Floor Statements

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1194, a bill that would reinstate authority within the Department of Health and Human Services to allow up to 10 States and Native American tribes a year to conduct demonstration projects that test ways to improve child welfare programs.

I want to thank the chairman of the Human Resources Subcommittee, Mr. Davis, for following in the tradition of the previous chairman, Mr. Linder. He was the one who worked with us last year in putting this through. It's good to have that same thing going through. This is a rare bill. It's actually a bipartisan bill.

This bill reinstates the waiver authority to allow the States and tribes to implement and evaluate innovations to improve outcomes for at-risk families and children. The legislation is cost neutral and renews waiver authority for the next 6 years.

Twenty-three States and jurisdictions received waivers under the previous authority, which began in 1997 and ended in 2006. Although the authority for new waivers has expired, a handful of States and counties have continued demonstration projects, including Florida, Ohio, and Los Angeles County, California.

The legislation also includes a new emphasis on the Federal side of supporting waivers that identify and address domestic violence and related problems, which lead to children being placed in foster care. It emphasizes early intervention and crisis intervention services that safely reduce out-of-home placements.

The waiver authority requires States to report on the Federal, State, local,

and private funding sources that support various services under the demonstration project. This additional information will increase our understanding of waiver policies and increase accountability. The innovative strategies successfully tested in States under the previous waiver authority taught us some lessons at the national level that were helpful because it made child welfare policy more effective.

One of the most successful demonstration projects provided support to grandparents and other relative caregivers who became the guardians of young relatives in foster care. This became Federal policy when it was incorporated into the Fostering Connections Act, which passed in 2008.

Since the waiver authority expired, States, service providers, and foster care experts have called for it to be renewed, to allow continued innovation and evaluation of strategies to address the complex needs of children and families in our 21st-century communities. Many States, like my State of Washington, can do more with limited funds than they have if they have well-defined waivers.

Following a hearing last year in the Ways and Means Committee, I introduced legislation with John Linder, as I mentioned before, to reinstate the waiver authority. We did it late in the session; and a short time later, the legislation passed the House. Unfortunately, it was late in the session, as I said, and the Senate was unable to take up the bill. So we thought if we put it over early this time, maybe it will be dealt with before the end of the 112th. The legislation before us is identical to the bill introduced last year and passed in this House unanimously.

Mr. Speaker, my support for restoring this waiver authority is not meant to suggest that traditional Federal investments are not needed in the child welfare system. We need to fully fund our child welfare programs. These child welfare waivers simply give the States more flexibility in developing innovations. Waivers are not a panacea. They are not a substitute for comprehensive solutions for the problems that remain in the child welfare system.

I also want to point out that the authority provided by this bill in no way affects a child's entitlement for assistance under Federal foster care and adoption assistance programs. This is important to remember for anyone comparing the waiver authority in this bill to proposals for much broader waivers in other safety-net programs. Reinstating the child welfare waiver authority will allow States to continue developing strategies to improve the lives of children and families, who are some of the most vulnerable in our midst.

I urge a ``yes'' vote on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

(Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I simply want to say again ``thank you'' to my colleague from Kentucky. This working relationship on behalf of children is one that has never gotten really political, and it is one of the nicest things about serving in Congress. So I appreciate having Geoff come on as the new chairman of the committee.

I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Lemanuel ``Lee'' Jones, who passed away on the 23rd of April after many years of remarkable service to his country and to other veterans. Lee Jones was born in Crockett, Texas, on September 24, 1942, and entered the U.S. Army in 1963.

He served in Vietnam as a sergeant and a squad leader with the First Cavalry Division in 1965 and 1966. He fought in multiple engagements in Vietnam with enemy forces, including the fierce battle of Ia Drang Valley, a battle that was recounted in the best-selling book and as well in a Hollywood movie, ``We Were Soldiers.'' Lee considered this battle to be the prime source of the PTSD that afflicted him for the rest of his life. Lee recently died of physical health problems connected to his service in Vietnam.

In recognition of his military service, he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and the Air Medal.

