Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, last week we were here talking about jobs. This week, we need to talk about jobs again because, quite honestly, the problem the United States has is we have to get our people back to work.

These fine folks who just had the hour before us, they were talking about jobs, talking about the ability to get a job. I thought it was an interesting discussion. We are all concerned about jobs, and we all have different views of how this should be done.

The President laid out a broad agenda for another stimulus bill that he believes will cause us to have new jobs. He's going to deliver that I think today in writing so we can all sit down and look at it and analyze just exactly what it actually says so we can figure out how much of that will create jobs, and if there is a disagreement, we will at least know what we disagree with.

But the bottom line is there are some things that are basic. People take their money and they invest their money when they feel like, A, it's going to make them money, and B, they can feel relatively safe that the future that they envision is the future that's going to actually happen. You've got to look down the road in any organization and get yourself a perspective of just what it takes to make your business or your operation thrive and go forward. And there are some basic things you want to know. You want to know, basically--let's say you're doing a 5-year plan. Over the next 5 years, there are some simple things you would like to know: What are my taxes; what taxes am I going to have to pay on my business? What regulations are going to affect my business, and are they going to change? What is the source of money to borrow or invest in my business if I want to expand? Let's say I want to put a new assembly line in my factory, or I need a new building for my business to grow and put my employees in. Am I going to be able to finance that building? Am I going to be able to come up with the mortgage money to be able to do that? Can I envision a pathway to

income that will support that mortgage and the paychecks for those people that I'm going to hire to run my business with me, to operate the business? These are not mind-shattering things. This is very simple stuff.

If you were starting a lemonade stand, you would have to make some kind of projection on a lemonade stand to figure out whether you were just going to sell lemonade today, or maybe you could sell it all week if you're a little kid. But you've got to know what the playing field is about.

Tonight I'm going to talk about the same thing we talked about last time, something that may be unintended consequences. It may be a different agenda of a different view of the world, or whatever you want to call it, but there are very, very onerous regulations that are popping up now on a basically daily basis that are surprising people and industry around the country. The one that is a front-page headline and will be the subject of legislation I believe this week in Congress is on this board right here. And Congressman Tim Scott of South Carolina has a bill to block this regulation, this action by one of our regulatory authorities, the National Labor Relations Board.

The National Labor Relations Board has filed a complaint against Boeing to prevent them from building a new aircraft plant in South Carolina. Boeing currently has a large complex of production in Seattle, Washington--or somewhere in Washington, I think it's Seattle-- Puget Sound it's called. The problem that the National Labor Relations Board has with the South Carolina site--which is not going to displace, to my knowledge, any of the union employees that are at Puget Sound, but it's a new factory with new employees. But because this factory is in a right-to-work State, where a person doesn't have to join a union in order to get the salary and benefits that the company pays, the National Labor Relations Board has filed suit against Boeing to prevent them from hiring these people and opening this plant.

Now at a time with over 9 percent unemployment--close to 10 percent in some estimates--and as you heard, in some communities, the African community, 16 or 18 percent unemployment, in the Hispanic community, the very same kind of numbers for the Hispanic community, why would a board in Washington, D.C., the National Labor Relations Board, why would they want to say to a company which has made a financial determination that the wise place for them to build their next factory is in the great State of South Carolina, but because they are not a union State, they say, no, we're not going to let you build it there? When did it become the government's job to have regulatory authorities telling people where they could and could not build a plant based solely on union membership? This is very, very onerous. It's very, very unfortunate.

Without any argument pro or con toward union membership, this State-- which is a sovereign State of our Nation--has chosen to have right-to- work laws, which means you don't have to join the union to go to work. Other States choose to have union laws, and closed shops, which means that you can't work in a place unless you join the union. Whether you like one version or the other depends on where you stand, but the facts are that in this country we have both union shops and right-to-work States, and I don't think the government should be picking winners and losers.

I think it's inappropriate for the government to be picking winners and losers. So that's why Tim Scott is bringing a bill to the floor this week, I believe it's this week, to discuss this very issue and, basically, restrict the National Labor Relations Board from having the power to do something like this, because this is not appropriate. The National Labor Relations Board's job is to develop the relationship between labor and management. It's not a guarantee of union membership. The reason we're talking about this, first and foremost is this is the current event in regulations and government interference in a company's business.

And by the way, what is a corporation?

This is something I'm always amazed by. The minute you said the words ``Boeing Corporation,'' it's like they become something, some giant something, and like it's one rich man someplace that owns Boeing. If you own a 401(k), if you have a retirement plan, if you are involved in even the government investment plan that we have for our Federal employees, there's a pretty good chance you might own Boeing stock. Your plan might own Boeing stock.

So what is that corporation? Well, it's you, if you own Boeing stock, because the owners of that company are the people who own the stock. So we need to realize that it's not one or two rich people that own Boeing. It is a multitude of Americans who have invested a small part of their paycheck in buying a share or 10 shares or a million shares, whatever they can afford, of Boeing stock.

So we've got this concept that came out of the sixties, it's don't steal from the individual, but steal from ``the man.'' In criminal law where I've spent much of my life, that was always an amazing thing for me. ``The man'' seemed to be anybody that you didn't know. But it certainly was the corporations.

And, yet, an awful lot of people have their life savings invested in companies like Boeing, like Shell Oil Company, like Exxon, like United States Steel, if they still exist, I don't know whether they do or not, like Continental Airlines, like American Airlines, like Union Pacific Railroad. Those are all owned by people. People own those corporations.

Why should the National Labor Relations Board tell the representatives of the people that own Boeing stock that they can't be in South Carolina because it's not a union shop?

I don't think they should. I think this bill will pass out of this House and, hopefully, will get the support of the President and the realization by the Democrats over in the Senate that this is an important thing and a very bad precedent for the government to be picking winners and losers.

So we started with this board. Now, I talked about my bill that I have, which we may or may not take up. First off, let me tell you something we've been doing. The Congressional Review Act is in existence at this time, and it allows Congress to review every Federal regulation issued by the government agencies and, by the passing of a joint resolution, overrule those regulations.

Federal agencies shall, that means they must, submit to each House of the Congress, that's the Senate and the House, to the Comptroller General a comprehensive report on any major proposed rule. Congress has 60, and that's legislative days, to pass a joint resolution of disapproval of any rule. The Senate must vote on a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval.

So there is a tool to actually disapprove of some of these rules that we're going to be talking about tonight, and we're going to be using that tool. We've already started using it. We're going to continue to use it, so I'm going to put it down here at the bottom so we'll remember we've got a tool.

People have asked me why I put a bill forward that would be so general as to say let's have a general regulation moratorium on all regulations until 2013. Let me read you some--this is not an original idea by John Carter, that's me. This is some regulations that come, some articles out of some newspapers. Let me just read you a couple of them.

The Detroit News: The flood of Federal regulations coming out of the Obama administration add costs, stifles economic growth and limits job creation. Growth is a smarter way to generate additional taxes from businesses than raising the rates and thus the operating costs. The former approach creates jobs. The latter kills them.

The business community is also warning that a flood of Federal regulations will limit growth and job creation. Obama should suspend implementation of any regulation with the potential impact on the economy until the unemployment rate falls below 6 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in particular, must be throttled. The EPA's war on coal affects power plants that provide roughly half of the Nation's electricity. In Michigan, DTE

energy says that the new rules will take 20 percent of its capacity off line within 3 years. Without an assured supply of energy, companies will not invest in new facilities.

That's the clip from the Detroit News.

The Wall Street Journal: Business leaders, ``Stop the Implementation of Job-Destroying Regulations.'' Many of their suggestions are familiar. The CEOs want lower corporate taxes in the U.S., which has among the highest corporate rates in the world, and a moratorium or a rollback of business regulations.

``The government needs to be a better partner with the business world,'' says Magellan Health Services CEO Rene Lerer, echoing a sentiment expressed by many. James Turley, Chairman and CEO of Ernst Young, ``Remove government regulatory policy uncertainty through 2013 by halting initiation or implementation of regulations when such regulations could hurt jobs or economic growth.''

So that's just two quotes out of the newspaper. There are more here. But the point of that being is that the people who create jobs, the job creators are the small and mid-sized businesses of this world, and the big businesses for that matter. But the real generator is the small businessman in America. Over 90 percent of all the jobs held by anybody in this country, those people work for small businesses.

Now, what's a small business?

Well, the other day we had, sitting up here listening to the President's speech, we had a franchise holder for McDonald's franchises. McDonald's hamburger place is a small business, as it belongs to a person who has purchased the franchise for that business.

We had another man with Sports Cuts, which is a haircut franchise. And these are individual people who get a national name, and a national product, and they pay money for that, for the right to use that national name and national product, but they are a small business, usually run but one or two individuals. And they're telling us the uncertainty of regulatory procedures of the Federal Government is making their job untenable.

I'm joined here by my good friend from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo). I think he might have something to say about this. Don, would you like to take the mike? I'll be glad to yield you whatever time you'd like to have concerning regulations and how you see them affecting folks in your part of the world.

If the gentleman will yield, I believe this board is made out of that styrene. This is what we call plastic board.

If you look at it, it probably is made out of styrene.

Recapturing my time, I thank my friend and say that I hope that all of those Members of this House and others that might be listening heard you say America could lose this industry. You didn't say that the world would lose this industry because, quite honestly, once again, a great industry that produces good-paying jobs will, all

of a sudden--not because of taxes or not because of high labor costs, which are a lot of the arguments we get--a new factor, the regulatory industry, drove this prosperous industry out of our country because of possibly voodoo science that they didn't investigate enough. They've got a concept, and they stick to that concept on their science arguments and they don't go outside the scope of their view of the world.

They're going to shut down an industry. But are we going to stop making plastics? No. The world's not. Just the United States is going to stop. And then people say, Why are all of these jobs offshore?

It's not just the cost of labor that drives people offshore. Our regulatory agencies have as much to do with that as anything there is out there.

