Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, listen carefully, the growing sound and the roar we hear from the Senate is the sound of Republican Senators rushing to change their position on the child tax credit. What we hear is them now recognizing the incredible injustice they did to hard-working families with children who earned under $26,000 a year who will not get that $400 check for each of their children like other families this summer. The Republicans have recognized the injustice; but the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), the leader of the Republicans in the House----

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. Speaker, I am only reporting on what the Senate is doing. I am reporting; I am not characterizing.

Mr. Speaker, Senators are changing their position on the child care tax credit. It is in The New York Times. I could read the names of the Senators. That is what is happening there.

Here, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) says they are not going to correct this injustice to these families. These families will go without their $400 check that is so important to the income of those families and the ability to raise their children. How dare the Republicans suggest that these children are less valuable than the children of other American families.

Mr. Speaker, when the President and the Republican party made a decision that they would not extend the financial benefits of the increase in the child tax credit to all families, they essentially made a decision that they would leave out millions of young children who live in families who earn between $10,000 and $26,000 a year.

What they said was somehow those families and those children were not worth as much as the rest of children and families in this country. Thirty years ago we made a decision to have a child tax credit to help families with the cost of raising their children, to ease the burdens of raising their children, educating them, providing health care, and it was extended to all Americans with children.

Over time we have increased that child tax credit, and this year a decision was made that we would increase that child tax credit by $400 for each child, and those checks would go out this summer. But, tragically, in a back room, in the late night, in negotiating the bill under the leadership of Vice President Cheney, the Republicans made a decision that low income working families would not get that child tax credit for their children. They will not get that $400 per child increase this summer.

Erin Doyel of Vallejo, California in the district in which I represent and her daughter, Adrienne, will not get that tax cut. Erin is going to work every day and earning $12,675 as a financial administrative assistant. Erin is doing everything that this Federal Government told her to do: To get off of welfare, to take responsibility for her child and to get a job. And she has been doing it and she is doing it well.

But as we can see here, Erin and her daughter Adrienne, Erin is asking the question, What about my kid? Why is not my kid worth the same tax credit as the other children? Because I only make $12,000 a year?

She needs this help for her family. She needs this benefit for her family so that she can provide the education, she can provide the wherewithal to hold her family together. She knows how much she needs it. She says they made a big mistake when they left her daughter out of the tax cut. She needs this money to help her pay the rent, to pay for her car, to pay for her job expenses.

That is what she would do with that money. She would immediately put it

back into the economy. That is why that tax credit was given to help those families with those expenses in a difficult environment.

Some people say that this was a mistake by the Republicans, but the fact is we know now as the facts have come out it was no mistake. The Senate, in fact, put this tax credit in for Erin and her daughter, Adrienne. But the Republicans in the House decided they were not going to accept it. They wanted to use the money that that tax credit would cost to give a greater tax cut to those people making over a million dollars. If they had given a $400 tax credit to Erin and her daughter, Adrienne, and to other similarly situated families and children, those millionaires would have only gotten a tax cut this year of $88,000 as opposed to $93,000.

So the Republicans in the House made a choice that they were going to deny Erin and Adrienne the tax credit. They were going to give it to the millionaires.

Now, we understand that the Senate is going to change this. The Senate has come to its senses. The Senate now understands what they have done to Erin and her daughter, Adrienne, and the impact that they are having on her ability to hold their family together. But we are also told that the majority leader, the Republican majority leader, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) has said he is not going to do that. He is not going to pass that tax cut to Erin and her daughter, Adrienne. He is not going to do it. Republicans in the Senate who sponsored it originally, who voted for it, who participated have said we wanted to do this. It is a matter of equity. It is a matter of fairness. It is a matter of justice to these families who are working hard, as the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) stated, playing by the rules, doing what we asked them, that they should be able to share in this tax cut like other families with children. But the Republicans in the House say no.

They say no to 12 million children and families earning between $10,000 and $26,000 a year. However you measure it, it is not very much money to survive in American society today. These are people who work hard. They do not get paid terribly well, but they get up every day and they go to work and they do many of the jobs that many other Americans would prefer not to do. And that is why we created the tax credit. To help them. And somehow, somehow along the way to finalizing that tax bill, somehow the Republicans in the House became mean spirited. Somehow they lost their sense of humanity and somehow they lost their direction in terms of economic justice and decency for all families and all children in America.

It is a sad and tragic day when a party loses its direction and becomes that cynical about decent people like Erin and her daughter, Adrienne.

Mr. Speaker, the President's spokespeople, the Republicans in Congress and the Republican National Committee, appear to be having some trouble with the truth, that is, because they have suggested that everyone who pays taxes would benefit from the recent tax cut. They have said that those who pay the taxes will get the tax cut, that those who earn the least will benefit the most.

It is simply not true. It is simply not true, because they made a decision to leave millions of families, with millions of children, out of the child tax credit, a tax credit that we give families to raise children. But they simply decided that those families earning between $10,000 and $26,000 a year would not be eligible for the child tax credit. Somehow I guess these families have additional money to raise their children that people over $26,000 a year do not have so they get to do this. They made a fundamental decision about unfairness, about inequity, about greed; and they decided that they would rather give this money to 200,000 millionaires so they could get a tax cut of $93,000 a year because if they gave this tax cut to those families who are going to work every day trying to support their children on low wages, that they would have to give those millionaires only $88,000 a year. So those families, those working American families between $10,000 and $26,000 a year, got nothing in terms of the increase in the child tax credit. The rest of the families in America will get a $400 check this summer. These families will get nothing. Yet the President, the Republicans in Congress, in the House and the Senate, want to suggest that this was an accident and they are going to cure it.

It was no accident. It was never in their bill, in either version of their bill. They simply made the decision that they did not think these people were worthy of the child tax credit, a tax credit that passed this Congress on a bipartisan basis because we thought the government ought to do something to help these families with the cost of raising their children; so that those moms who wanted to stay home, maybe this would allow them to stay home, or those fathers who wanted to stay home, maybe this would allow them to stay home; or it would defer the cost of child care or health care or whatever it takes as we raise our children in this country. But the Republicans have now decided for millions of American families, they are not going to be treated the same.

Of course we find out as we look at this tax bill for almost 50 million Americans, they will not be treated the same because they are not going to get much of a benefit. They just simply decided that they were going to declare class warfare on low-income working people in this country. There is no other result.

But now they want to lie about it. Now they want to pretend like they were not part of it. Now they want to pretend like they are going to fix it. No, the Bush-Cheney class in America just declared warfare on working families. But that is only the beginning, because it is the Bush-Cheney class in America that has denied those same families an increase in the minimum wage because many of these families work at the minimum wage. The minimum wage today is worth $4.75 in real wages. They will not increase it. They will not give those families the child tax credit. This week later on the floor they are going to try to take away their overtime pay, and they are passing regulations so fewer and fewer Americans are eligible for overtime, a pay that many Americans use to hold their families together because that increase in pay for overtime makes a difference in their yearly salary in the support of their families. And, of course, for many of these same children who will not get the child tax credit, they are taking away their health care at the State level.

