Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for his courtesy.

Facts are really kind of difficult if you have to deal with them. The gentleman just spoke about a sad case of an individual that wasn't able to go on a trip because of the high price of gasoline. He may want to tell that individual that the oil industry, on average, over the last several months, has exported over 24 million gallons of gasoline a day, 24 million gallons of gasoline a day, exported from the United States. Maybe that has something to do with the high prices.

But a few other facts. As of March of 2011, onshore, the Department of the Interior offered, between 2009 and 2011, 6 million acres of land for leasing. The oil industry only took 4 million acres. As of that time, March 2011, 38 million acres of land were under lease. 25 million acres of land were inactive. A full 65 percent of the available leased land already in the hands of the oil industry was inactive, not explored, not being produced. 65 percent unused, inactive.

Offshore, 37 million acres were under lease. 2.4 million acres were active. 70 percent not being used.

So why are we here opening more land? There's a reason for it. There is a reason why the oil industry wants to do this. If they are able to acquire a lease, they put it on their books as an asset, thereby giving the appearance that they have a lot of assets available to them, when, in fact, they have no intention to, in the near term, probably the next decade or so, actually explore and produce. It is a financial game. It is not a game of producing oil.

Now, if we really wanted to do something, we would immediately put in place a production tax credit for the wind turbine industry, which is languishing now because we are refusing, Republicans, in this case, refusing to put forth a renewal of the production tax so that the wind industry can actually continue to produce energy for our Nation.

So what does it mean?

There are some 70,000 jobs in the wind industry today. Some 17,000 more would immediately go into place if the production tax credit were in this bill and became law.

What does it mean?

If we were to enact my bill, H.R. 487, those wind turbines would be manufactured in the United States, and thousands more jobs.

The bottom line of this: this is simply a play by the oil industry to gather more assets on their balance sheet, at the expense of the environment and, just as important, at the expense of a real, all of the above energy policy.

It's a sad day that we're here debating an energy bill that really doesn't do anything at all to help us meet the energy needs of this Nation. There's nothing in this about renewables. It's unfortunate.

Mr. Speaker, last Thursday, the 2,000th U.S. military servicemember was killed in Operation Enduring Freedom. I send my deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of each individual who has been killed since this war began more than a decade ago. Those losses are a cause for sadness beyond what I can adequately convey in my words. Having just celebrated Father's Day with my daughters and son, I reflect on the fact that each fallen soldier was the child of some parent. Many were husbands and wives, and many were parents themselves.

We are a Nation at war. Yet the burden of this war has been primarily borne by a very few, by our military servicemembers and their families. Less than 1 percent of the United States population is in the armed services. Many Americans were not aware of last week's tragic milestone, or perhaps they may have glanced at the fatality count in their local paper and then they went about their daily events. This is a war that, for many, goes on in the background while most Americans carry on their daily lives.

It's imperative that we stop and think deeply about the human cost of this war. We must read the names of those who have been killed, look at their pictures, and imagine the grief of those who have been left behind. We must also think about those who have been wounded. Every day outside this Chamber, we see yet one more military man or woman who has lost a limb, who has been harmed. They are in our military hospitals now, their futures uncertain. We must think about those servicemembers whose lives have been so shattered by the experience of war that they cannot continue living. More servicemembers took their lives in this year than were killed in combat in Afghanistan. Only when we feel those losses can we fully comprehend the cost of this war.

Recently, this House passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act that I opposed but the majority pushed forward, a bill that has no meaningful timeline for ending combat operations and bringing our troops home, no concrete plans for transitioning full responsibility for Afghanistan security to Afghan forces. Most Republican supporters of the National Defense Authorization Act would slow down the withdrawal of our troops. They would have American troops continue to fight against a domestic insurgency in Afghanistan, and they would have American troops fighting for the corrupt Karzai government.

As Members of Congress, we're responsible for authorizing the funds that sustain this war. If we believe this war should continue, we should say that this war is absolutely essential to our Nation's security. This war is not.

Can we look into the eyes of the mother or father of a serviceman who has been killed and say your child died for a mission that's absolutely essential to our Nation's security? I can't do that, and I believe most of us cannot. I believe it is time for the war in Afghanistan to come to an end. Our troops and their families have given enough. We should welcome them home as heroes, and we should ensure that they receive the support and care that is due when they return.

We sent our brave servicemen and -women to Afghanistan to eliminate international terrorist organizations that threaten the United States. As President Obama said last month, our goal is to destroy al Qaeda. Our troops have successfully executed this mission with phenomenal dedication and capacity. We have virtually eliminated al Qaeda from Afghanistan. No expert says that there's more than 100 there, and they have no meaningful operation. They have demonstrated that we can take terrorists out wherever they are in this world. We have captured and killed most all of al Qaeda's top commanders. One year ago, we celebrated the historic moment when Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind, was killed. He met his just end.

The cost of this war in blood and treasure has been staggering. Even those who have not given their lives have given of their lives. It's time for this war to end. The loyalty and dedication of our servicemembers, our most sacred resource, must be conserved. We must not squander it. End this war now.

Mr. Speaker, last Thursday, the 2,000th U.S. military service member was killed in Operation Enduring Freedom. I send my deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of each of the individuals who have been killed since we began this war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. These losses are a cause for sadness beyond what I can adequately convey in words. Having just celebrating Father's day with my daughters and son, I reflect on the fact that each fallen soldier was the child of some parent. Many were husbands and wives, and many were parents themselves.

We are a nation at war. Yet the burden of this war has been primarily borne by the few--by our military servicemembers and their families. Less than 1% of the U.S. population serves in the armed forces. Many Americans were not aware of last week's tragic milestone, or perhaps glanced at the fatality count in their local paper and continued with their day. This is a war that, for many, goes on in the background while they carry on with their daily lives.

It is imperative that we stop and think deeply about the human costs of this war. We must read the names of those who have been killed, look at their pictures, and imagine the grief of those they left behind. We must think also about those who have been wounded, who are right now in our military hospitals with uncertain futures. Every day outside this Chamber, we see yet one more soldier who has lost a limb. And we must think about those servicemembers whose lives were so shattered by the experiences of war that they could not continue living. More servicemembers took their own lives this year than were killed in combat in Afghanistan. Only when we feel these losses can we fully comprehend the costs of this war.

Recently, this House passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a provision inserted by the majority that would continue this war indefinitely. I opposed this bill. This majority bill has no meaningful timeline for ending combat operations and bringing our troops home. It has not concrete plans for quickly transitioning full responsibility for Afghanistan's security to Afghan forces. The majority has pushed to slow down the withdrawal of U.S. forces. They would have American troops continue fighting against a domestic insurgency in Afghanistan and striving to defeat those armed factions that threaten the corrupt Karzai government.

As Members of Congress, we are responsible for authorizing the funds that would sustain this war. If we believe this war should continue, we affirm that this war is essential to our national security. It is not. We should be able to look into the eyes of a mother or father of a service member has been killed and say, ``Your child died in a war that is absolutely necessary to keep our country safe.'' I cannot do that, and I believe most of us cannot. It is time for the war in Afghanistan to come to an end. Our troops and their families have given enough. We should welcome them back as heroes and ensure that they receive the support and care that is their due when they return.

We sent our brave service men and women to Afghanistan to eliminate those international terrorist organizations that threatened the United States. As President Obama stated very clearly last month, ``Our goal is to destroy Al Qaeda.'' Our troops have successfully executed this mission with phenomenal dedication and capacity. They have virtually eliminated Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, as our intelligence experts report that fewer than 100 Al Qaeda operatives remain in the country. They have demolished terrorist training camps, and captured or killed most of Al Qaeda's top commanders. One year ago we all celebrated the historic moment when Osama Bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind who bears responsibility for the death of thousands of innocent American civilians, met his just end.

The costs of this war, in blood and treasure, have been staggering. Even those who have not given their lives have given of their lives, missing time with loved ones at home while they serve our country abroad. The loyalty and dedication of our military servicemembers is America's most sacred resource, and we must not squander it. They have achieved the core national security objectives for which they were sent to Afghanistan. It is now time for our troops to come home to their families.

I want to thank the gentleman from Minnesota for yielding time for me to discuss this.

During this approximately 1 hour of debate, it pays to listen to what has actually been said. What has been said by my Republican colleagues is: It's our way or no highway. We're going to have our way or no highway.

What is their way? What is it that the Republicans are demanding? Get past the nice rhetoric, and look at the detail underlying the words: eliminate duplication. What does that mean? Well, it basically means eliminating the environmental laws. Oh, we don't need them. The States can take care of it.

I think not.

They want to focus on highways. Well, we all do; but what does that mean? It means that they want to eliminate the public transportation portion of this legislation. Okay. So no buses, no trains, no light rail funding. Get into the details about what is actually being demanded by our Republican

colleagues, and you begin to say, Well, wait a minute. I think we can understand why there has not been progress here.