Upon leaving the military in 1966, Lee earned a B.A. in counseling from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He went on to serve veterans as a counselor at the Seattle Veterans Center created with other vet centers by an act of Congress in 1979. Lee soon was promoted to direct the vet center as a team leader, the first African American to achieve this position in the Western United States.

By 1984, Lee was increasingly aware of the cultural and communication barriers that prevented many African American veterans with PTSD from benefiting from therapy groups that were primarily composed of Caucasian members, so he started an African American veterans PTSD group that facilitated culturally sensitive and open communication, education, and therapeutic interactions among its members. Lee's efforts were recognized by the City of Seattle when Lemanuel Jones Day was proclaimed on November 9, 1989.

This PTSD group was such a success that it continued to meet at the vet center until Lee retired in 1995. The group then convinced Lee to return as a leader of the newly named African American stress disorders program at the VA Medical Center in Seattle, which continues to meet today.

From modest beginnings, this nationally unique program has grown to include hundreds of African American veterans. It has been of great benefit to veterans and to the community. None of this would have been possible without Lee's leadership, therapeutic skills, and compassion for fellow veterans.

I had the privilege of making Lee's acquaintance. In 2008, I asked him to share his experience and perspective on a panel at a veterans town hall meeting in Seattle. The purpose of the town hall was to increase awareness of the hidden injuries of PTSD and traumatic brain injury. It was also to honor soldiers and veterans and their families and to educate them on where they could get help.

The African American Veterans Group of Washington State, which Lee founded in 1984, is planning a community memorial service on May 28. I know there will be an outpouring of grief and appreciation for this soft-spoken hero. He touched so many lives with his healing skills and lessons of his great pain and sacrifice. Our country is a better place because of Lemanuel Jones.

Rest in peace.

Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to this underlying bill.

It reminds me, as I listen to this debate, of debates around the Vietnam War. I remember a village that was napalmed by a military unit, and the officer who had them do it, he was asked why he did it. He said, well, I destroyed it to save it. Now that's the argument we are hearing today on Medicare. We have to destroy it to save it.

Now ask yourself--and there are a lot of people watching, Madam Chairman. If I were sitting at home trying to figure out what's this all about, well, why would Representative Ryan suggest that a voucher system is the way to save Medicare because of the rising costs? Everyone knows that the costs of Medicare and medication and health care in this country are totally out of control.

Now, President Obama came up with a plan which he brought out here. It wasn't like he created something that nobody had ever thought about before in the whole United States. He looked at the State of Massachusetts. It's been a place where a lot of great things have come from. And he saw what Governor Romney, a Republican, a Republican thought that we ought to have a universal plan for Massachusetts, and so they passed the law and they covered everybody in Massachusetts.

Now, then came the question: Once you have got access for everybody, how do you control the costs? Well, then the problems developed. And the problem was they found in Massachusetts they didn't have enough primary care physicians. Now, what does that have to do with it? That's what this bill is about. This bill is about the training of primary care physicians.

What everybody in this country needs is a physician that knows them and is a medical home. When they get sick, they go to that person. The doctor knows them. If they need some preventive care, the doctor takes care of it. The doctor does it in a very cost efficient way, before the catastrophes.

Now, for the many people in this country who don't have a primary care physician, they sit at home and say, well, I've got to wait until I am really, really sick, and then they go to the emergency room. Now, if you have your blood pressure monitored and you take medication, you can live a long life; but if you don't, you are very likely to wind up with a stroke.

Now, we spend millions of dollars in hospitals on stroke victims that could have been prevented by good primary care. And we say to ourselves, well, why don't we have more primary care physicians? Well, because the health care system is designed to take care of people after the big event. After they have got the cancer, we will spend millions of dollars on cancer treatment. We will spend millions of dollars on heart problems, on all these things where prevention could have prevented it all and cost less. That's what every industrialized country in the world has done.

It's why the Swiss are able to provide universal coverage to everybody in Switzerland for a little over one half of what we spend in the United States. Because they provide good preventive care in the form of general practice, general medicine. That's true in England, in Norway, in Canada, in every other country except the United States, where we are dominated by specialists.

