especially since she is now from the sidelines publicly contradicting evidence and testimony presented to the Commission.

If Condoleezza Rice has another version of the events and facts, she must come forward and present them to the Nation under oath. Congress, the families, and the public deserve no less.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me such time as I may consume, as long as I do not go on and on.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the majority for working with us and for bringing this bill to the floor today. I want to thank the chairman, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), and the gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle), the chairman of the subcommittee, for their efforts, as well as the ranking member of the subcommittee, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey), for her participation and effort in arriving at this compromise, which I think is a very good bill on child nutrition. I also want to thank the American School Food Service Association for all of their years of effort to improve the quality of this program, to expand its coverage of this program, and for continuously looking after the nutritional state of our schoolchildren, especially since we now so clearly understand the link between nutrition and school performance among children.

Over 27 million schoolchildren take advantage of the school meals program every day. More than 2 million children receive meals during the summer, and the Child and Adult Care Food program provides over 1.5 million meals to children in child care programs. The Women, Infants and Children program provides information on healthy eating and nutritious foods for nearly 7.5 million poor women and their children. Clearly, families still struggle to provide their children with healthy meals, and the need for quality nutrition continues to exist in this country.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3873 acknowledges these needs, and it contains significant program improvements to allow more and more low-income children to access these programs in schools, after-school programs, child care centers, and through the Women, Infants and Children program. These policies reflect common sense in these programs. If a child is deemed to be eligible for both the Federal assistance programs, they should be eligible for free and reduced-price meals. The bill removes barriers for migrant children and homeless and runaway youth by making them automatically eligible for school meal programs. It continues a provision to allow children in low-income and military families to participate in these programs.

While many of us would have liked to go further to eliminate the reduced-price category of meals so that more children could eat for free, this bill makes headway in assuring that children who are eligible for these programs are, in fact, receiving the meals. These program improvements are laudable, and I support the bill for all of these reasons.

I am, however, disappointed that at a time when the trends in childhood obesity rates reveal a disturbing health crisis, we did not take the opportunity presented to us to improve the quality of foods available to children in the school meals program.

Obesity rates have doubled for children and tripled for adolescents in just for over the last two decades. More children are experiencing adults' health problems such as high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, all of which is contributed to the threefold increase in annual hospital costs for obesity-related diseases in children over the past 20 years. This Nation can no longer ignore the cost of this problem to our children and to the health care system in this country.

We can all agree that there are no simple solutions to the issue of childhood obesity. The local wellness policy that will now be required of schools is a good start, as is a new emphasis on physical activity. However, this is not an adequate response to the health problems facing millions of children and youth.

The Federal Government can and should address the nutritional quality of food available in schools. Without Federal guidelines on this issue, the overall quality of the school meal programs is significantly undermined and children will continue to be surrounded by unhealthy food choices in schools. I will continue to press for action on this area, and I hope that the chairman will

join me, as will the members of the committee.

This is a significant reauthorization. It is a substantial improvement in the existing programs and I urge all of my colleagues to support this legislation.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Chairman, Americans have always known that education is about more than education. They have always understood that education was about their dreams, about their families, that education was about their children and their communities, that it was about the health of our economy and the future of our country. That is why we are so terribly disappointed when we see the broken promises by the President of these United States in this budget and the Republican Budget Committee, when we see that special education is not fully funded.

And the gentleman is quite correct, it is not fully funded in our budget because you gave away all the money. You made a conscious decision 2 years ago in the Committee on the Budget not to fully fund education. It is a dead letter, except for the parents and the children who suffer from those disabilities and their families and looking for that educational opportunity. That was a campaign promise of this President, but it is broken in this budget, it was broken in last year's budget, and it was broken in the budget before.

We argued about it in the committee, we had votes on the Senate floor, we had votes on it here; and the Republicans killed it each and every time we brought it up. Of course, then there was a promise of this President that he was going to raise the Pell Grant. But again he gave away all of the money, so he had to break his promise. He kept his promise to the wealthy, but he could not keep his promise to kids who were struggling to pay for their education. So the Pell Grant is worth less now than it was in 1976, but the cost of a college education is not what it was in 1976.

And then, of course, there is the granddaddy of all broken promises, and that is, if we gave him real reforms in elementary and secondary education, real reforms, he promised us in the Oval Office of the White House that he would provide the real money to go along with that.

