Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, in the 1930s, over half of our seniors lived in poverty. They survived on whatever friends and relatives could spare. So Congress created a shield against common threats like old age and disability.

For 75 years, Social Security has protected millions of Americans. For 75 years, it's been our government's bedrock promise. For 75 years, it's helped people like Janice Moore, whose husband passed away 13 years ago, leaving Janice and their three children to fend for themselves.

Republicans want to hand this over to Wall Street. It's the same privatization scheme they tried 5 years back. If they had succeeded, we would have lost trillions in the stock market. But Democrats and the American people said ``no.''

Today, we again reject these schemes and say ``yes'' to Social Security's promise--protecting American lives for another 75 years and many generations to come.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and concur in the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 5610)

to provide a technical adjustment with respect to funding for independent living centers under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in order to ensure stability for such centers.

Mr. Speaker, I request 5 legislative days during which Members may revise and extend and insert extraneous material on H.R. 5610 into the Record.

I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, a month ago we passed H.R. 5610, the Independent Living Centers Technical Adjustment Act, to provide a necessary fix to protect services for the many people with disabilities who benefit from the work of the independent living centers. This fix will allow States to request that ARRA funds not be included in determining their centers' previous year allocations so that the temporary funds provided under ARRA do not permanently change centers' base allocations.

The Senate amendment before us today changes the deadline for States to make that request from July 30 to August 5 so that eligible States can make use of this fix after this bill is passed.

I urge you to support this technical change to ensure independent living centers can continue the important work for people with disabilities in our communities.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Madam Speaker, on July 26, 2010, I was absent from the House and missed rollcall votes 467, 468 and 469.

Had I been present for vote 468, on H.R. 1320, the Federal Advisory Committee Act Amendments, I would have voted ``aye.''

Had I been present for vote 469, on H. Res. 1504, recognizing and honoring the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I would have voted ``aye.''

Had I been present for vote 470, H.R. 3101, the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support the millions of Americans caught in the crosshairs of Republican political calculations. Today, a partisan minority blocks relief to those laid off during this recession.

This obstruction doesn't just keep food off American tables; it keeps Americans out of work. People like Annette Tornberg. Last month, she lost her benefits. Now she can't afford the gas she needs to drive to job interviews. Like the vast majority of those

on unemployment, Annette uses the funds as a bridge to her next job-- not to replace it.

The notion that relief discourages people from seeking jobs is not only wrong but outrageous. So today, I call on Republicans to stop hurting American workers. Stop playing politics with their lives and start letting the Senate and millions of Americans get back to work.

Thank you so much. And I truly appreciate the gentlelady from Ohio for her leadership in putting this Special Order together on such a critical topic.

I rise today to call attention to the plight of millions of American families. Across the country, men, women, and children are caught in the crosshairs of Republican political calculations. Instead of providing emergency relief to Americans laid off during this latest recession, a partisan Senate minority is blocking this vital aid.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle should be ashamed. Time and

time again, when asked to solve our Nation's problems, they've instead shown why they've been known as the party of ``no,'' and it couldn't come at a worse time. Throughout our country, we face the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It's the legacy of 8 years of the Bush administration.

My hometown of Los Angeles lost over 84,000 jobs this past year. That's the greatest decrease for any metropolitan area in America.

Congressional Democrats want to confront this problem head on. That's why a majority of Senators have tried not once, not twice, but three times to temporarily extend unemployment benefits, because any economist will tell you that, in addition to helping individual families, the program stimulates the entire economy.

But the obstructionists just don't care. They don't care about the 368,000 Californians who've lost benefits since their filibuster began a month ago. They don't care about the 2.1 million Americans in other States who've also been cut off. They don't care about people like Marcelo and Maria Gonzalez.

For 34 years, Marcelo worked for the same credit card manufacturing company. The job provided a paycheck and peace of mind. But 16 months ago, his facility cut back production and Marcelo lost his job. Fortunately, unemployment benefits kept food on the table for the Gonzalez's and their two children, that is, until Republicans cut off the program and its aid to families like Marcelo's.

Now, this obstruction doesn't just keep food off American tables. It keeps American people out of work. People like Annette Tornberg. Last summer, Annette lost her job at a Sacramento book bindery, and last month, she lost her weekly $270 in unemployment benefits. This means that Annette can no longer buy the gas she needs to drive to job interviews. You see, Annette, like the vast majority of those on unemployment, use these funds as a bridge to their next job, not a replacement for it. The notion that emergency relief somehow discourages people from looking for work is not only misguided, it reflects a lack of faith in hardworking Americans like Annette.