Now, in this country, if you get sick or you have a pain, if you don't have a primary care physician, a doctor who knows you, you call up your friends and you say, I've got a pain in my leg. What should I do? And they say, well, I saw an orthopedic surgeon, and his name is such, and so you go to a specialist. And that specialist looks at your leg. He doesn't look at all the rest of you. He doesn't know what's going on with you. He doesn't know your whole history.

When I started in medical school, the maxim we were taught at the very beginning was: Listen to the patient. He is telling you what's the matter with him. And everybody knows that doctors are running on a conveyor belt today, one right after another, no time to listen because we have not invested in primary care physicians.

Now, the average kid going to medical school would like to take care of people; but when he comes out, or she comes out, they are $250,000 in debt. This bill is making that problem worse and, therefore, is bad for Grandma and everybody else.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor Mr. Timothy Egan today because I, and countless other readers, have learned so much from his first-rate reporting and his terrific books. In well-deserved acknowledgement of Mr. Egan's ongoing contributions to our civic discourse and public understanding, the Rainier Club, one of Seattle's oldest urban institutions, has named Mr. Egan its ``Artist Laureate for 2011.''

Many in this chamber will recognize Mr. Egan's byline as the Northwest Correspondent of The New York Times. He is a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist whose insightful reporting and opinion pieces exemplify outstanding journalism. Even more remarkably, Mr. Egan's talents, and achievements, are not limited to newspaper reporting. Hardly. His six successful books include five works of non-fiction (The Good Rain, Breaking Blue, Lasso the Wind, The Worst Hard Time, and The Big Burn) as well as a novel (The Winemaker's Daughter).

Mr. Egan's books are great reads--his subjects range from the distinctive qualities of the Northwest region and an unsolved Spokane murder case to the powerful mythology of the American West and most recently, an early twentieth century wildfire that triggered permanent and far-reaching changes in land management policy and attitude. In 2006, Mr. Egan published perhaps his best-known book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, for which he received the National Book Award. This is a powerful account of a truly critical episode in our country's history. Mr. Egan details the almost incomprehensible hardships endured by those American families who fought to survive the Dust Bowl of the Thirties, and in so doing, he brings his subjects and their circumstances fully to life.

His newest book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, recounts the story of the devastating 1910 wildfire in the Rocky Mountain high country that claimed nearly 100 lives and changed forever our commitment to protect our public lands and their precious resources. His research is painstaking, and his commitment to the story unfaltering. Through his lens, we better understand ourselves and our relationship to the natural world.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding newspaper reporting and the National Book Award, Mr. Egan has twice received the Washington State Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award.

Mr. Speaker, on the occasion of the honoring of Tim Egan's lifetime achievements, the Rainier Club celebrates a son of Seattle who has reached millions with words of purpose and meaning. I extend to him my congratulations and my appreciation. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, in the recent months, taxes and spending have become a central topic in our national debate. How much federal income tax people pay and what those taxes pay for is not well understood by many Americans.

Very little information about how tax revenues are spent is ever made available to the American people. This results in significant misinformation. For example, a Washington Post and Kaiser Foundation poll found that by a margin of two to one, Americans believe that the federal government spends more on foreign aid than on either Social Security or Medicare. This is why I am reintroducing the Taxpayer Receipt Act of 2011. This bill requires the Secretary of the Treasury to provide each taxpayer with a simple annual statement explaining how his or her federal income tax dollars were spent.

In the previous session I introduced this bill to bring transparency to government spending. Today, in tandem with the President's launch of the official federal taxpayer receipt, I will reintroduce this legislation to require by law that this critical information be provided to the American people for years to come.

The taxpayer receipt act provides an unbiased objective receipt that details federal spending based on the same budget functions used in the appropriations process and rarely changed. This ensures accuracy and consistency from year to year, to ensure that the tax receipt is used to inform the American people objectively and not be used as a political document.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ``Information is the currency of democracy.'' To that end, providing Americans with information and transparency on government spending is essential to maintaining the strength and health of our democracy.

Mr. Speaker pro tempore, there's a joke going around in Congress: the difference between a Boy Scout troop and the House of Representatives is that a Boy Scout troop has adult leadership.