When is it that the Bush administration decided that they were going to declare war on America's working families, especially low-income working families? One of my colleagues was here talking about how they fixed the marriage penalty, that they got rid of the marriage penalty. Well, if two people who are earning 10 or $12,000 a year get married, as single people, they would get a $2,500 credit because they are both low-income working people. If they get married, they lose $1,000 of their credit. They have almost a 50 percent tax assessed on them because they get married.

Why is this happening to these people who are struggling to get up and go to work every day? Every day they go to work in hard, difficult jobs, jobs that many Americans would prefer not to do. And at the end of the year they end

up poor. They end up struggling to take care of their children. They end up struggling to educate them. They end up struggling to provide them health care. They end up struggling to provide them with decent housing. And this government, this administration, the Bush administration, has decided to cut them out of the tax bill.

And they want to talk about fairness in America? They want to talk about justice in America? They want to talk about freedom in America? I do not think so, Mr. and Mrs. America, because they made a conscious decision.

Mr. Speaker, I want to join my colleague, the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), in saying that it would be unconscionable for the House to continue to do business as usual when the voices and the needs of millions of hard- working American families have been closed out of the people's House. Without being able to participate in the final negotiations over the tax bill, with Vice President Cheney in the room, the Republican leaders of the Senate, the Republican leaders of the House, they decided to simply exclude some 6 million families, some 12 million children who would be entitled to the $400 increase in the child tax credit.

That means that this summer those families on behalf of their children, those families that go to work every day would not get a $400 check as will millions of other American families on behalf of their children. But this administration and this Congress closed those voices out of the debate on the tax bill. They have quietly cut a bill to exclude the Senate amendment that was there to protect those families and to protect their children, and to help them educate their children and provide health care for their children.

No, we cannot continue to do business as usual when this Republican leadership and the administration cuts millions of Americans out of the Democratic system.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time, and I thank her for presenting this bill on the floor. And this bill has been properly represented. It is a matter of sorting out the equities between Indian water right users and non- Indian water right users, the needs for wetlands development and to protect the sacred rights of the lands of the Zuni people.

That is what the legislative process is supposed to be about, but that is not what it was about 2 weeks ago when we passed a tax bill. We could talk about balancing the equities of the Zuni people and the water rights of this bill.

Point of Order

Mr. Speaker, that I am.

We are talking about a bill that has gone through many, many years of negotiation and a bill that is designed to balance the equities. We spent considerable time on a tax bill.

Mr. Speaker, regular order is what the gentleman from California is following.

Mr. Speaker, once again, I would say that this bill is about a legislative process where all sides have been heard, agreement has come. That is why this bill is on suspension. And yet we have seen that that legislative process has not worked for millions of American families and their children when the tax bill left out their equitable claim; as the Zunis claim an equitable claim for their traditional water rights, for the historic water rights, these people were making an equitable claim on behalf of their children.

They were making an equitable claim that their children, their family, should get the same $400 that millions of other American families got, but in designing the tax bill, the Republicans simply left out those wage earners, those people who go to work who earn $10,000 to $26,000 a year, some 12 million children who will not get the benefit of the child tax credit.

The Zunis would argue, if we simply cut them out of the water development rights, if we simply cut them out of their historic water rights and we gave it to non-Indians for use in development or we protected the wetlands and we did not take care of their sacred lands, they would argue it is not fair.

I am simply presenting that the arguments that are presented here today on behalf of the Zunis, which are very reasonable, very fair, were never presented on behalf of millions of Americans when they were cut out of a tax bill; and they will now not receive their check this summer as will others.

Point of Order

The gentleman from California would say to the Chair, I think there is a very strong nexus being maintained here. It is about equity and it is about justice, and it is about economic justice. It is about historic claims.

The child tax credit is not new. It is an old claim before this Congress, where the Congress decided the children of the Zuni tribe would be entitled to a tax credit if their parents worked. Many Zunis, I suspect, are eligible for that tax credit, but they are not under this tax bill because of the difficulty in finding the kind of wages that would pay what would make them eligible for that kind of tax credit.

The nexus is here. The nexus is clear. The nexus is about an abuse of the legislative process, unlike the one which we are going through here. That is why my colleague from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) said that we should not operate business as usual. The ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means suggested the same thing, and I would just say that I think they are correct.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Speaker, what is the colloquy about?

Mr. Speaker, I supported the bill. I just do not support business as usual right now, as the gentlewoman understands.

Mr. Speaker, I have a follow-up question for the gentlewoman from Wyoming. Does she support improving the child tax credit so that millions of American families can get a tax credit, many in the gentlewoman's State that have been cut out of the tax bill?

Colloquies are two-way conversations. Would the gentlewoman support the unanimous consent request to bring up the fixing of the tax bill?

Mr. Speaker, I answered the gentlewoman's question. I strongly support the bill.

No, I will not.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

This is an important bill. These lands that were given to the State of Wyoming by the Federal Government were for the purposes of educating their children. It was an effort by the Federal Government to try to put resources into their hands so that the resources would be there for the State to provide for that education. That is what we do with the child tax credit; we try to put resources into the hands of parents so that they will have the money to provide for the health and welfare of their children and for the expenses of holding their families together in difficult economic times, recognizing that we want our children properly cared for. That is what the State of Wyoming has done with these State lands. That is what the Federal Government did when it transferred the lands to the State of Wyoming; and it is for a very, very good purpose.

Now we have the opportunity to transfer those lands to keep them out of other development within the boundaries of the national park to make sure the park can be consistent in its mission. It is one of the great parks in the world. It is one of the great ecosystems in the world with its diversity and with its habitat that it protects and provides for. That possibly is now under threat from development from what the gentlewoman from Wyoming described as the ultra-, ultra-wealthy who might build homes there.

It sounds a little like class warfare. I do not think that is what is going on here, but since we opened up the subject of the classes here in the discussion of this bill, I want to raise the prospects of those individuals. Because not only is this a great national park in terms of its environment and ecosystems and its beauty and its importance in terms of the protections of surrounding areas and watersheds, it is also a huge economic engine. Because of its beauty, because of its importance, it drives millions of people from all over the world to come and visit the Tetons and come and visit Jackson and to experience the bounty of this country.

To service those people, we have people working in the service industry. They work for the concessionaires and the parks; they work for the restaurants and the hotels and the tourism industry. They work as guides for fishermen, they work as guides for people who want to hike the Tetons, they run climbing schools. At the end of the year, they do not make very much money, but they have families. They have children. And today they get a child tax credit if they have children. They file it like everyone else. And in the tax bill 2 weeks ago, we increased that tax credit for Americans, families with children, an additional $400.

Point of Order

The gentleman from California would say to the Chair that I am focusing on the employees of the Grand Teton National Park, which is the subject matter of this legislation. And the reason these lands are being given is to try to maintain the integrity of that park which provides so many economic benefits to the State of Wyoming and to our country through international tourism. And the welfare of those workers ought to be of as much concern to us as the integrity of the land base.