He got the most significant reforms in Federal education policy in 40 years. Those are his words. I agree with him. These are real. These are important. They are starting to make a difference. But we did not get the real resources to go with those real reforms. The President owes us about $9 billion in various parts of this program; $7.2 billion alone in Title I.

Yes, we can come up with a budget, but the fact of the matter is, the President had other priorities. He simply chose to give tax cuts, and then after he gave the tax cuts we had a war, we had 9/11, we had another war, we had a recession.

It did not bother the President. It did not faze him. He kept his promise to those wealthy people, those people making more than $4- or $500,000 a year, but he could not keep his promise to the school children. He just could not keep that promise. So he chose not to fully fund No Child Left Behind.

I do not know what a Presidential promise is worth anymore. Apparently not much to school children, not much to the disabled community, it is not much to young people trying to finance their education. They cannot take that Presidential promise to the bank. They cannot take that Presidential promise to get service for their disabled children. They cannot take that Presidential promise to get supplementary services for their children in school who are having trouble. As No Child Left Behind provides, they will not have that qualified teacher in their classroom as the bill mandates the States to do. No. And they will not have that restructuring of the local education system as the bill mandates because the President did not keep his promise.

The tragedy of this is Americans and their families understand the value and importance of education, but this Republican budget does not. It devalues education. Why does it do that? They are forced to do that, because they made a decision about the tax cuts and to loot the country. They looted the Treasury on behalf of the wealthy the first day that they came to office, and there is nothing left in that Treasury for the children of America, for their schools, for their higher education, for their disabilities.

What a sad, sad portrait of the country. This portrait was intentionally painted by this Republican administration, this President and their friends at the Republican Budget Committee. It is a tragedy for this Nation.

The Republican Budget Resolution provides for only a $2.8 billion increase over a frozen FY 2004 education funding level. This provides for meager increases in Title I, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Pell grant funding--leaving these programs billions of dollars short of levels promised by the Bush Administration and House Republicans:

The Republican Resolution would leave the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) $9.4 billion short of promised levels. This leaves our schools with a nearly $27 billion deficit in NCLB funding compared to what was promised when the law was enacted.

The House Republican Budget resolution shortchanges education and job training programs at the time when American children, students and workers need the assistance the most.

This year's House Republican Budget Resolution comes after yet another paltry budget submission by President Bush. The Bush budget represents the smallest increase in education spending in 9 years, cutting $1.4 billion in critical education programs, including those that improve family literacy, and provide school counselors to elementary school children. The budget resolution also continues the Administration's unprecedented level of proposed cuts to job training and related programs--totaling $1.8 billion since he took office.

The House Republican Budget Resolution shortchanges Title I funding by $7.2 billion. This Budget will deny nearly 5 million disadvantaged children critical education services, such as extra help to become proficient in reading and math.

The Republican Budget Resolution freezes the maximum Pell grant for the third year in a row at $4,050 just as college tuition continues to rise faster than family income.

The maximum Pell grant is worth $500 less (in real terms) than the maximum grant in 1975-76. Not only do the Republicans fail to stop tuition hikes, but they actually make college even more expensive by freezing or cutting student aid and increasing taxes on students.

The Republican budget breaks President Bush's campaign promise to provide a $5,100 Pell grant.

The House Republican Budget Resolution also calls for a freeze on teacher quality, after school, and technology programs. This means fewer professional development opportunities for teachers, fewer safe learning environments before and after school and less technologically advanced classrooms.

The Republican Resolution would leave us over $11 billion short of fully funding special education. This budget calls for yet another $1 billion increase for special education. At this rate of increase America's children with disabilities will never benefit from full funding of IDEA.

The House Republican Budget Resolution would leave no room for any increase in Head Start funding. This means zero dollars to expand the program to serve more children and no added resources to improve program quality.

During the Bush Administration, 2.2 million jobs have been lost--the worst job creation record in 70 years. To keep pace with the number of jobs available for working adults when President Bush took office, we would need to create 7.1 million new jobs today. In addition, there are over 2.8 million workers who would be engaged in the labor force, but they have either dropped out entirely or failed

to enter the labor market because of the lack of jobs.

