Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, unfortunately, the amending text contained in the motion to recommit was not fully debated or its full ramifications considered prior to the vote, and I cast my vote on the limited information available. As a result, my vote was informed by my concern over the current state

of military recruiting. Nonetheless, I wish to reaffirm my opposition to the military's policy of ``Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' and my belief that the policy should be discontinued, as well as my support for the 1st amendment rights of American universities.

Madam Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise today with my esteemed colleague from Oregon to offer an amendment that will help communities across the country pay for wastewater projects, protect their environment and preserve their open spaces by combating sprawl.

Today's action on the underlying bill comes not a moment too soon. Nationwide, there is over a $300 billion shortfall in funding for wastewater projects. In my district, we have $500 million in projects that can't get funding just because the dollars aren't there.

Communities in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere are also trapped in a battle to balance the booming population with the preservation of water resources and open spaces.

By requiring States to prioritize spending of revolving loan funds of moneys on existing projects, this amendment will help address both of these challenges by helping to bolster existing communities, instead of haphazardly subsidizing the building of new developments.

There is an old adage that says, ``Work smarter, not harder.'' For many of our rural and suburban and rural communities, the only way to accommodate growth without sacrificing precious open space is to build smarter, not wider. Targeting moneys to projects that will help existing communities provide expanded and improved water treatment will meet that test. Without a smart growth strategy, the loss of open spaces, runoff created by the change from soil to pavement and other impacts will wreak havoc on our environment.

If we don't take aggressive action to make smart growth the guiding principle of development, we will end up squandering our resources, jeopardizing our health, and damaging our economy.

The amendment will also do one thing that I think, quite frankly, the Federal Government should be doing more of, giving property taxpayers and municipalities much needed relief.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield the balance of my time to my colleague from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Madam Chair, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar).

Mr. Speaker, the situation at Walter Reed Medical Center is an embarrassment to our country. The deplorable conditions for outpatient care at Walter Reed are not fit for men and women who have sacrificed to serve our country. The delayed and mishandled care of these individuals has harmed their recovery and placed significant strain on their families.

This is not the way our combat veterans deserve to be treated. These conditions demonstrate a catastrophic failure of planning on the part of the administration.

Although the Army has stated its intention to remedy the situation quickly, we must act for those who are currently held at Walter Reed, for it is clear that the Army is not currently equipped to do so. It is unacceptable for those who served us abroad to languish in a no man's land at home.

Mr. Speaker, in the coming days I will introduce a bill to allow Walter Reed outpatients the option of moving to a VA facility closer to their homes and families while still getting their military pay and benefits. We must show that our country supports our troops not only in word but also in action.

Madam Speaker, I stand here to support the Employee Free Choice Act because it is necessary.

This bill would not be necessary were the administration and the NLRB neutral in labor relations. However, they are not and have not been. Therefore, I am hearing from my constituents, such as citizens of my district who work for a school bus company which won an election many months ago which has not yet been certified by the NLRB.

While the NLRB is dawdling, there have been 16 consecutive labor charges filed against the union by the management. This company, by the way, is owned by another company in England which is 96 percent unionized in England. So apparently it is good enough for them to have union representation there, but not here.

I speak and vote in favor of my constituent who distributes dialysis equipment and supplies around the New York and Hudson Valley area who was called in for repeated meetings with his supervisors when they learned that he was helping to organize a union drive. Even after the election was won, management filed an appeal and lost.

If it were not for such, I could go on for a long time with stories I have heard in my districts from my constituents, and what I am hearing is about harassment, intimidation, about anti-union propaganda on the lunch table, in the lockers, on the bus seats. Look at the evidence. Look at the disparity in income. Look at the increase in poverty rate and the explosion of wealth at the top of our income scale.

What we are seeing here is the result of a systematic tilting of the playing field. This bill tends to tilt it back towards working families.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I stand with the other members of my freshman class to support this important resolution. My election and those of my fellow freshman colleagues were an unmistakable signal from the American people. They believe the President's path in Iraq is wrong and they want new voices to produce change.

Mr. Speaker, I am one of those voices, and today I rise to speak with the American people to oppose the President's escalation.