Granted. If it is required by the Chair, I would be glad to put a map down on the table and talk about this in terms of the map of the Grand Teton National Park.

This is about a nexus. This is about whether or not people are going to be able to afford to take those jobs in that park that tourism generates, a very, very important part of the western economy in this country, a part of our economy that is in serious trouble.

There is a story today in the newspapers, I do not know if it is in The New York Times or the L.A. Times, that the national parks are suffering; that tourism is not only down from 9-11, it was down before 9-11. So what are the national parks trying to do? What are the concessionaires trying to do? What are the people who are on the perimeter of the park who run the hotels, run the lodging systems, the guide systems trying to do? They are trying to increase service to attract Americans and international visitors back to the national parks. But if their employees cannot sustain themselves with the jobs that are offered, then it is not going to work.

One of the things we do to help these people who are working in these jobs where the wages are not very good is we provide a child tax credit for those people who are working and have families. But somehow last week the Republican leadership decided that that tax credit would not go to the employees of the Grand Teton National Park, the subject matter which we are talking about.

Point of Order

I am working hard, Mr. Speaker.

I thank the Chair for the admonition, and I take it seriously.

I have counted my words and I have talked about the Grand Teton National Park and the State land transfer and the employees of the park, I think on a ratio of about 12 to 1 to the tax credit, which those employees will be denied, as will some 34,000 other children in Wyoming who will not be eligible for the tax credit because of the actions of the Republicans.

But my ratio of nexus to this bill far exceeds my discussion of the tax bill. I have been doing this for many years. And because we do not have an opportunity, and we did not have an opportunity, to discuss a substitute to the tax bill, we have to find ourselves in a situation where we have to talk about it on other matters as they are presented to the House, always closely keeping the nexus between the matter at hand and the subject matter that is far more important to the American people, and especially for those families with those 12 million children who will not get the tax credits this summer because Republicans simply decided that low-income hard-working American families were not entitled to it.

Mr. Speaker, the billion dollar tax cut that President Bush signed into law last week was supposed to give everyone who pays taxes a tax cut. In fact, President Bush said, ``My jobs and growth plan would reduce taxes for everyone who pays income taxes.'' The President declared that several weeks ago.

Well, now as it turns out, that is not exactly the truth; and the devil is in the details. Because what the President did not tell the American public and what he did not tell America's families waiting for their tax cut was that a back-room deal he struck with the leadership in the House and the Senate, a bill that was sent for his signature, excluded 2.5 million taxpayers and 12 million children from the benefits of this bill. These are mostly single-parent households, with a child 16 years or older, that earn between $10,000 and $26,000 a year.

It was not a mistake. It was not an oversight. The Republican tax writers who crafted the final compromise all by themselves, with no Democrats in the room, under the supervision of Vice President Cheney, made a conscious decision to roll back the benefits of the child tax credit for 12 million children to save $3.5 billion. And they did not take that savings and put it into the Treasury against the massive deficit they created. They took that $3.5 billion, and they gave it to corporations who run overseas to avoid taxes; they refused to close the Enron loopholes that destroyed corporations and many people's retirement. They took that money from those 12 million children, and they gave it away so that they would not have to close corporate tax loopholes.

Now, what does this mean, and why are we here late into the evening to discuss this matter? Why have so many Democrats lined up to speak on this matter? Because this is an issue of basic fundamental values about our families in this country, about equity, and about fairness. And the Republican tax bill violated all of those values. They made a conscious choice to take families, a husband and a wife earning $15,000 to $20,000, a little bit more, raising a couple of kids, a single parent raising a couple of kids, who are struggling to get by in a tough economy, and they decided that they were simply going to exclude them from the benefits of this tax bill. They were not going to give them the child credit.

Now, Congress had made a decision over the past many years, from Ronald Reagan on, that we should have a child credit; that we should try to help offset the cost of raising children for middle-income families and lower-income families and that has been the policy in this country on a bipartisan basis. But this extreme Republican leadership in the House, along with Vice President Cheney and now the Republican leadership in the Senate, decided that these children had less value than other children in the Nation.

What kind of person makes that decision about these children that they do not even know, about these parents struggling to raise their children and to pay their health care, to educate them, to provide them the necessities and maybe a little extra on salaries that do not exceed $26,000 a year? What kind of mind, what kind of person was in that room that night when they made a decision to deny these children, to deny these parents this increase of $400 in a tax cut to come this summer, that these children and these families would not get to participate in? It is a corruption and a corrosion of any sense of the public interest. It is a corruption of the process of this Congress that they would do this in the middle of the night in a secret deal and tell no one.

It was only after the President signed the bill did they have to admit that this was what was done. First they tried to say it was not true. First they tried to say that this did not affect these families. They were playing a little fast and loose with the truth down at the White House that day through the President's spokespersons. Well, the truth came out. Twelve million children denied the benefits of the child tax credit.

This is extremism at its far point. This is a denial of the value of America's families at the extreme. This act must be overturned. It must be overturned soon so that these families too can get that $400 check that they are entitled to under the laws of this land and a decent system of fairness and equity.

Mr. Speaker, as the ink is now drying on the tax bill of 2 weeks ago, and as the President and the Republican Party were looting the Treasury and the Social Security System of this Nation on behalf of the wealthiest people in this Nation, we now see there is a monumental defect in this bill in terms of its unfairness and its greed, and that is that millions of working families making wages between $10,500 a year and $26,000 a year will not get to participate in the increase and in the child tax credit. That means they will not get their $400 increase this summer that families with children are entitled to get under the tax bill.

Why? Because Republicans simply decided that these people were not worthy of that tax cut, as though it was less expensive to raise their children or their children were not equal to the children of people making over $30,000 a year. An incredible act. An incredible act of greed. An incredible act of unfairness to hard-working families in this country.

Mr. Speaker, politics in the making of public policy is about choices. Every day we are called upon to make a choice, but a horrible choice was made by the Republican majority when they wrote the most recent tax bill, a horrible choice that works against millions of families and the children in those families as the Republicans decided that they would not allow those families, families making between $10,500 a year and $26,000 a year, they would not allow them to have the increase in the child tax credit. A $400 a year increase to offset the cost of raising children, that this Congress made a decision about over many years, was proper to do with families to help hold families together, to allow some people to stay home with their children if they chose to do so, the purpose of that credit.

Rather than spend the $3 billion on those individuals, they chose to spend it on people making over $1 million a year. People making over $1 million a year will now get $93,000 a year in a tax cut. If we had chosen to take care of those 12 million children who will not get the tax cut because their families earn less than $26,000 a year, those same millionaires would have gotten a tax cut of $88,000.

The Republicans made a choice. They chose America's millionaires over America's children. Somehow they decided that the children in upper- income families and middle-class families are more important than those families who are working their tails off going to work every day, all year long and still coming home earning between $10,000 and $26,000. They made a decision that they were going to support the Bush-Cheney class in America over the working class in America. They made a decision that they were going to support millionaires over the children of America.

