Floor Statements

I want to congratulate you on your election as the president of the Democratic '06 class. You are doing great so far.

I want to follow-up on your opening comments on the heels of the prior group that was here that seemed to suggest that freshmen were being suppressed in the opening 100 hours of the 110th Congress. As we all know, nothing would be further from the truth.

Our level of participation in the floor debate and in the design of this agenda could not have been more robust and full from the beginning of the process to the end.

Where we, I think, learned our information about the content of that agenda was on the campaign trail talking to the people in our district. These are ideas that have been out there for a long time. If anything has been suppressed or held back, in fact, it was the 100 hours agenda, not the process or the new Members of Congress that are again beginning our time here in the House.

As an undergraduate in Boston, I used to walk by Powder House Square in Cambridge past the home of Tip O'Neill who at that time was Speaker of this body, the predecessor of the gentleman in the chair. He was a wonderful man. He is certainly not maybe the typical blow-dried politician of the 21st century but he had a street wisdom that I think still resonates to this day. Of course, he coined the most famous phrase, which is that all politics is local. I was asked by a local reporter about where does this 100 hours agenda fit into the district. When are you guys going to start dealing with the Second Congressional District where I come from, eastern Connecticut.

The fact of the matter is if you go down this list of the 100 hours agenda, you can find exactly where in eastern Connecticut it matters, starting with homeland security. In my district, we have the Port of New London. We have more of Long Island Sound than any other congressional district in Connecticut. There are thousands of container cargo ships that every month pass up and down the Race in Long Island Sound. Today we have a situation where only a tiny fraction of those containers have been screened before they have reached that point. This is a large population center in our country. Yet despite the fact that the 9/11 Commission recommendations were out there telling us that we need to go a safer direction in terms of screening that cargo, it wasn't done by the prior Congress.

Secondly, the commission recommended that we would have funding based on need, not politics. It was one of the recommendations that the Chairs of the commission in their fifth year anniversary of 9/11 pointed to as the biggest failing of the prior Congress. Yet in the State of the Connecticut where we received almost $60 million funding in homeland security funding 3 years ago, it had dropped to $15 million last year, leaving first responders high and dry in terms of the investment that they were trying to make in communications equipment and systems that would actually protect the people of our area. New York and the World Trade Center is not very far from my district. We lost people in the Second Congressional District on 9/11 and H.R. 1 right out of the box did everything in the world for my local community, my district, in terms of making us safer and stronger as a district and as a State.

In terms of student loans, my district is the home of the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University, three community colleges, Mitchell College, Conn College. As Mr. Wilson indicated, this bill will literally make a difference between whether or not students go to college and stay in college or not. It is as simple as that. There was probably no other decision of the 109th Congress that was more out of touch than the decision to cut by $12 billion aid for student loans. What we did a couple of days ago was take a big step in terms of reversing that damage to the system.

On the Education and Labor Committee on which I sit with Congresswoman Hirono from Hawaii, we are going to follow up on that down payment to address Pell Grants, to revise the reauthorization of the Higher Ed Act to make sure that we build a system that will create a workforce for the 21st century.

Those are just two small examples where we kept faith with the voters. And with Speaker O'Neill's famous words about all politics is local, I think our class was a big part of that process over the last week. It has been terrific working with all of you and I think it is going to be a great time ahead of us in the 110th Congress.

Madam Speaker, H.R. 5, introduced by Mr. Miller in the opening hours of this Congress, begins the critical work we must do as a Nation to build an economy that is based on an educated workforce.

Make no mistake about it. The economic health of our country will turn on whether or not our children have the educational tools to compete and succeed. And make no mistake about it, all the present trends in access to higher education point to danger.

The bipartisan National Conference on State Legislatures issued a report last month which described higher education in America as a system in crisis, largely due to the Federal Government's declining commitment to keeping higher education affordable.

Coming from a congressional district that is home to the University of Connecticut, this finding comes as no shock. Students and their families all testify to the same grim condition: tuition has gone up 41 percent since 2001, college costs have gone up faster than health care over the last 25 years, and in Connecticut, college is increasingly becoming the sole province of the well-to-do.

According to the Hartford Current, 58 percent of Connecticut's young people from the top income tier are in school, and only 16 percent in the lowest are enrolled. Students are leaving college burdened with record levels of debt, and many are forced to leave early because of economic hardship.

Even though all these disturbing trends are occurring, the last Congress did the unthinkable. It cut $12 billion of Federal assistance for college loans, pushing up the rate of interest for students. No other budget decision of the last Congress demonstrated how disconnected its priorities were than this cut, which hurt not only just students but America's future.

H.R. 5 will begin to repair the damage of the 109th Congress' harmful cuts to student hopes and America's economic future. It will reduce the rates of student loans by 50 percent over a 5-year period, and it will do it in a fiscally responsible manner with offsets, not an increase in the deficit.

Chairman Miller deserves great credit for H.R. 5 and represents a down payment on the efforts of the Education and Workforce Committee to strengthen, and not weaken, our economic future.

Mr. Speaker, in 1991, as chairman of the Connecticut House Human Services Committee, I brought out to the floor of the Connecticut Assembly legislation which created a manufacturer's rebate for the State's Medicaid and Connpace prescription drug programs that provide coverage to seniors. The rebate gave the State an 11 percent discount off the average wholesale price of medications purchased by Connecticut. At the time we heard all the same arguments in opposition that are being used today, that rebates were price controls, they stifle R&D, that the State would be left with a restrictive formulary denying needed medications for the elderly. We went ahead and passed that bill, and I can say with pride today that this measure has saved Connecticut taxpayers tens of millions of dollars yearly and resulted in no, I repeat no, harm to Connecticut's seniors or the State's pharmaceutical industry.

I point this history out not to pat myself on the back, although I am proud of that legislation, but rather to confirm that H.R. 4's plan for price negotiations is not just a theory but, rather, legislation that is grounded in real life, empirical, successful experience.

For those of us who have fought this battle at the State level, this debate is like Yogi Berra's ``deja vu all over again.'' For the fiscal health of Medicare and for the physical health of our seniors, let's vote for H.R. 4.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in full support of the civility provisions offered in part today as one of the new rules of the 110th Congress. I applaud the new Democratic leadership for offering this reform package, because our country needs a fair and functioning Congress if we are ever going to meet these huge challenges that we face as a Nation.

When my constituents in Connecticut's Second District voted for change, they knew to create that change. We need a legislative body that allows real debate and discussion, not a rush to judgment that deprives our democracy of good ideas. To achieve that goal, this rule will curb past abuses of this Chamber's processes.

This rule will prohibit votes being held open for the sole purpose of affecting the outcome, a practice that in the past damaged the public's confidence in laws passed by this institution. It will reform the conference committee process, a reform that will give all Members, the press and the American people, the opportunity to understand the content of legislation at its most critical moment, right before passage.

Mr. Speaker, the Gallup poll that came out recently December 19 ranked the Congress' performance that only 20 percent of the American people rated it good. It is time to fix the broken branch by adopting these rules.