We need to really move forward. Some 60,000 construction workers have lost their jobs in the last 5 months. As our Republican colleagues have laid out their demands, which they have essentially said are nonnegotiable--their way or no highway--they're holding this country hostage. They're holding the construction industry hostage so that they can have their way. Understand what their way means: no public transportation programs. Oh, we'll repair bridges and we'll do highways--and that's good--but there's more to it than this: no bike paths, no safety for men and women who are walking along our highways.

That's their way. That's not what America's way needs to be.

We need to pass a bill. Two million people want to go to work. Yes, they agree with Mr. Walz' proposal, which is to get this thing done. What they're really saying is: Get it done our way or there will be no highway. The Senate has passed a bill, and 74 Democrats and Republicans agreed to it. Let's get it done.

If you can get it your way in the next 3 days, fine. Otherwise, give us the Senate bill, and let's put men and women to work here in this country. We cannot afford any more layoffs in the construction industry. We can no longer afford to wait. A 2-year bill is essential.

Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for this opportunity.

We have been engaged for this last hour in a discussion about what to do with one of the most important parts of America's public agenda, which is the transportation systems of this Nation.

We've heard a lot of back-and-forth. We actually heard that there was some agreement that we ought to get on with it. Indeed, we ought to get on with it. We ought to get a transportation bill before the American public, and we ought to get it to the President. Unfortunately, there is a gridlock and a deadlock. Behind all of the gentle rhetoric on the floor this evening, there are some profound differences in how we move forward with the transportation bill. We'll discuss some of those as we journey through this 1 hour or some portion of this 1 hour.

I think I would like to start maybe more than 200 years ago. There is a lot of discussion that we often hear here on the floor and in the rhetoric across the Nation that the Founding Fathers would do it this way or that way, and if we only listened to the Founding Fathers most of our problems would be resolved. Usually, those discussions really speak to not doing something. It turns out that the Founding Fathers really did have a great deal of wisdom.

I came across a book written by Mr. Thom Hartmann called ``Rebooting the American Dream.'' And in it, in his very first chapter, he goes back to the Founding Fathers, and he talks about what George Washington and George Washington's Secretary of Treasury actually did. On the day he was inaugurated, Mr. Washington said that he did not want to wear a suit made in England. He wanted to wear something made in America. Well, Make It in America is one of the principal things that my colleagues and I on the Democratic side have been talking about for some time.

So when I came across this book, I said, Wow, this is interesting. George Washington instructed his Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to develop a manufacturing program for the United States; and Alexander Hamilton did that. He didn't do it in 2,000 or 3,000 pages, as we might do it today. He did it in just a short, maybe 20 or 30 pages. And he developed an 11-point plan for America's manufacturers. It turns out that many of those 11 points are what we have been proposing on the Democratic side here for our Make It in America agenda.

But tonight I want to pick up one of those 11 points. And it happens to be the 11th of the 11 points that Alexander Hamilton presented to George Washington in 1790, and it was on American manufacturers. So point No. 11: ``Facilitating of the transportation of commodities.'' The language is rather ancient English, but it still speaks to the following:

Improvements favoring this object intimately concern all

the domestic interests of a community; but they may without

impropriety be mentioned as having an important relation to

manufacturers. There is perhaps scarcely anything, which has

been better calculated to assist the manufacturers of Great

Britain, than the meliorations of the public roads of that

kingdom, and the great progress which has been of late made

in opening canals. Of the former, the United States stands

much in need.

He goes on to talk about the necessity for transportation here and copying what had gone on in Great Britain, that is, the development of public roads.

Then he says:

The following remarks are sufficiently judicious and

pertinent to deserve a literal quotation: Good roads, canals,

and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage,

put the remote parts of a country more nearly upon a level

with those in the neighborhood of a town. They are upon that

account, the greatest of all improvements.

So here we are in Mr. Hartmann's book, ``Rebooting the American Dream,'' talking about what the

Founding Fathers wanted to do in 1790. I would also point out that by 1792 nearly all of those 11 points had become law and laid the foundation for the great American industrial revolution.

So back to ``infrastructure,'' the word we use today. We use infrastructure when we talk about our highways, our canals, our roads, and our transportation systems. There were, in fact, some public transportation systems at that time.

Now, speaking specifically of roads and jobs, we often talk about jobs here. We need to understand that today, if we were to pass the Senate version of the public transportation bill, we would put 2 million unemployed construction workers back to work this year. This year, 2 million would go back to work if we were to take up the Senate bill. Unfortunately, we have been in a gridlock, and there has been no effort to compromise.

My colleagues on the Republican side are demanding fundamental changes in the transportation systems and the way in which we apportion that money. Those changes have not been acceptable to the Senate; and, indeed, those changes were not acceptable to even their own caucus. The Republican Caucus was unable to reach agreement--they have more than enough votes to pass a bill out of this House--but they could not reach agreement among themselves, let alone with the Senate. And yet they are demanding that the Senate take up what they could not agree to.

On our side, we have simply said, let's go with the Senate bill. After all, 74 Senators--both Democrats and Republicans--voted for it, leaving some 26 that chose not to support it.

So 2 million Americans are waiting for action by the House of Representatives and the Senate; 2 million Americans want to go to work. And yet we have this deadlock. We just found some support amongst ourselves to tell the conferees, Get it done by the end of this week or take up the Senate bill.

Listening carefully to what we heard on the floor not more than an hour ago, compromise is not going to be found. Keystone pipeline. No public transportation funding. Eliminate the environmental protections that have been in place for more than 40 years. Streamline, meaning ``eliminate'' programs. So compromise is not there.

What has happened over the last several months? Well, while our Republican colleagues have been trying to get their own act together, here is what's happened to employment in the construction industry: way back in January, some 5,570,000 Americans were working in the highway construction and public transportation and construction sector. In May, that number had fallen to 5,510,000. Some 60,000 Americans lost their jobs while the Republicans were trying to figure out how they could come to an agreement with themselves on a transportation bill. They couldn't. So 60,000 Americans, 60,000 families lost their ability to earn a living as the majority in this House failed to even agree amongst themselves on what to do.

The Senate moved forward with a bill. It's been there nearly 2 months, before this House, available. A conference committee was formed, and gridlock continues. So now there are 60,000 families without an income as a result of the gridlock and the inability of our colleagues to come to an agreement.

It's time for us to move on. It's time for us to put a 2-year bill in place, as the Senate has proposed, one that would put 2 million Americans back to work immediately. States could move forward. States would know that over the next 2 years, there would be funding from the Federal Government. Right now, the word from my friends on the other side of the aisle is, Well, we're going to go with the 60-day extension. States cannot work with that. They don't know what would be available at the end of the 60 days. They don't know what's available today because we're up against a deadline.

It's time for us to move with the Senate bill. It's time for us to end this continuing decline. This is May. If we were to take the June figures--which are now, unfortunately, coming forward--more and more construction workers have lost their jobs. They are in my district.

Contractors in my district are saying, There is no further contract available to us. We won't be able to put our people to work. We don't have a contract. The States can't offer new contracts. So it won't be just 60,000. At the end of June, it will probably be 70,000 or 75,000, or perhaps more, that have lost their jobs as this gridlock continues here in the House of Representatives. We can do better.

How important is this to the economy? It's very important to the economy and not just the construction workers, not just their families, the 2 million that could go to work if we accepted the Senate bill. And it's a good bill. It provides adequate funding for transportation, for repairing the bridges that we heard so much discussion of, for paving the roads that we heard so much discussion of just less than an hour ago, of providing the money for the public transportation sector so that the buses, the trains, the planes can continue to operate. It's a good bill, but not perfect, not as large as many would want. It doesn't have the Keystone pipeline in it. It doesn't eviscerate the environmental protections that are necessary as we build these projects.

So what would happen if we were to accept the Senate bill? End the gridlock, put 2 million American workers back to work, end the decline. For every dollar we invest in infrastructure--that's the highway bill and the transportation bill--$1.57 is pumped into the American economy. That comes from Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody Analytics. Spend a dollar on transportation and you increase the GDP; you increase the economic activity of this Nation by $1.57.

So there's more than just transportation at stake here. What is at stake here, as we see, is the continuing decline of the transportation and construction sector as a result of the gridlock that's been with us nearly this entire year. What is at stake is the growth of the American economy. It's the grocery store that will have a customer coming in and not spending an unemployment check but, rather, spending a check that's given to them by the contractor. And that money circulates in the economy so that the hair dresser, the barber, maybe even the gun shop owner will see their business increase 57 percent. For every dollar spent, $1.57 is generated in the economy, putting other people to work beyond the construction industry.

Now, there's more to it than that. One of the provisions that we would like to see in the bill, which actually is in the Senate bill, is a tightening of the waivers that have been so injurious to the American economy, the waivers that have been overused in the last two decades, waivers that push aside the Buy America provisions that we presently have in the law, push those aside and say, We don't care whether that money is spent on American-made equipment. We don't care whether that money is spent on jobs in America. Just pushing aside the Buy America provisions.

