John Campbell

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Trish Kelley, Mayor of the City of Mission Viejo, on her outstanding service to our community and to congratulate Mayor Kelley on her retirement.

Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Kelley has been a leading advocate in preserving and enhancing public safety, transportation, and quality of life of the Mission Viejo's residents.

Because of Mayor Kelley's leadership, Mission Viejo has received recognition as the safest city in California each year since she was first elected.

She has implemented and advanced transportation and infrastructure programs that have lowered traffic collisions and enabled safer travel for residents.

Furthermore, Mayor Kelley led efforts to establish the City as a Community of Character, developing a youth education program that won national recognition for promising practices by the Character Education Partnership.

Mayor Kelley's volunteerism, vision, and commitment to excellence has created a sense of pride for the City of Mission Viejo as a premier city of Orange County.

I wish Mayor Kelley the very best in her retirement and I thank her for the extraordinary legacy she is leaving behind; a true inspiration for future generations.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4809) to reauthorize the Defense Production Act, to improve the Defense Production Act Committee, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and submit extraneous material on H.R. 4809, as amended, the bill currently under consideration.

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

This bill today, H.R. 4809, is a bill to reauthorize the Defense Production Act. Simply put, the Defense Production Act is a bill that is intended to minimize distortions to the economy when it is necessary for the government to take action to aid speedy recovery from large natural or man-made disasters or to protect our servicemen and -women during combat situations. The underlying legislation was used in the recoveries from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and used to get new body armor in a hurry for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan when supplies ran dangerously low.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean war was when Congress first enacted the Defense Production Act, DPA, granting the President broad powers to access prompt, adequate, and uninterrupted supplies of industrial resources to satisfy national security needs. During that war, the DPA was used to establish a robust national defense infrastructure which later provided the U.S. strength in the ensuing cold war.

Since then, the DPA has been used only sparingly. In recent years, Congress expanded the Executive's use of the DPA to include the protection of critical infrastructure and needs arising from civil emergencies, such as

hurricanes, in addition to its defense purposes. When it was enacted, the DPA consisted of seven titles, including some controversial wage and price controls. As the Korean war wound down, four of those titles were allowed to expire. The remainder of the law, the remaining three titles, have operated effectively and without much controversy since.

There are three remaining titles. First, title I, which grants the President authority to meet urgent defense or disaster recovery requirements. This authority essentially allows the government to move to the head of a company's production and delivery schedule and indemnifies that company against breach of contract lawsuits by nongovernment entities.

Title III authorizes the President to use loans, purchase commitments, and grants to encourage contractors to establish or expand industrial capacity and produce items that are essential to the national defense that must be domestically produced but are otherwise not economically attractive enough to have a domestic producer. These programs are usually small, typically less than $15 million, and in the history of the DPA, going back to the Korean war, only three have exceeded $50 million, each of which was specifically authorized by Congress.

Title VII authorizes the President to provide antitrust exemptions for voluntary agreements and joint activities among private entities intended to address production and distribution problems that might impair defense preparedness.

While the first two titles and the rest of title VII expire at the end of September, title VII also contains the authorization of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which scrutinizes the foreign direct investments process, to ensure that they do not threaten national security. That authority does not sunset. It did not before, and it does not in this reauthorization.

Mr. Speaker, the bill before us reauthorizes the DPA for 5 years and reinstates some modest reforms, the reforms that were in place prior, adds back the guidelines for the use of title III that clarified that title III must be the most cost-effective solution to the defense industrial base shortfall, and it has a requirement for a separate congressional authorization for projects greater than $50 million. As I just described, all previous projects greater than $50 million since the Korean war have all received congressional reauthorization, so this really is not changing what has been existing practice.

The reforms also stipulate that the use of title III may only be approved by the President and makes some changes to improve the effectiveness of an interagency coordinating committee on the uses of the DPA.

Mr. Speaker, this bill preserves the vital and important authorities of the DPA while preventing any abuse or perception of misuse. It passed the Financial Services Committee in June by voice vote. I would urge immediate passage of this bill and its commonsense reforms.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

First of all, let me thank the gentleman from Colorado and my friends on the other side of the aisle for their work on and support of this Defense Production Act, for which I will call the vote in just a moment.