Over 760,000 people have exhausted their unemployment benefits between the end of December and the end of February, and two million are projected to lose their benefits by June without an extension of these benefits. To make matters worse, President Bush has proposed to cut nearly $1.8 billion in job training and vocational education funding since he took office, eliminating training opportunities for thousands of workers. Now House Republicans answer these dire economic conditions by proposing a Budget Resolution without any meaningful help for American workers:

The Republican Budget Resolution would freeze job training and vocational education funding. The Budget resolution utilizes its paltry increase for programs other than job training, leaving no room for an increase for these critical initiatives.

The Republican Budget Resolution contains no funding for an extension of unemployment benefits. The Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans have failed to extend unemployment benefits despite continued high unemployment and lack of job growth, and despite the fact that $20 billion will be sitting, untapped, in the Unemployment Insurance Trust funds at the end of March.

President Bush's budget severely cuts available child care assistance and the Republican budget resolution does nothing to rectify this situation. Despite the importance of quality child care on later academic achievement and despite research demonstrating how child care is the most important work support keeping low income workers employed, the Republican budgets significantly decrease the number of children served by the federal child care assistance program.

According to the President's own budget documents, his decision to freeze child care funding will lead to more than a 10 percent decrease in child care assistance for low income workers. Despite serving only 15 percent of eligible children to begin with, the Administration chose to cut the number of children served by child care assistance, from 2.5 million in 2003 to 2.2 million by 2009.

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

Mr. Chairman, I wanted to take a moment to talk about this budget. What we really have seen here now, as the Republicans have taken over the House, is a complete and total loss of any sense of fiscal discipline. What they have done, and certainly since they have been joined with the Bush administration, its takeover of the White House, is they have simply done nothing more than add trillions of dollars to the debt of this country and run annual deficits of about $500 billion a year over and over and over again.

Why is that so? Because they could not stand to have to engage in any kind of fiscal discipline. They want to blame it on President Clinton. They want to blame it on the economic cycles. They want to blame it on war. They want to blame it on terrorism. They want to blame it on the vernal equinox. But the fact of the matter is, the problem resides at home. It resides within the Republican philosophy of government. And that is simply to run deficits. It is what they did all during the 1980s when they were in control.

Back 22 years ago I came to this Congress and I asked that the Congress adopt pay-as-you-go rules. The Congress argued about it for a decade. The Republicans did not like it because they said they could not do tax cuts. And the Democrats did not like it because they could not spend on some of their programs. The conservatives were nervous and the liberals were nervous.

But a decade later, George Bush, Sr., signed pay-as-you-go into law, and that became the means by which we engaged in fiscal discipline. After a decade of arguing, we adopted it and what happened? The deficit shrank, the economy soared, the budget, dare we speak, was balanced for the first time in 40 years, because people had to make choices and choose priorities, something you do not have to do any longer in Congress.

You can just charge it to the deficit. You can just run crazy. You can just romp through the halls of government, run across the country and charge it all to the deficit.

You want to engage in a war? You do not have to ask anybody to sacrifice. You can have a tax cut. You can do whatever you want. But when you do that, you end up where we are today, with trillions of dollars in Republican-created debt. Trillions of dollars will be sent to the next generation. We all know the arguments.

But why did that happen?

I remember when I lost one of the votes on pay-as-you-go by one vote. Senator Gramm, at that time a Democrat, would not vote for it. He said it was too weak. Just before he left the Senate, he asked for its repeal because it was too strong. He could not live within the fiscal discipline any longer. I guess he could not stand the surpluses that we were running, the money we were sending back to Social Security, the paying down of the deficit, Alan Greenspan talking about that we would not have 30-year bonds anymore. The government had no debt to sell.

We could not stand those halcyon days of fiscal responsibility, of balanced budgets and a roaring economy. So the Republicans jumped in the car. They got their good friend George Bush with them and they drove right over the cliff. Not a bad idea if it is just Republicans in the car; it is kind of like that joke about lawyers.

But they took the Nation with them. They took the Nation with them into trillions of dollars of debt that was not here before.

I do not think we need any lectures from the Republicans about fiscal responsibility, because when you took over the government, we handed you a surplus. We handed you a healthy economy. Gentlemen, you have run it into the ground. A little pay-as-you-go, but you could not do it. You just could not bring yourselves to do it in this budget.

The Senate did it. I am sure you can negotiate it away from them so you can keep spending your money and you can keep having your tax cuts and you can have your war on credit and you can hide the costs of veterans.

