Floor Statements

Mr. Chairman, I first want to thank Chairman Obey for including $50 million for treating the health needs of 9/11 first responders from all over the country in this bill. Without his leadership, the heroes of 9/11 would still be waiting for the Federal funding they so desperately need for medical treatment following their work at Ground Zero. Although this funding is an important step, we need so much more.

Just this morning the New York Times revealed a new study by the Department of Health and Human Services that says that the cost of treating 9/11 illnesses will reach $20 million a month, $20 million a month by the end of this year.

The Federal Government must drastically increase its funding commitment if it is to fulfill its obligation to those suffering the health effects of 9/11. But today's bill is at least a first step.

We have all heard the harrowing stories of those first responders, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians and countless others from all around the country who responded and put their own lives in danger to save others. But they are not the only victims of the environmental disaster that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The toxic mixture of asbestos, mercury, benzene, dioxins, jet fuel and other harmful substances landed inside apartments and schools and office buildings. The dust settled onto furniture and carpets and onto curtains and air ducts.

Before buildings in Lower Manhattan had ever been tested to insure that they were safe to reoccupy, residents were urged by the EPA to return to their homes near Ground Zero, and students were sent back to school, where they breathed poisonous dust for months.

Residents and students followed EPA instructions to clean up the dust in their apartments with a ``wet mop or a wet rag,'' a completely inadequate, not to say illegal, method for cleaning up asbestos and other toxic materials.

Students at Stuyvesant High School returned to a building that sat next to enormous piles of toxic debris being carted off to landfills. To this day, there has been no comprehensive testing or cleanup of World Trade Center dust in buildings in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jersey City. More than 5 years later, an increasing number of residents and students are now becoming ill from 9/11 toxins.

Residents and students, in addition to first responders, should be eligible for 9/11 health funding as our colleagues in the Senate seek to do but this bill does not do.

I had planned to offer an amendment that would have made residents and students eligible for 9/11 health funding, too. I will not offer that amendment tonight, but I will express the hope that the chairman will support, as we go forward, the work to provide treatment to the tens and thousands of residents and students who are now suffering and will suffer the health effects of 9/11. And I hope we will accede to the Senate version of the bill.

On a separate matter, I would also like to say that I am extremely pleased to see that $39 million has been included in this bill for arts and education. In past years I have had to offer amendments to add funds in this area, but for the first time we have a bill before us that does a very good job in arts and education. The funds provided in this bill are vital as they bring the arts to schoolchildren across the country, many of whom would otherwise have no other opportunity to experience the arts.

I again thank the chairman for his initiative in this respect.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, is the gentleman aware that it is standard usage in the Government of Iran and in many of the Arab regimes that since they will not say the word ``Israel,'' they refer to Israel as the Zionist entity or the Zionist regime so that when they say the ``Zionist regime,'' they are not necessarily calling for regime change? When they say the ``Zionist regime'' or the ``Zionist entity'' must be abolished, they are usually referring to the country of Israel?

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I will respond again. It proves nothing because the fact is that if you are just looking at etymology, it may make sense. But if you look at usage in the Middle East, the Arab and Iranian people who wish the State of Israel eliminated have, since 1947 or 1948, referred to Israel either as the ``Zionist regime'' or the ``Zionist entity.'' And you can look back at the rhetoric of 1967 when they lined up the troops and they said all the Jews will be killed. They talked about the Zionist regime or the Zionist entity being eliminated. They weren't talking about regime change; they were talking about genocide.

I thank the gentlelady for her support, and I thank Ms. Ros-Lehtinen for her support.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to join me in supporting House Resolution 137, a resolution to honor the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum, known more familiarly as Jacob Birnbaum, especially his commitment freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural and communal extinction.

It is fitting that Jacob Birnbaum was born on December 10, which is also International Human Rights Day. This past December, Mr. Birnbaum celebrated his 80th birthday. It is time for this body to honor the life and work, the 60 years of public service of this remarkable human rights activist. I am very proud to call him a fellow New Yorker.

Jacob Birnbaum was born in Germany, and during World War II, his family fled the Nazis and settled in the United Kingdom. Throughout the war, the Birnbaum family knew the plight of Jews, especially their own relatives, under the Nazis. His personal experience with the horrors of evil sparked the activism of Jacob Birnbaum.

Beginning in 1946, following the end of the war, 19-year-old Jacob Birnbaum devoted several years to providing relief for younger survivors of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian systems. Through his work with young Polish Jews who managed to leave the USSR after the war, he became familiar with the iniquities of the Soviet system. These earlier experiences fueled his later passion to mobilize American Jewry in the drive to rescue Jews from oppression in the Soviet Union.

In the mid 1950s and early 1960s, he became involved in assisting people from the disintegrating Jewish communities of North Africa caught up in the struggles of the host countries for independence from France and in the persecution of the Jews of North Africa after the independence of Israel.

His activism did not end then. After traveling to the United States, he decided to create a national student organization to activate the grass roots of the American Jewish community. Settling in New York, in 1964, he set up his first student committee. Then he concentrated on building a student core at Yeshiva University. Mr. Birnbaum named the new organization the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, known familiarly as the SSSJ.