The Senate bill has a very important provision that will create even more jobs in America because it tightens up the waiver provisions and says to the Department of Transportation, no, you cannot just willy- nilly provide a waiver. You must adhere to the law that says Buy America: a 60 percent minimum American content in the steel in the bridge that's going to be repaired, in the asphalt and concrete that's going to be laid over the roads. Minimum of 60 percent content on the buses and the trains that are going to be paid for with your tax dollars.

What that means is: Make It in America. That provision that is in the Senate bill will enhance American manufacturing by limiting the waivers that have been so numerous over the last two decades as to hollow out the American manufacturing sector. Manufacturing matters. This is the American middle class. The construction industry and the manufacturing industry is the heart and the soul and the foundation of America's middle class. And so in the Senate bill it tightens up the waiver provisions and says that Americans will have the jobs, not some foreign employee of a company that has gained the contract.

I want to give you a specific example. In California, the largest public works project ever is the reconstruction and

the rebuilding of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, a new bridge, billions of dollars. The steel in that bridge was made in China. Six thousand jobs in China, no jobs in America. It's said to be 10 percent cheaper. It turned out that at the outset, the Chinese steel manufacturers could not produce the steel. But they got the contract and what they did was to figure out how to produce the steel. They built a new steel mill. Six thousand jobs. In America, no. In China, yes.

It turned out that the steel was not 10 percent cheaper. It was shoddy. The welds were not adequate. They had to go back. Delays occurred. It turned out to be even more expensive. Had that occurred in America, that new steel mill would have been built in America, and it would be there for the next contract, the next bridge to be built in America, or around the world. But, oh, no, we're going to save 10 percent. We lost American jobs.

If the Senate bill were to come to this floor and become law, the waiver that was allowed and given to the State of California, a waiver that allowed the Chinese steel company to have the contract, would not have been allowed. Six thousand jobs would have been in America, and we would once again make it in America and Americans would make it. But, oh, no, it didn't happen. Manufacturing matters.

I would like to see another provision in the bill, but I won't demand this and my Democratic colleagues who support this are not going to demand it because we want to get on with providing those 2 million jobs for American workers in the construction industry. But let me take a moment to explain what it is.

This is a bill that I introduced at the beginning of last year. It's H.R. 613. And what it says is that our tax money, the money that is being spent by every American when they buy a gallon of gasoline or a gallon of diesel, that that money goes into the highway trust fund. And H.R. 613 says it must be spent on American-made equipment. Highways. This is the steel that's in the bridges. This is the rebar that's in the roads. This is the concrete, the asphalt--American made.

If you want to build a high-speed rail, as we do in California, then that high-speed rail is going to be financed with your tax dollars, and it will be an American-made high-speed rail train. You want a train? You want to improve your transit system? It will be American made. Is it possible? Does this work? Let me give you have an example.

In the American Recovery Act, sometimes known as the stimulus bill, there is a provision for Amtrak trains. Upgrade the Amtrak system. I think it was a little over $12 billion. Some wise staffer wrote next to that $12 billion a sentence that said: This money must be spent on American-made equipment.

One hundred percent American-made equipment. Oh, you can't do that. Well, it turns out that you can do that. A German company, one of the largest industrial companies in the world, looked at it and said, $12 billion? We can build it in America. And they did. They built a manufacturing plant in Sacramento, California; and they are producing 100 percent American-made locomotives because the law said that it must be done.

H.R. 613 says precisely that. If you want the tax money, then it must be American-made equipment. Use our tax dollars to create American-made jobs, not steel made in China, not trains made in Germany, not locomotives from Japan. It's our tax money. It will be spent on American-made equipment.

That's what this does. And we have the proof that it can be done. It's being done today in Sacramento, California, by Siemens, a German company that built a manufacturing plant to take advantage of money that was available if the product was made in America.

Another sad example, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, BART, needs to replace its 40-year-old trains, $3.2 billion. The minimum in the law today is 60 percent. The bids went out. Two bidders were in the finals. One, a French company, Alsthom; another, a Canadian company, Bombardier. Bombardier's bid was 2 3 percent lower than Alsthom's. However, there was a significant difference. Bombardier said we will build 66 percent American content. Alsthom, the French company, said we can do better. A little bit higher price, but we can do better. We will build 95 percent American content. The difference: $1 billion in American jobs. Sixty-six percent/95 percent; a 2 percent, 3 percent difference in price.

The BART board of directors refused to go back to a second bidding process that would have taken 60 or 90 days. Alsthom said we'll cut our price. We want these jobs in America. It turns out most would be in New York, not California. We want these jobs in America. Go back to another round of bidding, and we'll get out a sharp pencil and we'll come down. The BART board of directors let that opportunity for a billion dollars in jobs go by.

Many of us believe that Alsthom would have matched or even outperformed the Bombardier bid. Or maybe Bombardier would come back and say, okay, we'll go to 95 percent. We don't know. We'll never know. But what we do know is that a billion dollars of American jobs were lost.

So now, as we continue to debate and dally and let time go by, as American jobs, as American workers in the construction industry see the continued decline month by month in the number of men and women that are employed, as layoffs continue--between January and May, more than 60,000 construction workers in the United States have lost their jobs while we continue to fight over issues here.

But the fundamental issue is the issue of jobs. You can talk about the Keystone pipeline, and there are jobs there. And maybe some day that pipeline will be built.

You can talk about the environmental processes that have protected the environment of this Nation for the last 40 years, and maybe there ought to be some adjustments there.

You can talk about giving States the power which basically means there is no money set aside for public transportation. We can talk about those things. But as we wrestle back and forth on what one or another of us think is so critically important, every day another construction worker has lost their job. Another family has lost their opportunity to make the payment on their home. Another community has seen the economy in their area diminish.

We have a reasonably good bill available to us and we could vote on it tomorrow. That's the Senate bill. It protects American jobs. It protects the public transportation system. It is fully funded, not with some hypothetical money that may come in some day, but rather real dollars. It says that our tax dollars must be spent on American-made equipment, on American jobs. It's a good bill.

We had a motion to instruct here on the floor just a few moments ago. And as you listened to the debate, you'd think there was agreement. And there is agreement--we've got to get this job done. We have to put Americans back to work. Two million Americans await our decision. Are we going to continue to fight for some perceived issue that is important to a small group of people? Or are we going to look at the larger picture here, the picture of American workers, of American jobs.

I suppose tomorrow we'll take up that motion to instruct and we'll see if by the end of this week we're willing to compromise. Are we willing to put Americans back to work, 2 million Americans? Or are we going to hold fast to perhaps a funding scheme that has been proposed and can't even be agreed to by the members of the Republican caucus, or an elimination of certain categories of funding like public transportation which couldn't even be agreed to by the Republican caucus, let alone the Democrats.

It's time to look at the bigger picture. It's time to look at that construction worker in our community, the ones we represent and say I want you to go back to work. We'll fight this out another day. But the most fundamental, the most important issue confronting this American economy and each and every individual in America is, where are the jobs? Where is my job? How can I support my family?

It's time to put the bickering aside. It's time to accept the fact that Americans want to go to work, and 2 million Americans are out there looking for their opportunity. And their opportunity rests with us. It rests with the House of Representatives. The Senate has done its work. It's put a 2 year, fully funded transportation bill that

meets the needs of this Nation for the next 2 years. They passed it out. This House has not passed a transportation bill.

We put a stopgap thing out so we can go to conference, but it wasn't a transportation bill. It didn't do the job. Maybe Wednesday, Thursday, or maybe some time Friday there can be an agreement between the two houses. But if there is not an agreement, then as I heard not more than an hour ago from my Republican colleagues, in agreeing to the motion to instruct, that if there is no agreement, then take up the Senate bill. That was in fact the motion. Take up the Senate bill if there is no agreement. Put 2 million Americans back to work. Repair our highways. Repair our bridges. Buy American. Enhance the buy American provisions.

We've got work to do. Americans have work to do. Americans want to work, and it's time for this House to work. And with that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

We all like to think about ``what if''--what if I had actually gotten an A rather than an F in that high school class? What if I had hit that home run instead of struck out? The what-if game is part of our life. But I want to take that up today in a very, very serious way. This is about what if this Congress, led by our Republican colleagues, had taken up and passed President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act.

Last September, the President made a very bold proposal to put Americans back to work, a comprehensive piece of legislation that covered many, many different parts of the American economy. It's called the American Jobs Act. Fully paid for, not increasing the deficit at all, but paid for with the elimination of unnecessary tax breaks for Big Oil, unnecessary tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy 1 percent of Americans, a fully paid-for American Jobs Act proposed by the President last September.

What if? What if this House under our Republican leadership had taken up the elements of the American Jobs Act, modified them, as is our nature and our responsibility, but nonetheless passed those very significant proposals that would, according to economists, create somewhere between 1.3 and 1.9 million jobs immediately? Not some day in the future, but now. What if we had done that last September? What if our Republican leadership had allowed those measures to come before the committees and on this floor to be signed by the President? Then 1.3 million Americans or maybe even 1.9 million Americans would have a job today.

We're going to talk today about the most tragic what-if this Nation is pondering at this moment. What if the American Jobs Act had been implemented?