This Republican opposition, however, goes beyond a lack of faith. It is a deliberate means of allowing millions to suffer, worrying about whether they can put food on the table, and we cannot let this happen.

It's time for this stonewalling to end. Senate Republicans need to get out of the way so Annette Tornberg can get that new job, so Marcelo Gonzalez can start putting food on the table again, and so that millions of Americans who are out of work, through no fault of their own, can once again get the emergency relief and peace of mind they need to make it through these tough times.

So, tonight, I'm calling on Republicans to stop hurting American families, stop playing politics with this problem, and start letting the Senate and millions of Americans get back to work.

And again, I thank the gentlelady from Ohio for this very, very important Special Order and allowing us to say what we need to on this very important issue.

The gulf oil spill is the worst environmental disaster in our Nation's history. It's devastated the gulf coast and taken lives, lives like Gordon Jones and the 10 other victims of the gulf Horizon explosion.

Congress is making sure that the families of these men receive the justice that they deserve. Current law values the lives of those who die at sea far less than deaths on land, and to relatives not financially dependent on the deceased, it provides nothing but a check for funeral expenses. This is wrong.

It doesn't matter where someone dies. If it's someone else's fault, justice is due. Moreover, these losses go far beyond the value of a pay stub or the costs of a funeral. That's why the SPILL Act ends the outdated devaluations of maritime deaths, and it opens the door for family members to receive damages based upon pain and suffering.

But that's not all it does. Current law limits the liability of Transocean, the company who owned the rig, to just $25 million. Now, Kim Tran, Vietnamese shrimpers, and all the fishermen of Louisiana know that the damages caused are so much greater, and so does Congress. That's why our bill eliminates those caps and assures that we hold those who caused the spill accountable for the damage they've done, no matter who they might be. That's why I am proud to cosponsor the SPILL Act, and I call on all of my colleagues to vote for it.

I rise in support of the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5610) to provide a technical adjustment with respect to funding for independent living centers under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in order to ensure stability for such centers, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I request 5 legislative days during which Members may revise and extend and insert extraneous material on H.R. 5610 into the Record.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 5610, the Independent Living

Centers Technical Adjustment Act. This bill addresses an issue brought to our attention by a number of States that are at risk of having to reduce services for adults with disabilities. Authorized under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Independent Living Center program serves adults with disabilities by providing an array of independent living services, including the information and referral services, independent living skills training, peer counseling, and individual and systems advocacy training. This program is administered by the Rehabilitation Services Administration, which allocates Federal funds to the centers based on a formula in an established State plan. Under current law, Centers within a State must first receive funds at the level they received in the previous year, and absent sufficient funding, they must receive the same proportional amount of the total they received the previous year.

The Independent Living Centers were provided additional funds through the stimulus package passed by Congress in 2009. States were given maximum flexibility for determining the allocation of these funds among the centers in their States. Several States opted to distribute these temporary funds using a formula different from their base formula. As a result, some Centers received a proportionally larger or smaller allocation than they did in previous years.

This one-time change in the allocation of funds made sense because of the challenges State economies were facing. At the same time, current law did not envision this one-time increase in funding. And, in fact, the Rehabilitation Services Administration is required to allocate 2010 funds based on a Center's total proportional allocation for 2009 and the additional funding a Center received under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. This requirement may result in some Centers losing up to 35 percent of funds as the total proportion a Center received may be less than they received in the prior year.

The Independent Living Centers Technical Adjustment Act will allow States to request that ARRA funds not be included in determining their center's previous year allocations. That way, the temporary funds provided under ARRA do not permanently change the Center's base allocations. This is a complex but necessary fix to protect services for so many people with disabilities who benefit from the work of the Independent Living Centers.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Miller for introducing this important legislation, and I urge support of this technical change to ensure Independent Living Centers can continue the important work for people with disabilities in our communities.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support of H.R. 5610, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, when you buy a car, you expect to put a key in the ignition and go. When you eat at your favorite restaurant, you expect a memorable meal.