The President made a joke recently where he said he found out that all shovel-ready jobs are not shovel-ready jobs. Well, let me tell you. I haven't checked all of those jobs he's talking about, but I'd be willing to bet you that there's either an endangered species or, in some form or fashion, the Environmental Protection Agency is in between the shovel taking the first load of dirt on a project and somebody trying to get a project done, because it's the agencies that are shutting down our highways. They're shutting down our bridges. They're shutting down our sewer projects, our water projects, and sometimes for very bizarre reasons.

I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Reclaiming my time to just continue this conversation, I think it's very interesting what you said about the pipeline. That pipeline is bringing heavy crude from Canada to the United States to be refined. Now, let's just point out that it was in The Wall Street Journal sometime this week, as I read it this week, that Alberta, Canada is just exploding. Everybody has got these great jobs because they are going forward, their environmentalists are staying out of the way, and they're developing this heavy crude industry, this tar they've got there, tar sands; and that's what we're shipping down here to be refined in this proposed pipeline, down to where the market is in the United States. Canada is one of our largest, if not the largest single, exporter to the United States of petroleum products.

Now, what's interesting about this picture is that same field that's across that imaginary line in Canada is also down in North Dakota, and we know it's there. It's in Montana, and we know it's there. And it's probably in a lot of other places that are called ``public lands'' in this country right now. Those are lands held by the Federal Government. They own those lands.

Now, what does that mean? That means that they're not letting the drilling going on or the exploration going on on our land for the same petroleum products that we're buying from Canada and building a pipeline to ship down here. Why? EPA and others, regulators and bureaucrats, are preventing the development of those products. Now, it all goes back to the global warming or climate change argument or whatever this whole big umbrella is over this whole idea.

But you wonder why there are no jobs; 250,000 jobs have been created in Alberta, Canada in the last 18 months. 250,000 jobs all to do with that oil. Right across the border, we could be doing the same thing.

It's natural gas. And I will tell you something else. I was just down in San Antonio meeting with some friends down there. One of them is a banker, and he said, Go to south Texas. Man, you should see what's happening in south Texas. Besides the oil and gas we'd already found many years ago down there, they have now found out that there is shale oil and shale gas down in the ground, amazing deposits down there. They're going to have to be using the fracking system to get it out.

But already they're building hotels in towns that only have 8,000 people in them. They're building four-story hotels. Why? Because for the foreseeable future, working men and women are going to be in those hotels, because they've got a job there, until they can find a place to live. Builders are already looking at developing subdivisions, and the people who sell work boots are selling work boots in south Texas. And all those periphery things that come off of that discovery and that development of that discovery create thousands and thousands of jobs.

It multiplies as it goes, just exactly as you were describing, Mr. Manzullo; and that's the exact kind of progression that will bring this country back if we let those folks continue to manufacture.

I guarantee you there's not a person that's watching this or listening to this or who is in this Chamber that there's not somewhere almost within their reach something that's made out of styrene that you've just been describing to us. It is almost as abundant as wood. In fact, if you remember the old movie ``The Graduate,'' what was the advice the guy gave the kid? ``Plastics.'' That's the future: plastics.

Well, we're in that future now, and it is the future. In fact, one of the reasons we have such an outstanding medical world that we live in is we're not having to rewash and sterilize metal and glass instruments. We're making all of our instruments out of this plastic with that styrene in it, and then we're throwing them away. They're disposable. We're making them at a price where we can dispose of them for health purposes, which has changed the lives of many thousands and thousands of Americans in this country every single day, the health pluses of having that product on the market.

But with the government's interference, we will be getting it from China or India or who knows where. But it won't be from here, and no American will have a good job on that. It's almost criminal.

I yield to the gentleman.

I thank you for joining me. And if you would like to stay, we'd love to have you.

Going back to another quote: CNBC, CEO: ``From a regulation standpoint, government just needs to get out of the way. We asked several CEOs leading up to the speech what bold steps Obama could take to reduce the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. John Schiller, chairman and CEO of Energy XXI, said, `If the government would get out of the way, from a regulation standpoint, and let us, XXI, do what we do good, you'll see us continue to hire and grow this economy. I think that's a message from across the board,' said Schiller.''

From the Washington Examiner: ``If President Obama was serious about boosting job creation, he would stop his administration from creating even more regulatory uncertainty. This is the President who once blithely quipped, `You know, the business community is always complaining about regulations.'

``But Friday's decision can only be viewed positively if it is indeed a first step. There are still six other proposed regulations from the EPA that would cost the economy dearly. According to

the EPA's own estimates, the cost to small businesses for obtaining carbon emission permits alone would be $76 billion per year, not including the hundreds of billions of dollars in widespread economic damage from higher energy prices. If Obama really wanted to remove `regulatory uncertainty' from the economy, he would use his Thursday jobs speech''--that was last Thursday--``to announce that he is ordering EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt all of her agency's work on global warming regulations.''

Now, these are just some quotes from some of the media out there that are talking about job creation. I'm for a moratorium. We'll see if we can get that done.

Red tape reality: the White House promises to save $10 billion in 5 years. The White House just put forward $17.7 billion in regulations in only 2 months.

The next chart, this is something we call the TRAIN Act. The purpose of the TRAIN Act is simple: Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation, TRAIN. These guys sit up late at night to figure out how they can have an acronym to cover whatever they're doing. But this is very simple: TRAIN delays MACT and CSAPR--these are two huge rulemaking issues which I will tell you about in just a minute--until the full impact of the Obama administration's regulatory agenda has been studied. They basically say 1,000 power plants are expected to be affected. The annual electricity bill increases in many parts of the country from 12 to 24 percent.

Now, what is this? The administration's new Maximum Achievable Control Technology standards and Cross-State Air Pollution Rule for utility plants will affect the electricity prices for nearly all American consumers. A total of 1,000 plants are expected to be affected. Middle class Americans can expect their bills to go up between 12 and 22 percent.

Mr. Sullivan is saying, look, let's make an economic analysis before you actually impose these regulations, see what it's actually going to do. How is it going to hurt the individual consumer, and how, by the way, is it going to hurt the act of ability of people to get a job?

If you are going to shut down in some instances up to a third to half of power plants, because they are either coal emission power plants or because they've got boiler issues that have got to be dealt with, then what happens? You are talking about people's jobs, getting laid off. When it comes to coal-powered plants, there are some places where the majority of the electricity in the Midwest, for instance, is coal power.

Now if you are going to shut down coal-powered plants to make them retool for new regulations, here is an interesting thought: They have already retooled to put scrubbers on these things three or four times. It's another set of retooling on top of the retooling before the retooling and the other retooling. When they get to this thing they find at some point the guy is going to say, my gosh, I have had about all of this regulation I can stand.

I am going to tell you an amusing story, but it's true. When I was a young lawyer I worked for the Agriculture Committee of the Texas House of Representatives as their lawyer, and we had a hearing one day about new Federal regulations on sausage manufacturers.

Now in Texas our heritage has a lot of folks from the sausage manufacturing parts of Europe. We have Germans, we have Czechs, we have Swedes, we have Norwegians, we have a lot of people who in their old country, they made sausage. And so we have lots and lots of small sausage operations in Texas. Almost every town you go to in Texas, some butcher shop somewhere is making their own best sausage made in Texas.

You can go to our grocery store and you will see sausage that's produced--I am just talking about Texas now--in multiple cities all over the State. Most of them are small towns.

Now, this is a true story. We were having testimony about new government regulations concerning the manufacture of sausage by small businesses. They brought a man in who was in a prison uniform from the State prison in Huntsville and they put him on the stand.

They said, why are you here? He said, well, my brother and I, we made the best sausage in east Texas. But this guy came in our office and he says, I've got these regulations here. You're not going to be able to make this in your butcher shop anymore. You're going to have to redo your butcher shop.

He gave us a list of stuff we had to do. We took it to our banker. He said, you boys have got the best sausage operation in east Texas. I'll loan you $25,000, you can fix your place up. So they put in tile floors with drains, and they put in different butcher blocks, this, that, and the other. He said, we borrowed $25,000.

About 8 months later that same old boy came through the door and said, I've got some bad news for you, gentlemen. We've got new regulations. All that stuff you had to do last time, it's not good enough. Everything has got to be stainless steel. You've got to have a cement floor with a power drain in it. You've got to have certain kinds of saws.

So me and my brother, we went to the banker and we said, hey, what are we going to do? He said, well, that's another $50,000 but you're good, you've got a great business. I'm going to loan you that $50,000. You boys do the work.

So we did the work, and it was working great. We were manufacturing sausage. We still made the best sausage in east Texas.

Then that same old boy came walking in our door, and he said, I got bad news for you, boys. And that's when I shot him.

Now, that's a true story, and he was serving time for manslaughter in a penitentiary for shooting that regulator. I am not in any way advocating shooting regulators. I am telling you how frustrated a small businessman can get just for regulations on the manufacture of sausage in his hometown butcher shop.

Now, think how frustrated an employer gets whether a regulation causes him to lay off one-third of his workforce to afford to do what he is doing. This is the whole concept of why regulations have to be so carefully planned and done, and you have to have good studies done as to the economic effect, as John Sullivan, my friend from Oklahoma, has brought before this House.

This is called the Environmental Protection Agency Regulatory Relief Act. This has to do with Boiler MACT, hospitals, factories, colleges, thousands of major American employers use boilers that will be impacted by the EPA's new Boiler MACT rules. These new stringent rules will impose billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs, increase the cost of many goods and services, and put over 200,000 American jobs at risk.

The American forest and paper industry, for example, will see an additional burden of at least $5 billion to $7 billion. Morgan Griffith of Virginia has this bill which provides a legislative stay of the four interrelated rules issued by the EPA in March of this year. This legislation would also provide the EPA with at least 15 months to re- propose and finalize new regulations that are achievable and do not destroy jobs, and provide employers with the ability to extend compliance on these rules.