But as to comments that my friend from Colorado made, first of all, I think he knows I agree with him on Export-Import Bank and on terrorism risk insurance, so you are not going to have any debate from me there.

Clearly later this week, the action to sue the President will come on the floor. There will be plenty of time to debate on that.

Just one comment I would like to make. You mentioned bipartisanship, and I agree with you, there is not enough around here and there needs to be. In the end, you can never move the country forward sustainably without getting something that has support on both sides. So I agree on that.

But when I first got here almost 10 years ago, George W. Bush was President, and I saw a number of your colleagues, the Democrats, had a button that said ``article I.'' I am like, what is that? They said: Well, this is to show that we, Congress, are article I in the Constitution, the executive branch is article II, and we believe that President George W. Bush is treading upon the rights enumerated in the Constitution that rightly belong to the first branch of government, Congress.

Now, we, Republicans, believe that the current President, President Obama, is doing the same thing.

Here is a place where I think maybe we can have some bipartisanship at some point. When George W. Bush was President you thought he went too far. Many of us probably did too, but didn't say so because of sort of party loyalty. Now we believe this President is going too far. I would wager to guess that some of your side believe that too but aren't saying so because of party loyalty.

At some point, Republicans and Democrats in this institution, in this body, need to protect its constitutional responsibilities.

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

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

I thank the gentleman from Colorado.

I understand the point. Some individual Members, I believe, did introduce--the House didn't per se--but did introduce some charges, if you will, against President Bush.

The point I am simply trying to make is, each side of the aisle has felt that the rights under the Constitution of this institution have been trodden upon by a President of the other side of the aisle. What the right response to that is and what the right remedy to that is we can debate. I am retiring at the end of this year, so I am leaving all of this for you all. But as we grow the executive branch, as we add more departments, and we add more things, we continue to concentrate power there and take it away from here.

This place, for all its faults and foibles, and it has plenty of them, it is accountable to the people. It is accountable to the people in a way that the executive branch can't ever be. That is why we on a bipartisan basis, if it is not with this President then with the next one, we need to start clawing some of those rights and responsibilities back to article I of the Constitution.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank again the cooperation and involvement of my friends on the other side of the aisle for the Defense Production Act, and I would ask for its passage.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1944, the Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2013. Unfortunately, I was delayed in returning to Washington and, regrettably, but want to take this opportunity to note its importance.

When we hear the words ``eminent domain,'' we often visualize the government taking a home, an office building, or a piece of land, often for a highway or some other public infrastructure. But my colleague Mr. Sensenbrenner articulated well in his remarks that the powers of eminent domain are sometimes used for very different purposes.

One abuse of eminent domain that I have long been publicly against is the use of eminent domain to seize mortgage notes from investors, using the courts to unilaterally restructure the terms of those loans before selling them to other investors. In this scheme, some private investors have their investments seized and incur losses while other private investors benefit. Many of the investors who will incur losses are the savers and retirees who own them through their 401(k), IRA, or pension accounts. But ultimately, this is a blatant abrogation of private property rights and undermines longstanding contract law. As a response, I have introduced H.R. 2733, which prohibits Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration from making, purchasing, or guaranteeing loans in areas where eminent domain is being used to seize mortgage notes. This legislation is also included in the Protecting American Taxpayers and Homeowners (PATH) Act.

I believe that property rights, whether real property or the financial instruments that finance them, should be protected. Doing so will give certainty to the housing finance system, which is necessary to transition from a system dominated by government-guaranteed mortgages to one based on private capital.

The Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2013 is not the only legislation to address the issue of abusive eminent domain practices. Section 407 of the Consolidated Appropriation Act of 2014, Pub. L. No. 113-76, prohibits the expenditure of federal funds to support activities that utilize eminent domain powers, unless it's exclusively for a public purpose. The schemes being considered call for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to guarantee the seized and restructured mortgage loans. Given that some private investors and their paid intermediaries stand to benefit, it is apparent that FHA is unable to participate in these restructuring programs, so long as eminent domain powers are used. With this provision signed into law just last month, Congress and the President have already begun to define the limits of acceptable usage of eminent domain.

I thank Mr. Sensenbrenner for his important work on this issue.