Let's talk about what it is. What are the elements of the American Jobs Act? Bear with me, if you will, as we go through these. I'll go through them rather quickly, and then we'll come back and touch on them as we go on.

If you've been watching here in the gallery or if you are watching C SPAN, you would have heard my Democratic colleagues talk about the transportation bill. The President said last fall, We need to have a transportation bill, and we need it now. We need to put men and women back to work in the construction industry repairing our bridges, building our highways, paving our airports, building the infrastructure that this Nation needs.

The student aid bill. We know that if America is going to compete, we have to have the best educated workforce in the world. And so the President proposed a student aid bill, legislation that would provide additional sources of funding so students can go to school in community colleges, in 4-year schools, and in the master and doctorate programs.

The President took up one of the great conundrums and problems that this Nation faces from our competitors. Yes, China. China manipulates its currency, and the President said that has

to stop. He asked for the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass a piece of legislation dealing with the manipulation of the Chinese currency, which gives them somewhere between a 20 and 25 percent price advantage on all the things that they manufacture and import into the United States. He said, Do something about that. Give me, the administration, the power to deal, to put a tariff on those Chinese goods if the Chinese Government continues to manipulate its currency.

He said we ought to buy American-made products. We ought to use our money, our taxpayer money, to buy American-made goods.

I have a piece of legislation that would do just that, and I'll talk about that before this hour is done.

Buy America. Enhance the Buy American provisions. Do away with the waivers that have created a 12-lane freeway for foreign products to find their way into America despite the laws.

The President said that there are millions of homes in America that are inefficient, that leak energy and cost the homeowner or the renter vast amounts of money. He said we could put people to work putting in new windows, caulking, putting insulation in the attics. We could put people to work and, in the process, reduce our consumption of energy and create jobs.

He said there ought to be a permanent research and development tax credit so that our industries would stay ahead of the competition around the world, so that they would know year after year after year that the research and development tax credit would be there and the more that they invested in research, the more that they took that research and developed products, the more jobs would be created, and they didn't have to worry that, well, maybe, it won't be there next year, so this 5-year research program, we won't do it. No, he wants certainty. His American Jobs Act would have given certainty. But the leadership in this House refused to take up all of those provisions.

The President went on and said we need a payroll tax cut for businesses and for the worker. We did a little of this. Businesses didn't get a tax break on their payroll; however, the men and women that do work and do get a salary did get half of what the President proposed.

He said we ought to put veterans to work. And fortunately, on Veterans Day last year, we did pass a bill to do that, and we should consider even more.

285,000 teachers have lost their jobs this year across America. The President said that we cannot survive as a stable, growing country with a just society if we don't educate our kids, and so he said let's put those teachers back to work, 280,000 of them, and police and firemen along with them, so that we would have the public protection.

He said that in addition to a transportation enhancement, an additional $50 billion over and above the transportation bill, we ought to put people to work and give a jump start. Just like you would with a dead battery on your car, he wanted to put those jumper cables on the American construction industry, $50 billion, get it up and going.

And he said we need a permanent infrastructure bank.

I'll finish this up quickly, because it gets to be a rather long what-if. But, oh, what if. What if we had done these things?

How about rebuilding our schools and houses, again putting people to work. And how about allowing Americans to refinance their homes to stop the inevitable decline of the housing industry as more and more people were forced into bankruptcy and losing their homes.

It's the American Jobs Act, proposed by the President of the United States last September, and to this day, two of those policies have been adopted. What if? What if?

The economists say 1.3 million Americans would be working today if this legislation had been allowed to be brought to the floor of this House, had been allowed to be brought to the Senate and the President to sign it.

And don't forget this: It was fully paid for. It was fully paid for. The deficit would not have been increased. However, the oil companies would not have $12 billion of your money in addition to what they've taken at the gasoline pump--the wealthiest industry in the world. We'd get our tax dollars back, and we'd put people to work.

And for those with a million dollars of annual income after all of the deductions, after all of the credits, for those with a million dollars of annual income, their taxes would have gone up to pay for putting 1.3 million Americans back to work. What if?

I'd like now to call upon my colleague from the State of Oregon who for years has fought for transportation, one of the senior members on the Transportation Committee.

Mr. DeFazio, you were here late last night fighting one of the most foolish proposals I have heard of, to cut the transportation budget by $37 billion. Thank you for fighting that fight and informing us. Fortunately, this House rejected that foolish proposal.

I yield to the gentleman from Oregon.

Mr. DeFazio, for years you have been fighting for infrastructure. I didn't watch last night's debate as you fought fiercely to prevent one of the most foolish pieces of legislation-- well, there have been many foolish pieces of legislation proposed by our colleagues, but you couldn't be more correct.

Let me just put this up. I came across this yesterday. Basically what this is is it's a diagram of the employment in the construction industry. We had about, what is that, 5,570,000 men and women working in the construction industry in January, and here we are in May and we're just over 5,500,000--some 20,000, almost 30,000 have lost their jobs. And the proposals that our Republican colleagues are making would guarantee that once these projects are finished, it would be over, nothing more.

But the President laid out not only a transportation bill, but he laid out a very robust jump-start to it--$50 billion of additional money invested. Now, let's understand, this is not government money; this is an investment by the American people. It is their gasoline tax, their diesel tax. It is their investment in the highways and bridges and transportation systems of this Nation. Well, I guess if you're anti-tax and you're anti-roads and you're pro-gridlock, you're guaranteeing that the economy will slow down and eventually, who knows, even collapse.

Fortunately, there's a gentleman here from the great Mid-Northwest, Mr. Keith Ellison. You've been on this issue for a long time. I know in your area you've been very, very concerned about the issues that are in the American Jobs Act. Please join us.

Well, Mr. Ellison, in your community and my community, people want to go to work. They want a job. They want to be able to be part of the American machine that creates the wealth of this economy. They want to have the opportunity to provide the money for their family, take care of their needs. They take pride in their work. They're hardworking people, but they can't make it.

We have a long, long tradition in America that dates back really to the very first day of the American modern government. The day George Washington was sworn into office he undertook an industrial policy. I know our Republican colleagues like to talk about the Founding Fathers. Well, they really ought to listen to the Founding Fathers. And if they had listened to the Founding Fathers, they would have paid attention to the President's proposal on the American Jobs Act, because here's what George Washington did: he turned to his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and said, Mr. Hamilton, we need to grow this economy. We need to put people to work. We need to be a strong Nation, a strong economy, and I want you, Mr. Hamilton, to develop a policy to do that.

Hamilton came back a few months later with an industrial policy, 13 different items on about five pages--now it would probably take 5,000 pages, but nonetheless, he did it. Do you know what was in it? What was in that industrial policy that Hamilton presented to Washington and to Congress--and mostly implemented over the next decade or so--were policies that--let me put this back up. Let's see here. How many of these were in it? And here's the great ``what if?''

There was a transportation part to those policies--in fact, two different ones. One, Hamilton said if we're going to grow this economy, we need to have good roads, we need to have good canals, and we need to improve our ports. He proposed legislation that did become law--some of it by the States, some of it by the national government--that created the canal systems, put the roads in place, and improved the ports of America. Very beginnings of this Nation. Pay attention, my colleagues who like to talk about the Founding Fathers: the Founding Fathers said we need America to have a transportation program.

Currency reform was on the agenda. Yes, it was. Hamilton, Treasury Secretary, said we need to pay attention to the currency issue. There was a huge fight going on at the time about the Federal bank, about the currency issues, but he said we needed a common currency, and we needed to be aware of the international exchange rates that were going on so that we were not put at a disadvantage.

There was a Buy American program. Hamilton told George Washington and the Founding Fathers that we needed to put in place a Buy America provision. You just heard our colleague from Oregon talking about a robust Buy American provision--and sometime before I end I'll talk about my legislation

that says if it's our tax dollars, it's going to be spent on American- made equipment and American jobs. We're not going to use our tax dollars to buy foreign equipment. That's precisely what Alexander Hamilton told George Washington in the very first Congress of this Nation, and they began to implement it.

Energy efficiency wasn't there. He did, however, talk about this one, this was one of the 13. He said we needed to have a robust research and development program--they called them patents at that time. We need to be ahead of everybody else. He wanted to put in policies, and they did become law. And here we have it today, just on these issues alone, these six issues.

The Founding Fathers said transportation. They said watch the currency. They said Buy American. And they said we need to be ahead with research and patents and be on the cutting edge of technology.

What if President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act had been taken up by the Republican leadership that control this House?

What if they had listened to the Founding Fathers and actually implemented what the President wanted to put in place? 1.3 million, 1.3 million jobs, perhaps as much as 1.9 million jobs Americans would be working today. The great ``what if'' question of our time.

What if they had listened to the Founding Fathers?

Mr. Ellison, I know you have more to say.

Wouldn't you love to go into K-Mart or Target and see on the shelves ``Made in America''?

Made in America. That's why the currency reform is so important.

Americans would make it if we made it in America. We'd have those middle class jobs. That's where it is.

Mr. Ellison, thank you very much. I know you've got a plane; you've got to get back to Minneapolis. Thank you so much for joining us.