These rules, as they stand, are business-killing rules today; 200,000 people will lose their jobs if these rules are implemented. This will be brought up in October, around the 3rd of October, in that week, to basically put a hold on these job-killing regulations.

The President himself said we need to examine regulations and see how they are going to kill jobs. Well, here's one right here, Mr. President: 200,000 jobs at a minimum will be lost, maybe forever, and cost us $5 to $7 billion in just one industry.

Now, that's money, that is capital that has been put into a different project than building and expanding your business. That means instead of hiring people you are laying off people.

Now, why in the world, in the environment where we have 9 percent, 9.1 percent unemployment, we have been teetering around 10 percent now for almost a year, why in the world would we want to have these people who work for us in the government--they are not elected, they are appointed people, they are hired, just like anybody else--that are out there thinking up ways to shut off people, good, honest hard-

working men and women, in this country's jobs because of some concept they have on making an improvement.

Let's make improvements. Let's keep our environment clean, but let's do it in a way that remembers that we are part of the environment too.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time remains?

This is something I have worked on. I have worked on it now for almost 6 months. This is cement, and John Sullivan, who has been working with us on this, is bringing this up that week of October 3.

The Cement MACT and two related rules are expected to affect approximately 100 cement plants in America. Now, when we say cement we are talking about a process that makes that powdery gravel and sand that, if you go to the--I won't advertise for anybody--but if you go to one of these stores that sells stuff for construction, you will see these sacks of stuff that say something ``crete''--``cement crete'' or something like it. And in that sack is a bunch of stuff, and you add water to it, you make concrete. Gardeners use it, everybody uses it.

On a bigger scale you pour slabs for foundations for buildings. On an even bigger scale you put special reinforced steel in the cement pour, the concrete pour, and you make pre-stressed concrete walls which most of our big buildings in this country and around the world are built with. In fact, concrete is the number two building material in the world. The number one building material in the world is water.

Of the elements that are used in building things, Portland cement is number two, and it's the process that makes the powder that binds it to make concrete.

Now, this is our process. We discovered it. We did it. We originated the prestressed concrete that many of these buildings here in Washington, D.C. that aren't marble are built out of. And yet our regulatory process has the potential to drive anywhere from a third to a half of all the cement manufacturers, the people that make the powder that binds the concrete, out of the country.

Now, we are doing it for the good of the environment. Right? Well, we have scrubbers on our cement plants, and we have lots of things that we have cleaned up in our cement process. But our competitors in China and India have nothing. I mean, zero. They don't have anything to do with cleaning up the environment. So is it really going to clean up the world's environment, all the way around the world environment, by taking it away from a place that does it right and putting it in a place that does it wrong? A $7 billion industry could cost as much as $5 billion to fix these regulations. Put a pencil to that. I mean, they are worth $7 billion, and $5 billion more has to be put into it.

And the only solution that many of them see is just close down the plants in the United States, fire the people that are there. Hello? What kinds of jobs are these? The lowest paid man that works at a Portland cement factory makes around $65,000 a year, a laborer. And then the technicians get up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not minimum-wage jobs; these are the kind of jobs that every American dreams about, the kind of job that every family dreams is the basis of their family.

And because of the regulatory analysis of some people, they have decided that they are going to impose regulations that basically drive these people off to Mexico or to China or to India. And they bring up issues like mercury. But studies, their own people's studies, show that the majority of the mercury that is in the air right now in the United States comes from China and India because they don't clean things up over there, and it blows over here from China and India. So we are going to make it better by sending more over to China and India? I don't think so.

But what about the American jobs that are here. What if they let these people thrive. If they thrive, building materials stay reasonable. We don't have to ship building materials from China to build our next house, to pour our next concrete slab. And so what happens, the price of everything goes up. Can we afford that next house? Who knows. This is what regulations do. It is a compounding effect that costs us jobs.

I see one of the smartest men in Congress here, Mr. Gohmert, over there. Is he here to talk on a different subject? I know he is smart enough to talk about this if he wants to. Louie is one of my colleagues from Texas, and I'm proud to call him my friend.

Let's go to the next chart. We don't have a board for this, but let me say something. I'll tell you about south Texas and the jobs that they are creating down there. Just to give you an example of how excited people are about that find of natural gas in south Texas--and now remember, Texans are oil and gas people. Remember this, too: when Texas came into the Union as a country, we had a special treaty which let us keep our public lands. So the Federal Government doesn't tell us what we do with our land in Texas because we own our public lands. And all of this land that is going to be drilled on in south Texas is owned by people, not by the Federal Government. So they can't keep us from leasing our land out to drill these wells.

Now, they can keep us from using the process it takes to break up that shale to capture this gas, and that's what they're trying to do. Now, we created an Energy Department in this country, I forget, 30 years ago. And its goal was to make us energy independent in our lifetime. Well, I don't know whose lifetime it was, but some of those people are already dead, because the truth is we are further from being energy dependent than the day that they created the Energy Department. Way further.

At that time, less than 30 percent or 40 percent of our oil and gas came from overseas. Now we are in the 80 percentile range. Now, why in the world when we know that we've got it and we know we're going to use it, we have to use it, why would we keep buying it from Saudi Arabia and other places like Venezuela that hate us? Why don't we just get what we've got? Go down there and get what we've got. Out in the gulf and in south Texas and in the great State of Pennsylvania, where they've got a huge shale gas find, ask those people how they like their shale gas. They love it; 25,000 jobs have been created in that part of Pennsylvania in the last year and a half. The same shale goes into New York, and it is going other places. So there are jobs that get created by this.

But here is another peripheral thing. Because there is no place to stay in south Texas--it is just a bunch of little bitty towns down there--big hotel firms are coming down there and building hotels down there because they see this as a long-term operation down there, and it is worth investing and building hotels and motels so the people working down there will have a place to stay.

What comes with that, restaurants. And what comes with that, washaterias, and all of the other things that you need to help people grow. And then when people settle, what is the first thing that they are looking for, an apartment or a house to live in. They get tired of staying in a hotel.

One company, I won't use their name, one company went down to south Texas and leased a whole eight-story hotel for 2 years. That's how convinced they are this is going to be an economic boom in south Texas.

Why would we ever want to stop that. And yet there are people who are continuously bombarding this industry and saying that this terrible shale fracking process is poisoning the water supply. But there is no evidence, real evidence that proves that.

By the way, anybody that tells you that they smell it in their water doesn't know what they are talking about because natural gas doesn't smell. It smells in your house because they put a chemical in there that makes it smell so you know when your gas is leaking. But it doesn't smell when it comes out of the ground.

I worked in that industry as a kid. I had the crummy job of actually digging up one of those smell machines that puts the smell in natural gas, and I could testify under oath, it's the foulest-smelling thing that you ever saw, but they have a machine that puts it into your gas so you can smell it when it goes into your home. There are a lot of people who are just being crazy over some of these issues.

Look at this, coal. First, I was talking tonight at supper with one of our Members from Kentucky, and he said they've issued two coal mining permits in the last 2 years, I think he said. And they are one of the largest coal-mining areas in the entire country. They are doing everything they possibly can to kill the coal industry. And yet we have an abundance of coal, and cleaning up the coal process has been the goal of the coal industry and the manufacturing world. We have some States like Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, those States along the Ohio River, and many of the States on the east coast, and even this city have coal power plants. In fact, in some places the predominant power plant is the coal power plant.

Now, if they shut those down and take them offline, how are we going to have enough electricity for everybody? We already worry about brownouts and blackouts if we have hot weather. How are we going to have enough electricity if we're going to take away the natural resources?

And who's going to take it away? A vote of this Congress? No. We've had that vote, and it didn't happen. A guy who works for the government that sits in his little office in a cubicle and decides that he doesn't think we ought to have coal, should he and a group of people be able to write a regulation that shuts down a whole industry based on possibly bad science? That's a question we have to ask ourselves. And do we all want to sit around in the dark as we ponder because if we shut off what we use to power our power industry, we won't have any electrical power. This is for the residuals. I guess it's the ash, is the best word I can say.

Now, what in the world is anybody worried about coal ash for? Well, I think everybody in this room, if they don't have sheetrock in their house, there's something probably strange about it, because most everybody has what we in our part of the world call sheetrock. Now, up here they may call it wallboard or something else. Well, part of the component of sheetrock is coal ash. And yet this bill creates an enforceable minimal standard that allows coal ash to be used in the products it's being used in with appropriate studies. If they do the pending rules for coal ash, there's another thousand jobs that's going to be lost.

So just in our talk tonight there's 300,000 jobs.

We're almost through this stuff, but there's plenty more. I've just got 10 of the hundreds that have been passed, in just the last 2 months, of new regulations. These are just 10. But in these short 10, now we're at over 300,000 jobs lost when these regulations go into effect.

Most of these are current events. This will happen before the end of the year or certainly before the middle of next year. So, as we are trying to create jobs, we're losing them as fast as we can create them. And why? Because of the regulations.

Now, we can regulate without shutting things down. There's a smart way to do things and there's a stupid way to do things. Let's do it the smart way. Let's get the politics--and by ``politics,'' I mean the environmental politics--out of this process and let's get off to where we need to be. And that is: What do we need, how do we accomplish it, and how do we keep working while we do it? If we can do that, which is certainly not flying to the Moon. It's less complicated than that. If we can do that, we can start solving the job problem we've got in this country because we can put people back to work.

I'll give you one final example that we don't have a board on. I talked earlier about people who have franchises. If you wanted to buy a McDonald's hamburger franchise for your hometown--I don't know what it costs, but it's not cheap because it's a moneymaking business. And when you bought it, you would be a small business owner. You would own one McDonald's store. I think that would be a pretty good definition of a small business owner.

Now, we have written a regulation--there's more pages in that regulation than there are chairs in this room--called the Dodd-Frank bill. It regulates the financial industry. As a result of the Dodd- Frank bill, if you had the ability and the creditworthiness to get the money, to borrow the investment money and put up some of your own to buy a McDonald's franchise, the Dodd-Frank bill has put so many regulations on these folks that the availability of capital--and ``capital'' is not a dirty word; ``capital'' is another word for investment money--availability of capital for these small businesses is almost impossible.