The United States requires a new path in Iraq, a path that will deploy our troops out of Iraq; a path that will force the Iraqi Government to plan for its own defense; a path that will engage countries throughout the region and around the world to help stabilize and protect Iraq; and a path that will allow the United States military to rebuild and refocus on the important mission of destroying al Qaeda and defending America from the threat of international terrorism.

Sadly, the escalation proposed by the President does none of these things. The President's plan continues down the same path we have traveled for the last 4 years. These years have taught us that U.S. military power alone is not sufficient to stabilize Iraq, yet it is the only tool this President employs.

From the outset, this administration has been wrong. The administration led us into a war with flawed intelligence. That is one wrong. The administration

went to war without a plan to win the peace. Two wrongs. This administration chose to protect Iraqi oil fields before securing the ammunition dumps throughout the country. Three wrongs. This administration sent our troops into harm's way without enough body armor or armored vehicles. Four wrongs. This administration gave no-bid contracts to its friends and political allies. That is five wrongs.

Years ago now, President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln before a banner declaring mission accomplished and said, ``Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.'' That is six wrongs.

Now, this administration wants us to blindly place our faith and the lives of 20,000 more of our troops in an Iraqi Government that has failed to meet every security obligation it has pledged. Sadly, once again, this President is wrong, and no amount of wrongs is going to make the President's policy towards Iraq right.

It is time for a new kind of escalation on the diplomatic front. A stable Iraq is in the United States' interests and in the interests of Iraq's neighbors. However, the President has done next to nothing to gain the assistance of regional partners.

Inside Iraq, the government must meet its promises to reach out beyond its base of support and unite the Iraqi people. Sending more troops into Iraq does nothing to push the Iraqi Government towards greater self-reliance. At a time when it is incumbent upon the Iraqi Government to step up and do more, why should we give them the opportunity to do less?

This resolution is an important first step that voices loud and clear the message America sent last November, and it puts the President on notice that the Congress will no longer stand by and allow him to recklessly endanger American lives and security. If the President refuses to change course, this Congress will be forced to act.

We will no longer allow him to send underequipped and underprepared units into combat. We will demand appropriate accounting standards and no longer allow billions of taxpayer dollars to disappear unaccounted for into the rabbit hole of Iraq. And we must not let our National Guard continue to be decimated by repeated and extended activation.

I recently met a young man from my district who has been accepted at West Point and who will soon serve as a future leader in the United States Army. I want to ensure that when he graduates from West Point and accepts his commission, the Army he joins will not be decimated by the mistakes in Iraq.

I also want to talk about the veterans of this war and the unique challenges they will face. I am proud and honored to be on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. I am proud that one of my first votes in Congress was to provide an increase in VA health care funding.

Currently, there is a backlog of nearly 600,000 pending veterans claims at the VA. We must reduce this number so that all veterans can be better served. We must provide funding to better diagnose and treat post-traumatic stress disorder. I am appalled that during this time of war the administration would cut funding for research on prosthetic technologies that will let our wounded veterans lead more normal lives.

My district is the home of West Point Military Academy and, as such, has a unique perspective on the war. The leaders that emerge from the halls of that institution are an invaluable resource for our Nation. Sadly, we have lost over 50 West Point graduates in Iraq and others in the services and throughout my district.

My brother-in-law is a lieutenant colonel who works at West Point. My nephew is a cadet. The courage, devotion and conscientiousness of the men and women of the United States Military Academy embody the best of America.

In the words of the sheriff of Putnam County, a retired brigadier general, one should never send our Armed Forces to do a job which is not militarily achievable.

I support this resolution

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Indeed, as my colleague from across the aisle says, there are many of us, citizens and Members of this House, who do not believe our Commander in Chief, and we have good reason not to believe him. I wish it were not so.

After President Bush announced his escalation of the war, I said that he owed the American people an honest explanation as to why he thinks this surge will succeed when previous efforts have failed. Unfortunately, the President decided to stay the course and to begin the escalation before either House of Congress had a chance to consider it. Instead of providing a new comprehensive strategy to turn the tide in Iraq, President Bush offered the same tired rhetoric. Rather than engage in an important discussion with the American people, his loyalists prevented the Senate from debating this crucial matter.