They said when they were caught at these shenanigans over the last few days, when the press discovered what was in the legislation, they said, well, we designed it only for those people who are paying income tax; they are the only ones who should benefit from that. It is rather interesting because they decided they were also going to give the tax benefits of this bill to a number of corporations who pay no income taxes, corporations that have fled America, changed their corporate citizenship for the sole purposes of not paying taxes, and yet we would give them additional tax breaks under this bill.

They wanted to say that they wanted to end the double taxation on dividends and that corporations that paid taxes could get a deduction for dividends. By the time the bill was done, corporations that have paid no taxes will get a deduction for dividends, but if someone were a poor family, if they were a poor family and they are working every day and they are making between $10,000 and $26,000 a year and they have children, they are not going to get the increase in that deduction. But these people do pay taxes.

The Republicans have it all wrong. They have it all wrong in fairness. They have it all wrong in greed. They have it all wrong in the value of our children and our families in this Nation. This is an incredibly harmful policy to those families who are struggling in and around these wages.

The Republicans will not increase the minimum wage to help them support their families. They will not give them the child tax credit to help them support their families. They will not increase the Earned Income Tax credit to help them support their families. Poor people just are not entitled to this. What they get to make is they get to make an increased sacrifice on behalf of the rich.

Somebody once said, one would think the Republicans think that the rich have too little money and the poor have too much. It is an incredible policy. The Republicans rail against class

warfare, and they declared war on the very survival of these families who are working at the margins. We see them every day. These are people who work hard in difficult jobs, in jobs that most people do not want. They get up and they ride transit, and they go to work and they work and they work and they come home, and at the end of the year they continue to be poor.

Past Congresses gave them the child tax credit, and this year when we decided we would give an increase in the child tax credit, we did not decide. The Republicans decided in the back rooms, they decided they would declare their own private war, their own private class warfare on these individuals. They decided to do it on the last night, in the back room, with the lights turned out and with Vice President Cheney casting the deciding vote, who now declares he is ignorant on this. Then how did he vote for it? How did he vote for it?

Class warfare, the most mean-spirited, the most greedy action of class warfare we have seen was just committed by the Republican Party in the tax bill against struggling, working, lower-income families in this country.

Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, 2 years ago President Bush brought a $1 trillion tax cut to the American public in the name of creating jobs and stimulating the economy. Since the time that he has done that, the economy has lost 2.7 million jobs; 2.7 million Americans out of work, the deficit has soared dramatically, and the economy is moving sideways, at best.

Now what does the President suggest? Today he suggests we cut taxes again, another $1 trillion, and that $1 trillion is supposed to create jobs. Very shortly President Bush will reign over the loss of 3 million jobs since he has come to office.

The President keeps putting forth this plan as a means of creating jobs. What it has done is it has killed 3 million jobs. The President's economic plan has yet to create its first job, its first job; but it has killed 3 million jobs in the American economy. The American public ought to understand, it is a $1 trillion giveaway to the richest people in the country and a job killer for working Americans.

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

It is certainly understandable why the chairman of the committee would not want us to talk about this bill. It is certainly understandable that he would not want the American public to learn from us that this is a trillion-dollar tax bill that plunges this country faster and further into debt than anytime in history. He certainly would not want us to tell the American people that when they did their first tax bill of a trillion dollars 2 years ago, that since that time we lost 2.7 million jobs, the economy has faltered, the market has faltered and the Bush administration and the Republicans in the House and the Senate do nothing.

They do nothing but take care of the Bush class in America against the middle class in America. I am sure the gentleman from California would not like to have us tell that to the American public, just as he did not want us to tell the American public when we had a substitute and they denied us time to talk about it, they denied us the right to offer. Why? Because we had a substitute that was fair and fast acting, would have created a million jobs and no long-term deficit. They could not figure out how to construct one. They did not have the discipline to construct it. They did not have the morals to construct it. They did not have the ethics to construct it, so they just dove into the pit of debt and deficits and red ink.

And now as they emerge from that pit, it drips off of them, deficits, red ink, muck, to be left to the future generations. That is their plan. And I am sure they would not like us to talk about it. And I am sure that he will beg us to yield back our time. But we think this is the House where the people rule. This is where the people ought to hear what is taking place here. The facts that cannot be buried, as he would say, is the exploding deficit, the cost of these tax bills, a $400 billion deficit this year, a $7 trillion deficit over the long term and the immorality of passing that on to future generations.

Mr. Speaker, we are spending $100 billion and tragically the loss of young men and women's lives in a war in Iraq that was supposed to be about getting the weapons of mass destruction out of Saddam Hussein's hands so he could not give them to the terrorists. So far, we have not found those weapons of mass destruction.

But the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) pointed out to us that there are 5,000 tons of weapons of mass destruction in chemical weapons and gases and sarin chemical that we know exactly where they are. But the Republicans will not allow an amendment in order to protect Americans from the assault from these weapons when they fall into the hands of terrorists. We know exactly where 5,000 tons are. We have not found one ounce in Iraq.

There is also nuclear material in the same area of the former Soviet Union and in Central Asia and elsewhere in the world. But they will not allow us to clean it up. They will not allow us to secure it. They are compromising the security of this Nation because this is more likely to fall into the hands of terrorists than anything that Saddam Hussein had.

You have to ask yourself, what are they doing to the security of this Nation when they will not allow us to go in and to secure these weapons of mass destruction?

Ladies and gentlemen, we are on Orange Alert. We are on Orange Alert as a Nation, and as a Nation and as a Congress we will not be allowed to debate the reduction of these weapons.

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I thank the Chair, and I yield back my time.

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Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Already today we have heard a lot of heated exchange on the subject of fire policy. Our Republican colleagues will make impassioned speeches about the need to pass this legislation to protect communities. The President has implored the Congress to act. And without question Democrats and Republicans agree that this is a critically important issue to so many of our western communities, to the health of our forests, to the safety of those communities and to those who are engaged in firefighting during the fire year in the western United States.

But there is a big difference between these pieces of legislation. There is a big difference between talking about catastrophic wildfires and really helping communities that are at risk. There is a world of difference between wildfire legislation put forth by my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle and the alternative that we are proposing on this side of the aisle. That really comes down to an issue about the priorities of these communities.

Yes, we have drawn an area around these communities of a half mile which we have slated for fire treatment; and if we treated all those communities we would use up all of the money that is in the budget for the treatment of those fires, those where we engage in catastrophic fires, not necessarily the largest fires that take place in the western United States or in the United States, including Alaska, where huge fires rage very far from communities, far from where people live. Those are destructive fires in many ways, but they are not the catastrophic fires where we engage in the intensity of firefighting, the risk of human life, and the risk to property.

So we think in our legislation that we have made a decision that we will concentrate the resources on that, we will do it in a bill that is essentially noncontroversial, that addresses the problem, that can go to work right away, can create the jobs in the community that are necessary to provide for the health of our forests and the safety of our communities.