When the California Public Employees' Retirement System invested in mortgage funds with AAA ratings, it expected a safe, steady return. Instead, it lost $1 billion when subprime mortgages, which were hidden in the funds, unraveled--wiping out the pensions of millions of public employees and leaving taxpayers high and dry.

The Wall Street reform bill ensures this won't happen again. It ends taxpayer bailouts. It lets investors know what they are buying, and it makes sure banks are never too big to fail. That is why I am backing this bill, and am helping those 1.6 million California retirees and countless others across America.

A vote against this bill is only a vote for the big banks that got us in the mess in the first place.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize a great loss to our community, Mr. John Delloro, who passed on the morning of June 5, 2010, at the young age of 39. My heart goes out to his wife, Dr. Susan Suh, their two young children, Mina and Malcolm, and the rest of John's family and friends.

Delloro was an extraordinary citizen, a powerful advocate for social justice in Los Angeles, our Nation and beyond. He helped improve the lives of many people in his short yet fulfilling life, becoming a nationally recognized labor leader, educator, organizer, teacher and mentor well before the age of 40.

A Bruin through and through, John earned his master's degree in Asian American Studies and his bachelor's degree in Psychology at UCLA. He worked as a lecturer at UCLA's Asian Studies Department for three years, inspiring countless students to become involved and active in their community.

During his tenure as a faculty member at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, Delloro helped groomed a new generation of union leaders, teaching classes in politics and labor, labor leadership and strategic planning for labor unions.

John will always be remembered as a tireless advocate for working men, women and families. He served as manager of the southwest California area of the 90,000 member SEIU Local 1000, the Union of California State Workers and as staff director for the acute care hospital division of SEIU Local 399. He was a dedicated labor leader, spending countless hours organizing workers of all backgrounds, from cooks in Las Vegas to court employees in Los Angeles.

He was also a leading advocate for his own Filipino American and APA community, co-founding the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California and serving as National President of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, the largest and only national organization dedicated to representing the interests of Asian Pacific American working families.

I urge all my House colleagues to join me in honoring my friend John Delloro for his remarkable service and contribution to our country. He has made a true impact on lives of many, and will be sorely missed.

Madam Chair, the Small Business Lending Fund Act is critical to helping small businesses across the country and is, therefore, critical to helping people because small businesses create more jobs than anyone else. Small businesses sustain their communities.

Our amendment ensures that we don't leave minority business owners behind. Minority businesses need every opportunity to grow, create jobs, and contribute to their community. But there are barriers. Our amendment makes sure that bank lending plans, outreach, and advertising are culturally and linguistically appropriate for diverse sets of businesses. This provision is essential for the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities because government programs can miss important details when they don't account for cultural and linguistic differences.

Take the Census Bureau, for instance, which provides so many funds

for our communities. Earlier this year, they mistranslated parts of the Vietnamese census forms. The forms used a phrase connected to the previous governmental regime which meant ``government investigation'' in place of the word ``census.'' Clearly this was no minor gaffe. The language in this amendment ensures that future outreach doesn't repeat these mistakes, that is, excluding deserving businesses from great opportunities.

But it's not just minority businesses that need access to this program. Minority-owned banks also deserve the right to compete. That's why our amendment makes sure such institutions receive consideration during the program's implementation. Minority-owned banks play a vital role in the Asian Pacific Islander and minority business development endeavor; and together they enhance the country's economic recovery and long-term growth. Minority firms currently provide nearly 5 million steady jobs but could potentially create over 11 million more. Our amendment helps them do so.

I ask my colleagues to support this amendment because it eliminates obstacles in the way of our Nation's minority businesses and facilitates their growth during these very tough economic times.

Thank you, Congressman Garamendi, and thank you for bringing this very, very important order to the floor tonight.

I would like to focus for a moment on the oil spill and its impact on the victims.

Kim Tran doesn't know how he will pay this month's car insurance, and he has got no idea how he will take care of his mortgage, but what he is most in the dark about is when he will be able to get back in the water and start working again.

Kim is a deckhand on a commercial fishing boat which is stationed near Buras, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish. He is part of a close- knit community of Vietnamese and Cambodian shrimpers whom the gulf oil spill has hit particularly hard. Many of them came to the gulf coast in the 1980s as war refugees from Vietnam. They did well. It is estimated that the Vietnamese Americans own between one-third and one-half of all of the fishing vessels on the gulf coast.