I appreciate your tortured discussion of veterans. If it is so good, how come the Disabled American Veterans are asking people to vote against it? Maybe on the Beltway it sounds good. It is bigger. It is more. It is larger. But it just will not supply enough health care to the veterans who need it. That is what the disabled vets say.

Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, we now learn that the efforts to provide a prescription drug benefit to the seniors of this Nation, which they so desperately need, that legislative process has now become a scandal.

We learned in the papers this morning that administration officials were threatened to be fired if they told the Congress the true cost of that legislation. We learned that the Medicare administrator was negotiating to set up a consulting business with the very people who would benefit from this legislation.

We learned that the legislative chairman of the committee was negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for a contract to a job after leaving Congress. We learned in the New York Times that there is an inquiry now about the offering of a bribe to a Republican Member of Congress to support that legislation.

No wonder the senior citizens do not like this bill. It was never about them. It was only about the special interest and special money and campaign contributions and employment contracts for the Republican administrators and the Republican Members of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, once again, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives has taken an issue of bipartisan concern and turned it into an occasion for partisan division.

On the 1-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the leadership introduced a bill that claims to honor our troops--at the same time that our Armed Forces and veterans are being shortchanged in the budget that is under consideration in this body.

I strongly oppose this resolution for two important reasons.

First, it fails to properly acknowledge and honor the American troops who are serving, have died, or have been injured in this war.

And secondly, it is a blatant attempt to cover-up the fact that American soldiers went to war in Iraq because Iraq allegedly had weapons of mass destruction that threatened America. And yet no such weapons have since been found in Iraq.

Our troops--National Guard and Reserve and regular forces alike-- deserve more than one line in a resolution on the first anniversary of a war. Their service and their sacrifice deserve to be honored, and more importantly they deserve the resources to help them succeed with the greatest degree of safety possible.

Had Democrats been afforded the opportunity to modify this resolution, we would have offered our sincere condolences to the families of the more than 500 soldiers killed and thousands wounded in Iraq, given our troops in Iraq the body armor and armored vehicles they need to keep them safe, and continued to press for a true international coalition to relieve the United States of its nearly unilateral burden in Iraq.

I am a proud cosponsor of the Democratic Salute to Veterans and the Armed Forces Act, a comprehensive package of benefits designed to honor the contributions of those who have served America in the Armed Forces. The legislation ensures that those who are serving today have incentives to continue serving, those who served in previous conflicts are properly honored, and those who choose to serve in the future are coming into a system that is the best in the world.

As I said at the outset, I also oppose this resolution because it is a blatant attempt by the Bush administration to distort the public's understanding of why America went to war.

Americans did not die in Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein for his reprehensible and vile actions, such as gassing the Kurds in 1988 or flooding the Arab marshlands. Those actions clearly did not pose an imminent threat to the security of the United States, especially not in the year 2003. And yet those are the actions that this partisan House resolution today speaks to. Americans would not have believed that those actions warranted a military attack in Iraq last year.

President Bush warned Americans that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States that could only be deflected by a unilateral military strike against Iraq. Today, the House seeks to bury this crucial piece of history.

The President provided intelligence that has not been discredited to justify the attack on Iraq. It must never be forgotten that American soldiers attacked Iraq because the President said that it had weapons of mass destruction that endangered our security.

The Republican leadership sponsored this resolution today hoping to later attack Democrats who vote against it. But I for one will not join them in their partisan charade that brings shame on the People's House. My Democratic colleagues and I will continue to articulate our concerns for America's armed forces, for America's veterans, and for America's security.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to correct a vote which I cast erroneously last week in support of H.R. 3717. I did not mean to vote for this legislation, and I would like that fact to be noted in the Record.

It goes without saying that no one likes to vote against a bill that purportedly is designed to reduce the coarseness and crudity of public discourse. We are all aware that the limits of

socially acceptable behavior have changed significantly and continue to evolve, sometimes in ways that are offensive to many in our society.

But this legislation simply goes too far, imposing massive financial penalties and potentially license revocation for actions and words that are far too broad and ill-defined. Far too much authority is placed in the hands of the FCC--which is not a court, which is not elected by anyone--to determine what Americans can voluntarily listen to or watch. The courts have established clear parameters for unacceptable speech; this legislation goes much further, imposing massive penalties and punishment that could--and presumably would--vastly exceed the constraints imposed by the courts.