Finally, he called a national founding meeting at Columbia University on April 27, 1964, followed by a large student demonstration 4 days later on the Soviet holiday May Day in front of the Soviet United Nations Mission. The authoritative Center for Jewish History has listed the demonstration as the beginning of the public struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jews.

Many consider this action as the reason to consider Mr. Birnbaum the father of the movement to liberate Soviet Jewry. Indeed, the evidence supports this notion. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, under his direction, the Student Struggle continued working full time in response to the oppression of Soviet Jews.

As we know, the Bolshevik Resolution in Russia led to the imprisonment of Soviet Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Jewish culture, Jewish religion and Jewish communal life were forcibly extinguished under the Soviet regime, which also indulged in numerous anti-Semitic actions.

Even after Stalin's death, the Soviet kingdom of fear abated only slightly. The Cold War effectively continued to cut off the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe from their fellow Jews in the West, and almost all expressions of Jewish religion and culture continued to be prohibited.

Nevertheless, expressions of outrage began to accumulate in the early 1960s, with a few pioneers leading the way. Shortly after the initial organizing by Jacob Birnbaum, the major Jewish organizations met in Washington, D.C., and established the American Conference on Soviet Jewry. The SSSJ that Mr. Birnbaum had established functioned as its handbook said, to mobilize a tidal wave of public opinion.

After the mass arrests of young Jewish dissidents on June 15, 1970, and the

death sentences handed down to them in the Leningrad trial of December 1970, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry was created.

The Greater New York Conference, under the direction of the then young activist Malcolm Hoenlein, initiated the profoundly important Solidarity Day marches, modeled after Jacob Birnbaum's Jericho, Redemption, and Exodus marches and rallies of the 1960s. Mr. Hoenlein is now the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Of great significance was the creation in 1970 of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a coalition of non-established regional groups, under the chairmanship of Dr. Louis Rosenblum, with whom Jacob Birnbaum worked for many years.

Mr. Hoenlein has publicly stated that he considers Mr. Birnbaum ``the father of the Soviet Jewry movement.'' Similar statements have been made by other major public figures such as Dr. Meir Rosenne, who worked closely with Mr. Birnbaum in the early formative period of 1964 to 1967. Dr. Rosenne later became Israel's Ambassador to France and then to the United States. Sir Martin Gilbert, the official British historian of Winston Churchill and his times, has made a similar statement.

In May, 1965, Mr. Birnbaum was the first person to testify before a congressional committee on the importance of utilizing economic leverage on the Kremlin to secure the liberation of Soviet Jews. When the late Senator Henry Jackson initiated the legislation which finally resulted in the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, Mr. Birnbaum worked closely with the director of Senator Jackson's office, Dorothy Fosdick, and, of course, with his other aide, Richard Perle, who played a major role in the initiation and development of the legislation.

The idea of placing economic pressure on Communist states to increase emigration played a key role in softening up the Kremlin regimes to make possible the Soviet Jewry demand of ``Let My People Go.'' For the first time, there was legislation to put teeth into the previous congressional humanitarian resolutions.

From 1976 to 1986, Jacob Birnbaum conducted annual Most Favored Nation campaigns, based on Jackson-Vanik, to pressure various countries, including Romania, to increase emigration and to release prisoners. He testified annually before both Senate and House Committees.

In the latter 1970s, Mr. Birnbaum enlarged his Soviet Jewry strategy. He expanded the slogan ``Let My People Go'' by adding ``Let My People Know.'' Let them know their heritage. The Kremlin had pulverized Jewish religious, cultural and community life, and, in the 1960s, the Soviet Jewish resistance underground began to generate Jewish self-education, cultural, religious and Hebrew-speaking groups in the Soviet Union.

Mr. Birnbaum conducted numerous campaigns for their protection, enlisting the aid of many Christian religious denominations. These efforts reached a high point when he organized and led a delegation of the Synagogue Council of America to meet with the Deputy Secretary of State and the Department's Human Rights Director, Warren Zimmermann, in September 1985.

Mr. Birnbaum's vision was partially realized with Malcolm Hoenlein's Solidarity Rallies in New York, and, finally, by the great national rally in Washington on December 7, 1987, on the eve of President Gorbachev's meeting with President Reagan.

Finally, in 1990, the Kremlin conceded to all the pressure and permitted a mass emigration, which has now totaled more than 2 million people, about 1 million to Israel and 1 million elsewhere, mostly to the United States. This was no small accomplishment. And many people played a role in making it happen.

In addition to the courageous work of Mr. Birnbaum, tribute ought to be paid to the many pioneers and the other national organizations which fought so strenuously for the liberation of Soviet Jews:

Morris Abram, U.S. Human Rights Commissioner; Dr. Moshe Deeter, the scholar whose research fueled the early movement; former Justice Arthur Goldberg; the distinguished theologian, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Heschel; Senator Jacob Javits; NASA scientist Dr. Louis Rosenblum of the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism; and Elie Wiesel, whose book, ``The Jews of Silence'' was so influential.