Now, I predicted a shutdown of this place more than a month ago, not because I'm some kind of prophet but because I saw the movie of the Gingrich shutdown in 1996. The same elements are here today that were there then. I don't want a shutdown. I know what it does. I think it's silly and stupid and hard on the American people and a lot of people are going to suffer, but the elements are there.

First of all, a number of Members came in new, a lot of them, who were absolutely sure that they knew what was right. Secondly, they had no experience in governing. They didn't understand compromise. ``Compromise'' was

a dirty word. It meant you give up your principles.

If you operate on that principle, you can never negotiate a settlement in anything. What they don't understand is that there is a time when you take what you can get and come back tomorrow.

Everybody who has been here for more than one term knows that nobody gets 100 percent of what they want. I have been here in this place for 23 years, and I have gotten 60 percent and I figure I'm a big winner. Now, you come back the next year for the rest. We're doing that on the health care bill. We're doing that on a whole lot of things. You do not get it all now by saying, It's my way or the highway. No, every battle is not to the death.

The only hope I had for us was that our leadership on the Republican side had been here in 1996. They saw what happened. And 2 years later the Republicans lost seats, 2 years after that they lost seats, and the Speaker, Gingrich, was gone, he's history, on the basis of coming in here and saying, My way or the highway.

Now, if you think this is the big battle, let me give you the real facts:

In 5 weeks we're going to come to the debt limit. If you think people who believe that their way is the right way are going to fight over what's going on right now, what is it going to be like when we get to the debt limit, or by September when we get to the next budget resolution? We could have three shutdowns this year with no problem at all if the leadership on the other side allows their Members to drive them into this craziness. They have to stand up and tell them, Look, guys, there is a tomorrow; all right? We're hurting people and they're going to remember. People are not going to forget what happens here. They didn't forget in 1998, and they didn't forget in 2000. They kept whacking away at the people who were in charge.

Now, what's it all about here? It's not about money. H.R. 1 was $101 billion. Okay. The President has come all the way to $71 billion or $73 billion. That's more than halfway. The Republicans won that issue. Take it. Take it.

No, no, they say, but we have to change social policy.

This is really about social policy. It's not about winning or cutting down the deficit or any of that stuff. It is just as it was in Wisconsin. It was not about the deficit in Wisconsin; it was about breaking unions. The judge said that. That's why he threw the law out, because, he said, you're taking away people's rights in unions; you're not here worrying about the deficit in Wisconsin.

Well, here the issue was NPR. Now, if we took NPR off the radio tomorrow morning, do you think the deficit would be one bit affected? Of course not. If we got rid of the EPA, would there be some effect on the deficit? No. In fact, the Senate, they took the EPA repeal off the table. They said, Look, rich people breathe the air; rich people drink the same water as everybody else in the country. That's a stupid public policy change. So we're not going to take that one.

What was left? Family planning, abortion, poor women. Now, there's a bunch that can't fight back. Let's go get 'em. Let's hold out and we will finally get the poor women in this country.

That's what this is about. It is not about balancing the budget. It is not about anything else except getting poor people.

Madam Speaker, the Republicans ran on a jobs agenda; but so far this Congress, they have not done one thing to help Americans find jobs. For 14 weeks, they have been running the House with not one mention of jobs.

The Republicans have put their budget proposal out now, and now we have their real agenda: a radically ideological plan to protect giveaways to corporations and to attack the elderly, the poor, women and children of the country. Reaganomics drove this country to the brink of bankruptcy in the 1980s. Reaganomics drove the world economy to the brink again in the Bush years, and now the Republicans are trying for a third time to impose their intolerance and everyone-for- themselves economics on the American people.

We need to be fiscally responsible. I think there are things moderate Republicans and Democrats can agree on, but the Republican plan is to dismantle the social safety net of this country.

This is a debate we should have.