It is very clear, I think, when we look at both bills. Westerners understand the difference between smoke and fire, and I would suggest that the Republican bill is a lot of smoke if we are talking about protecting those communities. I think it is important to understand what are the distinctions in the bill. We provide direct aid to local communities to treat private lands and public lands because they are intermingled. To suggest you are going to do one without the other is to put the other at risk.

In fact, we find that there is not the aid to local communities in the Republican bill. Our provisions are noncontroversial and will speed up the thinning projects. I think when my colleagues read the legislation presented by the committees, they will see, as we have already heard comments from so many organizations that are deeply concerned about the due process provisions of this law, that will make it much more difficult, certainly delay its consideration in the Senate.

We create the new jobs quickly, providing that aid for the treatment on public and private lands, and we target the resources to those communities that are at risk and to the watersheds in those communities that are at risk. That is what we should be doing. That is what we should be doing. And we should especially be doing that when we consider the budget requests of this administration, which requested less money in this budget for hazardous fuel treatment than in the previous year.

The Department of the Interior requested stable funding in this year. The fact of the matter is, in total, what we see is there is less money to treat fewer acres. That is why we had to set some priorities.

Yes, we would like to think that we could second-guess nature, that we could go out to where lightning is going to strike, treat that area this year, and we would not have a fire there next year. But the fact of the matter is, in the urban-suburban interface, where communities have moved into the forest, where there is a risk, where there is a different urgency about fighting a fire because of properties and threats to communities where we put people most at risk in fighting those fires, that is where we ought to have the priority.

That is really what this legislation does. It makes a decision that the Congress, living within the budget constraints, and I hope the Committee on Appropriations will add additional money to this, but living within those constraints, let us treat those lands where we have the most critical need on this.

The suggestion in the Republican bill is that if we just cut down enough big trees, enough big valuable trees that are not the problem with fire, therefore we can pay for the treatment of more lands. In California, it is suggested that we could cut down many of the areas of the giant sequoia monuments, where we are preserving some of the oldest trees on the face of the earth, that we could cut down these trees and pay for treatment in Southern California or Northern California. That is a Faustian bargain the public does not want.

We have heard much discussion here about how fires used to creep along the forestlands. The suggestion we have to cut down the biggest trees so fires will once again creep along the forestlands is a mistake. What we need in many instances, and what many communities can do on a priority basis, is mechanical treatment and controlled burns to get rid of that understudy of brush that then allows those fires to jump into the crowns. But that is not what the Republican legislation does. It does not put the priority in the protection of those communities.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Udall).

(Mr. UDALL of Colorado asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall).

(Mr. UDALL of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee), a member of the committee.

(Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on what the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) said here, because it is a part of the bill that is in fact a subterfuge in the underlying bill of the committee, and that is that they are not prepared to authorize money to be expended for this purpose, so they are going to rely on forest stewardship contracts.

We have already been put on notice by the people in the Forest Service in California that they are going to need

to log the large trees around Lake Tahoe in Northern California to go down and to do treatments in forests in Southern California where there are no big trees. It will not pay for it. They cannot cut enough trees to pay for it. It costs about $1,500 to $1,800 an acre to treat these lands, and yet there is no money in this. So they rely on forest stewardship. They have got to go out, and they have got to cut the big trees. If the communities do not have the big trees, then they are not going to be in the priority because they have got to pay for the projects.

That is why we put up real money in the authorization for this purpose so those communities could be treated and they can cut any size tree they want. There is no limitation on this, and they just balance out the books.

Forest stewardship is not about balancing the books. It is about balancing the watersheds. It is about balancing the ecology of the area. It is about balancing the soils. It is about balancing the growth rate. It is about balancing the infestation. It is all of that in determining the health of those forests. But what we have suggested is they just create an accounting system. They have got to treat 1,000 acres. Then they have got to go cut enough big trees somewhere to pay for the treatment of that 1,000 acres.

That is not the proper way to do this. There is a public cost to this, and it ought to be authorized. If they are going to spend all the money on infestation, then where are they going to get the money to do the fire treatment that is necessary in forests where fire is the major threat, not necessarily infestation?

So that is the weakness in the underlying bill. If we want to deal with the problem that was agreed upon, that there was this area around the cities, around these communities that needed to be treated because that is where the catastrophic fires could break out, that is where the danger was posed; and to protect those watersheds, that is where we were prior to the election.

Now that it is decided, they have got those votes, they are going to open the door, and the fact of the matter is we now have a bill with no discipline. There are no priorities, and they simply must pay for it by cutting down late successional old forests or the largest trees they can find in the area.

Because if one could make money outside of chipping them, people would take the small trees. They would be happy to have them. But we know that that is not going to happen; and when we look at the budget submissions of this administration, they are planning on treating less land this year than they did the year before.

So we have got kind of a cataclysmic event taking place here between the needs of the forest, what many are projecting to be a dramatic fire year, maybe more so than the past year, no budget money, which then pushes them into large forests where the fire treatment in many cases is less needed than around the communities. That is the irrational part of the Republican bill.

But it also happens to be accurate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would just say that I think that this process that we have seen with this bill is indicative. It gives us warning about the Forest Service process. Here we see this bill being rammed through the House of Representatives, no amendments being offered, on a day when we do not have a full schedule; but the intent and the purpose is to ram it through without the full participation and the deliberations of this body.

It is reflective of what is in this bill. It is an effort to ram through these treatment programs, the cutting programs, the logging programs, the fire treatment programs, and limit the public participation to the greatest extent possible. That is what is wrong with this legislation.

The suggestion that somehow we are going to unilaterally turn over the decision on whether or not to protect old forests, or protect old growth, to protect large trees, to mark gray unilaterally without review, is like turning the banking system over to Bonnie and Clyde. It just does not make any sense in terms of the well-being of these forests, in the long-term, multiple use of these forests.

If you are just out there hunting for large trees to cut and you need a rationale to cut them, then this bill will give you the ability to do that, because it throws open the doors to logging of those large trees that matter the most to the communities in the West, matter to the citizens that we represent, matter to the citizens sense in our State; and that is what this bill does.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I too rise in opposition to the previous question so that we would have an opportunity to offer an extension of unemployment benefits. As the minority leader has said, this is the most efficient economic stimulus that we can provide to our economy. It helps people who are out of work. It helps the economy because they must spend the money on the necessities and what our economy needs is demand.

My colleagues do not have to believe me. Just look at the figures that were published yesterday. And that is, in fact, that consumers are running out of gas, retail demand is down in the country, and the stock market was down yesterday as a result of that. That comes on the heels of what the Republicans have offered and that is additional tax cuts.

It is rather interesting, though, when we see the people who are now commenting on the tax cuts in terms of the economy, we see that the Republican-controlled Joint Committee on Taxation says that even under dynamic scoring, the tax cut will lead only to more job loss, higher deficits, more debt for our children and grandchildren. Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute was quoted in The Washington Post yesterday as saying that the dividend plan is one of the most patently absurd tax policies ever proposed. Then today the senior economist for Goldman Sachs says that these tax cuts being offered are not stimulative.