This is part of the Democratic agenda. This is something we've been working on now for well over 2 years, and we call it ``Make It in America.'' This is rebuilding the American middle class. This is about the American middle class coming back.

Over the last 20 years, we've seen a decline in American manufacturing. In the early nineties, we were a little more than 19 million, almost 20 million, Americans in the manufacturing sector. Those were middle class jobs, where you can go to work, earn a living, live a middle class life, buy your bass boat, take the kids on a vacation.

Today, we're just over 11 million middle class manufacturing jobs in America. So looking at this dismal situation, a couple of years ago, shortly after I arrived here, we began looking at what do you do about this. Why did this happen? Why is it that the American manufacturing sector declined?

We did our studies. We did the economic analysis. But mostly, we looked at public policy. We looked at the laws of this land. We looked at what was going on in the public policy sector; and what we found was the policies of this Nation discouraged manufacturing and, in fact, rewarded American corporations that would offshore jobs, literally, actually, giving American corporations a reduction in their taxes for every job they offshored. Total about $16 billion a year.

I know; you don't believe that. How could there be such a policy? That was my question. What? You mean to tell me that the tax policy of the United States gives a tax break to American corporations when they ship a job offshore?

Can't be. In fact, it was. And so in the last year, the last months of the Democrats' control of this House in 2010, we undertook to change that. We put a bill on this floor that would eliminate $12 billion of that $16 billion tax break that American corporations had for offshoring jobs. It passed without one Republican vote. Not one Member of the Republican Party voted to end a tax break for American companies that offshored jobs.

The Senate took it up; it passed. President Obama signed that legislation.

Public policy matters. Public policy matters a great deal.

We've talked here today about the Buy American provisions, been in law for 30, 40 years, that basically say, if it's our taxpayer dollars, it ought to be used to buy American equipment.

Over the years, probably beginning in the eighties and carrying on, those provisions began to gain loopholes, one after another, so that at the end of 2010, the loophole was a 12-lane freeway that you could drive any project through and buy whatever you wanted to buy from wherever it came from. So much so that in San Francisco, when the Oakland Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco had to be rebuilt because of earthquake safety issues--some of it fell down in the Loma Prieta earthquake--the largest construction project, public works project ever in California. The main central steel column for a uniquely designed bridge, $1 billion or more, Chinese steel, Chinese welders, 6,000 jobs in China to save 10 percent.

It turns out the steel was faulty, the welds were faulty, the jobs were still in China and the inspectors were Chinese.

If we'd have had a Buy American provision that meant anything at all, we

would have had 6,000 jobs in America; the inspectors would have been American; and there would be American jobs.

So my legislation, H.R. 613, says this:

If it is your tax money, it's going to be spent on American-made equipment, American-made steel, and the jobs will be in America.

Where is that bill? It hasn't even been taken up for a hearing in the Transportation Committee.

We're nibbling around the edges here. Of every bill that comes through this floor that's relevant to this issue, we try to shoehorn into it a Buy American provision. We try to increase the Buy American laws. We try to make certain that your tax money is going to be spent on American-made equipment. That's our agenda.

Have we been successful? No. No, we've not.

When the half-baked, worthless transportation bill was brought to the floor by our Republican colleagues, who could not even get agreement in their own caucus, we tried to put a provision on, an amendment on, and it was rejected. It was rejected.

Americans want to go to work. Public policy matters. Will your tax dollars be spent buying Chinese steel? I'll give you another example.

In Los Angeles, they went out to buy new light rail cars. Two bids were the final bids. One was by Siemens--yes, a German company that has a manufacturing plant for light rail cars in Sacramento, California. Siemens said that their light rail cars would have a minimum of 80 percent American-made content. A Japanese company came in and said, We'll do it for 60 percent. There was a slight difference. I think there was about a 2 percent difference in the bids.

So what did the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, do? It chose the Japanese company. American jobs were lost immediately in Sacramento as a result of that decision.

Now, whose money is going to be spent buying those cars, those light rail cars? Whose money is it? Your money. It's your tax money. Good for Japan. They're going to get some jobs. Bad for Sacramento. Layoffs have already occurred, and there are more to come.

Do you want another example? I'll just use California. That's where I'm from.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit System, BART: $3.2 billion for new trains over 10 years. $3.2 billion. Two bids. One, Bombardier, a fine Canadian company, said they would build them with 66 percent American-made content. Okay, that's good. It's not good enough because Alstom, a French company, said they would build them with 90 percent American- made content. Yes, it's a little more expensive, but we're talking $1 billion of American jobs here.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit System said, Well, the Federal Government says it's 60 percent, and we're going to have to go with 66. I said and thousands of Californians said and New Yorkers, which is where most of these jobs would be, that Alstom has a plant in New York to manufacture light rail and heavy rail cars. They said, Wait, let's take 2 months--2 months--and let's rebid this, and let's see what we can do. Alstom was prepared to lower their bid if they would have had an opportunity, and $1 billion of American jobs are not here. They're somewhere else around the world.

Public policy matters. Public policy matters.

I think it's about time to wrap up here, so I'm going to go back to where we started.

What if the House of Representatives under the control of our Republican colleagues--totally under their control and the Senate also under the control of the Republicans because it takes 60 votes there-- what if the President's American Jobs Act had been taken up and passed? We'll modify it, and don't forget it was fully paid for, 100 percent paid for with no increase in the deficit. The economists said clearly that 1.3 million would immediately result from the President's American Jobs Act. What if?

What does it mean to you in your community? Would that road have been built? Would you have had the job paving that road? repairing and painting that bridge? down at the local school, painting the school? cleaning up the playgrounds? putting new toilets into the restrooms or, specifically, a new laboratory in the high school--not a lavatory but a laboratory? What if?

What if we had put aside partisan politics?

Keep this in mind that the Republican leader of the Senate, on the day or shortly after President Obama was inaugurated, said that his number one goal was to make sure that this was a one-term President. So how do you do that? Well, when the President proposes an American Jobs Act that would employ 1.3 million Americans immediately, you make certain that it doesn't become law. You slow it down. Everything has to be 60 votes in the Senate; and here in this House, you do not even take it up. You don't allow a vote on it.

You don't do a transportation bill. You don't take the $50 billion injected immediately into infrastructure--totally paid for. You don't do it even though that would employ tens of thousands of Americans. You make certain that the 288,000 teachers who have been laid off across America are not rehired so that my daughter's classroom is not 22 students but 35 students.

How do you destroy a President? You make certain that this economy doesn't move. You take his American Jobs Act, and you sit on it. That's what has happened. The great ``what if.''

What if we put Americans back to work? Yes, maybe Obama would get reelected--maybe I'd get reelected--but I'll tell you this: Americans would be working. Americans would be working. What if?

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 9 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

I am opposed to the bill in its current form.

Madam Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Is it not the case that if my amendment is adopted, we would immediately vote on the final passage of the bill, as amended?

Madam Speaker, this is a very simple amendment. This is about a four-letter word, ``jobs,'' American jobs. This is about jobs for American men and women. We know there is plenty of unemployment. We've heard repeatedly, as the amendments have been put forth on this floor, that the National Defense Authorization Act is about jobs.

Well, we think there ought to be a few more jobs, and we think those jobs ought to be in American ports, at American shipyards, for the men and women that work in the shipyards of America. Whether those shipyards are in Guam or those shipyards are here on the continent, American workers want to go to work, and they can.

With this amendment, my colleagues, with this amendment, American workers in our ports, at American shipyards will have more jobs. There are few enough already. I cannot understand why anybody in this House would vote against a jobs bill, particularly one that doesn't cost us any more money than is already going to be spent.

The question here is, Where will the jobs be? Are the jobs going to be in a foreign port, such as Hong Kong? Are the jobs going to be in Singapore? Are they going to be in Dubai? Or are they going to be in America?

Ladies and gentlemen, my colleagues, we want jobs in America. We want it made in America. We want it repaired in America. And we want Americans to have jobs. That's what this amendment is about.

Is there anyone here that would disagree with that? Is there anyone on this floor that would disagree with the men and women that work in our shipyards having an opportunity to repair American military vessels? Where are you? Which one among you is going to vote against a man or a woman here in the United States repairing an American vessel?

And it's not just the Navy. This is about the merchant marines. This is about those American flagged ships that provide service to our military. Where will they be repaired? In some foreign port? Or are they going to be repaired by Americans in American ports?

This is about American jobs--not millions of jobs, but tens of thousands of jobs.

Those of you that represent those ports where there are ship repair facilities, pay attention to this one. Pay attention to this because these are jobs for your constituents. These are jobs repairing American naval vessels. This is about your job in your district. This is about your job in your district and your work and my work to make sure that we have American jobs repairing American naval vessels.

Now if there's an emergency, that's another matter. That's waived, and that's not included in here.