Many organizations also played an important role, and I will name them in my extended remarks.

Following the collapse of the Soviet regime, Mr. Birnbaum spent a substantial part of the 1990s in combating anti-Semitic manifestations in former Soviet Central Asia, mostly in Uzbekistan, intervening through the State Department and enlisting Malcolm Hoenlein's aid in engaging the Uzbek Ambassador in Washington.

In his 81st year, Mr. Birnbaum continues to support groups engaged in the Jewish education of former Soviet Jews and their children. His dedication to his beliefs remains as strong as ever.

For all these reasons, Mr. Speaker, the House of Representatives ought to honor the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum and especially his successful commitment to freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural, and communal extinction. He is a true hero.

I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, for moving this resolution quickly through his committee. I would also like to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Watson) for managing the consideration of this resolution today, and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen) for her leadership on this.

Again, I urge all my colleagues to join me in passing this resolution to honor this work of this unique hero of this century.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Debra Brown Steinberg for her reception of the 2007 Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Through its Ellis Island Medals program, the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO) honors United States Citizens whose life and work show dedication to community service and the preservation of ethnic heritage. Ms. Steinberg joins an elite group of medalists, who represent several industries and come from many different backgrounds.

Debra Steinberg is an accomplished attorney who has devoted time in her professional life to advancing civil rights. Most commendable is her pro bono representation of families of 9/11 victims. Determined to protect the rights of this group in need, Ms. Steinberg assisted in drafting The September 11th Family Humanitarian Relief and Patriotism Act, H.R. 1071. I am proud to be an original co-sponsor of this bill. As a founding member of ``Project 9/11,'' a consortium of lawyers formed in October 2001, Ms. Steinberg provided legal services for families of victims of the September 11th attacks, including those seeking citizen status. Collectively, these lawyers devoted many hours of their lives to this fight.

Once again, I offer my heart-felt congratulations to Ms. Steinberg at the time of this venerable distinction, the 2007 Ellis Island Medal of Honor. As representative of the 8th Congressional District of New York, I am honored to have such a distinguished citizen working in my district to improve the lives of all Americans and their families.

I thank the gentlelady.

Mr. Speaker, when the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the towers sent up a plume of poisonous dust that blanketed Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and parts of Queens and into New Jersey. A toxic mixture of lead, dioxin, asbestos, mercury, benzene and other hazardous contaminants swirled around the site of the disaster and far afield as rescue workers labored furiously in the wreckage, many without adequate protective

gear. Thousands of first responders inhaled this poisonous dust before it settled onto and into countless homes, shops and office buildings.

Immediately after the collapse, and for the weeks after that, the Environmental Protection Agency had the responsibility of being the lead agency responsible for ensuring the safety of the hundreds and thousands of people who live and work and attend school in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jersey City, and of the first responders.

Instead, the EPA and the Federal Government betrayed the people who live in New York and betrayed all the first responders, the police officers and the fire officers, and the volunteers from all over who came to help us clean up. It betrayed them in two ways.

First, the EPA assured all that the environmental conditions in New York were not hazardous and that the health of those near the plume was not in danger. Former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman irresponsibly declared within a few days after 9/11 that the air was safe to breathe and the water was safe to drink, and EPA continued saying that when they had plenty of data to say it wasn't true. The EPA and the Federal Government lied, and because of these lies, people are sick and dying today. The air was not safe. There is no doubt the EPA initiated two separate cover-ups that go on to this day.

For years, the Federal Government, the State government, the city government insisted that there was no evidence, no proof that people who were getting sick, that fire officers and police officers who had annual exams and had been healthy all the time and who suddenly could not breathe and could not work, this had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. You couldn't prove it was because they were poisoned by the atmosphere.

It was only last September, in September 2006, 5 years after the World Trade Center collapsed, that this cover-up unraveled.

A study released last September by Mount Sinai Hospital found that of the more than 9,000 first responders examined in that study, 70 percent suffered health problems related to their work at Ground Zero.

The evidence continues to pile up. Yesterday, the New York Times reported a clear link between World Trade Center dust and life- threatening disease. And yet, until very recently, the Health Department and the City of New York continued to deny that this was the case.

The City of New York continues to contest every workers comp case filed because, obviously, these are all malingerers; nothing was true.

The article in yesterday's Time cites reports by doctors from the fire department of New York and the Albert Einstein Medical College which again confirm what we have known, that all honest people have known for years: that we are facing a major health crisis as a result of September 11th. And we know that these conditions are very often long-lasting, life-lasting and that they go on and on.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, New York City firefighters and police officers joined with workers and volunteers from all 50 States to aid in the colossal rescue and recovery effort. But more than 5 years later, the Federal Government has not begun to do its part.

To this day, there has been no comprehensive program by the Federal Government to monitor, as Mrs. Maloney said, to monitor the health of all the victims, the firefighters, the cleanup workers. There has been no provision of medical services.

The President finally, in this year's budget that we are now debating, proposes supplying $25 million. And yet we know that the cost of caring for these people will be probably in the neighborhood of $300 million per year for the indefinite future.

