Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose the previous question and to urge support of the Democracy for All Amendment that we intend to offer if the question is defeated.

The last thing Congress needs is more special interest candidates who don't answer to the American people. The Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon have opened the floodgates of unlimited spending on campaigns.

Protections against special-interest influence on our elections have steadily eroded, along with public confidence in government. The result is campaigns dominated not by ideas, thoughtful debates, or visions for the future, but by television ads, mostly negative and mostly funded by unaccountable outside groups.

In my State of Kentucky, Mitch McConnell and his special interest allies have spent more than $8 million, running nearly 26,000 TV ads in our Commonwealth. The vast majority are from outside groups attacking Mr. McConnell's opponents. Many bend the truth and intentionally mislead Kentuckians, which is a lot easier to get away with if the attacker isn't accountable to voters.

Under our current political system, these groups are allowed massive influence over our campaigns, much more than any average citizen or group of citizens could ever exert.

It is system riddled with loopholes, lacking meaningful disclosure, and more awash in corporate influence than ever.

In Kentucky, Mr. McConnell's race is expected to cost $100 million. That would pay the annual salaries of about 2,000 public schoolteachers in our Commonwealth. While Senator McConnell and other supporters of the Citizens United decision call this ``freedom of speech,'' it is actually the freedom to deceive. To be fair, dishonest ads are coming from both sides by both parties. These are ads made possible by Citizens United, and if The Washington Post Fact Checker actually had to present real Pinocchios for all of the dishonest ads made possible by Citizens United, Geppetto would be the busiest man in America.

That is why we need to pass the Democracy for All amendment--to put a stop to this runaway special interest spending on campaigns and to return Congress to the people it was meant to serve.

Mr. Speaker, my home State of Kentucky has been a national model for how the Affordable Care Act can succeed. Through Kynect, our State exchange, more than 413,000 Kentuckians have gotten health insurance, nearly 310,000 of them for the first time.

These two maps show how health reform has reduced the rate of the uninsured in the Commonwealth's 120 counties. The orange and red in the top map show counties with pre-Affordable Care Act uninsured rates of 14 percent to more than 20 percent. Some of the most impoverished areas, such as eastern Kentucky, also had the highest uninsured rates.

The bottom map shows Kentucky today under the health care law. Only one county still has an uninsured rate

of more than 14 percent. In three counties in the heart of Appalachia, the uninsured rate plummeted from more than 20 percent to less than 5 percent, as shown in blue.

Mr. Speaker, overall, in just 6 months, the Affordable Care Act reduced the total number of uninsured Kentuckians by nearly a half. Behind every number, behind every red county turned blue or green are the stories of a person or family getting the health care they need. That is success by any standard, but most importantly, Kentucky standards.

Madam Speaker, today, some of my colleagues from across the aisle unveiled their proposal to address poverty in America. It is ironic because, tomorrow, they will vote to push 6 million children deeper into poverty by excluding their low-income families from the child tax credit.

I just wish they would explain what they will do differently from their current budget, which is a hard-hearted and direct attack on the poor.

Two-thirds of the cuts in the Republican budget come from our social safety net, including Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and education. Their budget ends the Medicare guarantee and raises prescription drug costs for seniors.

It raids Pell grants, raises the already overwhelming cost of college, and slashes investments in jobs to rebuild our national infrastructure, and it does this to cut taxes by one-third for the well-off and well-connected, while continuing to reward companies that ship our jobs overseas.

Madam Speaker, cutting services for low-income Americans, blocking a livable wage, and increasing health care costs isn't a path to prosperity. It is a promise of poverty.

If we expect to have any hope of reducing poverty in generations to come, we need a strong safety net today, and we need to invest in quality education and good jobs to create opportunities for the future. Democrats promise to do that.

Madam Speaker, Republicans talk a lot about the need for the Federal Government to provide businesses with certainty so they can plan for the future. I agree with them. So why do they continue to block a long-range plan to fix our crumbling roads and bridges?