This is about your job protecting your people in your district, those men and women in your district that are at the ports, that are at the ship repair facilities, that are hungering for the jobs. They want to bring the bread back home. They want to bring food to their table. They want to pay their mortgage. And this bill provides them with an opportunity to continue to work to repair American naval vessels here in American ports, American men and women working to keep our ships on the line, on the seas operating. And for those ships that are American flagships across this world, delivering the supplies to our men and women wherever they happen to be, those ships too will be repaired in American ports.

This is a jobs bill. This is a simple vote for your people in your home districts, whether they will have the opportunity or whether the job will be in a foreign port, with foreign workers repairing American naval vessels.

There's also a small national security issue here. Many of these ships are ships of the line that provide very important services. For example, the USS Samuel Roberts, a guided missile frigate, repaired in Italy. I don't have a problem with the Italians. But I want those Italians to be in America working on the USS Samuel Roberts. The USS Blue Ridge, a command and control ship, $16 million of work, repaired in Japan, when it could have just as easily been done in Guam or Hawaii or another American port.

I ask for your ``aye'' vote. I ask for American jobs.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Madam Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

This morning in California, in Marysville, a young soldier will be laid to rest, one of many. The most important issue facing this Nation--the Afghanistan war--continues on. We have 10 minutes to debate our view of how that should end.

Ranking Member Smith proposed in committee an amendment that would rationally bring down and end this war. He was refused the opportunity--the ranking member, refused the opportunity to even be heard in committee.

And now we are faced with the language in the bill that extends this war indefinitely at a cost this year of $88 billion and at the same level interminably into the future. This deserves a robust debate. What is the role of America in Afghanistan? How long are we to continue there? Unfortunately, that debate is truncated and will be terminated by the majority in an unsuccessful way that extends the war. Why would we do that? Apparently for reasons that are not understood.

To the ranking member and the chair of the committee, thank you for a long slog of hard work and for the production of a bill that has much good in it.

Certainly, we have to provide for our military. We need a strong, agile, smart, and deadly national defense program. That's certainly in this bill. We also need to provide for our soldiers--for the men and women--and those who serve this country, and that's in this bill. The issue of those who have served and who have come home remains an issue that we'll probably take up in other legislation.

Provisions in the bill also provide for the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance necessary for us to be smart, and the bill provides for us to be agile in air mobility. Those are good things. However, there are many parts of this bill that I find objectionable, which has led to my ``no'' vote on this legislation. Let me quickly list those:

Certainly, we've already talked about, here on the floor, the issue of due process. It needs to be addressed, and I want to congratulate the ranking member of the committee for his work in developing a very good proposal that deals with the due process issue, which provides that every person in this country has full access to the civil liberties in the Constitution;

The Afghanistan war is not taken care of in this bill. In fact, there are provisions in this bill that, in all likelihood, would increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan by some 20,000 and leave them there in perpetuity. We cannot do this. We've got to bring this war to an end very, very quickly, and the bill does not go in that direction. In fact, it goes in the opposite direction. We just heard a discussion about Iran, and I will simply second that portion of the bill as being out of place and incorrect;

There are also things in this bill that are a vast waste of money: missile defense on the east coast, a missile system that doesn't work to protect us from a nonexistent threat. Why would you spend $100 million this year and up to $5 million to $7 million in the succeeding 2 years? We ought not do that;

Some things are also to be found at home. The Lawrence Livermore Labs need to be protected.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you very much, Congresswoman Speier, and thank you for bringing this very, very important issue to the attention of the American public this evening as we spend this hour talking about gas prices in the United States.

I was really struck by the charts that you put up. Wow. But they tell us that the story is we don't pump oil in America. Not so. We do. We really do. And they tell us that we're going in the wrong direction. But if you take a look at those charts, we're actually producing more and more energy. Today, in the Resources Committee, on which I have the honor of sitting, we had a debate about this. And our Republican colleagues were saying that we're not producing as much. And so we show them the energy institute's statistics, and they say they're wrong. That's an independent agency and they collect the statistics, and in fact they're right. And your charts clearly pointed out that we are in fact making it in America.

This is my favorite chart. This is what I'm often on the floor talking about: Manufacturing in America and making it in America. It's not often that we take this subject of making our energy in America, building an American energy machine, one that will supply the energy that our Nation needs to meet a growing economy and the needs of our society.

So very, very much what we're talking about here is making it in America. There are so many different pieces to this. I'm going to just bring up two of those, and then we'll carry on our dialogue here.

First of all, conservation. I think you're going to talk about this a little later--about automobile conservation, the gasoline in automobiles, which is very, very important, but there's so much other conservation that we must be doing in housing, in commercial buildings, in this building. This building is over 150 years old. We've got serious lack of energy conservation here within the Nation's Capitol.

But if we carry on a major effort on conservation, we will reduce our expenses and simultaneously make the available energy--the energy that is currently available--much more widely available and at a lower cost because of the market forces. So conservation is absolutely critical not only in oil and gas but in all of the other energy that we consume in this Nation.

Now the second thing, and then I'll circle back around quickly, is what I call substitution. We can substitute energy forms for oil, and in doing so, increase our domestic availability for oil--and that's diesel and gasoline. And in the substitution we also reduce our importation of oil. So substitution is really important.

So what is substitution? Well, substitution is going electric. We can go to electric cars, go to hybrids, which are a combination of electric and gasoline. There are many different ways on the transportation sector. But oil is also used in the production of electricity. Natural gas is the big thing today, and it is a wonderful substitution for coal. And we'll come back to that.

Finally, biofuels. The point I want to do here leads me to this little chart that I've used before, and it talks about where your tax money is going. Where is your tax money going? Well, I'll tell you that about $5 billion of your tax money every year goes to the oil industry. It goes to the oil industry to provide a subsidy that's now been in place for more than a century. And in doing so, it worked. That subsidy worked. It created one of the wealthiest--not one of--the wealthiest industry in the entire world. That's the oil industry. And, again, I know you're going to pick this up and carry it a little bit further.

But just here, our subsidies, our tax dollars handed over $5 billion a year to the Big Five, who earn billions and billions of dollars of profit every quarter. Why do we continue to do that when we really starve the substitutions?

You look at here, this is the biofuel area. This is the green technologies--wind, solar energy, biofuels. This is ethanol down here. You just compare this. The subsidies from $70 billion a year going to coal and oil, that's well beyond the Big Five. And over here on this side we're talking about some $12 billion. And down here, some $16 billion a year.

So what's happened is that your tax money continues to subsidize oil and coal and just a little teeny, tiny bit on the substitutions, where the opportunity for real energy independence will exist. So we should keep this in mind as we look at how we use your tax dollars.

Now there's a huge fight going on here in the Congress, appropriately so, about changing this substitution; that we ought to stop subsidizing the oil industry, put some of that money over here into the substitutes, that is the green technologies, and into paying off our deficit or taking care of our seniors and our sick. There's much, much more to be done on that.

I would love to see your charts and we'll get into this in some, hopefully, elegant way.

Well, you have another chart there that showed the oil that is pumped and the price of gasoline. Congresswoman Speier, you used this before. And you asked me: If we take away the subsidies, will it increase the cost of gasoline? The answer is, categorically: No.

First of all, it is an international market that sets the price of gasoline. I should add one little caveat to that. International market and speculation. And I'm going to come to the speculation in a little bit.

Anyway, the international market sets the price of gasoline that these Big Five companies buy and the value of the oil that they extract. So the barrel of oil is set internationally. Now if it's set internationally and you take out the speculation, it remains fairly constant. Here's the production. And it has gone up, but it's been rather steady over this period of time.

The subsidy is to encourage the production of oil. Well, they've had the subsidy and so the production has been rocking along here. The price of oil is set internationally. What explains this enormous variation in the price of fuel at the pump? Well, it's not production. That's from here. Is it the subsidies? The subsidies are a very, very small part. You're looking at a $137 billion total profit. The subsidy is $5 billion. So it's inconceivable that the subsidy has much to do with the bottom line, other than adding $5 billion, which would be, I guess, if you took the subsidy out, it would be $132 billion. Oh, my, let's whine about that. I don't think so.

So the subsidy doesn't have much to do, if anything, with the price of gasoline. The price of gasoline, however, is set by those companies. And that leads directly to that bottom line there--this $137 billion. They choose to set that price.

Now what are we going to do about it? Well, take the subsidies back and begin to move away from dependence on oil, whether that's imported oil or oil that is pumped out of the ground here in the United States, and move to these alternatives.

Move to the alternatives, electricity and natural gas and the biofuels. All of those will further reduce the demand for oil which will bring down the cost of a barrel of oil within this country and around the world and, in so doing, allow us to have a lower gasoline price; and to do that, capture the subsidies. It's not going to increase the cost of a gallon of gasoline at all.

The speculation issue, this morning we had a fellow from the Connecticut Petroleum Retailers Association come in and talk to us about speculation. You and I didn't have enough time to put this together, we talked about this beforehand, because we were both taken by the information he provided. It is really not new information, but it is very interestingly put on the issue of speculation. Forgive me, general public and forgive me, Ms. Speier, but I just decided to put this together on the back of this Make It in America chart because America was taken to the cleaners in 2008.