What is that telling us? That is telling us that people are going to continue to be unemployed, that the economy is going to continue to soften; and the Republicans are not concerned. The Republicans simply do not share a concern for people who have lost their jobs. Their number one priority since the Bush administration has come to town was and always has been tax cuts, tax cuts for the wealthy. The unemployed are incidental to their concerns. That is why my colleagues ought to vote against the previous question on this rule so we can immediately offer unemployment extension benefits for millions of Americans who are out of work to help their families. The last time the Republicans did this, they dropped the ball. They did not get them reauthorized at the end of December, so these families had weeks of uncertainty before they knew whether or not they were going to be able to continue to pay the mortgage, to try to keep their car from being repossessed, to educate their children. We owe these families better than this. The Republicans ought to start showing a little bit of compassion for these families who are in very hard times because of the lousy Bush economy.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New York for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, today we confront an issue that is absolutely fundamental to the interests of our constituents, to their well-being, and the question of whether or not they will have the assets to properly retire in the future, and that is because we address the issues of the security of the American pension system.

In the wake of the worst pension scandals in recent history, the response of the Republican congressional leadership is to see no evil, hear no evil and do no good.

Once again, in the shadow of the failures of Enron and Global Crossing, and with the new disclosures about Delta and American Airlines, the Republicans bring forward a pension bill that does nothing to help employees, but includes lucrative benefits for corporate interests. How tone-deaf can they be?

Pension scandals that move from page 3 of the business section to page 1 in every newspaper and magazine of popular nature of this country, but it is still the business as usual for Republicans in Congress. The only problem they see is that the investment companies are making even more money, while pensions and 401(k)s of employees dwindle with less and less.

The pension bill the Republicans want to steamroll through the House today fails to address the pension scandals that have outraged Americans and left so many Americans destitute. It is as though Enron and Global Crossing and these other pension scandals never happened. It is business as usual for business, and let the employees fend for themselves.

The heart of the Republican bill would change the law to allow investment firms for the first time to give biased and conflicted financial advice to employees, something that is currently prohibited under the law. Does this make sense when many of these same investment firms that would be giving the employees this advice just copped a plea to Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, if firms like Credit Suisse, First Boston, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs and many others just paid out over a billion and a half dollars in committing these kinds of abuses?

Now, I recognize that they do not think they copped a plea, because they said they did not admit any wrongdoing. But they paid $1.5 billion just in case they might have. That $1.5 billion is chump change alongside the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that people lost in their pension plans during the stock market bubble and because of conflicted advice and bad advice.

Now, here we are 2 years after Enron, and we are coming back to simply allow the same thing to happen that

happened in those corporate scandals. It is no wonder that the American public, the small investor is reluctant to return to the stock market. It is no wonder they are reluctant to invest again in mutual funds, because they recognize the devastation that they received at the hands of what was essentially criminal activity. Today, the Republican bill makes that activity legal.

That is why the Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, of New York said this about this legislation: ``This legislation opens the loophole that will sharply erode, rather than enhance, the safeguards for employees seeking independent and untainted advice about how to invest their retirement savings. Clearly, this bill puts the interests of Wall Street firms far ahead of the interests of millions of working Americans who simply want a fair shake in making sound decisions about their retirement investments.''

That is what the American public is entitled to. That is what the people are entitled to as they contemplate how to provide for their future retirement. That is not what this legislation does. That is not what the Republican legislation proposes. It now says that those firms can provide that conflicted advice to our constituents and to the workers, and that is what we should not allow in this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, today we will have a choice about what to do on behalf of America's future retirees, the employees of America's corporations and the protection of their pensions. We can do, as has been suggested in the Republican bill, a bill that essentially does nothing for retirees and for employees. What it says is that employees should be offered advice, and then it also suggests that that advice can be conflicted, it can be biased, it can be compromised, because under the current law, if we are given investment advice, we cannot be given conflicted advice.

And yet in the wake of Enron and Global Crossing, the answer to the Republicans is to change the current law to allow advice to be given to employees about their retirement futures but to allow that advice to be conflicted, to allow that advice to be conflicted by the very same institutions that just recently settled for $1.4 billion because they had offered conflicted advice and bad advice to their clients. $1.4 billion, that is what those companies agreed to pay. That does not even begin to speak to the hundreds of billions of dollars that the shareholders lost, that employees lost in their mutual funds, their retirement plans because of those conflicts and that essentially criminal behavior. Yes, the deal was struck for $1.4 billion.

Now along comes the Republicans 2 years after Enron, and they say we are going to give them the right to have advice, but that advice gets to be conflict. How tone deaf can one be? How shocked will the American public be when they find out they took their retirement plans and put them exactly in the hands of people who just copped a plea for a billion and a half dollars for giving people bad advice, maybe illegal advice, almost criminal activity, if the Members will. The Republicans' answer is to take America's retirees and turn them over to those firms.

One has to fail to understand what America saw after Enron, what they saw after the bust in the stock market of their retirement plans being depleted, the same kind of outrage that Americans felt when they saw the CEOs and executive officers of American Airlines guarantee their pensions at the same time they were negotiating several billions in givebacks from pilots and flight attendants and workers. They were shocked when they heard this. So shocked and so bad was the reaction, that the CEO of American Airlines had to resign, and they had to give back their compensation package.

Delta Airlines, going through givebacks of billions of dollars from their workers, secures and guarantees their compensation and pension for the CEOs, where former Delta executives, corporate executives, write Delta and say it is a shameless act, an embarrassing act that they would do this. And yet today, after all of those actions, after that public response to that failure to protect the employees, the reaction of the Congress is to essentially do nothing.

But the Democrats offer a different alternative because I think we are listening to the public and to the employees. Yes, pensions is a dull subject. It has not captured the imagination of all the politicians. But the fact of the matter is it has moved from the back pages of the business section to the cover of every major business magazine and every major business; journal, and Fortune Magazine got it about right and that is the oink factor. How far will these corporate executives go? How far will these pigs go at the trough to grab hold of the assets of a corporation at the same time that they are letting their employees go down the tubes? Yes, it is the oink factor. It is CEO pay, it is guaranteed pension plans.

These captains of capitalists, these crusaders of the capitalist system, what do they want out of the system? They want a guarantee that no matter if the company goes bankrupt, no matter if they run the company into the ground, no matter if the company is successful, they want a guarantee that they will be protected financially forever into the future. That is what they wanted at American Airlines. That is what they wanted at Delta Airlines. That is what they wanted at Enron.

Today, the Republican bill is silent on that greed, on that oink factor.

But the Democratic bill offers something different to the Members of this House, who have heard from their constituents about the devastation of their retirement plans. There is none of us in this House that have not gone to a picnic, have not gone to a family gathering, have not gone to a graduation where people have not said that they are postponing their retirement because the retirement plan is not all they thought it would be, who say their spouse is going to have to work a little longer than they thought, who thought the place they were going to retire to in another State or in the country is not available to them any longer because their retirement plans have been devastated because of the activities of so many corporations.