Across the country, one of every nine bridges is structurally deficient, and the American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave our national infrastructure a grade of D-plus. In my district alone, 129 bridges have been deemed functionally obsolete, and 65 are structurally deficient. Every American who drives a car, rides a train, or crosses a bridge knows we need to act.

Our national infrastructure was once the envy of the world. In a lot of communities today, it is an embarrassment. A strong, long-term investment in infrastructure provides States, cities, and businesses the certainty they need for the future. It will keep Americans safe and help commerce move more efficiently, and it will put tens of thousands of workers back on the job.

Madam Speaker, we should take this opportunity to create jobs and certainty for a change and enact a multiyear transportation bill.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday's deadly shooting at Reynolds High School in Oregon was the 74th school shooting in America since the gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

That is nearly one school shooting per week. More than half have occurred at K-12 schools. These shootings are becoming so frequent that one company saw a business opportunity and is marketing bulletproof blankets to elementary schools.

The congressional response to the senseless loss of our children, educators, friends, and neighbors to gun violence has been silence-- moments of silence on this floor, amplified only by the cowardice from those in this body who refuse to stand up for basic public safety.

Mr. Speaker, 86 Americans lose their lives to guns every day, and Americans are 20 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than people in the rest of the developed world.

The American people want us to act. Ninety-two percent support expanded background checks to close loopholes in the law and help ensure dangerous people can't get guns.

Mr. Speaker, enough with the moments of silence. It is time for a moment of action from Congress to prevent gun violence.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and fellow captain for yielding.

I want to congratulate the Republican team on their victory. It was well earned. It was a thumping. As Rahm Emanuel once said of the 2006 election: we got thumped. Elections have consequences, and I hope that we can use this public embarrassment to shame some of my colleagues, who do play golf, into participating next year because we have some talent on the sidelines that we would like to get in the fray.

The victory was well earned, and as my colleague said, the true winners are the children of America who benefit from this great program. There are more than 200 chapters of The First Tee around the country, so virtually every Member has a First Tee chapter in their district.

I hope that they will continue to support The First Tee program for the values it instills in our young people.

With that, once again, congratulations to the Republican team.

Mr. Speaker, Kentucky has been a national model for the Affordable Care Act. In the first 6

months of Kentucky Kynect, the State exchange created by the law, we enrolled nearly 415,000 Kentuckians in new health coverage.

That is one in 10 Kentuckians and nearly half our previously uninsured population; but rather than help inform his constituents of life-saving options now available to them, Senator Mitch McConnell has spent the past 4 years working to repeal that coverage while misleading Kentuckians about the law.

Now, he is suggesting Kynect's overwhelming success can remain, even if he succeeds in repealing the law that created it. That couldn't be more disconnected from the truth.

If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, more than 300,000 Kentuckians covered through the law's expansion of Medicaid would lose their coverage. Insurers would no longer be required to cover preexisting conditions, and private plans through Kynect would become unaffordable for most Kentucky families.

Mr. Speaker, health reform has been so successful in Kentucky that Mitch McConnell now says we should keep Kynect, but his claim that we can keep Kynect and still repeal the Affordable Care Act is as absurd as it is disingenuous, and our constituents deserve to know that.

Mr. Speaker, it has now been more than 4 months since Congress let emergency unemployment insurance expire. In that time, more than 2.8 million job seekers, including 200,000 veterans, have lost the ability to provide for their families. Another 72,000 Americans are losing critical unemployment benefits every week.

Let's be clear: these are people actively looking for work who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Both are requirements for receiving

unemployment insurance. But by failing to extend emergency insurance, we are creating a new disaster on top of the hardships already facing millions of American families, and we are damaging our economy.

During just the first week that emergency unemployment insurance expired, our economy took a $400 million hit. Failure to extend that insurance could cost us 240,000 jobs this year due to lost buying power, exacerbating the difficulty for current job seekers and adding more to their ranks.

Mr. Speaker, this is not smart policy. It is coldhearted and shortsighted, and I urge my colleagues to join me in demanding a vote to extend emergency unemployment insurance today.