This is what happened to the price of a barrel of oil in 2008. Now keep in mind in 2008 the wars were going on, but there was no real change in the wars. In March of 2008, a barrel of oil cost $70 a barrel in the United States, and I guess worldwide also. So March of 2008, it was $70 a barrel. Nothing happened, no big change. The Straits of Hormuz were not shut down; Venezuela and Nigeria and other countries continued to pump oil, as they had before.

But between March of 2008 and July of 2008, what's that, 4 months, 5 months, the price went from $70 a barrel to $147 and gasoline was very close to $5 a gallon. So oil went from $70 to $147--doubled, doubled in price--in just a period of time from March, April, May, June until July of 2008. And then the speculators broke and the price plummeted between July to November to $32 a barrel.

Now this has nothing to do with the production of oil around the world. It has nothing to do with major international crises of any kind. Obviously, we had a problem in the United States with our economy; but the consumption of gasoline remained about the same, but the price of a barrel of oil doubled and then in the same year, July to November, plummeted to $32 a barrel.

If there is ever, ever a situation that says somebody is speculating in this market, it's this extraordinary change that occurred over a period of time from March to July to November. And there's no supply and demand, no international crisis that could even begin to explain this extraordinary shift in prices. It is, I think, beyond a doubt that all of this, this was the great gasoline crisis of 2008, was caused by speculation. Now, we need to do something about that.

Here is an issue before the House of Representatives, and every day somewhere in the buildings here in Washington there are a group of Republicans that are doing their level best to eliminate the one law that we have been able to put in place to control speculation. This is the Dodd-Frank legislation. The Dodd-Frank legislation has very powerful tools to control speculation. And you can draw your own conclusions why our Republican friends would try to torpedo, to end, to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank legislation so that the speculators can continue this kind of activity.

Now, keep in mind that this is not ending. If we go to 2010, 2011, the current period, my guess is that we would see something similar to this kind of speculation. So the Dodd-Frank legislation is the only tool we have available today to deal with speculations such as occurred in 2008 and is in all likelihood continuing today.

I was there for that, and I was struck by the very same statistic. As you look at what happened then, $10 here, a doubling in price. Consider for a moment what it would mean to somebody that had purchased back here in March a million barrels of oil at $70 a barrel, and they come up to July, that million barrels of oil has doubled in value. So this is why speculation occurs. It occurs because somebody by playing the market, by speculating, is able to make a vast sum of money.

There's the other side of that coin--somebody lost a vast sum of money coming down here. But the American public, however, was the single biggest loser in all of this because as that went up, the price at the pump also went up, and Americans paid more and more for the price of gasoline. It was about $5 a gallon when it came up here. And it didn't go down from $147 to $32; that proportion didn't happen. It did drop from near $5 down to $3.50, in that area.

So the American public was stuck with an exceedingly high price which continues to this day, which leads to those extraordinary profits which you were showing just a few minutes ago. Now, I'm not saying the oil industry was involved in the speculation; but I will say this, the oil industry benefited from the speculation that left a very high price for oil into the future. This didn't last very long. This went back up to $70, and today it's over $100 a barrel.

So we need to consider all of these things about what's going on in the oil market. The bottom line of this is we need to change. And this is, I think, where you want to go. You want to talk about conservation. You're the leader here, take us where you want and I'll follow.

Well, I took a look at that before we began this hour, and I go, Oh, my, do I have to wait until 2025 to buy that vehicle? No, not really. There are pure electric vehicles that are available today that get not 54 miles per gallon but like infinite, by using electricity only. You can buy those. Unfortunately for me, in my district where a Saturday run around the district is 600 miles, it doesn't make much sense yet, but it's coming.

The battery technology is improving for automobiles. You can store that energy or take down that energy at night. This is part of the electric grid and the changes that are occurring in the electric grid all across this Nation. Given the low price of natural gas today--just over $2 per 1,000 Btus--we're seeing the electric utility industry shifting from coal to natural gas. As they do that shift, we get an enormous reduction in the carbon emissions--which is good for the environment and good for the climate change issue--and, simultaneously, we're able to then see a path to an electric vehicle, or at least a hybrid plug-in, hybrid electric vehicle. All very, very good. Biofuels will be part of that also.

So it's very, very powerful that we continue to increase. And let's keep in mind that there had been no increase until the Obama administration came in. I think it was over 20 years that the standards had been in place, and then President Obama came in and said, Listen, we need to move to conservation. And the result is the incredible savings.

I don't want to wait until 2025. Let's do something about it today.

I have a couple more things that I'll pick up along the way. Let me just share one of them, since we're on the gasoline issue.

You and I go back to our district every weekend. A month ago, 2 months ago, the rage was the price of gasoline. I was doing town halls. I knew you were also, and so I was doing some research about where the gasoline is and what it's being used for and what the cost was.

I came across a statistic from the Energy Information Institute that was absolutely surprising to me. The talk on the radio and on television and the talk radio and talk television was that we have this enormous shortage of gasoline, that the threat of a war in Iran was responsible for driving it up, and somehow problems in Nigeria or Venezuela--or wherever--were somehow shorting the market and that gasoline was in short supply. But the information, the statistics were exactly the opposite. There was a glut of gasoline in the United States, so much so--get this--so much so that the oil industry-- Chevron, Exxon, BP, all of the rest--were exporting 28 million gallons of gasoline a day. At the same time they were exporting, they were driving the price up towards $5 a gallon.

And we go, wait a minute. What's this all about? You're telling me we have a shortage? If we have a shortage, why are you exporting 28 million gallons of gasoline a day? And from the information I've been able to obtain, it appears as though that export continues to this day--an export of 28 million gallons of gasoline a day out of the United States at the same time that the industry is saying, Oh, woe is us. We have a short supply. Well, if it's short supply, it's because they are creating it to the deficit and to the harm of the American traveling public who has to buy that gasoline.

Now, one other thing--and check me on this; I was trying to recall all of the information this morning--that in the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of this year, the United States, for the first time in--help me here, 40 years?

--60 years was a net exporter of oil, a net exporter. We had achieved energy independence. We were exporting more than we were importing for the last quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year. I don't know if that's going to continue, but it flies right in the face of what the oil industry was telling us as the fake, false crisis of the spring occurred. My guess is it was speculation. My guess is it was greed on the part of the oil industry.

My solution is to end the subsidies, bring that money back and use it on the green technologies and conservation. My solution is to enforce the Dodd-Frank laws and to make certain speculators are not robbing the American people day in and day out. Those are two things we can do. And as you said earlier, we will continue to produce energy in the United States, and we'll Make It In America.

I thank you so very much. I do have another meeting. I'm going to have to run, but this is good. It's good to get the information out there. Thank you for bringing us together tonight.

Is this the one that goes a gazillion miles an hour in 5 seconds?

I was going to head out the door, but your Tesla story caught me as I was about to leave.

The grid, we need to have a smart grid. This is one of the things that is in contention here. This is about energy research. Now, we need to understand, how can we make that grid smart enough and robust enough that we will be able to charge, on any given block, one, two, three, four, five, or six more homes at night?

To do that, we need to have research and understanding, not only on how we produce the energy in an environmentally sound way that reduces the carbon emissions, but we also need to know how to distribute that power and when it's going to be needed. That's called the smart grid.

Now, to do that requires research. It requires us to invest in research to understand how the grid works, how it can be improved, how we can create the efficiency in the grid, how that power can be distributed to where it is needed when it is needed. That takes money. The Federal Government has, over the last several years, provided that research money in the budget that we're debating here now. Well, we're not debating it. It actually passed.

The blueprint for the current budget from this House reduces the energy research in the United States. So it may be some time, if our Republican colleagues have their way about the energy research, before those three people will be able to plug that thing in at the same time at night.

Thank you so very much.

Madam Speaker, on May 9, 2012, the House of Representatives reaffirmed our strong relationship with the State of Israel and demonstrated our commitment to Israel's right to defend itself, by passing H.R. 4133 with 411 votes. Unfortunately, I was not present at the time of the vote, but I would like to voice my support for Israel and this bill. Israel is a valued ally and friend of the United States. It is in the national security of both countries to ensure that Israel has the robust defense needed to protect itself from many threats within the region. H.R. 4133 guarantees that the United States will aid Israel in this defense and this bipartisan vote shows that we will always stand firm on our commitments to this relationship. Again, I would like to apologize for missing this important vote, but I commend my colleagues for supporting this vital alliance.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to take this 1 hour.

We want to spend this hour discussing a piece of legislation that is extraordinarily important to every woman and every man who lives within the United States. It's the Violence Against Women Act, which is up for renewal, and we'll be discussing that. But before I go into that, we've just heard an hour of discussion on an extremely important matter, which is the issue of national defense.

I do sit on the House Armed Services Committee, and I spent about 16 hours last week working to move that bill out of committee. Every single person on that committee and every single person in this House and in the Senate cares deeply about this Nation's security and providing the necessary support for the men and women who are currently in the military and those who have served in the past. There's no doubt about that.