Republicans often chuckle that winning at politics is worth the cost to their conscience of being straight with the public. I think we need to let citizens come to their own conclusions by giving them some facts. And here are some indisputable facts about the Republican budget plan:

First, the Republican budget has mostly fictitious numbers. The media has picked up on the Republican number of ``$6 trillion in savings'' like catnip, but the Republicans made up most of the numbers of the plan to get there. To create this big number, the Republicans ignored the Congressional Budget Office. That's quite a strategy. If the nonpartisan budget scorekeepers don't say what the Republicans want, the Republicans just ignore it and make up their own numbers.

Secondly, the Republicans' answer to the people in need is to dismantle Medicaid and leave health care for the poor to the States. The Republicans will drop millions of low-income people, children, seniors, disabled, and pregnant women off their rolls. Not only that, those patients that are left on the rolls will get a different kind of care from State to State, and some of that care is very bare bones. You shouldn't have to care about where you live if you are poor, elderly or a child in this country. There are some States that you don't want to live in.

Third, the Republican plan does nothing, not one thing, about the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks American people give corporations every single year. The Republican plan even cuts more for the superrich in this country.

Republicans say they don't like to pick winners and losers. But they pick winners and losers all the time when they give money to oil companies and Wall Street and then push the disabled people living in poverty off the Medicaid health insurance.

And the Republican Party does nothing, not one thing, about the defense budget. Iraq is winding down, Afghanistan is winding down, and Libya will be over shortly, but they don't take one thin dime out of the defense budget. They can't find anything to save anyplace.

Now, the American people need to know the facts. The fact is that if we restored the fair Clinton-era tax rates, what we had in effect before 2000, and kept all other spending at the same point, our deficit drops by two-thirds. That's where we are today. In 10 years, it drops by two-thirds. That's a simple plan that is very doable without destroying the safety net in this country, without going after all the poor and the dispossessed in this country.

We still have to work to lower the deficit even more. We need the right priorities. And the right priorities should be figuring out more ways to save on health care spending. We spend too much for too little results. If we don't deal with health care costs, this deficit is going to be very tough to deal with.

But the Republican plan is to demonize poor people and union workers. Take a good look at Wisconsin. You'd think all the problem in Wisconsin was because of school teachers. Now, that blaming everyone else for the economic disaster is simply to avoid the admission of what they have done. The Republicans take zero responsibility for their disastrous policies and then say the situation they created is the reason why we need to implement every form of their radically failed philosophy. It's cynical. It's ugly politics. And it's the Republican strategy.

Consider what they're doing to seniors. They're saying to seniors: Now you have a set of guaranteed benefits. We're going to take it away and give you a voucher. Go look for some health insurance. And good luck.

Mr. Speaker, the Affordable Care Act includes key provisions to increase availability of primary care doctors. For example, it will pay a 10 percent Medicare bonus, expand loan forgiveness programs and create flexibility within the National Health Service Corps. However, and underlying persistent problem exists in Medicare that must be corrected if we are to make primary care sustainable.

No single factor is driving the workforce crisis in medicine more than the income gap between certain procedure-heavy specialists and primary care/cognitive specialists. Last October the Wall Street Journal published an expose of the American Medical Association's Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee, also known as the ``RUC''.

For two decades the RUV, a specialist-dominated panel, has encouraged national health care reimbursement policies that financially undervalue the essential and complex work of primary care providers and cognitive specialists, while favoring sometimes unnecessarily complex, costly and excessive specialty medical services. This imbalance drives results down for patients and drives medical costs even higher.

The RUC's votes are not open to the public, yet Medicare has mostly rubber-stamped the RUC's recommendations over 90 percent of the time. Since the creation of the RUC in 1991, the income disparity between primary care versus procedure-heavy specialists has exploded.

Today, I'm introducing a bill called the, ``Medicare Physician Payment Transparency and Assessment Act of 2011'' that will put a transparent light on the way CMS identifies and values health care services. My bill would add public and transparent data collected from independent analysts to compare to the RUC's recommendations. It would also use independent analytic contractors to conduct surveys and collect data for physician services paid under Medicare and to annually identify services that may be over or under-valued.

I am proud to note that this bill is endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Society of General Internal Medicine.

It's time we let taxpayers, the citizens who pay the bills for Medicare, see for themselves how Medicare decides how much to pay doctors and for what.