Today we have a chance to take the oink, to take the oink, out of this pension system. We will be given the opportunity to vote on a substitute to where the problem is when executives loot, as the Delta people tried to loot the pension plan of the Delta workers, but to guarantee and insure their own pension plans. The Republican answer is oink. The answer in the Democratic bill is equity for employees.

As the President said at the beginning of the Enron scandal, what is good for the captain is good for the sailor. But the Republicans in Congress do

not think so, and the Delta executives did not think so 2 years later, where executives lie to their employees and do not provide full disclosure about what the executives are doing with the corporate assets and with the pension assets. Once again, there is nothing in their bill, just a big oink for those executives. We require full disclosure for those employees.

With regard to the conflicts of interest on investment advice, the heart of the Republican bill is to provide that conflicted investment advice to flow to those employees; not independent investment counselors, but the very people who will be earning commissions and fees from the investment of those funds.

The question is, are the American public and employees not entitled to better? These are the same people who will allow corporate executives to dedicate hundreds of thousands of dollars to giving investment advice of all different kinds to the executives of those corporations, but do not want to give that kind of advice or help those people out with respect to advice for the employees.

Finally, with regard to older workers, now with hundreds of companies poised to move from a defined benefit plan to a cash balance plan, where the shorthand is this, that older workers in their fifties who have been with companies 10 or 15 years stand to lose 30 to 50 percent of their retirement assets. This is not speculation, this is what happened last time they did this. We have a bar on them doing that again. This administration wants to remove that bar.

There are hundreds of corporations who are poised to make this conversion, and those employees will lose those pension assets. If you are 50 or 55 years old, there is no place you can go to make that up. But the company thinks that they can loot your pension assets to help out their bottom line.

So there is a stark contrast to be offered to the Members of Congress. There is a stark contrast to be offered to the workers of this country about the protection and the security of America's pensions, about the protection and the security, because that is the issue here today. It is not whether or not employees should have access to conflicted information. That is of no real value to those employees.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney), a member of the committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), the senior Democrat on the subcommittee.

(Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva), a member of the committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. Speaker, the Democratic substitute that we offer today is based on a very simple principle. It is a principle that we all grew up with. It was a principle that was articulated by the President of the United States just days after the Enron catastrophe when America saw that so many people who worked for Enron were trapped in a system during the meltdown of that company, during the corruption in that company, during the unlawfulness in that company, that they were trapped in that system and unable to protect their retirement while corporate executives in the penthouse suites were unloading stock, getting golden parachutes, getting secured pension plans, getting insured pension plans, having pension plans put into trusts. They took good care of themselves even though they took the company over the edge. But down below, just like in the Titanic, just like in the Lusitania, the poor people were trapped as the ship was going down. They were trapped because of a class system.

That very simple principle that has been articulated by the President was that if it is okay for the sailor, it ought to be okay for the captain. What the President was saying there was those protections that are in place for the executives should have been in place for the employees, that employees' pensions ought to be treated as executive pensions are treated.

We grew up with this. Our parents told us when you got into a fight with our brothers and sisters and maybe it did not go our way, they said, ``What's good for the goose is good for the gander.'' What is good for the captain is good for the sailor. We have said it to our spouse, we have said it to our children, we have said it to our partners in business, we have said it to our staff. It is about fairness.

What the Democratic alternative recognizes is the basic dignity of the American worker and the right of that worker to control the pension plan, which is their money. This is money that was given to them for the work that they gave to the corporation. It was figured out by the corporation, how much they would pay them an hour, how much they would give them in health care, how much they would give them in pension benefits, and they went to work for them. When they gave it to them each month, it is theirs. But now they do not want to have them have any control over it. They do not want them to have the same protections as the corporate elite. They do not want them to have the same rights as those individuals. Why?

Enron was not just built on the back of Ken Lay. Big parts of that company were built on the utility workers in the Pacific Northwest, the pipeline workers in the Southwest, the power plant workers in California and everybody in between. Why were they not entitled to these protections? Why were they not entitled to these rights?

But the Republican bill today, as the Republican bill last year, keeps in place that class system, that the corporate elites will get taken care of, these great captains of capitalists, these crusaders of the free enterprise system, the people who come to Congress and talk about risk, that they take risk. What we now see is the CEO of Delta Airlines, we see the CEO of American Airlines, we see the CEOs of so many companies and the board of directors, they do not want any risk, they want their compensation guaranteed, they want their golden parachute guaranteed, and they want their pension plan guaranteed. Even if they drive the company into the ground, even if they take it into bankruptcy, they will be protected.

That is what has so incensed the American public, and the pilots, and the flight attendants, and the machinists, and the workers at American Airlines that they were willing to risk their whole future to say, that is unfair. And America recognized it like that, Wall Street recognized it like that, and the chairman of American Airlines resigned, admitting that he had made a tragic mistake in being so selfish on behalf of the board of directors and himself at a time he was asking workers to give back billions of dollars.

So what do we say? We say that workers are entitled to advice about the selling and the coming and going in the corporate suites when they are selling their stock because they do not think the corporation is doing so well; we are entitled to know that on those inside sales. We say that workers are entitled, if they have their pensions guaranteed, that the crew, the workers, will have their pensions guaranteed just like the people in the corporate suites. We are saying for those workers, that they should be represented on the boards of the retirement plan so that they will have the information, because as we saw in Enron, the executive representative on the retirement plan, the captain, so to speak, never told the crew that she was selling her stock because she had investment advice to get out of the company. Those people lost their fortune. She walked away with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because she did not tell them.

We are simply saying, you must tell them, that you must be on the board so you have a chance. That is what this bill does. It is about the equity for the worker, it is about the dignity of the worker, and it is about the rights of the worker to be protected.

They say this will cause trouble in corporations, this will cause concern. A little democracy? A little democracy in the corporation? A little recognition that the corporate body is more than just the CEOs and the executives, that it is also the workers? That causes concern?

Ladies and gentlemen, that is what we are talking about spreading to the rest of the world, the free enterprise system. We are talking about spreading the democratic system. But somehow when it comes to carving up billions of dollars, we cannot have too much democracy in the workplace.

It is simply unfair to the workers. This bill also closes a loophole of having conflicted advice that the Republican bill opens for the first time, and this bill responds to the concerns of the Attorney General of New York, who just settled a case for $1.4 billion, when he said that this bill would open up a huge loophole, a huge loophole for conflicted advice, and put at risk the pensions of these individuals, that this bill goes too far. That conflicted advice, Jane Bryant Quinn, the financial columnist in Newsweek magazine, says they might as well give their money to an Olympic ice-skating judge as give it to this conflicted advice. These are the very same people who just agreed to pay a $1.4 billion fine for their activity. They did not admit that they did anything wrong, but they put up $1.4 billion. We have got to understand that we cannot turn the pension assets, the retirement assets of those workers over to those individuals. The workers in this country and their families and their future and their children and their retirement plans deserve better. They deserve the Democratic substitute.

Mr. Speaker, the suggestion again has been made on the other side of the aisle that somehow this would be a burden or somehow this would be complex if we required that workers be treated the same as executives.