And yet our banks are overflowing with capital. It's not that they don't want to make loans. It's, first, small business men are scared of this environment and they don't want to borrow. But if they do want to borrow, the regulations have made it so difficult, they give up and they don't borrow the money. Bankers don't make a living if somebody doesn't borrow the money. That's how they make a living.

So, everything in our economy is interrelated and tied together. As we talk about small business, it is the driving force for the American economy. If you keep small business from creating new jobs, you keep our economy from growing. These regulations and others we'll talk about in the future are just that--job-killing regulations. And if they've killed existing jobs, they're certainly not going to be helpful in creating new jobs.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we've all been back in our districts for the last month, and we've been talking to friends and neighbors back home about what America is truly concerned with, what is most important in the eyes of all Americans, and that is getting America back to work.

Our economy is stagnant. This administration is throwing up barriers, which is freezing assets because the folks that normally would invest in growth and hiring people are frightened about what's around the next corner, and they're sitting with all their money and they're not growing.

I met this morning with around somewhere between 12 and 14 of my neighbors in just a sit-down cup of coffee, where we sat around and we talked about the way that folks in central Texas view what's going on with the job market.

You know, in Texas we've been blessed. We haven't faced the kinds of unemployment numbers that other States have had. But we now are certainly seeing unemployment creeping up in our State also.

We had small businessmen and -women there, and they talked about the things that concern them. But yet we've had meetings with bankers who've explained to us that you can look at their deposits and see that American local investors are sitting on the sidelines and keeping their deposits in the bank and not investing in growth and not investing in capital structure, not building buildings, and certainly not hiring people. And so part of the discussion this morning from some very intelligent small business folks was, we think we know why; why do you say this is happening?

The answers I got were answers that we hear on the floor of this House every day.

But the one that I've been talking about now for almost a year, probably maybe even over a year, is the fact that we are seeing the administration doing through government regulations, which are basically laws passed by the regulators which change the playing field for people and our economy across the board at every level. It's not done by acts of this Congress. It's done by acts of bureaucrats in the Obama administration as they make rules and regulations that fit their view of the world and how they think the world should work. And these regulations regulate the drivers, the force builders that employ the American people.

Many of these regulations have become such a shock to the conscience of people who are in business that they say, ``My Lord, I'm not about to get invested in growth until I know whether I'm going to even have my business once the regulators are through with me.''

And then sitting on the sideline is the giant regulator program, which is the health care bill that this House passed last year and the Senate passed. We call it ObamaCare. Its 2,000 pages are multiplying very rapidly as the regulators, the people who are able to pass rules to set up the regulations that govern that bill, are imposing more and more burden on the individual employer and on those people seeking health care.

So what I heard today from some people who are presidents of small businesses, run small businesses--a Thomas Barrett, a very intelligent lawyer who is both a financial adviser and a lawyer for small and other sized businesses all over central Texas and is highly sought after for his opinion--they said it's the unknown that's driving the investment off the page in the United States. It's the unknown. We don't know what's going to happen next. Our taxes. What are taxes going to do? We've got taxes that will last for a while and then go back to a different tax automatically unless this House acts.

Then most importantly, and what we talked mostly about today, was all the new regulations that are coming up.

In the next 3 or 4 months, the Republican leadership in this House is going to do everything it can to turn back some of the craziness that's gone on in the regulatory world. I brought the Members here tonight just a few examples of some of the regulations, many of which we've been talking about all year. We've spent a lot of time talking about the cement industry; we've talked about Boiler MACT; we've talked about a lot of other things we're going to talk about tonight.

But it's just a general outline of some corrective measures that this Republican-led House is going to try and going to pass through this body to just start slowing down and changing the direction of what we think are some ill-conceived regulations by the executive branch, the Obama administration.

I want to start off with this poster right here, which just gives you a small example of what we're talking about. In July of this summer-- this is what we've called the ``regulatory summer''--these are regulations that have been proposed by various agencies. Many of them are household words like the Environmental Protection Agency; but there are plenty of others, the Labor Department--you could go on and on.

In July, 229 proposed regulations went into effect, 379 final regulations, and the cost estimated of these proposed and final regulations: over $9.5 billion to the economy in the month of July. That meant business, the job creators, took a hickey of $9.5 billion in 1 month, the month of July 2011. We have just finished August--270 proposed regulations, 347 final regulations: over $8.2 billion in August. So for this summer, just July and August, the 2-month total: $17.7 billion in costs to the people who create jobs.

Now, is it any wonder that the people who create jobs are sitting on the sidelines and saying, holy cow, how do I hire somebody? And I think the American people know why people in business hire somebody. They hire somebody because they think that person will make their business more prosperous, will make it work more efficiently, will make it do the job the business was set up to do. If you are in the roofing business and you put roofs on houses, you hire more roofers because you think you will be able to produce a better quality product faster and more efficiently, therefore enhancing the profit that those who have invested their capital and labor into that business--they can make a profit so that that business can thrive. You don't hire roofers when you don't need to put roofs on houses. I mean, that doesn't make any sense, and everybody with any kind of common sense knows that.

Now, if you've got a person who's got some business, whether it be big or small, and they literally don't know what the government is going to do to them tomorrow or, let's just say, in the next 2 months, following this track record, they could be looking at another almost $20 billion worth of additional costs to their business that could be coming up in September and October. Based upon the last 2 months, it's arguable that it's pretty close to $20 billion of additional costs that they were not anticipating and never thought was going to happen to them; and all of a sudden out of the clear blue, it drops in their lap.

Now, you will hear arguments like, wait a minute, there are these things that are environmental and other ways and people have known all along something about this was going to be done. And that may or may not be true. But the ramifications of what the regulators actually did are turning out to be horrendous costs to industries that right now are trying to get the ground under them stable so they can start hiring people again.

If you're on balancing ground sort of like this earthquake we had up here in Washington, which I am very fortunate that I wasn't in, when that ground is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Well, the same thing goes for business. When the foundation underneath your business is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Are you going to go out and hire somebody, give them a job, when this is what your life is right now and someone is creating that problem, that are actually by their actions making it unstable?

I would argue that questionable regulations, the imposition of additional costs, the unknown of what taxes are going to be tomorrow-- all these things create an unstable environment for the people who hire people. So this last regulatory summer is a perfect example of the earthquake that has shaken the foundation of the small businessman and the job creators in America.

The President of the United States promised us, the White House promised us, to save $10 billion in redtape, which is kind of the slang term for bureaucratic regulations, in 5 years. But the White House has put forward $17.7 billion worth of redtape in 2 months. The message has been lost somewhere. Where is it? When did what we were promised change into a three-for-one worse situation? We were promised a $5 billion savings for the job creators; and, in fact, we've created a $17.7 billion expense and uncertainty to the job creators, and we wonder why we are not creating jobs.

Mr. Kucinich was talking about his view of the world. He and I don't see

the world the same way, but the facts are when he was talking about we need to create jobs, we darn sure need to create jobs.

The role of the Congress today is finding ways to get this country back to work. If we put this country back to work, 90 percent of our problems will be much, much better. So the real goal of the Republican House this year, to finish this year out, is going to be trying to correct at least some of this instability created by these regulators, these unelected regulators. These are appointed people, not elected people. The heads of these agencies are appointed by the President. They are under the wings of the White House, if you will. They are part of the executive branch of government. And the legislature, this branch, the Congress, is going to, in the next several months, try to put some reins on these out-of-control regulators and hold them back. And we've got just some of them I am going to talk to you about that some of my colleagues are putting forward in the future.

The week of September 12, which is next week, I suppose, we're going to take up the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, by Tim Scott of South Carolina. Now, the facts of this situation are very unusual in my way of thinking, and I think most of the people in the United States, when they heard this on television, they said, they can't do that, can they?

It seems the Boeing Corporation has a big operation up in the Washington State area, and they were wanting to build an additional plant to build whatever Boeing builds, whether it's aircraft or whatever it is--they wanted to do it in South Carolina. They have been negotiating and working in good faith with the citizens of South Carolina and the government of South Carolina. They have looked at alternative locations around the country to make a determination of what is best for their business in their situation today, and they determined that they were going to build a very important plant in South Carolina.

But the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, issued a complaint against the Boeing Company for the alleged transfer of an assembly line from the Washington plant to South Carolina. Yet not one union employee at the Boeing's Puget Sound facility, that's the Washington plant, has lost his or her job as a result of the proposed South Carolina plant.

Still, the NLRB is pursuing a restoration order against Boeing that would cost South Carolina thousands of jobs--these are new jobs in South Carolina--and deter future investment in the United States. This is the government telling Boeing how they can run their business at the base level of you can't move unless we tell you you can move; and if you choose to go to a right-to-work State instead of a union shop State, we're going to tell you, no, you can't do it.

What happened to the freedom of movement that our Founding Fathers created in this country? I mean, part of what makes us great is if you can't prosper in Texas, you can maybe prosper in South Dakota. In fact, people are right now, as we talk right now, people are taking businesses from one part of the country and going to another part of the country because of maybe newly discovered resources, maybe a better work environment, maybe a more intelligent workforce, maybe a better investment community, maybe better opportunities, maybe better tax structure. That's the free right of every American, is seeking prosperity for their company and for their family to go seek these places.

If we're going to tell Boeing they can't build a plant to create jobs in South Carolina, next they may be telling Sam Smith in Oklahoma, I'm sorry, but we need you to stay in Oklahoma, we don't want you to move to Texas, or we don't want you to move to South Carolina to go to work in the Boeing plant, which we just canceled. Is that the kind of world we have and we want this government to have? I would say no.

Do we want the people of South Carolina to have 1,500 new jobs? Yes. Is anybody talking about hurting the people employed at Puget Sound? No.