Fortunately for us, such obstruction will not occur in this Chamber and the House will begin to take up this important debate this week. As a new Member of the House, I feel it is my responsibility to ask serious questions of our President who refuses to take this institution seriously. I ask my colleagues to join with me, to not try to score cheap political points but to push this administration and its supporters in Congress for real change in the direction of our Iraq policy. Our men and women in uniform, who have done everything that has been asked of them, deserve no less.

So I ask the President why this Congress should support his proposal to send 20,000 more troops into harm's way when his own former Iraq commander, General Abizaid, said it is not needed? Why should we support it when the Prime Minister of Iraq has himself expressed no support? And why should we support it when the American people have shown that they actively oppose the President's policy towards Iraq?

From the very outset, this administration has been wrong at every step of this war.

The administration led us into an unnecessary war with flawed or manipulated intelligence. Wrong.

This administration went to war without enough troops to win the peace. Wrong.

This administration gave no-bid contracts to its friends and political allies, locking out other countries who might have helped us and indeed locking out the Iraqis. Wrong.

President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 and said, ``Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.'' Wrong.

This administration literally took piles of cash, flying pallets of millions of dollars from the U.S. mint to Baghdad, into a war zone, and lost billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Wrong.

Now this administration wants us to blindly place our faith and the lives of 20,000 more of our troops in an Iraqi government that has failed to meet every security obligation it has pledged. Sadly, once again, this President is wrong. And no amount of presidential wrongs is going to make the situation in Iraq right.

Last fall's National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the President's policy in Iraq is creating more terrorists than it is eliminating. Nothing in this policy will change that. Three thousand one hundred twenty-four American service men's and women's lives have been lost in Iraq as of yesterday. Three thousand one hundred twenty- five will not make it right.

It is time for a new strategy in Iraq. It is time to start to bring our brave men and women who have fought so courageously back home. By turning Iraq over to the Iraqis, we will force their government to fight for their own security. Al Qaeda in Iraq will lose their mission and be less likely to inflame the Sunni-Shiite conflict. And Iran and Syria will have to work for calm rather than sit in the shadows and stir the insurgency.

Mr. President, it is time for a new path for the United States and Iraq. This nonbinding resolution reflects the will of the American people. It is an important first step but only a first step. I look forward to working with my colleagues as we seek to untangle this disaster the administration has brought upon us all. Together, we can begin to repeal this tragic blunder and undo the damage done to our military, to our country, and to our standing in the world.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that I find it amusing to be lectured about energy independence and working hard to get things done from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who for the last 6 years could have solved these problems, but instead watched us sink further into dependence on foreign and polluting sources of energy.

In April 2005, President Bush was quoted as saying, ``With oil at more than $50 a barrel, energy companies do not need taxpayer incentives to explore for oil and gas.'' Then, even as prices went higher, he and the Republican Congress went ahead and gave them a goodie bag of taxpayer subsidies. Gas prices topped $3 per gallon, Big Oil made record profits of $97 billion, and record dependence on foreign oil still leaves us vulnerable to the whims of unfriendly regimes.

Today, we are going to take back the tax giveaways to Big Oil so we can give the American people a break at the pump, a breath of fresh air, and a more secure nation.

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am excited to be here at this time, at this point in history when our country will finally, beginning in this House of Representatives, begin to act on renewable energy and conservation in a meaningful way. And I also want to say that I hope Northeast farmers will also be able to contribute to the biofuels that will be developing.

I have a friend in New York State who is driving around in a stock diesel Jeep Liberty 4-by-4 that he is running on biodiesel made from wood waste at a renewable tree farm that makes furniture in New York, just north of my district in Representative Gillibrand's district, but it is minutes from where I live in Dover Plains, New York. There is no modification needed to the vehicle. The company that is making this fuel runs all their farm vehicles on it, they run their road vehicles on it. Every scrap of leaves and sawdust and little twigs and things that are parts of the tree that are too small to go into the furniture they make goes into making biodiesel fuel, and it is very successful.

The only thing that is lacking is the knowledge on the public's part that they can ask for it, and the law of supply and demand will work for renewables the same way it does for any other form of energy or any other commodity.