For every day that goes by, more and more people become sick and are diagnosed with illnesses that their doctors attribute to the contamination of the World Trade Center. That is why a number of pieces of legislation have been introduced. For instance, Senators Clinton, Menendez, Schumer and Kennedy, and in this House, Congressman Towns, Engel, Weiner, and I have introduced the 9/11 Heroes Health Improvement Act of 2007, which would provide more than $1.9 billion in Federal funding for medical and mental health screening, testing, monitoring and treatment grants for institutions that provide care to those whose health was affected in the 9/11 attacks, for the next 6 years, this would cover.

And that is just the first cover-up. The second cover-up is that we know that the World Trade Center contamination settled in Lower Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in Queens, probably in Jersey City, in many neighborhoods, buildings and onto streets. Nature cleans up the outdoor air, but it doesn't clean up the indoor air. The rain washes away dust in the outdoors; the wind blows it away. But nothing removes the indoors. People were told, don't worry, it is safe to move back to Lower Manhattan. In high school, students were told to go back after a week. And yet, we know that the indoor contamination was not dealt with properly. We know that, unless properly cleaned up, professionally cleaned up, indoor spaces are still contaminated; that even if you went in, as the New York City Department of Health urged, and said, ``If you see World Trade Center dust in your apartment, clean it up with a wet mop and a wet rag,'' and the EPA echoed this advice. This, too, was a betrayal, because not only is that advice illegal because we know that much of that dust had asbestos in it, and it is illegal to remove asbestos-laden material, to move it, to touch it, to deal with it unless you are properly licensed to, certified to do so and wearing equipment. But EPA and the City of New York Health Department told people to remove it with a wet mop and a wet rag.

We also know that, if you did that, besides being illegal, you probably inhaled some of it. And the very often immigrant workers hired by fly-by-night firms, who, not professionally, did this probably inhaled a lot of it. And we also know that, if you did it, you didn't thoroughly do it; that the dust settled into the porous wood surfaces and into the carpets and the drapes and behind the refrigerator and into the HVAC systems. And where the toddler crawls on the rug today and loosens that dust into the air, that toddler is being poisoned today. We probably have thousands or tens of thousands of people all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City who are being poisoned today and who we will see come down with asbestosis and mesothelioma and lung cancer 15 years from now, because it has never been properly cleaned up because the EPA continues to deny its responsibility.

The EPA ombudsman's office was called in at my request in February and March of 2002, and held hearings to see what could be done about this. What happened? The EPA abolished the ombudsman's office.

The EPA set up, at Senator Clinton's request, a scientific advisory body to look into this. They started saying, ``Hey, wait a minute. We have got a major problem here.'' What happened? They were disbanded by the EPA.

The EPA inspector general's office looked into this, and came out with a report in August of 2003, saying that thousands of people are endangered by this; that what we have to do is randomly inspect indoor spaces, apartments and work spaces in concentric circles going out from the World Trade Center so that we can find out where the contamination still exists, maybe 3 blocks in one direction, maybe 3 miles in another direction. But, wherever it is, map it, delineate it, and wherever it is, go in on a building-by-building basis, clean it up so that people are not continually poisoned indefinitely.

Clean it up, so that people are not continually poisoned indefinitely. What happened to that report? It was ignored by the EPA, and the people in the Inspector General's Office are no longer there.

And again, at Senator Clinton's insistence and because Carolyn Maloney and I and others insisted, the EPA set up another scientific advisory body in 2005. What happened? They started saying, you know, the Inspector General is right and what the EPA has done is inadequate. What happened? They were disbanded before they could make official recommendations.

To this day, we know that we are poisoning large numbers of people continually and piling up unnecessary cases

of fatal diseases that will come out in 10 and 15 years because the Federal Government and the city government of New York has ignored this problem and covered it up.

So, in summary, we have two separate cover-ups, one of which unraveled only within the last year. We are trying to deal with it. We still don't have the funds to deal with it. The Federal Government, the Bush administration has ignored it, basically. They have not come out with proper recommendations.

Some of us, Congresswoman Maloney, Congressman Shays, myself, Senator Clinton, have made legislative proposals for long-term care and monitoring of the medical conditions caused that will be with us for the next 50 years. We don't have administration support. We haven't enacted that legislation. We must.

But at least, because that cover-up unraveled last year, we're talking about it. But that second cover-up, they're still denying it. The City of New York is still denying it. The Federal Government is still denying it. And until they admit it, until we do the proper investigation in the way that the Inspector General recommended and look at all the areas and find out where the contamination is and go in and clean it up, and it may cost a couple of billion dollars to do that, but until we do that we will continue poisoning people, we will continue making sure that 10 and 15 and 20 years from now we will have thousands perhaps of unnecessary cases of fatal diseases.

So I say to you, Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Maloney for calling this special order tonight. But I say to you, we must enact a legislation such as Carolyn has talked about, such as I have talked about, such as others have, to put into place systematic means of monitoring and providing medical services for the victims, the first responders. But we must also make sure that the EPA and the Federal Government step up to the plate, unravel that second cover-up, peel it away, see what the problem is, inspect the areas, find out where the contamination still is. And where it still is, go in and on a building by building basis clean it up so that we can know that people can live and work in areas without being poisoned and without coming down with additional diseases.