It's the issue of union membership that drove this whole thing, and we have given our States the right to choose whether they have a right- to-work State or they have a union State, and every State in this country has some difference in how they view that. It's part of the environment that State creates to bring business into the community.

What in the world is wrong with that, and when did that become Big Brother's job to tell somebody where they can and can't offer you a job? So are we now saying that the people of Washington State--and I have many friends there and I love very much, and I don't mean to be in any way defaming Washington State--but we have got a group of bureaucrats that are saying those are more important people than the people in South Carolina who want to work for Boeing for a good salary, because the government's telling them they can't do it.

The gentleman from South Carolina, Tim Scott, has got this bill, H.R. 2587, we're going to take it up next week, I understand, which is going to protect these jobs from this government interference. It would take the common-sense step, and it would prevent that National Labor Relations Board from restricting where an employer can create jobs in the United States.

Who would have ever thought we would have had to even address this on the floor of this House? This world that we have lived in, and, in fact, President John F. Kennedy in writing one of his dissertation papers at Harvard came up with a term ``The Great Frontier,'' which the whole concept of America was if you failed in one place, the great blessing of America is you can pack up and move to another place. At one time that was the frontier.

Now that frontier is in technology; that frontier is in science. That frontier is not just moved from one place to the other; it's moved from one idea to the other. That's the greatness of America. To have the government tell you where you can and can't locate is an abomination to the very spirit of the American Dream.

This one, we need to do it right away; we are going to do it. We hope our friends in the Senate are going to help.

We have the administration's new Maximum Achievable Technology Act, MACT, standards and Cross State Air Pollution, CSAPR, for utility plants, will affect electricity prices for nearly all American consumers. In total 10,000 power plants are expected to be affected. I can't tell you the number in other States, but Texas surprisingly fell under this act, which no one anticipated, and we actually had no input whatsoever--but that's a different argument which I have made before, but I know that we are talking about 17 to 19 plants just in Texas are being closed down.

These are coal-powered plants. We're talking about coal-powered plants in most instances here. The result to middle class America is an annual electricity bill increase in parts of the country anywhere from 12 to 24 percent, just by this one regulation that has been proposed dealing with coal-powered plants and greenhouse gas emissions. Well, Representative John Sullivan of Oklahoma has come up with a solution for this, H.R. 2401, the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation.

One of the things that we think any regulator should be looking at as he is doing this type of work is how does this impact the jobs of the American people, how does this impact the economy of the area. If you have a State that has 20 power plants and the results of your mandatory and arbitrary ruling is going to shut down 12 or 15 of those plants, it doesn't take a genius to figure the price of electricity is going up.

Even if they go in and they make a conversion to some other form of power at great cost and expense, billions of dollars of additional money happen to be spent, even if they do that, you are still going to have down time when electricity is going to be scarce and the risk of blackouts and brownouts is going to be increased. Quite honestly, it hurts every industry and every person that depends on that electricity.

Has anybody looked into this and said here is how we figure this out and told us with transparency what effect this has? No.

So what Mr. Sullivan is trying to say is that we need to call a time- out;

and it would require a cumulative, economic analysis for specific environmental protection rules and specifically delay the final date for both utility MACT and CSAPR rules until full impact of the Obama's administration regulatory agenda has been studied.

Some of this stuff is done with computer projections, but the facts are it's kind of a shock and surprise to everybody that's in the business, and it's time that we call time out and rather than cost this country jobs, give these people a chance to continue to have good jobs for the American people to work in.

This is a good bill, and we're going to take this bill up the week of September 19.

The next bill that this Republican Congress is going to go take up is H.R. 2250 to deal with what's called boiler MACT. From hospitals to factories, colleges, thousands of major American employers use boilers that will be impacted by the EPA's new boiler MACT rules.

These new stringent rules will impose billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs, increasing the costs of many goods and services. College kids will tell you how expensive going to university is today. They don't need any more cost increase there, but it will increase the cost of higher education; and it will put over 200,000 jobs at risk, just what they have done under the boiler MACT rules.

So what are we doing with H.R. 2250? Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia has proposed this. It's called the EPA Regulatory Relief Act and would provide a legislative stay for four interrelated rules issued by the EPA in March of this year. The legislation would also provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new achievable rules that do not destroy jobs and provide employers with an extended compliance period.

In other words, if it's a problem, let's fix the problem without costing people jobs. Let's fix the problem with a reasonable amount of time for compliance so that it's not a knee-jerk reaction that is required by everybody to try to keep from going out of business because of EPA-imposed rules.

So basically, just like the last bill we talked about, this is saying stop this craziness, take a new look, let the people you're regulating have some input into the cost and the compliance and the job loss, and then let's restructure. If we've got to fix this problem, restructure it in a manner that makes common sense to keep the American men and women of this country working, keep the factories open and producing and the colleges and universities open and producing and not impose a short-term, heavy burden of an additional capital infusion in order to meet regulatory changes. Give them a reasonable amount of time that common sense says it would take to fix the problem instead of imposing this rammed-down-your-throat series of rules. October 3 is the week the Republican Congress will be bringing that before the American people and before this House.

This is one I've been working on for quite awhile. I hope through part of our efforts during these evenings when we've talked about the cement MACT issue, the imposition of new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions for the cement factories, and the fact that we've had the opportunity to very effectively drive cement production out of this country and offshore to China, India, and maybe Mexico where they don't regulate at all the emissions, and then we think that somehow it's going to fix greenhouse gases. It's kind of insane that cleaning it up over here and driving people offshore to where they don't clean it up at all is going to help anything. It's going to hurt something, but that's a different argument.

In the week of October 3, the cement MACT and two related rules are expected to affect approximately 100 cement plants in America. The cost is estimated to be somewhere between $3-4 billion for a $6-8 billion industry. Just do the math. That's a tremendous burden if these rules come into effect. These stringent requirements will be cost prohibitive, and the American cement industry, quite frankly, could be at risk across the board. We could wake up finding ourselves importing from other countries, by necessity, a product that we now lead the world on.

You know, concrete is the second most used building material on Earth. The only thing that's used more than concrete is water. So Portland cement, which is the base ingredient in creating concrete, is as important to the building of infrastructure buildings, and basically everything that we live with, as anything on Earth. And we are in that business and we produce cement in various States in this country. We produce the Portland cement process, and these regulations would shut down factories and basically cause these international companies-- because all companies, whether they are based here or not, trade internationally--to move someplace else. And you wonder why jobs are going overseas. Well, in this case, in the cement industry, jobs will be going out of the country for one specific reason--government regulations beyond reasonableness.

The Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act sponsored by Representative Sullivan, my good friend from Oklahoma, will provide a legislative stay of these rules--hold off, brother, we need to look at these things--and provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new, and here's the magic word, achievable rules that do not destroy jobs and provide employers with an extended compliance period. Once again, quit cramming it down our throat. Quit saying you've got to do it tomorrow. Give us time to implement reasonable rules. And as we look at these rules, let's analyze what they are going to cost us in the way of jobs and in the way of our economy, and take that into consideration as you plan out the reasonable way forward. You'll find that many of the things that we'll be taking up in the next couple of months, right there is the secret key ingredient. We're going to come up with rules that you can achieve without destroying jobs that will still, over a long term, if you give time to comply, will meet the requirements that are necessary that people think to clean things up if they need to be cleaned up.

October 3 is when we are going to take that up. Sometime in the month of October or November we will take up another bill.

Oh, by the way, when you're talking about jobs in these Portland cement factories, these jobs are good jobs. These are labor jobs, but they are trained labor jobs. They are good jobs that pay somewhere between $65,000 and $85,000 each. Now, that's a good American job that ought to be done by an American, not by someone from China or from India because we have driven these industries out of our country.

Coal ash. H.R. 2273, these are anti-infrastructure regulations commonly referred to as coal ash rules that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, according to the existing regulations, affect everything from concrete production to building products, like wallboard. The result is an estimated loss of well over 100,000 jobs.

So, you know, at the end of this last month, we had no job gains. Not one job was created. That's what the report said. Well, just in the things that I've read to you so far as a result of these regulations, if all of this took place next month, just the numbers we've given, we're talking about 500,000 jobs so far that these bills that this Republican Congress is going to take up and try to get some reasonableness in this regulatory process.

It's time for this Congress to not surrender the lawmaking-- rulemaking is lawmaking--authority to regulators without overseeing what they are doing and making sure that they are not harming our economy and harming what is going on in America and the jobs that everybody needs. We can't afford to lose more jobs. We have to keep the people working who have jobs, and then we've got to enhance these businesses in such a way that they feel that they are not going to be threatened by surprise regulations; and, therefore, they are willing to say, I have got stable ground under my feet and I can start to expand and hire again and start to invest my capital which right now is sitting in the bank into new and better products, services, factories, et cetera.

So this coal ash bill that will cost this country 100,000 jobs, H.R. 2273, the Coal Residual Reuse and Management Act, sponsored by Representative David McKinley of West Virginia, will

create an enforceable minimum standard for regulation of coal ash by the States, allowing their use in a safe manner to produce products and protect jobs. It's just basically saying let the people who have this coal ash--and it's in certain States more than other places--use this coal ash and regulate this coal ash in such a manner that it does enhance the environment without destroying American jobs.

Once again, the Congress has got to act, and the Republican Congress is prepared to act.

Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is now proposing rules to regulate dust. Now, I live in Texas. We've got more highway miles than any other State in the Union, plenty of paved roads, but we've also got what we call farm roads and ranch roads. And in the western part of the State, those farm roads are covered with what we call caliche, which is a pulverized limestone, and over in the eastern part, they're covered with certain types of gravel. Some of it's river gravel and other things.

When a farmer drives up to his house on his driveway, it's usually got some kind of gravel or caliche on it and it kicks up dust. The EPA is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your gravel road. Now, what is your solution? Well, it's easy. Go out and spend $20,000 and pave your driveway--5 miles of driveway. So put pavement on it. Oh, but make sure you put a certain kind of pavement because it's got to have pavement that doesn't kick up dust. Arguably, if you use asphalt, it won't kick up dust, or concrete won't kick up dust--or not as much--but you might kick up a little more dust if you do what they call ``squirt top,'' which is what most farm roads are, which is tar with gravel spread on it. Until that gravel sets, it kicks up dust.