Madam Speaker, the Republican follies go on. The Republicans have done nothing in their 13

weeks in charge of this House to help Americans get jobs, nothing to open markets for businesses to expand, nothing to open up markets overseas for American workers and businesses to compete more fairly. While they hold the economy hostage to their cultural war agenda, maybe we could do something to help the American people.

I rise today in support of the effort to defeat the previous question so that we can take a first step toward addressing the egregious imbalance between China's currency and our own. For too long, the Chinese have been playing unfairly in the international trade arena, and this Congress has to send a clear message that China must become a responsible player in multilateral trade. The Chinese export-driven strategy is smart, but subsidizing it by suppressing their currency is an unfair way to do it.

This effort is a good step, and we should follow up by working together with our trading partners to bring a multilateral WTO case against China on the currency issue. This commonsense legislation helps the Commerce Department do a fairer job for making the multilateral mechanisms more available to U.S. businesses. We must send a clear signal with this legislation that the American people respect international agreements and expect fairness.

After years of an unlevel playing field, it is time to act; and this motion to defeat it and bring it to the floor is the right kind of measured first step we can take now. I hope the Republicans will join us in helping this economy. I am tired of reading the Constitution and all the silly things we have done for the last 13 weeks. When are we going to see anything having to do with job creation?

Mr. Speaker, today, I reintroduced legislation that would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to grant State waivers from certain Federal requirements under the foster care and adoption programs, so States can test innovative strategies to serve children better. Representative Geoff Davis (R-KY) is an original cosponsor of the bill. The legislation is identical to the bill I introduced in September 2010, which passed the House last fall by voice vote. Child welfare waivers will allow interested States to test interventions that help children and families, but they are only a first step toward the comprehensive child welfare financing reform that began with the Fostering Connections Act of 2008. Additional resources and improvements are needed to ensure we provide critical services to all children and families at risk.

I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to achieve this important goal.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that there should be a family doctor for every American family. That shouldn't be hard in the richest country in the world, but it's not a reality for too many Americans. There is nothing worse than having to worry about how you are going to pay for something that you absolutely need like health care.

That is why for the past century, leaders from Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton to President Obama have tried to advance varying forms of comprehensive health care reform. At every opportunity conservatives have warned that ensuring comprehensive care would be the end of freedom and usher in a new era of socialism. Despite this alarmism, Medicare passed in 1965 and thank God for that. Seniors and others such as people suffering from diseases like End Stage Renal Disease have a low cost way of accessing high quality of care.

With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last year, the promise of more access and fairer rules are being realized for all Americans. We have more to do, though. There has been a lot of attention made towards the supposed lack of flexibility in the ACA. States argue, correctly in my view, that they are in the best position to evaluate and address the specific needs of their communities. The ACA gives states a great deal of flexibility, but some states believe they can build on it to do even more to expand access, lower costs and raise the quality of health care. For example, in Vermont, there is a grassroots movement that has swept into the State House to move the State of Vermont towards a single payer system.

The people in Vermont are fed up with insurance companies and want more progress. They think it's ridiculous and shameful for insurance companies to post their highest profit margins ever this year while also charging higher premiums to consumers.

The American Health Security Act I am introducing today would give states the ability to increase quality and get control of costs by taking out the profiteering middle-man--insurance companies--and letting doctors focus on what they do best: treat patients. I believe this bill builds on the ACA by offering states an excellent option in moving our country towards a health care system that finally puts the patient first.

Mr. Speaker, today is St. Patrick's Day--a day that is universally associated with good luck. Calling on my Irish heritage, I would like to convey continued good luck to the University of Washington men's basketball team. This past weekend they won the Pac-10 Championship and tomorrow they seek to continue their run in the NCAA tournament when they open against the University of Georgia.

Good luck and go Dawgs.

Madam Speaker, I am here to report that the Republican follies continue today.

Today, we were scheduled to debate the Republicans' proposal to terminate the President's foreclosure prevention program called HAMP. But late last night, the Republican leadership decided to postpone debate until after returning from the recess.