After Katrina, they were one of the first groups to rebuild, but figuring out how to recover from the recent manmade disaster has been difficult. You see, for many of these fishermen, language is a barrier as bottomless as the Deepwater Horizon's well. Because English isn't essential for fishing, many have never learned it, so they rely on interpreters to help them cross the language barrier. It takes 14 words to translate the word ``dispersant'' into Vietnamese--and don't even get me started on what to do with acronyms like ``EPA.''

So not only have these fishermen lost their normal sources of work, but they have been locked out of the cleanup effort, too. Many have even had problems filing basic claims for lost income. These Vietnamese fishermen are just one group affected by the tragic gulf oil spill. Indeed, this spill has devastated lives up and down the gulf coast. It is the biggest environmental disaster in our Nation's history.

Yet Congress is working hard to repair the damage that has been done. I've joined in the effort to secure $85 million in emergency funding to assess and respond to damages from the oil spill. This money improves the Federal response and guarantees compensation to out-of-work fishermen, but we know that is not enough.

I am proud also to sponsor a very, very important bill on the Judiciary Committee. This bill is called the SPILL Act. It fixes our outdated liability laws, and it ensures that we can hold those who caused this spill accountable for the damage that they have done, but we know that's not enough either.

So I've cosponsored the bill to impose a moratorium on new drilling off the western coast of our country. The suspension is a great step forward to ensuring that a disaster like this never happens again. And even then, it's still not enough. Indeed, the only solution to this disaster, the only thing that truly makes sense, is to finally end this country's addiction to oil.

For decades, oil companies and lobbyists killed energy reform to keep their profits. For decades, our dependence on oil has hurt our economy and put the security of our country and our environment at risk. For decades, we knew that offshore drilling was just a disaster waiting to happen. Well, the news is that it has happened. And the Gulf oil spill shows that it's time to take back control of our energy policies--with clean power made right here in America.

We will never be able to undue this spill. As much as we wish it didn't happen, we can't pretend it never did. If we do, Kim Tran's worries about his car and house payments will only be afterthoughts because his town of Buras, and countless others like it along the Gulf Coast, will just disappear. But we will not let that happen.

Join me and make sure that these fishermen, these people, these families haven't suffered in vain. And let's make sure we clean up this spill, hold those who caused it accountable, and make sure it never happens again. Together, we will end our addiction to oil and create a better, cleaner future for our country.

The author Robin Cook wrote that ``education is more than a luxury. It is a responsibility that society owes to itself.'' Our country far too

often neglects this duty. Every year, nearly 750,000 American teens become pregnant. Every year, 70 percent of these new teen mothers drop out of school. Every year, the lack of services to keep low-income parents in school focuses this problem on our Nation's most underprivileged communities.

That's why I have introduced the Teen Parents Graduation and College Act. This bill would fund grants to help teen parents finish high school and college. It would provide tutoring and child care and counseling to help them succeed. It would let teen parents and their children lead better, fuller lives. This basic support is the least we owe our young people. Together we will ensure that the beginning of a new life doesn't mark the end of an education.

Mr. Speaker, in 1970, Dr. Jack Tiller traveled to a convention in Canada with his wife and daughter. Tragically, their plane crashed, leaving behind his children, George and Diana.

George went to Wichita. He cared for a sick grandmother and orphaned nephew when they didn't have anyone else. He planned to be a dermatologist. Instead, he took over his father's general practice when he saw that local patients didn't have anyone else. Soon after, women asked him if he would do what his father did. They were desperate women who needed reproductive control over their lives. George said yes.

Now you know why George Tiller began the career that cost him his life, because he decided he would be there for women facing a crisis when they didn't have anyone else.

Mr. Speaker, John Adams once said, ``Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes . . . they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.''

Well, when it comes to the economy, the facts are on our side. It's a fact that Bush's economic policies created the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It's a fact that Republicans produced a recession with nearly 800,000 job losses each month and almost doubled our national debt. It's a fact that 8 years of tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics only left the American people hosed.

And it's a fact that this Congress ended those flawed policies and enacted tax cuts for working-class families and small businesses across America. Democrats created nearly 200,000 jobs a month this year, cut over $800 billion in taxes, and we're about to cut almost $300 billion more.

Democrats are rebuilding consumer demand, creating new jobs, and getting our economy back on track. And that's a fact, no matter how stubborn the minority wants to be.