So even if you went to the expense to build a farm road that was a paved farm road, your paving method might kick up enough dust to get them to fine you and take money out of your pocket anyway. And the EPA now wants to regulate dust. California does this already. I asked one of my California colleagues, How do you keep from getting fined in California while having the dust regulations? Here's what they said: Water down your roads every day so it doesn't have dust. Mud is okay. Dust is bad.

Okay. Now that may be great for California. I don't know what the water situation is in California. But it hasn't rained in Texas. Some kids are about to go off to school and haven't seen rain in Texas, it hasn't rained so long. But seriously, I landed at the airport and looked out at this waterfall up here on the east coast, and said, Holy cow, we don't know what that looks like back home. Why don't they move all this water on the east coast down to Texas, where it hasn't rained, to my knowledge, in 6 months. And half of my neighboring county of Bastrop is burning to the ground because it's so dry and so hot, and we haven't had a rain in so long. We may be the only State in America that's praying that a hurricane will hit our coast so we can get some rain.

Are you going to tell that farmer that the only way he's getting that water that he's feeding his animals is through shallow wells that may have gone dry on him, or deep wells he has to drill to get to additional water under the ground, or windmills that are pumping that water, if you are out West, which are not that deep, and a lot of them have gone dry--his precious water that his livestock and his family needs to survive, he's got to take it out and squirt it on his road so he can get home at night?

Now, does that make economic sense to the American people? I don't think so. But then if you sit in the big EPA building in Washington, D.C., and have never even seen one of these roads and probably never been outside this Beltway, it may make perfect sense to that person in this paved world that we live in inside the Beltway. But it doesn't make sense to the average person that's trying to make a living all across the rural parts of the United States. And not just rural, but all across the United States where, unfortunately, we kick up dust. By the way, plowing kicks up dust. So then you can only plow when the fields are wet. Did you ever plow when the fields are wet? The only person who would sit in the EPA office and think that the farm products magically appear at their grocery store would know that you can't get off in a muddy field and plow effectively. Yes, you can turn up some moisture at the right time, and you can keep dust down, and farmers do. They don't want their top soil blowing away like it did in the Dust Bowl. They've learned their lesson about that, and they're doing the best they can, and I would commend them for doing it.

I went to school in Lubbock, Texas, back in the 1960s, at the end of what we call the Dust Storm era. And because of modern farming methods and so forth, they still have dust storms up there, but they're nothing like what they had in the fifties, nothing like what we had in the sixties, and I would argue that because of good modern farming methods, we keep the dust to a minimum. But we still sometimes have half the State of New Mexico blow through the panhandle of Texas.

Now, who are you going to fine? The State of New Mexico? The New Mexico farmers? The Texas farmers where it lands? Who's going to be responsible for all that dust that's out there in the air? Well, the EPA says somebody is, because they set regulations, and that would be a violation of these regulations. The biggest shortage of anything in this town is common sense. This is the most nonsensical rule of anything that's come down.

One of our new freshman Congressmen, Kristi Noem, is a smart lady. She knows rural America. She knows the ridiculousness of this set of EPA rules. She's come up with a farm dust bill which we will take up this winter to make EPA start using some common sense. The President was asked a question about this in one of his meetings here recently at a town hall. He sent this farmer on a bureaucratic wild goose chase and he never got anything in return. So as a result of that, that farmer, his efforts which--that wild goose chase produced nothing that was satisfactory--Representative Kristi Noem of South Dakota has H.R. 1633, which would protect American farmers and jobs by establishing a 1-year prohibition against revising any national ambient air quality standards applicable to coarse particulate matter--that's dust--and limiting Federal regulations of dust which are already regulated under State and local laws. In other words, let the States take care of it.

Let me tell you something. This is not one of those Texas brags. We had dust storms when I went to school where girls didn't wear dresses in the spring because it would pick up pea gravel the size of a dime with those 60-mile-an-hour winds coming across the plains and it would blow that gravel so hard against their bare legs, if they had on dresses it would literally cut them off if they tried to walk to class. Now that's an act of God. Nobody created that wind. And certainly pea gravel is about as big a particulate matter that would be flying around anywhere. But the Federal Government doesn't control the wind, and it never will. We've got to get some reasonableness back into what's going on.

Finally, because I've been talking about this now for over a year, and in my office we are tracking every regulatory agency, and every day we're seeing new and bizarre concepts of what we need to do from regulatory agencies--we're seeing bugs shut down major highway projects. When the President laughed and he said he learned that shovel-ready jobs are not really shovel-ready jobs, he should have gone on to tell you why many of those shovel-ready jobs weren't shovel ready, and it was because of regulations created by the regulatory agencies that stopped legitimate road and bridge projects that were funded. I have one in my district right now that is funded and the dozers are on the ground, ready to move, and that project is shut down by one of these many, many regulations. It's the same across the country.

We can't do today what FDR did. It's great to talk about what FDR did. I don't think it accomplished a whole lot in getting us out of the Depression, but that's my opinion. But the facts are you couldn't build a Hoover Dam today. Just up and go out there and start building a Hoover Dam. My Lord, just to build an electric power plant,

the number of regulatory agencies and permits that you would have to have would cover the walls of this Chamber before you even get to break ground. I've seen those rules put on walls. It's an amazing number of rules. We are a world of government control of everything. That's what these regulatory acts are about.

Finally, this Congressman, John Carter, because of looking at this stuff now just for the last year or so, I really and truly think the best thing we can do to give the stability to the employers who employ people is to basically ban the implementation of any new Federal regulations from now through January 31, 2013, guarantee a 2-year window for businesses to hire without any fear of new costs from regulations, and certain exceptions would be allowed for the military or foreign affairs or internal agency management and personnel rules. So they'd still be able to have regulations that fit in those categories and make sure that we keep our foreign operations and our military operating. They have to make rules to operate under. We would exempt those particular things. But the rest of them, we would say: Timeout. Continue your studies. Continue your discussions. I would encourage you to extend an arm out to business to say, This is what we're looking at. Let's hear what you think.

Let's start putting ourselves together with the idea that people are part of this environment, too.

People are really what makes up this country. Without people, we're just a barren land. People, to live, need to have a job, and the people who create jobs need to have a reason for hiring people and giving them a job. People who have ideas--the great driving force of America, the new idea. We just have so many examples of new ideas just in the high- tech industry and the communications industry, the revolution that has taken place just in the last 10 years of new ideas. Those new ideas come from the freedom to think and the belief that you can take that idea and put it into reality without somebody stepping on your toes and preventing you from doing it.

These regulations and this control from Washington, D.C., this cradle-to-grave mentality that seems to be running inside this beltway and the creation of these regulatory rules is putting the brakes on our economy and putting fear in the hearts of American entrepreneurs and businesspeople and employers who want to make their business better by hiring those good people that we're graduating from our colleges and universities, those good people that are trained in trained skills that we need to put to work in America, and we'll put them to work in real jobs, not government-created jobs with borrowed money but real jobs that produce something and create wealth and make us and continue to keep us the most prosperous Nation on Earth.

It doesn't come from government; it comes from the people. The people are the wealth of this Nation--their ideas, their entrepreneurship, the investment of their own personal capital, and their willingness to take a risk on America because they know America is great. And to people who don't think we're great or think that they're smarter and can be inside this beltway and make rules that can do a better job of telling you how to run your life or how to drive home on your farm road than you know, I say, Get out of the way.

That's what this fall is going to be about. We're going to be bringing these things up. And these are things that are going to be discussed and talked about and voted on this fall because we Republicans believe that the right path to create jobs and create wealth in America is to get the regulators to start thinking in terms of creating jobs, not destroying jobs; enhancing businesses, not negating businesses; and to put America back to work.

And if we put America back to work, all the rest gets better: the debt goes down; the tax revenues go up; the country has more to pay back the people we owe, which ought to be our first priority. We can get our financial house back in order. We can get our credit rating back that was taken away from us, and we can start operating like America has always operated. The business of this country is business; and as much as that was criticized back in the twenties, that statement is true today just like it was then. It's the American people that give the American people jobs, not the government.

Let's put the brakes on these regulatory things. We're going to do that this fall. I look forward to it. Pay attention to it. Members of this House and anyone around the country who has an interest, pay attention to it. Give us your input because we are bound and determined to level out and stabilize that playing field that business creates jobs on so that we can put America back to work.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, due to a clerical error, Representatives David Dreier, Michael Burgess, and Dennis Kucinich were omitted from being Original Cosponsors of H.R. 2671, the CAL Undiagnosed Diseases Research and Collaboration Network Act of 2011, which was introduced on July 27, 2011. I would like to apologize for this clerical error and thank my colleagues for their support on this important piece of legislation. Additionally, I would like to extend Representative Dreier a special thank you for his support and role in developing this legislation.

Offered by Mr. Carter

Amendment No. 75: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

Madam Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chairman, this is an amendment that was put together to ensure that the Interior Department prioritize its efforts to construct a joint law enforcement center in national parks and recreation areas along the southern border of the United States with available funds.

National Park lands on our southern border have experienced a gigantic increase in the amount of illegal activity that has crossed into our park lands. The reason for this is very similar to grabbing a bean bag and squeezing it; it always bulges out at some point. As we start tightening our southern border with a lot of the efforts that have been bipartisan efforts by this Congress, it causes the people who are wanting to have illegal activity to move farther and farther out into the rural areas and into the unoccupied areas, and they're moving into our national parks.

Joint law enforcement centers will be available to serve the National Park Service law enforcement agency, the United States Customs and Border Patrol, possibly even the Coast Guard when they're on the river at that border, and other Federal, State, or local law enforcement agencies as may be needed.