They do very complex things in the corporate suites. They create various accounts to pay for the pension benefit of executives. They go out and buy various insurance schemes to pay for the benefit of executives. They create special tax treatment. They come to Congress and get special tax treatment for the pension plans of executives. All very complex. But at the end of the day, it means that that executive will know, no matter what happens to that company, that they and their family and their children will be protected forever into the future because it will be outside of the bankruptcy, it will be outside of the corporate failure.

So complexity is not a problem when the executives want to protect their income. They have been doing it for years. But somehow now to say that we ought to send notice, send an e-mail to your employees and tell them that the president is selling 100,000 shares, that the President is doing an inside deal on a stock option, send an e-mail, you send them all day long, there is nothing complex about it, you type it out and push send; it is not complex. But they do not want the employees to know this. That is why so many people have been trapped in the financial collapse of these companies.

In the middle of the negotiations with the flight attendants, the pilots, the machinists, the ramp workers, when American Airlines was asking those people for $2.3 billion in givebacks from their vacation time, from their pay, from their health benefits, give it back to help the company fly, they were secretly, quietly and in a very complex fashion protecting and guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the executives; and they got caught. Once the light was shined on them, they scrambled like rats for the door, because they knew they could not sustain it; and the CEO resigned and they had to give back the compensation package, and then the flight attendants and others agreed to try to help the company stay out of bankruptcy.

That is all this bill does. It says that you ought to know about that when they are negotiating your union contract, what they are doing for the executives. That is why the pension story today is no longer a back-page story. That is why it is on the cover of Fortune Magazine, not exactly a left-wing journal. But Fortune Magazine captured the context when it said oink, the pigs in the suits are jeopardizing your corporation, your compensation and your pension plans. Oink.

Earlier, Fortune Magazine asked America, is your retirement at risk, and why? Because of what is going on in terms of corporate financial gimmickry. It is why millions and millions of Americans have left the stock market and why the stock market laments that they have not returned. They do not have confidence in this system. They do not have confidence in this system any longer. They understand it is rigged on Wall Street against them and it is rigged in the Congress of the United States against them.

Where do these families go to get justice? Where do these families go to get equity? Where do these families go to get fairness, if they cannot come to the Congress of the United States?

So now what we say in the Republican bill is we are going to give them additional advice about what to do with their savings, and we are going to give that advice from the very same people that just had an out-of-court settlement of $1.4 billion because they lied to their clients. They had financial arrangements that prevented them from being independent. They had financial arrangements, so they misrepresented how a stock was doing, how a company was doing, because they were getting fees, they were getting commissions, they were getting percentages of deals. Those are the very same people the Republicans say now that Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Smith ought to go to and trust that they are going to give them independent advice.

The Democratic bill says you can go to those people, you can make them available, but you also must make an independent adviser available to these people as they plan for their retirements.

When things go wrong for people in their retirement plans, as they did over the last couple of years, and you are 50 or 55 years old, you do not have much chance to make it up.

Again, we have all heard from our constituents about people who thought they were going to retire a year ago, a year and a half ago. From Pacific Gas and Electric, the Portland company, not the California one, a person came before our committee, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, who had $650,000 in Enron stock. He and his wife bought a small farm that they were going to use to run a care center for retarded children. By the time they got to our committee, he had $6,000 in stock. He is 60 years old. Where does he go to get back his money? Where does he go to get made whole?

Well, unless we want that to happen to another generation of workers planning for their retirement, planning for their families, unless we want that to happen again, we have got to support the Democratic substitute, because it is about justice, it is about fairness and it is about getting away from the conflicted advice, from the manipulation, from the dishonesty, from the criminal activity of the financial markets.

Mr. Speaker, $7 trillion was lost in the markets, $7 trillion. These are the people who want to take you out of Social Security and put you into that market. Social Security did not lose a dime. Wall Street lost $7 trillion, and hundreds and thousands and millions of Americans had their entire retirement future changed overnight.

We thought, well, that is the free enterprise system. That is the market system. But what we find out now every day is, no, like the California energy crisis, that was a manipulated system, that was a dishonest system, that was a criminal system.

All the Democratic bill says is give people some notice, give people some rights, give people control over their money so they can escape the ship. The CEOs, the board presidents, the presidents of companies, they are heading for the lifeboats. They do not even have the decency to hit the alarm bell to tell you the ship is going down.

We say at least you have to sound the alarm and tell the workers that they may want to jump too. That is the decent thing to do if you care about your workers, if you respect them, if you appreciate what they have done for the corporations. But that is not what is going on in America today, and that is not what will go on in America under the Republican bill.

Mr. Speaker, you must vote for the Democratic substitute if you believe that workers and their families are entitled to the decent protections for their retirement funds. I urge Members to vote for the Democratic substitute.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

I am, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, this motion to recommit provides that workers with 10 years of service with a company would have the choice of whether or not to accept a cash balance retirement plan or a defined benefit plan when a corporation decides that they want to switch from a defined benefit plan to a cash balance plan.

We do nothing about the corporation's right to do so. That is simply up to the corporations. Many corporations are doing this in an attempt to save money. The question that my colleagues must answer is should they be able to save that money by dramatically jeopardizing the retirement nest egg and the retirement benefits of older workers in that corporation.

The last time corporations did this before the moratorium, workers lost somewhere up to 50 percent. Last time, according to the GAO, older workers lost up to 50 percent of their retirement benefits. Individuals that were 50, 55, 60 years old, they had no ability to recapture those benefits. They could not work long enough. They could not make enough money. They could not save enough in those jobs.

The question is whether we will allow them the election. Secretary Treasurer Snow said that when he was chairman of the board at CSX Corporation, he recommended and the corporation did this because it was fair. He reminded us that when Congress switched its retirement plan, we allowed every Member in Congress at that time to have an election. He said that was the fair thing to do.

He said when he was on the board of Verizon, that he insisted that they allow workers to have a choice in that plan to see which one they would do better under. The company could save the money for all new workers, and older workers would be made whole.

The gentleman from Ohio will tell my colleagues that some 500 corporations have converted, and they have made workers whole. That is because that is the law. They are changing the law. They will no longer be required to do that under the law.

When Jesse James and Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde stole the life savings of people in this country, we hunted them down like dogs. Right now there are 300 corporations that have filed notice all over the country, all different sizes, affecting thousands of workers, that they are going to convert immediately upon the new Treasury ruling to a cash balance system. The question is whether or not we will protect these people against having their retirement benefits looted.

After a person gives this kind of service to a company, and they are too old to recoup it, they ought to make sure that they do not lose that benefit. That is what this amendment does, and I am going to tell my colleagues, for those who do not think this will affect them, several years ago we had this operation before the moratorium, IBM, Kodak and others, and it blew up. On a bipartisan vote of over 300 Members of Congress, we sought to end that practice.

The Clinton administration put on a moratorium. Those companies ended up giving their workers an election. It is the just and fair thing to do. There is no other remedy other than this amendment for those workers if the Treasury Department decides, as their original proposal did, that it did not matter whether we gave workers a choice or not.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

(Mr. EMANUEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.