Coming at a time when so many of our fundamental freedoms are under regular assault by those willing to sanction a lessening of personal liberty, this legislation is particularly disturbing. Many of those who long have described themselves as ``conservatives'' and ``upholders of the Constitution'' now sanction all manner of intrusiveness into the private and personal lives of Americans: whom the live with, whom they associate with, what they listen to, to whom they send emails. This is a period of serious overreaching into the personal and private lives of Americans. We as Members of Congress need to be more vigilant than this legislation suggests we are being.

I appreciate that some of the proponents of this legislation are genuinely offended by what they hear on the radio or see on television. That is why there is an ``on/off' button and a channel selector on every TV and radio manufacturered. People should use them. Parents should use them. But Congress should not be recklessly imposing penalties of this scope on entertainers whom millions of our fellow citizens choose to patronize by listening to their programs.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to call my colleagues' attention to a recent collective bargaining agreement between Pictsweet Mushroom Farms in Ventura, California and the United Farm Workers. This agreement deserves note on several counts.

First, it marks the first time since 1987 that the employees at Southern California's largest mushroom farm have been able to work under a collective bargaining agreement. As a result, 300 workers will enjoy higher wages, increased job security, and a company-paid health plan.

Second, it removes Pictsweet products from the boycott list. Pictsweet was first organized in 1975 and operated under a collective bargaining agreement until 1987, when the plant was bought by United Foods Inc. United Foods was intransigent in its refusal to enter a collective bargaining agreement with the UFW. In 2000, the UFW called for a national boycott of Pictsweet products and that boycott forced the plant to cut production by as much as half. By finally agreeing to deal fairly with its workers, Pictsweet will become a more profitable and productive facility.

Most importantly, however, this contract is the first to result from the enactment of California's law allowing farm workers or growers to seek mandatory mediation for farm labor negotiations that have reached impasse. Pictsweet was adamant in its refusal to negotiate a bargaining agreement. The UFW submitted the dispute to mediation in July and the mediator issued a proposed labor agreement on January 30. The company has decided to proceed with implementation of the mediator's report. As a consequence, the right of workers to benefit from collective bargaining has been preserved and the company has the opportunity to move from intransigent, ideological views of labor relations to pragmatic considerations of how best to work with their workers. Pictsweet workers were among the strongest proponents of the mandatory mediation when it was under consideration. It is fitting that they and their employer are the first to benefit from it.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the workers at Pictsweet and President Arturo Rodriguez and the leadership of the UFW for this historic achievement. I also want to commend my colleagues in the California Legislature for developing a model for the rest of the nation on how we can provide workers with a meaningful voice in the determination of their wages and working conditions. Legislation that I have introduced to restore meaningful collective bargaining rights to American workers, the Employee Free Choice Act, includes a similar provision providing for mediation and arbitration of first contracts.

Mr. Speaker, I was deeply disturbed last week when I read that the Speaker of the House may use his authority and his power in the House not to extend the investigation into what happened before 9/11, what it is we did that was right and what it is we did that was wrong, what it is we knew and what it is we did not know that led to the tragedy of the World Trade Center and the tragic loss of life there and the largest terrorist attack against this Nation on this soil. I was deeply disturbed that somehow the investigation into that would be curtailed, that the commission would not be given the time that it believed professionally was necessary to arrive at those answers, when I think about the families and how important those answers are as to what were the real circumstances under which their family members died and perished in the World Trade Center. I was deeply disturbed that the President said that he would only talk with two members of the commission, that there apparently is a concerted effort to take those members of the commission that appeared to be the most intent on getting to the bottom of these issues and these questions on behalf of our Nation and on behalf of our security and on behalf of the families, that they would not be allowed to talk with the President, to interview them, that they would not be allowed to share their notes, those who got in to see the President.

It is very troubling because the image of 9/11 and the tragedy of 9/ 11 is absolutely seared in the mind of every American, those images and that tragedy. And for us to suggest that in any

fashion this commission's work would be curtailed, not be given the time or the documents necessary, this is a matter of our national security so that it will never ever happen again. This cannot be about people in various agencies of the United States Government covering their tail because of something they did or did not do that may have helped us detect that act before it happened or have us understand what we need to do in the future.