Without doing this, we are adding to the work of the terrorists. The Federal and city governments are becoming complicit in adding to the victims. It was bad enough the terrorists cost us 3,000 dead that day. The Federal and city government should not be adding to the victims as they still are.

Thank you, Carolyn.

What struck me about the hearings was several things. We've had hearings for a number of years, and I remember the first hearing I attended was presided over by Senator Lieberman, a U.S. Senate hearing back in February of 2002. But none of this has changed. It's 5 years later, and it hasn't changed.

Number one, you see the victims, the first responders, the people who dropped everything they were doing to help, to help victims that we thought people might be still alive under the debris. They weren't. Who then helped with the cleanup to get, who worked on the pile for 40 and 50 days. And we heard story after story of how healthy people were no longer healthy and they could no longer work and they could no longer breathe, how they now had to take 20 and 30 and 40 different pills and medications a day, how they couldn't pay for the medications, how they had lost their jobs, and because they lost their jobs they lost their health coverage and how the workers comp system didn't work for them.

How a hero who was given an award for heroism at the World Trade Center, when he went for workers' comp, they said, Prove you were there.

So the first thing we saw at those hearings were these people testifying about how they selflessly worked, and we know that they did, and how they had been betrayed by every level of government in treating them, by the workers' comp and the State, by the Federal Government.

The second thing was it was clear from the heroic work done by the people at Mount Sinai and the Fire Department of the City of New York, in trying to deal with these sick people and who had to put the funding together for private philanthropic sources, that until last year there was no government funding for any of this whatsoever. Finally we got a few million dollars.

The Health Commissioner testified that. There has been a denial, a straightforward denial, by City and State people because they don't want to admit liability.

The third thing was that even now, even now, when Dr. Agwunobi testified, he said we will have a plan. Well, we haven't seen the plan. We know now that it is going to cost about $300 million a year just to deal with the health conditions of the people we know about. Never mind the cleaning up of the contaminated areas, but just for the first responders, it is going to cost about $300 million a year. The President proposed $25 million, but it was made very clear at the hearing, the last hearing, that the plan that the Federal Government was going to come up with, if they actually come up with a plan, would not deal with residents, would not deal with the health problems of people who are living there, who were beseeched by the City and Federal Government to come back and live and work in lower Manhattan and are suffering because they listened to that.

And that is a scandal also. The other thing that was very clear, and it has been clear from the EPA right up to date, is that the registry has dealt with people who live or who work in lower Manhattan, below Canal Street, as if there was a 30,000-foot high wall along Canal Street or a Star Trek-type force field along Canal Street and across the East River because, after all, anyone who lives north of Canal Street has no problem. And anybody who lives in Brooklyn, where we saw the satellite photos showed the plume went and where Congressman

Weiner testified that at his office 10 miles away, debris was falling on the terrace at his office, and we know it was falling across all these neighborhoods across Brooklyn; we don't have to deal with that. We are going to be studiously ignorant of all the people in these other places outside of lower Manhattan. That was brought out very clearly in Congressman Towns' hearing. And the fact is, we have to look at all these hearings areas and do the job properly.

That is a very good point.

There are a couple of lessons that really should be learned here. One, Abraham Lincoln said, at the end of the Civil War, that you have to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. We are failing in doing that, when he who shall have borne the battle here are heroes who came in to help, and we are abandoning them.

Second, the EPA had a duty to do the job here. They failed in that duty. And that is a danger for the future. The law provides that the EPA must come in and classify the area and make sure and protect people, and the OSHA laws were enforced in Washington so no one got sick. They weren't enforced in New York, and 50,000 people are sick.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, this bill deals with violent crimes committed against victims who are singled out solely because someone doesn't like who they are.

Violent attacks because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability often cause serious injury or death. They are more serious than a normal assault because they target not just an individual, but an entire group. They spread terror to all members of the group and often deter them from exercising their constitutional rights, sometimes for simply walking down the wrong street.

The only question for Members is whether they believe that singling out a person for a crime of violence because of his or her race or religion or because any other trait is sufficiently heinous to merit strong punishment.

For many years, Mr. Speaker, Congress debated what were known as the Federal lynching laws. They were designed to deal with the widespread practice of lynching primarily African Americans. There was staunch resistance to those laws here in Congress. For three decades, they did not pass while thousands were lynched. We heard many of the same arguments then that we are hearing today. That was not a proud period in our Nation's history. Today, we can do the right thing. I hope we can agree to do so.

Under current law, the attackers of someone like Michael Sandy of Brooklyn, who was attacked simply because he was walking down a street and he was gay, could not be prosecuted for a hate crime because, under existing law, only victims targeted because they are engaged in a federally protected activity, such as voting, are protected. This bill expands the definition to cover all violent crimes motivated by race, color, creed, national origin, et cetera.

This is not an issue of free speech. This bill deals only with crimes of violence in which the victim is selected with his or her status.