I called up my own local oil company in my hometown of Dover and asked if they had biodiesel to sell for me to burn in my home heating oil system, my furnace that heats our home, and they said yes. And I said, ``What is it?'' And they said, ``20 percent soybean derivative.'' And I said, ``Sign me up.'' And I asked the gentleman on the phone, ``How is it?'' And he said, ``I am the owner of the company and I burn it in our house, and it burns cleaner than regular home heating oil.''

So it is similar to the situation I ran into when I served in county government and we were dealing with markets constantly fluctuating in recyclables, for instance, where one month you might make money on recycling paper and the next month you might lose it. It depends on how many plants are built to recycle it and how many new communities start to do so in earnest.

If our country and our citizens know to ask for wind power, which we get in my home the first 1,500 kilowatt hours per month from a wind farm in Atlantic City. And that is only one of many wind installations that are being put up around the northeast. There is a big wind farm in the Tug Hill Plateau in the Adirondacks that is going to figure majorly in New York's energy supply, and in the Finger Lakes region also. Farmers are finding out that they can lease space on their property for wind turbines, make royalties on it or lease payments from the utilities on it that will pay their property taxes and enable them to stay in farming. The cows don't care. They graze under the wind turbines, and meanwhile they are turning overhead and cranking out the energy.

The Jersey Atlantic Wind Farm in Atlantic City that my wife and I are buying power from will be amortized in 5 years. It consists of five 380-foot-tall wind turbines. Each turbine is a greater surface area than a football field and taller than the Statue of Liberty and generates 7\1/2\ million watts of power when it is running at peak operation.

So if it is free in 5 years, the investment is paid off. After that, you have free energy, you have no pollution, zero emissions, and as you were saying it helps our balance of trade deficit, it cuts back on the money that we are sending to the Middle East oil potentates that are funding the madrasas that are training people that we then have to send our military to go fight. It cuts back on oil spills. It cuts back on asthma and emphysema in the inner cities, the particulate emissions. So it is a win-win-win situation with jobs being created here, with the dollars that we are spending on energy being kept here.

And I would just like to say once again that I am proud to be a part of this action of repealing and closing loopholes. It is not a raise of taxes as our colleagues on the other side of the aisle were saying before, but it is actually closing tax loopholes, subsidies, and giveaways that they created in the last Congress and transferring those funds to these renewable energies.

I am just looking at the uses of the Strategic Energy Efficiency and Renewables Reserve, and I will get that out in one sentence, to accelerate the use of clean domestic renewable energy resources and alternative fuels, to promote the utilization of energy efficient products and practices and conservation, and to increase research development and deployment of clean, renewable energy and energy efficiencies and technologies.

The word ``conservation'' is in there, and it is one that has been sadly neglected. In fact, it was unfortunate a few years ago when our Vice President said conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is no way to build a national energy policy. I completely disagree. I think it is one of the most important ways to start building a national energy policy, and I was happy Mr. Bartlett earlier was talking about energy efficiency. It is time all of us on both sides of the aisle did that and put our money where those words are.

I see these pet peeves of mine as I go through every day life. For instance, walking down the aisle of the supermarket, in the Northeast, I can walk through Hanford's A&P or Stop & Shop, and there are aisle after aisle of cold cases with yogurt or beer or cheese that is being kept cold by a refrigerator and a compressor running all of the time, and an open top so it is convenient. I can just reach in. But there is no door or plastic sheet to keep the cold air in and the warm air out. Meanwhile, because we live in the northern part of the country, half of the year there is a furnace going to keep the shoppers warm and the furnace and the compressor are working at cross purposes. That is the kind of blindness we have gotten used to, that energy is something we can throw away.

I wanted to mention something that should be another part of our energy mix and that is low head hydroelectric power. There are dams and waterfalls throughout this country where in some instances they used to generate power and no

longer do. But our own Idaho National Laboratory from the Department of Energy did a study a couple of years ago that showed, and it is on their Website, it shows how much State By State latent hydroelectric power is waiting to be harvested.

In New York State, there are some 4,000 dams and waterfalls that could, just by having turbines placed where the water is already falling, yield greater than 1,200 megawatts of power, which is about 60 percent of the peak output of the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in my district.