As I see that effort by the administration to curtail this, and now apparently it is going to go forward, they are going to get the 2 months, I am also deeply concerned that I see the administration involved in some dramatic rewriting of history. When David Kay came back from his search for the weapons of mass destruction, in his meetings with the House and the Senate he told the American public and these two bodies that we all had it wrong. I am not sure that is quite accurate, because there in fact is a whole body of evidence that has been developed within the Intelligence Community, within the international Intelligence Community, within the State Department, and elsewhere that was present at the time suggesting that in fact maybe many of the reasons and the conditions in which this administration said we are going to war did not exist. They certainly did not exist in the clarity that the administration presented them to the Congress or to the American people or to the international community. And now it appears that the President is trying to say because he got it wrong everybody had it wrong. That is just not the case. That is just not the case. And yet we now have commissions to look into that matter.

Tragically, this administration again is trying to curtail what those commissions can look at and not look at. The Senate may be allowed to look at one piece of evidence but not other pieces of evidence. The House may or may not have access. And then the President has his own commission which is supposed to investigate the administration but has been appointed by the administration. A little bit of a conflict of interest there. But these commissions are important, and these questions are important because, again, it goes to our national security.

And there is another set of families, just as there are the 9/11 families and those communities that suffer that tragic loss of those thousands of individuals, there is another set of families of those who have been sent off to fight in Iraq, over 500 that have been killed, thousands that have been wounded, so many that we have visited that are multiple amputees, that have lost their arms, lost their legs, lost the sight of one eye, that their life is changed forever. They are entitled to the answers and understanding how is it that this decision was set forth to go into Iraq when in fact we see substantial evidence suggesting, and as said by the CIA Director, ``We never said this was an imminent threat.'' The President wants to suggest that if we make that the test, the real threat against the United States, before we commit the lives of young men and women in this country, that somehow the only other option is it will surprise us. No, that is not the test, Mr. Speaker, but we will have more on this. But I think the American public ought to start to consider the level of interference that is being engaged in by this administration to keep these commissions, both congressional and civilian commissions, from getting to the bottom, to the real answers that are directly related to the future security of this Nation.

Mr. Speaker, what a rather startling revelation by Mr. Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, that the answer to the deficit that this administration has run up and the long-term debt of this Nation is to raise the basic retirement age of Social Security and to cut benefits.

Mr. Greenspan and the Republicans speaking for the investor class decided that average working people in this country, the ironworkers who are rebuilding the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the people who are building the skyscrapers in our major cities, who are building our transportation systems, who are working out there in snow and rain and cold weather all through the winter to provide for their families, that they should just work a few years longer so that they will not have to pay for Social Security.

This administration has run up the largest deficit in history, and now they are using that deficit as an excuse to attack Social Security, which is the backbone of retirement for millions and millions of Americans. Maybe not for Mr. Greenspan and his friends who have stock options, who have golden parachutes, who have buyouts when they leave their corporations, but for millions of hard-working Americans it

is Social Security, and we should not cut it to take care of the Republican deficit.

Mr. Speaker, today's resolution regarding the award of the Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Dorothy Height reminds us in this age of cynicism that one person can truly make a difference in our society. I was pleased to cosponsor the legislation to award Dr. Height with the Congressional Gold Medal, and I am pleased to support this measure today. I have great admiration for Dr. Height, a living legend and pioneer of civil rights, women's rights, and racial justice.

Beginning as a civil rights advocate in the 1930s, Dr. Height gained prominence through her tireless efforts to promote interracial schooling, to register and educate voters, and to increase the visibility and status of women in our society.

One of her many contributions was establishing Wednesdays in Mississippi, a unique project that brought together northern and southern women to get to know one another and work side-by-side for racial justice in the segregated south. That project lives on in that, today, the Children's Defense Fund has adopted the Wednesdays in Mississippi model for its innovative Wednesdays in Washington and at Home program, which enables advocates for children--especially poor, minority, and disabled children--to make their voices heard here in the nation's capital and across the country.

As president of the National Council of Negro Women since 1957, she has helped establish model programs on issues ranging from teenage parenting to the eradication of hunger. She also established the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Museum and Archives for Black Women, the first institution devoted to the history of black women.

Her leadership in struggle for equality, social justice, and human rights for all peoples is an example for us all.