There is, however, a very important debate underway about how we provide those services, given the ability of this Nation to find the money to pay for it. You heard a most remarkable debate this last hour--or a discussion this last hour, not a debate--but a discussion that basically, on the one hand, said, we've got this terrible deficit problem, and we have to deal with it; and on the other hand, we have to spend more and more money on the military.

Now recognizing that the war in Afghanistan is drawing down and hopefully will very soon be over, we are moving away from carrying on two major wars to a period in which we will not be having men and women overseas in these wars. That allows this Nation to draw down the military in an appropriate and very careful manner. Unfortunately, the bill that moved out of the House Armed Services Committee didn't do that. In fact, it moved away from the current law, which is one that was voted on by all of our Republican colleagues, which was the Budget Control Act that actually said the military had to be brought down. And the discussion you heard here about the President not having a plan, it simply isn't true. The President has put forth a balanced solution to the deficit within the confines of the Budget Control Act, a balance that has been rejected by the Republicans, a balance that calls for revenues, ending unnecessary tax breaks--for example, for the oil industry. Why should they receive $5 billion a year of our tax money on top of the tens of billions of dollars in profits that they are making in the sale of overpriced gasoline and diesel to the American public?

So the President says, take away those unnecessary subsidies and bring those back into dealing with the necessary things that we must do in this Nation. He also said that men and women who earn over $1 million a year in adjusted gross income ought to be paying their fair share.

There was discussion a moment ago about the budget reconciliation bill that passed this House. Understand that the budget reconciliation bill, as proposed by the Republicans, would increase the national deficit by $4 trillion. How does it do it? By giving an extraordinary new tax break to those at the very top. Those who earn more than $1 million a year would see their taxes reduced. So at $1 million a year in earnings, they would receive an additional tax reduction of $394,000. That's neither fair, that's neither balanced, and that clearly leads to an additional $4 trillion.

Back to the defense. We need a wise Defense appropriations bill out of this House. Unfortunately, though, what did pass was not wise, and it actually increased the number of men and women in Afghanistan. These are our Armed Forces. Under that bill, there would be an increase of 20,000 new soldiers into Afghanistan. That's not where we want to go.

Having said enough about that, I just thought we ought to put a little balance on the previous hour of discussion. So let us get on to what we really wanted to talk about tonight, which is, how do we protect women in America?

In 1994, a previous Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, and that act provided a level of protection to every woman in America to be protected from domestic violence. I have with me tonight one of the key architects of that piece of legislation. She is now a Member of Congress. She is from the great State of Maryland. Her name is Donna Edwards. Back in the nineties, she was the founding director and

the executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

The National Network to End Domestic Violence was an organization that Representative Edwards put together composed of State organizations that were dealing with domestic violence, many different kinds of organizations throughout the United States. Representative Edwards put that together. And she's here tonight to lead the discussion on how we can renew the Violence Against Women Act in a way that expands the protection to all women in the United States, all women. And central to this discussion will be that issue of all women within the United States.

But before I turn it over to her, as the Republicans always want us to do, I would like to read a couple of clauses of the United States Constitution. The 14th Amendment, in the end of section 1, says:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge

the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United

States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,

liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to

any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of

the laws. And section two of the 14th amendment of the United

States Constitution, says, ``The Congress shall have the

power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions

of this article.

``Any person,'' a key subject for tonight's debate.

Representative Edwards, you've been at this for many years. Please share with us the background, the history, and why this is such an important part of what we must do here.

Why don't we work together here. But before we pass the baton to our colleagues here, I think we all need to recognize the extraordinary work that you have done over these many, many years on this issue, and understand now how it affected your family. And I dare say it affects every family in America. If it's one in four women are at some time in their life abused and threatened with violence, we're talking some 40 million women. It's an extraordinarily serious problem. And the legislation that you helped write back in 1994 needs to be

reauthorized and strengthened, not weakened.

I would like now to turn to Sheila Jackson Lee, our colleague from Texas, who is deeply interested in this and has spoken on this before. And then, with your permission, Representative Edwards, I'll let you conduct the rest of this meeting.

I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for her very thoughtful and thorough discussion of this piece of legislation. It is about all women. We should never exclude any women from the protection of this law.

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

I think I'll let this thing cool down a little bit.

But the gentleman on the other side of this debate is quite wrong. There's no balance in this particular bill at all. There is no balance.

The cuts are devastating. Meals on Wheels for seniors, Medicare programs, Medicaid programs for seniors. And if you take a look at the rest of the issues, school lunch programs, kids are going to go hungry. There's no balance.

There is no tax proposal in this. There's no balance at all.

But the reason I rise today is to add one more problem that's not being solved by this reconciliation. The National Flood Insurance bill was folded in to this reconciliation, and it has a gaping hole. The Corps of Engineers has gone through the Nation's levees and downgraded those levees, creating an enormous problem for agriculture throughout this Nation, and certainly in California, where many of the levees have been downgraded. It's now impossible for farmers and the agricultural community to obtain loans to continue to produce and to enhance their agricultural production.

This amendment, which I had hoped could be put into the bill but was not allowed by the Rules Committee, would simply require an immediate study by the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to undertake a study on the impact of the downgrading of the levees and the resultant inability to get national flood insurance, and the impact that that has on the agricultural communities, keeping in mind that agriculture, in a flood zone, is one of the very best ways to reduce the risk.

I would hope that the majority would consider, as this thing moves along, to fold into the National Flood Insurance Program an opportunity for the Farm Flood Program that I've introduced, which would allow farmers to obtain national flood insurance, and then the lending that the banks could make available so they can continue to build the necessary facilities for their agricultural production.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank you for the courtesy of yielding.

The fact of the matter is that 1.8 million people will not be able to get the supplemental food that they get from food stamps. They're going to be hungry. That's a fact.

Now, the rest of the fact is the application process has been supported by the Federal Government and by the legislation so that the States can reach out to those people that are hungry and that are able to qualify for food stamps. That's gone in this bill. So the ability to reach out and to bring into those programs----

I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, day after day, or at least week after week, my colleagues and I are here on the floor talking about jobs. It is about jobs and jobs and jobs again. Our agenda, which we call ``Make It in America,'' is an agenda that would rebuild the American manufacturing sector, a sector that has lost about 40 percent of its jobs in the last 20, 25 years from just under 20 million to just over 11 million Americans who are working in manufacturing today.

One of the innovative ways of improving manufacturing has been developed. It's called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It's actually modeled after another Federal-State program that's been in existence for more than 100 years. Anyone that's in agriculture would recognize the Agricultural Extension Program. This is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a program that has actually added another feature to the old and still very successful Agricultural Extension Program, and that is a public-private partnership. In this program, the Federal Government, through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, runs a program in which funding is provided for local, private, or nonprofit organizations to become extension program managers.

In California, this has been a very, very successful program. Some $447 million in new retained sales have occurred, $128.8 million in new investments, and some 3,769 jobs have been created.

Some examples exist throughout California. In southern California, a manufacturer, a small company that makes high-tech parts for the aircraft industry, has been able to improve their manufacturing techniques and have been able to stay in business, and they now have been very successful in bringing down contracts with the aircraft industry.

In the Bay Area, another program--actually run out of San Ramon, near my district--has been very successful. This program, called MANEX, has been very successful working with companies in the area. Morgan Hill Precision, to be precise, is a company that, again, is a machine shop. That company has used the MEP program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, to good success.

Now how do we pay for this? Some $437,000. We take a little bit from some 20 different parts of the Department of Commerce. The result is it's working. We would like to keep it working at its full level, at last year's level. The bill before us actually reduces it by 50 percent. So we're adding $437,000 back by taking small amounts from some 20 different programs.

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

I move to strike the last word.

For more than 20 years, there's the question of what to do with the San Joaquin River, a river that was essentially dried out and a river in which the indigenous species--salmon and other fish--were simply nonexistent. That fight went on and on and on. And after 20 years of fighting and litigation, a settlement was reached--a settlement that called for the restoration of stream flows in the San Joaquin River so that the salmon and other species in that river could be returned. This amendment simply overturns that. It was a Federal court order that approved the settlement--a settlement between the water users of the CVPIA and also the environmental groups.

To do this amendment is simply going to once again reignite a major water war that is totally unnecessary. Certainly, it is going to be difficult to restore the river, but it can be done and it is going to take time and it is going to take money--and we should do it. This is one of the two largest rivers in the State of California. It's a river that had in the past, before the reservoirs were built and before the river was dried up, an extraordinary run of salmon. It will never be able to return to what it once was, but it can return to a viable river.

To take action at this hour of the night on an amendment that is going

to only be heard between half a dozen of us here on the floor seems to me to be quite wrong. We ought to oppose this amendment. We ought not allow it to be in the bill, and we ought to allow things to go forward.

I would remind those who are supporting this that this is going to be a major blowup in the U.S. Senate. I know we don't much care about that, but, nonetheless, Senator Feinstein has authored legislation to implement this particular settlement. This unravels all of that. We ought not be moving forward, and I therefore oppose the amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I move to strike the last word.

I yield to my colleague from Pennsylvania.

I yield back the balance of my time.