The law routinely looks to the motivation of a crime and treats the more heinous of them differently. Manslaughter is different from premeditated murder, which is different from a contract killing. We all know how to make these distinctions. The law does it all the time. We ought to do it here; we ought to say that crimes of violence motivated by one's status are particularly heinous and ought to be treated as such.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent in the name of Mr. Jon Porter of Nevada that Mr. Porter be removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 1964. Mr. Porter was listed as a cosponsor of H.R. 1964 due to a clerical error.

Mr. Speaker, it is a stain on our national honor that the citizens of our Capital City are disenfranchised without any votes in Congress. We presume to lecture other nations on the importance of democracy; but today we are being put to our own test, and we must not fail.

Now, speakers on the other side say that this bill is unconstitutional. They say, and they point out correctly, that the Constitution says that the House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the people of the several States. Washington, they say, isn't a State. QED. That's the end of the subject. But no, it isn't. It is not the end of the subject. The fact is, article III, section 2 says the judicial power, Federal jurisdiction shall extend to controversies between citizens of different States. Controversies between citizens of different States, that is the basis for jurisdiction for Federal lawsuits, some Federal lawsuits, many Federal lawsuits.

Well, what about a controversy when someone from the District of Columbia sues someone from Virginia or New York or Pennsylvania? Well, in 1805, the Supreme Court ruled that diversity jurisdiction did not exist between a citizen of the District of Columbia and a citizen of Virginia, in the case of Hepburn v. Ellzey, because the District of Columbia was not a State.

But the Court also said that Congress, under its power to legislate for the District of Columbia, could decide that, for purposes of diversity jurisdiction, the city of Washington, D.C. should be considered a State. Congress took its time in doing so, but did make that decision.

And there was a Supreme Court decision in 1949, a mere 145 years later. These things don't go that rapidly. 1949, in National Mutual Insurance Company of the District of Columbia v. Tidewater, the United States Supreme Court said, aha, Congress, having acted, the District of Columbia is a State for purposes of diversity jurisdiction under article III of the Constitution.

Congress has as much power to decide that the residents of the District of Columbia have the right to vote for Congress, which requires States, as Congress has the right to decide, upheld by the Supreme Court, that residents of the District of Columbia, have the right to sue citizens of other States. If the Congress has that power for purposes of giving the District of Columbia residents the right to sue and be sued by citizens of other States in Federal courts for diversity jurisdiction, it has the same power, the exact same constitutional power to decide that, for purposes of representation in Congress, citizens of the District of Columbia may have that representation in Congress.

So it is, I think, clear, but certainly very arguable, that Congress has ample power constitutionally. And if someone wants to challenge them, let them go to court. But it is not a valid argument to oppose this bill which is necessary for elementary democracy in this country.

Mr. Speaker, 4 years ago, the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. When no such weapons were found, instead of declaring victory and bringing the troops home, the administration in its arrogance decided to dismantle the major institutions of Iraqi society and settle into a long-term occupation in order to remake Iraq in our own image.

The dismantling of Iraqi institutions, the army, the Baath party, et cetera, led to the breakdown of the delicate balances in Iraqi society and the emergence of civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The continuing occupation led, as occupations do, to the development of a nationalist insurgency.

Now we have Sunni, Shiites and the insurgents shooting at each other and all shooting at American troops. This will go on as long as the occupation continues. The only way out is for Congress to mandate a timetable for a phased withdrawal of our troops.

Only such a mandate can get the Iraqi Government to step up to the plate. As Defense Secretary Gates said yesterday, the strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment. Only a mandated timetable for withdrawal will end the endless occupation and end the endless bloodshed of young Americans.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to an extraordinary group of young adults--The Equality Riders--who have dedicated 2 months of their lives, traveling thousands of miles, visiting 32 colleges and universities around the country and talking to countless students, faculty members and staff in pursuit of social justice.

The spirit of The Equality Ride was born out of the recognition that homophobia is globally pervasive and that no country, state, city, community or school escapes its reach. The Equality Ride offers a unique opportunity for student activists to dedicate their time and energy in the pursuit of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered equality through the practice of nonviolent resistance and educational campaigns.

I embrace the spirit of The Equality Ride and these leaders in the fight for social justice. The participants of the Equality Ride as well as its supporters have changed numerous lives, raised awareness and challenged notions regarding homosexuality through both on and off campus activities.

While conducting their work on the various campuses, riders confront some of their harshest critics and engage in structured dialogue with the academic community through classroom presentations, panel discussions, school-wide forums and film screenings as well as informal interactions. Outside of the college and university campuses, communities have welcomed the riders to share in worship, potlucks, fundraisers and meetings.

I applaud these riders and their supporters who have tirelessly waged a campaign of truth based on the nonviolent practices of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to end the cycle of fear and misunderstanding that causes this vicious form of prejudice. As the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, it is my great honor to pay tribute to these visionary young people and congratulate them on their courage, determination and dedication.

Madam Speaker, it is a disgrace, a blot on our Nation that the citizens of our Capital do not have a voice in Congress.