It is that kind of using everything. We have to leave no stone unturned and to try every opportunity for clean, renewable domestic sources of power for national security purposes, as Mr. Klein mentioned, for environmental purposes, as we all know, and for global warming. Anybody in my part of the country knows that the weather is not normal this year. And, indeed, the records for last year showed that it is the warmest year on record and there has been a string of years getting warmer.

We had a seminar at one of our freshman orientation sessions on global warming that shows as the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising, the temperature average is rising with it. It has risen out of what they call the background noise, where it is no longer something that can be written off to the normal ups and downs of climate. We are experiencing a change, a man-made change in our climate here on earth, and it is our duty to our children and grandchildren not to leave them that problem or to leave them mountains of debt because we refused to deal with this problem and keep borrowing money from one country so we can import oil from another country and lose our own sovereignty in the process.

Thank you, Mr. Inslee. I am pretty confident there will be votes from both sides of the aisle tomorrow. And it is interesting thinking about the history of ExxonMobil in terms of their corporate advertising, going back to the days of Herbert Schmertz and the op-ed in The New York Times, and how they have spent probably more money, and other oil companies as well have spent more money. Or I should say they have spent good money on advertising to try to stop people from changing the approach that they could have spent instead on research and development on these new forms of energy.

I wanted to mention one you had not mentioned yet, and that is tidal power. Wave power, of course, is obvious. My dad taught me to sail when I was a kid, and many is the time I have sailed by a buoy that had one of those wave-driven generators in it and keeping the light powered, and/or a solar panel on it keeping the light powered and a battery storing the energy.

But tidal power in my neck of the woods, in the Hudson River, which splits my district in half, is tidal all the way to Troy, all the way past Albany, and navigable all the way that far north. The current runs a couple knots and a half south on the ebb and about two knots north on the flood in New York Harbor. And in the East River and in Hellgate, what they call the juncture of the East River and the Harlem River, where it opens into Long Island Sound to the east, the tidal current there runs five to six knots, depending on the phase of the moon.

We have inlets, rivers, harbors, coastline all throughout this country where tide comes and goes, millions of tons, millions of tons of pressure of water moving in and out of these bodies of water twice a day every day. And that is, well, it is solar and lunar, because it is driven by, I guess primarily by the

moon, but nonetheless it is natural, free energy that can be harvested and should be explored. And, indeed, there have been experiments going on in the East River with tidal generators within the last year that I am looking forward to seeing the results of. But that is one more available source.

Yes, if the gentleman would yield for another minute. I wanted to mention a couple of other ways we can help, that the government can help jump start these industries. One of them is indemnification of risk. We have unbeknownst to most Americans been the underwriters for the nuclear industry since its beginning via the Price-Anderson Act. In fact, there would never have been a nuclear plant, electrical generating plant built in this country if the taxpayer didn't underwrite the possible cost of a catastrophic accident.

Now, if we took that same approach where we were willing to subsidize or underwrite alternative fuels or low head hydro plants, many of which are being held up, by the way, because of liability issues, that would be one way that we could help.

Another way would be preferential purchasing, because the government, at all levels, buys a lot of vehicles. And if we put out a request for proposals saying that we want American companies to build vehicles that will either be plug-in hybrids or plug-in biodiesel hybrids, or just high efficiency vehicles that can be used in our fleets that the different departments of our government used, that would start the economy of scale working. The same way the wrist watches, digital wrist watches that used to cost $200 when they first came out came down to the point where they are $2 now, and computer chips that were bought in quantity by the Defense Department, or by the aerospace industry and NASA, drove down the cost to the point where now anybody can afford a laptop. It is that economy of scale that we can help get started.

And as you said, it is not going to be something that we will have to underwrite or subsidize forever. But when you look at the number of years that we have been subsidizing the old technologies that may be 19th or 20th century technology, we certainly now, in the 21st century can look at these renewables, domestic clean safe renewables and think about the same helping hand to get them off the ground.

It created jobs.