Madam Speaker, budgets don't heal the sick or solve centuries-long medical challenges, but the programs budgets prioritize can.

In my district in Louisville, Kentucky, medical researchers at the University of Louisville and the Frazier Rehab Institute have made an incredible breakthrough. Thanks to an electronic implant that stimulates the spinal cord, four paralyzed men are now moving their legs on command. With continued therapy, they are confident they will walk again.

The Human Locomotor Research Center in Louisville is funded in part through investments made by the National Institutes of Health. More than 80 percent of NIH funding goes to the broader research community, fueling the innovation that makes breakthroughs like those in Louisville possible.

The Republican budget reduces the number of new NIH grants by 1,400, on top of hundreds of projects NIH has already had to turn down because of last year's reckless, across-the-board spending cuts.

Madam Speaker, when you see a man paralyzed for years lift his legs, you can't help but share in the enthusiasm for breaking boundaries we once thought impassible. But if we approve this Republican budget and these cuts, we extinguish that enthusiasm and the hopes of millions of families waiting for the next medical breakthrough.

Mr. Chair, budgets are a reflection of our values, they are a statement of our priorities, and they are about the choices we make to set the course for our future.

With this budget, Republicans are choosing the well-off and well- connected over middle class families, choosing, for instance, $45 billion in tax subsidies for oil companies whose own executives say they don't need it over veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who are out of work.

They choose a new average tax cut of $200,000 per millionaire per year over 170,000 of our Nation's most vulnerable children who would lose Head Start services.

Mr. Chair, we just finished with March Madness, and I am very proud of the University of Kentucky Wildcats. They had a great season. But isn't one of the cruel ironies of this debate, Coach Calipari of the University of Kentucky, who makes $5 million a year, roughly, under the Republican budget would get an additional tax cut of $700,000 a year, while the students who support his program would see their Pell grants slashed nationwide by a total of $145 billion over 10 years. Isn't that something? A man who makes $5 million coaching basketball gets a $700,000 tax break, while the students who were suffering and working hard to pay their way through college get slashed. This is one of the choices the budgets are about. This is why the Republican budget is totally out of step with American values. This is why we should reject the Republican budget.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

I yield the gentleman an additional minute.

Mr. Speaker, may inquire how much time we have?

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

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

One of the interesting elements of this debate is, and I think it is pretty clear that we have not a total disagreement of opinion on the two sides, we both want the same objective, which is a fair and honest accounting of what programs cost the taxpayer or how they may benefit the taxpayer.

We do know that it is pretty generally agreed that by moving toward the fair accounting method, the fair value method, that we would be creating a higher cost, or at least the budget would indicate a higher cost for many of the loan programs that we have been talking about. But we don't know exactly what the ultimate impact would be and which method would be more accurate.

But we don't know exactly what the ultimate impact would be and which method would be more accurate.

OMB does not support this proposal. OMB says it has a hard time figuring out how it could assess market-based value, so we don't have total disagreement here.

We are in search of the same objective; but there is another element of this that I think we have to consider, in that, when we compare loan programs in the private sector to loan programs from the government, we are not always comparing apples and apples. We are comparing two very different motivations.

In the private sector, when a financial institution makes a loan, its entire objective is to create return for its investors and stockholders. The loan is essentially isolated in purpose. You advance funds, you expect a return, and that is the ultimate objective.

When the government creates a loan program, it is not just to make money for the government. In fact, that is often not even considered. What we are trying to do in many cases is to create an additional outcome--an ancillary outcome that is the primary objective of the program.

For instance, with student loans, we are trying to create more college graduates throughout this country. Understanding that the more college graduates we have, from a strictly financial standpoint, the Treasury will benefit because people will be earning higher incomes and paying higher tax rates.

When we are talking about housing programs, we are looking at things like the VA--the VA housing program. We are trying to find a way to help veterans, many of whom come back from deployments disoriented, dislocated, and without any way to find housing. We are trying to create programs that will help repay our obligations to our veterans.