As the country faces a number of problems, including a serious housing crisis, the House Republican leadership decided that today wasn't the best time to terminate a program that has helped more than half a million homeowners stay in their homes.

See, tomorrow, the House will close up shop until March 28, and Republicans recognize that killing a foreclosure prevention program today would be bad politics. It would force Republican Members to go home and defend this feckless move for 10 straight days--to defend ending a foreclosure prevention program face to face with the people they represent, many of whom are struggling right now to keep their mortgage and keep their home. But, after the 10-day recess, when House Republicans come back out of the sight of their constituents, they'll move forward with their plans to end the home loan modification program.

This kind of leadership is disgraceful. American homeowners are struggling. Nearly 7 million homeowners are facing foreclosure in this country. One in every four houses are owned by people who owe more than the house is worth. Nearly half a million homeowners have been able to stay in their homes because of the Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. Ending that program will undoubtedly kick families out of their homes. That's something the Republicans realized they didn't want to do before a 10-day recess.

I'll be the first to admit the Affordable Modification Program is not perfect. So let's fix it or replace it with something better. However, I have yet to see a legitimate alternative from House Republicans. They just want to cut, cut, cut, cut. Cutting deficits is important, but the Republicans' policies and scheduling gimmicks indicate that they don't really care about the American people.

Every Republican Member should watch the ``60 Minutes'' special, entitled, ``Hard Times Generation.'' It aired two Sundays ago, on March 6. The special focused on families that were homeowners and part of the middle class before the 2007 recession started. Now hundreds of thousands of those American people are homeless and hungry for the first time in their lives. The children of one former home-owning family described what it was like to live in their parents' van. Before school, they'd go to a Walmart bathroom to brush their teeth, wash their faces, and get cleaned up to go to school. The kids and their parents are now living in a motel room, the whole family of six, which is, quote, ``better than the van,'' although it's small.

Is this the America that Republicans want our children to grow up in? Are Republicans really comfortable killing a program that has prevented 500,000 people from moving out of their house and living in their car? Clearly, my Republican colleagues need a wake-up call today, and I am here to help. Watch that ``60 Minutes'' special.

I've made it easier for you to watch the ``60 Minutes'' segment. All you have to do is go to my Web site, mcdermott.house.gov, then click on the very first slide in the slideshow that says, ``60 Minutes Special: Poverty.'' If you see that, click on it and you can watch what's going on.

And when my colleagues, Madam Speaker, are back in their districts over the 10-day recess after they've watched this, then they should meet with some of these people and see what their thoughts are about ending the program and doing nothing to help American families. If they still believe that they should simply do away with the modification program, my belief is they have forgotten why they were elected and who they represent.

The housing program that we will debate after the 10-day recess has saved the homes of over half a million people, or 500,000 families. It's far from perfect, but we need to focus on improving it or replacing it with something better, not just killing it.

How many more kids have to take their morning bath in the Walmart bathroom or the Exxon gasoline bathroom before we begin to help the homeowners who were caught in the debacle from Wall Street from which not one person has gone to prison or served one single day?

Mr. Speaker, 4 days ago, a huge earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. I was sort of surprised last night when we came in and there was no resolution recognizing the problems of the Japanese people and the terror and the difficulties they are dealing with at this time. So I want to come today to rise in support of them as they cope with this tremendous tragedy and the challenges that both the earthquake and the tsunami have created for them.

For the last 10 years or so, I have been the chair of the Japanese American exchange between the Diet and the Congress, and I've gotten to know many Japanese members of the Diet very well. I was a member of this commission some years ago when Kobe had a huge earthquake and devastation that took a hundred billion dollars to recover from.

So I was sort of brought up short by what happened when I saw it on television, and thought of my friends. And I immediately started trying to call them. I couldn't find them. I only this morning got in touch with a friend of mine named Matsuda San. We've been friends for a long time. In fact, I have been to his home a very few miles from Sendai City, where the earthquake--the center of this whole event was. He's well. His family is well. He said his friends are also safe and his house is still standing. So for many people, they have escaped the terror of this. But there are thousands and thousands of people who are struggling with this.