I wanted to say that you prompted this thought. I am not against big corporations. I am not against corporations making a profit. In fact, a couple of the companies that are making the most innovation and putting the most investment into wind energy in our country right now are GE and Siemens. General Electric built the wind turbines that are in the Atlantic City wind farm that I mentioned earlier. Whether it is small start up companies working on alternative energy or whether it is existing oil companies or other utilities or big energy companies, the important thing to say, and this is the important thing, I think, to say to individuals also, and it is what I believe leadership should be doing, whether it is our President, whether it is Senators or whether it is us here on the floor of the House of Representatives, we need to tell our corporations and our citizens that it is patriotic to save energy, that it is patriotic, when you have a choice, to use the most domestic, clean, renewable form of energy that you can. It is patriotic to try to support, if you have a choice on the back of your utility bill, as I do in New York State, to check off that I want wind power, or to check off that I want hydro electric. You could choose the source of where your power comes from if you can afford to do it. And not everybody can, but those of us who are able to spend a couple of cents more per gallon for home heating fuel can get biodiesel. Well, right now it is no difference where I live. It is the same price for bio as it is for oil. But we need to think of this in terms of patriotism and national security and our national interest, and that you can't separate it from our foreign policy. You can't separate it from our economic well-being. You certainly can't separate it from our health. And I don't think you can separate it from our job future either. We need to have these industries start up and be developed here so we can compete. We can't afford to be in a situation we are in right now with hybrids, where I, who want to support, I got elected with union support, I am proud to say. Now I want to buy an American hybrid car that gets top mileage, and right now, the best mileage cars being sold in the United States are made in Japan. I don't believe, for a minute, that we can't compete and make a car that will get as good mileage or better as any other country in the world as their companies can. I think it is the choices that have been made, and the incentives that have been offered or the direction that has been given by government has been lacking. And I am proud to be a part of this 110th Congress, when we, tomorrow, will start down that road where we transfer the emphasis from the old to the new in terms of energy.

I think you have said it all, Congressman. I am happy to be here and proud to be here as part of this 110th. This is part of our taking our own future back, we as a country, I am talking about all the citizens of this country.

I think the same way Congressman Klein mentioned the moon shot, I do remember that, I am a couple years older than you are, and there was a huge lift in the psyche of this country, because even though President Kennedy didn't live to see the day that we landed a man on the moon, it was done in 9 years when he said we could do it in 10.

So our ingenuity and our industry and our creativity took hold, and we accomplished the goal. You could just sense this palpable lifting of the weight off the shoulders of Americans on the street. I mean, people you knew, that we had done this.

The day that we harness all these alternatives, and harness the power of conservation and efficiency so that we can say no thanks, turn that tanker around, send it back to the Middle East, we don't need that oil, that day, when that day arrives, you will see the same feeling of weight lifting off the shoulders of the American people and a feeling of self-sufficiency and of pride and of being in control of our own destiny again. That is really something to look forward to.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding.

Rising drug prices have created an escalating crisis for seniors in my home in the 19th District of New York in the Hudson Valley and the rest of the country. This passage of H.R. 4 will represent another promise kept in our 100 hours with which we begin the 110th Congress.

When the House passed the bill creating the Medicare drug benefit in the dead of night, it took the audacious step of prohibiting Medicare from negotiating for the best price. It is unconscionable that a government agency serving 43 million seniors was not given the same consumer rights as other agencies and private companies. The drug companies have reaped record profits, the taxpayers have been shortchanged, and seniors have been forced to break the bank to pay for drugs.

Today we are moving to change that. Most importantly, we will make sure that our seniors, not the drug companies, get the best deal.

Rising drug prices have created an escalating crisis for seniors in my home in the Hudson Valley and the rest of the country. This passage of H.R. 4 will represent another promise kept.

When the House passed the bill creating the Medicare drug benefit in the dead of night, it took the audacious step of prohibiting Medicare from negotiating for the best price. It's unconscionable that a government agency serving 43 million seniors wasn't given the same consumer rights as other agencies and private companies.

In 2005, a Families USA study found that the median drug price under Part D was 48 percent higher than the price negotiated by the VA. More recently, the same group found the price spread had grown to 58 percent.