There are many other areas. We have an advanced vehicle manufacturing loan program. I know about this program very well because it was part of that loan program that resulted in a $600 million investment in the Louisville assembly plant in my district in Kentucky and now has added more than 3,000 new employees in my district.

So the objective there was not necessarily--as a matter of fact, it wasn't at all to make money for the government. It was to help stimulate the production of energy-efficient appliances and to promote advanced technologies throughout our vehicle sector.

So, again, just to say because there is an associated risk that is recognized in the private sector by financial institutions does not imply that we should necessarily say that that same risk is equally important in the Federal budgeting process because, again, we have essentially ulterior motives in virtually every loan program that we have.

So we understand, again, as the ranking member Mr. Van Hollen of Maryland said: We do want transparency; we want to make sure that the American people know exactly what the programs cost.

Probably, more importantly, internally, we need to know what these programs cost because we have to make policy decisions as to whether they are benefiting the country as a whole, benefiting the taxpayers, and benefiting the Treasury.

The question is, without the kind of analysis that the ranking member suggested, what we actually determined through hearings and discussions, what the cost of the student loan program would be, how many students we potentially are cutting out of the student loan program, what we might be doing

in the energy sector by imposing higher costs through the budgeting process and, therefore, a lower participation rate through the actual program, whether we are actually damaging the economy and the budget in different ways, not just on the direct costs versus benefits of the actual loan program; so these are some of the considerations.

This is why we say this is a bill that is not ready for prime time, and we think that we could be spending a better time in this body on more important measures to help the American people.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate Chairman Ryan's comments and agree with many of them.

I think one of the points that is important to consider here though is, while he mentions one case involving FHA, there are a number of loan programs throughout the government which don't necessarily fall into that same category; and many of them are very, very critical to our Nation.

If you talk about water supply loans, water system loans, there are many loan programs that affect rural America. In addition to the student loans, we have, again, the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program.

There are many across the board, and what this legislation would do would essentially treat them all as exactly the same, and we know that that is not necessarily necessary.

Under the TARP program--TARP was actually accounted for in the budget using the fair value standard that is proposed in this legislation, so we actually have a history of treating some loan programs differently than others.

What we would say is: Why don't we take the time to have hearings on this proposal to actually consider the impact of an across-the-board standard on a variety of different kinds of loan programs? This is why we keep saying this is a bill that is not ready for prime time.

There may be a considerable amount of merit in applying this accounting standard to some of the loan programs in the Federal portfolio, but that doesn't mean it is appropriate or helpful in assessing the impact on every loan program.

Furthermore, what we do know about virtually every analysis is that using the market-based risk analysis that Mr. Garrett's bill proposes would, under our budgeting rules, do two things.

One, it would add to the cost of virtually every loan program. There certainly is no instance in which his analysis would say a loan program would cost any less, and what that would also do is create a misleading picture of how much that loan program actually ends up costing the taxpayers on a cash basis.

Just because there is an intangible risk factor attached to a loan program in the budget does not mean that that will ultimately be realized, and, in fact, we may never understand if it is realized by the taxpayers.

So for all of these reasons, again, we would oppose the legislation and not because we think it is a horrible idea. We just think it is an idea that has not been vetted nearly sufficiently enough and could have a serious detrimental impact on many very, very important loan programs that benefit the American people.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is correct, but not in a totally accurate way. We have had a hearing about budget processes in which this was discussed. We have not had a hearing dedicated solely to this legislation in which we could actually flesh out the impact on these various loan programs that I mentioned.

So in conclusion, I think, to kind of summarize where we are, this proposal may be a perfectly appropriate proposal. We wish that we could have more time and more analysis to determine whether we do more damage than good.

We both seek to have the most accurate budgeting process and the most accurate process for assessing the value of important government loan programs. That is a shared goal of both Republicans and Democrats.

We think that this bill is not effectively and sufficiently fleshed out to make that kind of determination at this point. We think there are far more important things that this body ought to be dealing with, including raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, working on developing infrastructure for this country, as we all know is critically needed, all of those things that would help stimulate the economy and create jobs.