This is something that has been discussed; it has been agreed upon; it has been approved. Additional rangers and Border Patrol officers have been added to our border and been assigned and are being compensated for working down there, but they lack serious facilities within which to be able to operate.

One example is when we sent a group down to take a look at what other needs might be on our southern border, we ran across eight Border Patrol officers that were working in a temporary facility that was 288 square feet. This is absolutely inadequate. And if they were working in conjunction with the Park Service, there was no place for the Park Service to even stand in the building.

The purpose of this amendment is to dedicate $1 million to the National Park Service construction funds for FY 2012 to jump-start the interagency project already agreed upon between the Departments of Interior and Homeland Security. We are confident that with this shot in the arm we will be able to get these centers, as they may be available, constructed.

And it's not just a place for these folks to work; but if you take a look at most of our southern border from all the way across, you will see that, if there is no place to hold prisoners when they're captured doing illegal activities, then you have to transport them. In many instances, this transportation is 150 miles to a place where they can be secured. And these would also allow at least for temporary detention so that we wouldn't have Border Patrol officers running back and forth 150 miles every time there's a detention needed.

This is a facility that really will aid what we've already provided, which is personnel to help defend our southern border. It is budget neutral, and I would respectfully request that this be adopted.

I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman.

It is my understanding that this joint agreement, as we saw the acceleration of park rangers, and you're right, quite honestly, I don't think anywhere on the southern border people want illegal activity to be going on on our recreational areas, wherever they might be located. And nobody is trying to warehouse prisoners in a national park.

It is hard to envision this facility, but it would be a facility, I would assume, sort of like some of the facilities you see in other locations where people are operating out of it, but they have a temporary detention holding cell.

This would be strictly--and maybe I can explain it by pointing out one of the problems we have on the border with the transportation of our prisoners. And, in fact, one of the things that we used our National Guard for when we did have to transfer prisoners when they were working on the border, there always has to be someone having this prisoner in custody. Whatever the accused crime is, they have to be in custody.

When we had limited resources, we bumped them up. But they take a trained border patrolman whose duty it is to protect our border, if he's the only person available, and he has to transport that prisoner because there's no facility to temporarily hold him in. And when I say ``temporarily,'' it could be hours or maybe even minutes until someone can come along to help transport. If he's alone, then he has to transport him 150 miles. That's 3 hours that officer is off his post to make the transport.

So that's a little, tiny part for the purpose of this facility. This facility is really for a working space for those resources that we have already beefed up and put down on the border, and both Interior and Homeland have made agreements and really it is kind of just a kick to get them started. I believe we will see funding come from both sources to finish the project.

Offered By: Mr. Carter

Amendment No. 54: Page 15, line 8, after the dollar amount,

insert ``(decreased by $1,000,000) (increased by $1,000,000

)''.

Offered By: Mr. Carter

Amendment No. 11: Page 15, line 8, after the dollar amount,

insert ``(decreased by $11,000,000) (increased by $11,000,000

)''.

Six months ago, a small businessman was called into a financial lending institution and asked to come in and talk to the officer in charge. He went into that office and the officer in charge told him, You have been a customer of this organization for quite a few years and we have constantly been giving you a line of credit every summer to continue your operation for the next year.

This year our examiners have noted for us and also through our board of directors we've examined your operation and your borrowing patterns. Here's what we've discovered: We've discovered that where you had a going facility and you were doing well and you were employing people and things were going well, we've started to see a trend in your business to where you are increasing your debt more and more and more. Not only were you spending our line of credit that this bank lent to you to continue your operations throughout the year, but outside of that line of credit, you were accumulating many, many, many credit cards. And now at this point in time, it is our understanding and the way we look at it is not only are you using our line of credit that we gave you but you also have maxed out every credit card you have got, and, quite honestly, we are amazed at the number of credit cards you actually have. We didn't really know anybody could have that many credit cards.

So we're just going to warn you, if you don't change the direction of the way you're operating your business, we very clearly believe that your business is going to go bankrupt. But even more importantly to this institution, this lending institution, we're concerned about the fact that our institution is going to be placed in a very tenuous position on any loans that we make to you; therefore, our position right now is that when you come to us next August, we're not going to lend you the money for your line of credit.

Yesterday, this same businessman walked into that same lending institution and said, My accountant and I have done the same analysis that you've done on the situation of our operation. We've looked at it, and we actually agree that we have gone in the wrong direction now for many, many years and we have spent more than we've made for many, many years. And we, quite frankly, got away from doing the needs of our company to doing the wants of our company.

Therefore, we are seriously in debt. I want to start off by saying I recognize that. And when you gave us our wake-up call, we sat down and analyzed what we could do to show you that we are changing the direction of our business. And here's what we propose to you:

First, we propose to you that, this year, here are the reductions we're going to make on our credit cards, and here are the places where we're going to cut back on the way we spend. That's for this year.

Now, we've also analyzed every section in the departments of our business, and we have determined that we're way over what we really need to function as a prosperous business, so we're going to offer to you that our business plan over the next 10 years is to put a ceiling on every department and every part of our business operation so that we will never rise above that ceiling; therefore, we will be continually reducing the level of our spending over the next 10 years.

Then, finally, we are making a pledge to you of everything not encumbered in our business that we will balance our budget, that we will prepare a budget and balance that budget every year and that, if at any time it doesn't, then immediately you will call every note we have.

This is a parable, but it's also the reality in the United States of America today for everybody but the Federal Government. That's why, today, the Republicans will offer that same plan of Cut, Cap, and Balance.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I rise to address an issue that I think is very important to the patriotic men and women who fight and defend our country.

Representative McCollum, in good graces, asked that we restrict the military band funding by $120 million in an attempt to save money, but the Congressional Budget Office has informed us that this reduction, this $120 million reduction, will not save the American taxpayers one red cent, nor will it reduce the overall DOD spending.

The facts about our bands are that they are an integral part of the patriotism that keeps our soldiers' hearts beating fast. For example, over 10,000 funerals are held per year, and these bands attend these funerals. And many of us, unfortunately, in this body have had to attend military funerals in the past, and they know how much that music means to the parents of the loved ones of our lost heroes.

I have had the real great pleasure of being at welcome home celebrations at Fort Hood, which are very dramatic. The buses pull up at night across the parade ground in the dark, and then the band strikes up military music and out of the dark comes marching our soldiers into the parade ground. And the tears flow. And parents and children of the soldiers and the loved ones of the soldiers, tears come to their eyes. And that music is an integral part of it. The concerts, the ceremonies, the funerals, and the welcome home celebrations are all part of what makes our military the patriotic body that it is.

The individual bands performed as many as 1,200 musical missions during the 12- to 15-month deployments. Military bands also perform at USO and other places. The number of bands right now in the Army is 132 active duty, 51 National Guard, and 17 Reserve; Air Force, 24; the Navy, 14; and the Marines, 14.

And speaking of the Marines, Friday before last I had the first time opportunity to go to the parade at the Marine barracks here in Washington, D.C., and everyone, every red-blooded American should attend that, and every Member of Congress should attend it. And it was my first chance to do it. And that is the most patriotic-striking thing you will ever experience. And to lose something like that will be a tragedy for this country.

The total cost for the bands is $320 million, and 282 million of those dollars is personnel cost. Now, something that many don't understand is these band members that perform, and at least two of the services I'm familiar with, the Army and the Marine Corps, have other duties. Some of them in the Marine Corps are riflemen, just like every marine is a rifleman. In the Army, most of these people work in security or military police. And if the bands were not performing, they would still be in the military. They would still have personnel costs, housing costs, and other things that would be part of the DOD expenses. So this is no extra that we are doing here. These people are still going to be employed by the military, and they're still going have to those costs. So that's why there is no real savings here.

But we are saving something that's important to this country and that is this is what makes patriotic people join the military. This is what causes young men and women to have their hearts beat fast on behalf of their country. And to lose our military bands would be a tragedy. And therefore I am asking that we adopt this amendment and that we replace these funds for these military bands so that we are able to continue this long tradition that goes back to the beginning of our country, to having bands play to celebrate military events.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I hear what you're saying about these good programs that are being cut and reduced. And if this actually put money in the pockets of those programs, it would be one thing. But the facts are that the cuts that we do here do not change any amount of spending that the DOD does. These people continue to have military jobs, and they continue to get a paycheck.

Offered By: Mr. Carter

Amendment No. 31: Strike section 8127 (page 122, lines 6

through 9), relating to military musical units.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge the Democrat leadership in the Senate to immediately take up the fiscal year 2012 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill which was passed by this House on June 2. With the 10th anniversary of the tragic attacks of September 11 rapidly approaching, the proliferation of violence along the southern border and natural disasters, it is irresponsible for Senate Democrats to hold up this bill any longer.

The House-passed bill included $1 billion in supplemental funding for FEMA disaster relief programs that is available immediately upon passage. These funds are desperately needed to respond to natural disasters that have swept the country, including the wildfires which have devastated my home State of Texas.

The House-passed bill uses taxpayer dollars wisely, cutting $1.1 billion from fiscal year 2011 levels while at the same time ensuring all frontline defenders, including the Border Patrol, Coast Guard and Secret Service, are fully funded. In delaying action on this bill, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is putting the security of American citizens at risk and disaster relief on hold. Any further delay is unacceptable.

I urge my Senate colleagues to make the passage of the FY 2012 DHS appropriations bill a top priority.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I strongly endorse robust enforcement of our Nation's immigration laws. I happen to be from the State that has more of the Mexican border than any other State in the union. We are very familiar with that border. We have been living with it for our entire lives, and for the life of our State, from before the time when it was a State when it was a republic.

Our law enforcement officers see an epidemic of lawlessness flowing across the southern border of the United States, and our law enforcement officers in our area want to be involved in protecting the life, liberty, and property of Texans, and they are perfectly willing to be involved in protecting the life, liberty, and property of every American citizen. They are deeply concerned with what is going on at the border, and they want to be involved. They have volunteered to go into the 287(g) program, which gives them the kind of training which this Congress believes, and has made it a point to believe, that they should have, to know how to deal with immigrants who are looked upon as having special law enforcement needs.