The Japanese people have shown a resilience that is amazing. When the government said there's going to be rolling blackouts in Tokyo, we need to conserve electricity, the Japanese conserved electricity so quickly that they didn't have the rolling blackouts. That's how they came together in the interest of the common good in Japan.

Washington State, where I come from, has the third largest Japanese population in the United States. Only California and Hawaii have more. As I said, we have a sister city with Kobe. When that hit, it was shock for everyone in Seattle because we also live on the ring of fire around the Pacific Ocean that we've seen strike so recently not only in Japan, but in New Zealand. Sometimes you can't believe that you live in a place like that; you know it can happen any time, but you still go on with your life, sort of denying that it's real.

After the Japanese earthquake in Kobe some years ago, there was a lot of criticism of the government: you didn't plan enough. Well, they have been planning for this for the last 10 years. But nobody can plan for an 8.9 Richter scale earthquake. That's just too much. I think that it is important to remember the Japanese are not just good allies. They're good friends. To many of us, they are brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers. Some of them are among my very best friends.

This tragedy, as it continues to unfold, just think of what life is like for those people who are alive and under the rubble, or the homeless. Imagine, you have a life; it's a nice life. You're working, going to school, you're kids are growing up. And, suddenly, you have no food, no heat, no water, and you're in the freezing cold.

The United States has responded. We have had military bases in Japan for a long time. Luckily, they were close by so they could immediately move some of the aircraft carriers and other ships in to deliver relief aid. It is at that time when you realize--in fact, their government has actually realized--that fighting about some of the things politically they fight about are not so important. What is really important is the basics of life being provided to everyone in the country.

This is a national disaster that has been complicated by another factor that we have to consider in the United States, and that's the whole question of nuclear power and what happens to nuclear power plants. We have nuclear power plants in this country that are sitting near earthquake zones. So this is not something that we can say, Well, that's over there in Japan; that's 9,000 miles and 12 hours away.

That is, in fact, very near to us here in this country. For the Japanese, the threat of nuclear contamination, of radiation, is a special horror because they suffered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the only use of nuclear weapons--and the fallout that followed that. Today, millions of Japanese are still trying to absorb what they are seeing and are valiantly fighting to control the damage.

Our thoughts and prayers go to the Japanese people.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to pay special tribute to my friend, the late Judge Douglas Luna. Judge Luna was born in 1944 in Seattle, Washington, where he grew up in the Central District.

Doug Luna served honorably with the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War, assigned to Da Nang until the late 1960s. After returning from his distinguished military service, he completed law school and served as the Deputy Corporate Administrator for The Boeing Company's Small and Minority Business Program. Doug loved the law; he became an administrative law judge for the Washington State Department of Employment Security, and also served as a review judge for the Department of Social and Health Services.

Among Doug Luna's many lasting achievements is the judicial structure he helped to create for Alaska's Tlingit-Haida Tribe. The Tribe was part of his heritage, and he was proud to serve as an elected judge on the Tribal Court for nearly twenty years. Judge

Luna later served on the Washington State Minority and Justice Commission, an agency charged with determining if racial or ethnic bias exists in the courts of the State of Washington. He was a Eucharistic minister at Immaculate Conception Church and also was active with Saint Matthew's Church.

Throughout his life, Doug Luna was deeply involved in the Native American and Asian communities--in addition to his Tlingit heritage, Doug also shared Filipino heritage. He was a founding member of the Asian American Bar Association, and volunteered with the Seattle Indian Center, the InterIm Community Development Association, the International District Housing Alliance, and the Filipino American National Historical Society. Doug was the volunteer every organization dreams of: he was smart, dedicated, absolutely reliable, and a pleasure to be with.

Doug Luna championed the poor and the underrepresented throughout his life. His efforts to better his community were limitless, and he brought to his work a gentle spirit that touched hundreds of lives. Doug will be long remembered for his kindness, his generosity, and his unwavering integrity. He was a proud and loving father to his daughter, Mercedes, and I join her and so many others in mourning the loss of this extraordinary friend. It was a privilege to know Doug Luna.