For all of these reasons that I have mentioned and my ranking member, Mr. Van Hollen, mentioned, we oppose this legislation and urge a vote ``no.''

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, there is only one way to finish a season on a 20-game winning streak, and Louisville's Butler High School Bearettes girls' basketball team just did it, taking the Kentucky State championship and cementing the school's legacy as a powerhouse in our Commonwealth.

With a deep 10-player rotation that had perfected its stifling press by tournament time, the Bearettes used defensive pressure to drive their offense, romping through the Sweet 16 on the play of outstanding underclassmen and the steadying hand of senior Danielle Lawrence. In the championship game, the second-ranked Bearettes shut down top-ranked Elizabethtown High School, relentlessly dismantling the E-town offense and holding their opponent scoreless in the final 5 minutes and 27 seconds.

A great defense wins championships, the saying goes, but it also helps create unbreakable bonds among teammates. This team truly functioned as a unit, both on and off the court, maintaining a cumulative 3.7 GPA in the classroom while taking the Louisville Invitational Tournament championship earlier this year and adding the school's fourth State title last month.

Madam Speaker, I am proud to congratulate Coach Larry Just and the Butler High School girls' basketball team on an amazing championship season.

Go, Bearettes.

Madam Speaker, during the past 40 years, we have made tremendous progress in America technologically, medically, socially, and--for many of our citizens--economically, but not if you are a family trying to get by on the minimum wage.

In real value, today's Federal minimum wage is about 30 percent below the days when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and Cannonade won the Kentucky Derby.

As American productivity has surged, the economic status of the American worker has weakened and, along with it, the capacity of American consumers to continue driving our economy.

Even Walmart executives have admitted an obvious cause and effect. When their employees can't afford to shop in their stores, profits will suffer.

Madam Speaker, a fair minimum wage has the power to make work pay a little better, to give families a shot at a stronger future, and to grow our economy substantially.

It is a corrective to obscene corporate welfare, whereby American taxpayers must support low wage workers when their employers don't.

It reaffirms the basic American idea that, if you put in 40 hours a week, you should be able to put food on your family's table every day.

Thank you, Mr. Holt, for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, this bottle is filled with water from a well near a mountaintop removal mining site in eastern Kentucky. In case you can't see it, the water is orange.

This is what comes out of the taps in Appalachian communities where the water is contaminated by dangerous mine waste, which fills their wells and flows through the streams in their yards.

It is the result of an inadequate law that is failing to protect public health and safety near mountaintop removal mining sites; but today, rather than examining ways to strengthen that law and begin to address the public health crisis that accompanies mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, we are debating a bill that would make it worse.

Mining communities already have more instances of chronic pulmonary disorders and hypertension, as well as higher mortality rates, lung cancer rates, and instances of chronic heart, kidney, and lung disease. Proximity to mountaintop removal mining operations also correlates with a higher risk of birth defects and damage to the circulatory and central nervous systems.

Yet, instead of finding ways to better balance public health and safety with coal mining--or at least working to prevent mining companies from turning our water supply this shade of toxic orange, we are debating a bill to roll back what little protection the Federal Government currently offers these Appalachian communities.

I sympathize with my colleagues' desire to protect jobs in the coal fields, and the loss of 75 percent of eastern Kentucky coal mining jobs due to mechanized mining over the past several decades has brought challenges; but a rule to protect waterways that has been in effect since 1983 is not the source of those challenges, nor is addressing the public health crisis that has unfolded in Appalachia as a result of mechanized mining.

No one here would risk their health by drinking this water. If any of my colleagues want to prove me wrong, I invite them to come have a sip.

It is bad enough that children who live in mining communities color their streams orange when they draw their environment, but it is tragic that the water they drink is denying them the healthy future they deserve.

We are risking the health of families in mining communities in Kentucky and throughout Appalachia by continuing to ignore the toxic orange water that pollutes their drinking supply.

I urge my colleagues to stand up for public health and vote against this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, during rollcall 50 on final passage of H.R. 3694, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Deliver Act, my vote was incorrectly recorded as ``yes.'' I intended to vote ``no.''