Whatever technical issues there may be with respect to rectifying this problem, we must never lose sight of the fact that our democracy is permanently stained by the disenfranchisement of a large group of our citizens who pay taxes, serve in our wars, work in our government, and bear all the responsibilities, but do not have all the rights of citizenship.

Whether you took a cab to work today or rode the Metro or bought a cup of coffee or walked down the sidewalk or were protected by a police officer, your safety, your livelihood, every aspect of your life was made possible by people who have no vote in our democratic society. There is no excuse for that.

Now, we have heard from people who say, well, we should change this, but let's amend the Constitution. We have tried that. Very difficult.

We have heard from people who say, well, we should change this, but let's do it another way that will take forever and that haven't worked. This way we are told, doing it by statute, giving the District of Columbia a vote in the House by statute, is unconstitutional.

Well, it is not unconstitutional. The fact is the Constitution says that the Congress shall have power to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District, as may, by cession of particular States, become the seat of the Government of the United States. Exclusive jurisdiction. Very plenary power.

The Constitution also says in Article III, discussing the powers of Federal courts: The judicial power shall extend to controversies between citizens of different States, so-called diversity jurisdiction.

One of the earlier cases cited by the Supreme Court was that citizens of the District of Columbia have standing to go into Federal court and sue citizens of a different State, of any State under diversity jurisdiction, because the District of Columbia, for that purpose at least, is considered a State, and the Supreme Court was very clear on this. And if the District of Columbia is a State for purposes of diversity jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution, there is no reason why Congress cannot take advantage of that fact and legislate under its exclusive jurisdiction clause that the District of Columbia is a State for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives.

The judicial cases are fairly clear. We have ample constitutional authority to do this, and we should take that up. Let those who are opposed to American citizens having taxation without representation, let those who are supportive of American citizens be subjected to taxation without representation, let those who are opposed to American citizens having the full rights of citizens, let them go to court and argue that it is unconstitutional. Let us assert our authority, because we believe it is constitutional. The courts will ultimately decide if the Bush administration continues to oppose this bill and has threatened to veto.

What I don't hear from the administration is any concern about the injustice of depriving D.C. citizens of the right to vote, which speaks volumes about the administration's hostility to voting rights.

If we are to have the audacity to hold ourselves out to the world as a beacon of freedom and democracy, if we want to lecture other countries about the importance of freedom and democracy, as this Congress and the President regularly seek to do, we need to clean up our own House. I urge passage of this bill.

Madam Speaker, I, along with Mr. Rangel and Mrs. Maloney rise today to congratulate Ms. Vinnie Malloy on the occasion of her retirement from the United States Postal Service.

Ms. Malloy has broken many barriers throughout her career, which has been marked by excellence. From December 1998 until her retirement on February 2, 2007, Ms. Malloy served as the 37th District Manager and New York City Postmaster, the first woman to hold that distinction. In this position, Ms. Malloy was responsible for the delivery of mail and customer service for millions of residents and business customers in New York City. She managed 62 post offices, 46 stations and 15,000 employees.

Ms. Malloy joined the Postal Service in 1969, at age 21, as a Substitute Distribution Clerk in the James A. Farley Building. In the years that followed, Ms. Malloy held several positions in the Postal Service, including the historic first female Tour Director and Mail Processing Operations Manager in the New York District, as well as first female Bronx Postmaster.

Through mentoring and training, Ms. Malloy has assisted and encouraged many of her employees to seek higher level positions. She has one son and serves on the Senior Usher Board of the Cambria Heights Community Church in Queens, NY.

We are very grateful to Ms. Malloy for her assistance with the hundreds of constituent concerns we have brought to her attention over the years. We wish every government office were as responsive as Ms. Malloy and her staff have been. No matter how big or small the issue, our constituents have always been treated promptly and courteously. During her nearly 38 year career, she has been committed to the residents of Manhattan through her work in the United States Postal Service.

Ms. Malloy paved the way for other female Postal Service employees, and is an inspiration and role model for all women. For her commitment to the Postal Service and her community, it is our privilege to congratulate Vinnie Malloy on her distinguished record of excellence and achievement and upon her retirement.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support this resolution and to call upon my colleagues to make a commitment to protect our troops and to bring them home as quickly and safely as possible.

Mr. Speaker, the American people and Members of Congress were deceived. Every reason we were given for invading Iraq was false. Weapons of mass destruction, not there. Saddam Hussein working hand in glove with al Qaeda, not true.

I ask you, if the President had gone to the American people and said, we must invade a country that poses no imminent threat to us and sacrifice thousands of lives in order to create a

democratic government in Iraq, would we have assented? I think not.

As the President now says to us that we should continue indefinitely to expend American blood and treasure to support one side in a sectarian civil war, should Congress continue to consent? I think not. We need to say enough already. Enough with the lies and the deceit and the evasions, enough with the useless bloodshed.

We must protect our troops and ensure their safety while they are in Iraq. But we must not send more troops there to intervene in a civil war whose outcome they cannot determine.