The best I've been able to figure, I don't know who's imposing this on the people of Boulder, Colorado, but it is not being imposed on anybody else that I know of. It's a volunteer program. Law enforcement officers go and seek 287(g) training so that they can meet the standards that those who deal in immigration issues want them to know and understand. That's why we created 287(g), to make knowledgeable law enforcement officers at the local level who could be effective in assisting those who have the Federal requirement and the Federal duty to protect our borders.

I only agree with one thing that I have heard from my colleague: I agree we are failing at protecting our borders. And I would argue that this committee has done everything and continues to do everything that we can do to protect our borders, and this bill does everything it can do and does not short the people who protect our borders any because of the dangerousness that we are aware of on our southern border.

I don't understand why enlisting volunteers to assist in law enforcement would be offensive to anyone. Now if the folks in Colorado don't want to be part of the 287(g) program, don't volunteer. This is not hard stuff. But, you know, if you are one or two lone border patrolmen out in the middle of Brewster County in Texas, you've got a lonely, dangerous job. You've got some people coming through for economic reasons, and other people coming through who are clearly violators of the laws of the State of Texas and the laws of the United States, and our law enforcement officers who believe in their oath of office to protect people that they are there to protect. They volunteer for this program so that they can assist the border patrolmen in the effort both of the economic immigrants and the criminal immigrants that come across our border.

And don't tell a law enforcement officer that he's not happy to see a sheriff when he sees a body of armed men packing packs across open country in Texas.

This is a good program. It is a program that has effectively trained law enforcement to understand the rules that Federal agents have to play by, and still gives them the authority to assist people who need their assistance.

I would argue that the safest part of the Texas border is the part of the border where local law enforcement and local sheriffs and Operation Stonegarden in other areas--the safest part is where local law enforcement has joined with Federal law enforcement to enforce the laws of this land. I think anything short of that is leaving resources on the table that will protect the United States of America.

So I very much oppose this gentleman's amendment, and I very much hope that our colleagues will realize that we need every resource available, and in my opinion even troops, to protect the American border and make sure Americans citizens and their property and their lives are safe. So I urge my colleagues to not support this gentleman's amendment, to oppose this gentleman's amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the gentlewoman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I insist on my point of order.

Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the amendment because it proposes to change existing law and constitutes legislation in an appropriation bill and therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI.

The rule states, in pertinent part: An amendment to a general appropriations bill shall not be in order if changing existing law and it requires a new determination.

I ask for a ruling from the Chair.

I rise today in support of the fiscal year 2012 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act. This bill cuts $1.1 billion from last year's level and $3 billion from the President's request while still providing the resources needed to ensure that our borders are safe and secure and our homeland is safe and secure.

All frontline defenders, including the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Coast Guard, military personnel, and Secret Service agents are fully funded. In fact, this measure substantially increases funding for many of these frontline defenders over the President's budget request while eliminating waste in other areas.

It ensures our borders will be secure by providing both CBP and ICE with all necessary resources. It ensures our homeland will be protected from terrorist threats by giving TSA additional funds to conduct air cargo screening. It ensures that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, will have the flexibility of funds needed to respond to disasters, including the floods along the Mississippi River Valley, the tornados that have swept the Nation, and the ongoing wildfires that have devastated my home State of Texas.

This bill also includes 169 oversight actions which will force the Obama administration to be accountable to the Congress and ultimately to the people of the United States.

At a time when China owns $1.1 trillion of our publicly held debt, we must make hard choices on spending here in D.C. during these difficult economic times, just like families across this country do every day.

I would like to commend Chairman Aderholt and Ranking Member Price for their leadership on this critical measure, and I urge my colleagues to join in supporting this very important bill.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the gentlewoman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I understand the gentlelady's argument, and I am sympathetic; but I must insist upon my point of order.

I make a point of order against the amendment because it provides an appropriation for an unauthorized program and therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI. Clause 2 of rule XXI states in pertinent part:

``An appropriation . . . may not be in order as an amendment . . . , for an expenditure not previously authorized by law.''

Mr. Chairman, the amendment proposes to appropriate funds for an earmark that is not authorized. The amendment therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI.

I ask for a ruling from the Chair.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the gentlewoman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I must insist upon my point of order.

I make a point of order against the amendment because it provides an appropriation for an unauthorized program and therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI. Clause 2 of rule XXI states in pertinent part:

``An appropriation . . . may not be in order as an amendment . . . , for an expenditure not previously authorized by law . . . ''

Mr. Chairman, the amendment proposes to appropriate funds for a program that is not authorized by law. The amendment therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI.

I ask for a ruling of the Chair.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I continue to reserve my point of order.

Mr. Chairman, in total, this bill provides $1.7 billion for Homeland Security first responder grants. Of that, the bill provides $1 billion for the Secretary to provide a program that addresses the highest need and risk. However, as we are all aware, not all programs are funded at the previous year's level.

Several issues drove these reductions. First, as of today, almost a decade after the establishment of DHS, there is no method of measuring what our Nation is receiving for the $38 billion investment in DHS grants. There are no metrics that indicate how much safer we are today or how much safer we will be if we provide additional funds. This lack of quantitative measurement is intolerable, particularly in today's tight economic times.

Second, grant recipients are not spending the funds that have been provided. Of the $38 billion provided for the first responder grants, $13 billion remained unspent. In these trying times, we cannot afford to leave funds sitting on the table when other programs need additional resources and the debt skyrockets.

These cuts will not be easy, but they are long overdue and necessary to address the out-of-control Federal spending. I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.

Point of Order

I must insist upon my point of order.

Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the amendment because it proposes to change existing law and constitutes legislation in an appropriation bill and therefore violates clause 2 of rule XXI. The rule states in pertinent part: an amendment to a general appropriation bill shall not be in order if changing existing law.

This amendment constitutes a transfer not permitted under rule XXI.

I ask for a ruling from the Chair.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation on the point of order, and I rise in opposition to this amendment.

The bill before us today is born out of the need for reform. It consolidates disparate grant programs and provides discretion to the Secretary. These reforms include funding reductions, requirements for measurement, and requirements for spending languishing dollars.

The consolidation of this bill forces the Secretary to examine the intelligence and risk and put scarce dollars where they're needed most, whether it's a port, rail, surveillance, or access and hardening of projects, or whether it is to high-risk urban areas or to States, as opposed to reverse engineering projects to fill the amount designated for many programs or granting funds to lower risk.

Additionally, as noted by the gentleman, the bill limits Urban Area Security Initiative grants to the top 10 highest cities. Again, this puts scarce dollars to where they are needed most. That means that cities like New York are funded at significantly higher levels than other cities because they are the highest-rent urban areas. I don't think anyone here can argue with that. This does not mean lower-risk areas will lose all funding. It just means that funds will come from other programs such as State homeland grants that are risk and formula based.

I strongly urge my colleagues to support fiscal discipline by aligning funding with the areas of highest risk and vote ``no'' on this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Madam Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment

which would strip funds allowed to the Department of Homeland Security Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. The U.S. Government has no shortage of agencies dedicated to studying global climate change and its impact.

For fiscal year 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has a budget of $6.6 billion and identifies taking action on climate change as their number one goal in its fiscal year 2011 through 2015 strategic plan. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which among other things is charged with climate monitoring, has a budget of $5.6 billion for fiscal year 2011.

So why is Secretary Napolitano--why, at a time when our Nation is running a public debt of over $14 trillion, should the Department of Homeland Security be spending money on a Climate Change Adaptation Task Force?

Millions of pounds of illegal drugs are trafficked across our border each year. On May 9, 12 suspected members of the infamous Zeta drug cartel and one Mexican marine were killed in a shootout on Falcon Lake along the Texas-Mexico border, the same lake where a U.S. citizen was shot and killed by pirates while boating last September.

An untold number of men, women, and children are trafficked across our border for both sexual and labor exploitation, which is equivalent to modern-day slavery. Additional intelligence recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, revealed that al Qaeda was considering launching attacks on U.S. trains and subway stations.

Last October, two packages containing explosives were shipped from Yemen addressed to Chicago-area synagogues, and they were discovered on an air cargo plane. A vast network of computers and operating systems which our government and economy relies on to operate every day is under threat from cyberattacks originating from countries such as Russia and China.

These are the priorities that the Secretary should be focusing on, not wasting time duplicating the work of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Secretary's Climate Change Adaptation Task Force is a waste of time and resources. And those resources should be devoted to securing our borders and ensuring the safety of our homeland.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

I may have misunderstood Mr. Price; but I believe he said there was one person who had gone to the meeting of the task force, which included FEMA and the Coast Guard.

Is that what you said?

Aren't FEMA and the Coast Guard part of the Department of Homeland Security?

So there is more than one person for sure, and if it is so negligible and of no consequence----

I don't understand why you won't accept the amendment.

Let me point out that I did not ask that the department not look into climate change. I asked that we take any funds that are allocated to the Department of Homeland Security's Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. If there is no such task force, there is none. I believe there is, but if there is none, then there is none. I'm not saying they can't talk about climate change.

In addition, I named two agencies that are spending close to $15 billion in studying climate change. You, in addition, named the Navy, and you named other agencies that are looking into it. All of these agencies are spending tons of money. So why can't we get information from those people? Why do we have to go off and spend money, which we desperately need on our borders in order to protect ourselves from the real terrible violence that is slaughtering people on the Mexican border, on something for which you named five different groups that are studying it and for which I named two additional? Explain that to me.

Will the gentleman yield?

NOAA is the Weather Bureau. They're the weather folks who are studying this thing. They've got $5.6 billion to study it. I'm not asking for the world. If you'll recall, the last time you all were in charge, you took a spy satellite or two, moved them out of Afghanistan, and put them over the roles in order to study the roles.