When there was a crisis created by the anthrax attacks in 2001, HHS negotiated for lower prices for Cipro. There's an ongoing crisis now for seniors trying to cope with skyrocketing drug prices, and HHS should use its negotiating skill to come to their aid.

The drug companies have reaped record profits, the taxpayers have been short-changed, and seniors have been forced to break the bank to pay for drugs. Today, we're moving to change that.

Directing HHS to negotiate for lower prices will make it easier for Medicare beneficiaries to afford the life-saving and life-improving drugs they need. It will save billions of taxpayer dollars. And most importantly, it will make sure that seniors, not the drug companies, get the best deal.

The Medicare drug benefit was supposed to offer seniors the promise of affordable drugs that would help them enter their golden years with fewer worries. For too many seniors it turned into a dire financial predicament. I'm proud to be a supporter of legislation that will help us finally keep our original promise.

I thank the gentlewoman. Today, I rise in support of H.R. 3, the Chamber's effort to improve the lives of millions of Americans by once again advancing the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.

For many Americans, including relatives and friends of mine who suffer from the effects of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, paralysis, and other devastating illnesses, embryonic stem cell research provides the hope of a better life or even perhaps a cure.

Last year, Johns Hopkins University released the results of stem cell therapy tests on frogs in the laboratory using frog embryonic stem cells which showed paralyzed frogs recovering the use of their hind quarters. Now, one can't necessarily extrapolate from laboratory experiments to humans; but until we try, we will not know.

There has been a lot of debate about this bill, what it is and what it is not. I would just suggest that by allowing the Federal Government to support research on embryonic stem cells, regardless of when they were derived, this bill will allow science to move forward unimpeded in the quest to cure some of our most crippling diseases.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to speak in support this chamber's effort to improve the lives of millions of Americans by once again advancing the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.

For many Americans suffering from the effects of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, paralysis, and other devastating illnesses embryonic stem cell research provides the hope of a better life, or even perhaps a cure.

There has been a lot of debate about what this bill is, and what it isn't.

What this bill is an opportunity to expand the resources the federal government can bring to bear in supporting breakthroughs in medical technology.

Under current policy, only stem cell lines derived before August 2001 can be used for research. But according to the National Institutes of Health, of the 78 stem cell lines that were declared eligible for federal funding by the President, less than one third are still available.

To make matters worse, many of the available lines are contaminated with ``mouse feeder'' cells, making their therapeutic use for humans uncertain.

By allowing the federal government to support research on embryonic stem cells regardless of when they were derived, this bill would allow science to move forward unimpeded in the quest to cure some of our most crippling diseases.

What this bill isn't is an attempt to devalue human life.

Under this bill, stem cells could only be used for research if they would never be used by fertility clinics and be discarded, and only if the donor of the embryo gave full consent.

Instead of being discarded, these embryos could help researchers unlock the cures to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, MS, cancer, and other conditions. Certainly, advancing these goals is consistent with a reverence for human life.

Last year, Congress overwhelmingly passed this bill on a bipartisan basis, and it's clear that the majority of the American people want this research to go forward.

It is my sincere hope that we will again pass this bill by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, and send it to the President for his signature.

I would urge the President not to repeat his previous mistake of allowing ideology to trump science by vetoing this bill. Instead of placating his narrow political base, the President should heed the will of the great majority of the American people by signing this bill into law.

Mr. Speaker, before being sworn in, I was home in my district for a couple of weeks doing a listening tour traveling around the five counties that I represent, and I had dozens of my constituents come up to me and say, Please bring them home, bring our troops home.

I didn't have one person in my district in New York come up to me and say, Please send more over there.

I am proud and honored and humbled, and I must say saddened at the same time, at the prospect that as a member of the Veterans' Affairs committee of this House that I will be able and be responsible to help returning veterans from this war deal with their physical, psychological, economic, housing and other problems.

It is an honor. It is an important service to provide. But what is a shame is that we are creating so many more veterans that have so much more grievous problems, that this war is producing injuries that in previous wars might not have been survivable.

The good news is that the soldiers, our servicemen and -women, are surviving in greater numbers. The bad news is that when they come home, they have to deal with much longer periods of rehabilitation or much more serious injuries and limitations on their mobility and on their other physical capabilities.