And we should set a swift timetable to withdraw our troops from Iraq and let the contending Iraqi factions know that we will not continue to expend American blood and treasure to referee their civil war.

Only if faced with the reality of imminent withdrawal of American troops might the Iraqis strike a deal with each other and end the civil war. We know, Mr. Speaker, that the administration has botched the handling of this war. They stood by as Baghdad was looted, they failed to guard ammunition depots, they disbanded the Iraqi Army, they crippled the government by firing all of the competent civil servants in the name of debaathification, and they wasted countless billions of dollars on private contractors and on God only knows what with no accounting.

And all this while they continued to deny resources to the real war on the real terrorists. They let Osama bin Laden escape.

They allowed the Taliban to recover and to reconquer. They allow our ports to remain unprotected from uninspected shipping containers, and they let loose nuclear materials remain unaccounted for, waiting to be smuggled to al Qaeda to be made into nuclear weapons.

And why does the President want more troops in Iraq? To expand our role from fighting Sunni insurgents to fighting the Shiite militias also. Of course, when we attack the Shiite militias, they will respond by shifting their targets from Sunnis to American troops. American casualties will skyrocket, and we will be fighting two insurgencies instead of one.

I believe the President has no real plan other than not to ``lose Iraq'' on his watch, and to hand over the whole mess to a successor in 2 years. He will ignore anything we do that doesn't have the force of law. That is why this resolution must be only the first step.

In the supplemental budget we will consider next month, we should exercise the only real power we have, the Congressional power of the purse. We will not cut off the funds and leave our troops defenseless before the enemy, as the demagogues would imply. But we should limit the use of the funds we provide to protecting the troops while they are in Iraq and to withdrawing them on a timetable mandated in the law. We should provide funds to rebuild the Army and to raise our readiness levels. We should provide funds for diplomatic conferences in case there is any possibility of negotiating an end to the Iraqi civil war. And we should provide funds for economic reconstruction assistance. But above all, we must use the power of the purse to mandate a timetable to withdraw the troops from Iraq.

We must use the power the people have entrusted to us. The best way to protect our troops is to withdraw them from the middle of a civil war they cannot win and that is not our fight.

I know that if we withdraw the troops, the civil war may continue and could get worse. But this is probably inevitable no matter how long our troops remain. And if the Iraqis must fight a civil war, I would rather they fight it without 20,000 more Americans dying.

Yes, the blindness of the administration is largely to blame for starting a civil war in Iraq, but we cannot end it. Only the Iraqis can settle their civil war. We can only make it worse and waste our blood and treasure pointlessly.

So let us pass this resolution, and then let us lead this country out of the morass in Iraq so that we can devote our resources to protecting ourselves from the terrorists and to improving the lives of our people.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Mrs. Phyllis Miller upon receiving the Zella Butler Bronfman Award, presented by the UJA-Federation's Task Force on People With Disabilities and the J.E. and Z.B. Butler Foundation.

Throughout her 25-year career, Phyllis Miller has worked tirelessly on behalf of people with developmental disabilities. She taught Judaic studies and Hebrew language to both special and regular education elementary school students, beginning in 1973 at the Armed Forces Center for English as a Second Language in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She later taught at Temple Beth EI Hebrew School in Springfield, Massachusetts; Hillel Academy in Passaic, New Jersey; and Yeshiva of North Jersey in River Edge, New Jersey

In 1997, Mrs. Miller took a position as a Family and Child Advocate at the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, which she represents on the UJA Task Force on Disabilities. In this capacity, she assists people with special needs and their families in finding the programs and schools that best serve them. She also coordinates the Association of Jewish Special Educators and the Jewish Parent Advocate Coalition, through which she arranges in-service workshops for teachers and an annual Parent Empowerment Conference and Resource Fair for parents and social service providers. She also acts as the liaison to social service agencies and to families searching for special needs services.

A graduate of Stern College at Yeshiva University with a degree in Psychology and Judaic Studies, Mrs. Miller has five wonderful children, one of whom is currently studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Phyllis and her husband, Michael, have done tremendous work in forging relationships within Jewish communities both here and in Israel.

I am pleased to honor Mrs. Phyllis Miller for her many years of outstanding service, and to thank her for her extraordinary dedication to the developmentally disabled.

Mr. Speaker, what a deaf President we have. The American people told him loud and clear on November 7 that we want to change course in Iraq. He doesn't hear them.

The Iraq Study Group told him loud and clear we must change course in Iraq and certainly not escalate; he doesn't hear them.

His generals tell him that more troops won't do any good, will simply increase American casualties; he hears them, but he fires them and gets generals that will tell him what he wants to hear.

There is nothing more clear today than that the civil war in Iraq is a civil war, that there is no function for the United States to try to help one side against the other in that civil war. Indeed, one could make the case we picked the wrong side, and that we must withdraw our troops. We must tell the Iraqis that we are withdrawing, and we are withdrawing on a timetable. You make a deal with each other, you live together or fight your own civil war, we are not going to do it for you.

Mr. Speaker, for that we should not escalate. We should pass legislation in this Congress saying funds that are appropriated can be used only to protect the troops and to withdraw them.