I am reminded, standing here, of the State of the Union address 3 years ago when Ahmed Chalabi was sitting in the Presidential box next to the First Lady. At the time he was the fair-haired boy that we had picked out of Iraq to stake our hopes for creating a government in our image and likeness and our country on. So no longer is it Chalabi; it is Maliki.

The President is telling us we can to take his word and trust that he can produce 18 brigades to spread out across the country and to work side by side with our troops.

I am not so sure that 18 brigades that are reliable and independently-functioning of Iraqi Army and police actually exist. I am also not so sure that in another couple of years it won't be somebody else besides Maliki; that

there will be a new Prime Minister that we will be told we should stake our hopes on.

There was a front-page story in the Baltimore Sun yesterday that said that 20,000-some new troops heading to Iraq will have to go with the old, lesser armored vehicles, the flat-bottomed HMMWVs, because the new V-hulled transports that deflect the power of a roadside bomb or a land mine are not available in sufficient numbers because the money has not been available to bring the production lines up to where they need to be to have them ready.

It just bespeaks of the same incompetent planning, the same lack of thorough thinking of the problem through that leaves us with six fluent Arabic-speaking translators in the embassy according to the Baker- Hamilton Report.

If you believe our national intelligence estimate from this past fall that says all 16 of our intelligence agencies in this country report that so far the Iraq war has created more terrorists than it has disposed of, where is the logic in continuing that war? Where is the logic in escalating that war?

I would like to see a surge of interpreters and a surge of religious and historical experts in the region and a surge of trained negotiators, and I would like to see a surge of diplomacy, of us treating other countries as sovereigns and talking to them. There are a couple of examples of that working.

One might remember, for instance, a President from the other side of the aisle from me, President Reagan going to South Africa which at the time was a rogue state that had nuclear weapons, and I was on the side that was saying, Let's sanction them. Let's not talk to them. And let's cut off all interaction. And what he called constructive engagement was sending ballet troupes and sending artists and having as much commercial and cultural exchange as possible to bring them to our way of thinking. It worked in that case, a nuclear power disarmed. And I would like to see that kind of emphasis and diplomacy returned to our country's foreign policy.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 13, had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Madam Speaker, today the House of Representatives will consider an important package of reforms that, when adopted by this chamber, will take the first necessary steps toward restoring fiscal responsibility in our government. I am proud to be a cosponsor of these measures, which will allow us to undertake the critical tasks of balancing our budget and controlling our national debt.

For too long, our government has operated under a ``buy now, pay later'' philosophy that, if left unchanged, will force our children and grandchildren to foot the bill with increasingly dire consequences. The fiscal responsibility provisions put forward today will help us avoid this generational buck passing by imposing some much-needed discipline on the budgeting process. The package of reforms put forward today accomplishes that by preventing the House from considering budget measures that would increase the federal deficit.

One of the most important reforms we are advancing today is the reinstitution of ``PAYGO'' rules to govern the Congressional budgeting process. Although the overall budget process can be technical and complex, ``PAYGO'' simply means what it sounds like: you pay as you go. The ``PAYGO'' provision creates a barrier to passing legislation that would further inflate our huge national deficit and mortgage our country's future.

Congress operated under ``PAYGO'' rules from 1990 until 2002 with clear results. Under the ``PAYGO'' constraints on spending, our government was able to balance the budget, create budget surpluses, and reduce the national debt by $453 billion. Since the mistaken move away from the ``PAYGO'' rules, deficit spending is back and our national debt has spiraled out of control. As of today, the total national debt is almost an astonishing $8.7 trillion or almost $29,000 for every person in the United States. Disturbingly, much of this debt is held by America's economic competitors, including China. Instead of demonstrating the leadership needed to turn this dangerous fiscal tide, our government has not taken steps to curtail earmarks, our President has never vetoed a spending bill, and we have yet to demonstrate the will to do what is necessary.

I am proud to say that with today's reform package we can begin to change that. It is in our vital interest to get spending under control to eliminate deficits and return to paying down our debt. It will require difficult choices and the will to change business as usual in Washington, but it is our responsibility to meet that challenge by passing these reforms.