Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, in somber terms last night, President Bush described a crisis as if it had emerged on Wall Street from outer space. Never accepting any personal responsibility, this is the man who chased the sheriff off Wall Street while it had a party, a grand old party.

That infamous Republican earmark, that Bridge to Nowhere up in Alaska, it carried a hefty price tag, $223 million. Well, what President Bush is now asking Americans to do is to pay for the equivalent of 4,500 Alaskan bridges, a $1 trillion gold-plated, diamond-encrusted bridge to Wall Street.

And our job here in Congress is to ask, is this just another Bridge to Nowhere, and ask why is it that the party-goers don't have to pay for the party? Why should American taxpayers and future generations of Americans

have their future mortgaged to pay for a party they never participated in?

Mr. Speaker, a few months ago, President Bush accurately diagnosed the problem he just dumped in the lap of Congress: ``Wall Street got drunk, and now it's got a hangover,'' he said.

Mr. President, you gave them the keys to the liquor cabinet by failing to enforce our laws, and now you are really demanding that Americans who didn't get invited to the party must pay for everything destroyed in the drunken brawl.

These late-night negotiators have not asked the President, ``where do we find $700 billion?'' It is time to demand that the bailout supporters outline the revenue measures necessary to pay for it, and the place to begin is with those who enriched themselves as Republicans removed the cop from the corporate beat.

We need an alternative to just raising the credit card limit, an alternative to more irresponsible borrow-and-spend policies from a President who has borrowed more from foreigners than all previous presidents in American history put together, and who seems determined to continue to mortgage America's future.

Mr. Speaker, I rise as an enthusiastic supporter of the legislation that has been prepared by the gentlewoman from New York. Credit card abuse is rampant, and her legislation helps us to correct some of the most egregious abuses.

I have just come from the Subcommittee on Health on which I serve. It's well known that the number one item in terms of credit card debt is for medical bills and that health care costs are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in this country.

When we wrote the bankruptcy bill a few years ago, what began as a reasonable reform to deal with problems with debtors became an entirely one-sided piece of legislation that ignored these rampant abuses in the credit card industry. So it's appropriate here, under new leadership and a Democratic Congress and the leadership of the gentlewoman from New York, we are finally belatedly addressing some of these abuses.

But all of this will be for naught unless this measure becomes part of the great Wall Street bailout that the President has proposed. Once again, the proposal being advanced from this administration, not unlike our old debate about the bankruptcy laws, is all one-sided: give to those who cause the problem, give taxpayer money to those who cause the problem, and let those who cause the problem decide how that money is distributed. It's all one-sided.

If such a bill in any form is to be passed--and I think there's great debate about the wisdom of approving anything in this area of the type that has been advanced--but if such a measure is to be approved, it is essential that we do just a little bit for the consumers who have been entrapped, in many cases, with massive amounts of credit card debt. And incorporating the modest but very important reforms that the gentlewoman from New York has advanced into this legislation is absolutely essential.

We need not negotiate just over the unsatisfactory proposal that was advanced by the Treasury Department.

We need not be limited by just trying to improve an unsatisfactory proposal advanced by the administration; we need to add to that negotiating list key consumer reforms like this so that the protection is just not for the wrongdoers on Wall Street, but it's for the average consumer struggling to make ends meet with a huge credit card debt. And I applaud the gentlewoman from New York for her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for his help and leadership on this measure.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 6064, the National Sliver Alert Act, which I authored and on which we have had very good bipartisan cooperation. I appreciate the statement, the concern and cooperation of the gentleman from Florida who has recounted a very serious incident that occurred in his State, and I appreciate the leadership of the gentlewoman from North Carolina. We merged our proposals in committee and have reauthorized through this legislation the National Center for Missing Adults.

Our seniors, who have worked a lifetime building families, giving back to their communities, deserve dignity and respect in their retirement years. And when some of them are unable to care for themselves, they need our support. There is no silver bullet to providing that support, but one meaningful way of helping is through the national Silver Alert system that this measure would establish nationwide.

Silver Alert is a public notification system triggered by the report of the missing senior with dementia or other mental impairment, similar to Amber Alert which has worked so successfully to find missing children, where we rely on postings on the highways, radio, television, and various forms of media to broadcast information about missing persons, to locate them, and bring them safely home.

Sixty percent of those with Alzheimer's wander away from home at some point during their disability. If not found within 24 hours, up to half will suffer serious injury or death. Only 4 percent of those who leave home are able to get back without some assistance. Silver Alert provides that assistance.

Responding to this need, 11 States, including my home State of Texas, have already enacted such programs, and another five States are seriously considering State legislation.

While this is successful and important, we believe that every American should have the benefits of Silver Alert and that all States can benefit from learning about best practices that are occurring around the country.

The National AMBER Alert law, which Congress approved in 2003, has provided the national leadership to coordinate State programs, link States to resources and best practices, and fund the technology and improvements necessary to assure the best assistance that we can provide.

National Silver Alert will do much the same, coordinating from the Justice Department with the Federal Communication Commission, the Department of Transportation and the Administration on Aging to avoid duplication of efforts. This is a voluntary program that will help States initiate Silver Alert programs and sustain those that are already underway.

In short, coordination saves lives. Reuniting missing seniors with their families requires a rapid, united response. What's missing from efforts to locate missing seniors is sufficient Federal support, and this bill closes that gap.

With National Silver Alert, communities can use and build on existing resources to help keep our seniors safe. And as the population of the United States ages, more and more seniors will need this kind of support.

Since its inception in Texas last September, Silver Alert has been invoked 52 times. Forty-eight of the missing seniors were located safely, and 13 of these recoveries were directly attributable to Silver Alert.

One of these successes involved an 85-year-old man in my district in Austin. He left his home in Austin, drove south to San Antonio, then turned around and drove back, all the way through Austin to Dallas, a total of 325 miles. If it had occurred, instead of on I-35 in Texas, if it occurred here in the Northeast, he would have traveled through seven States.

He was finally located in a parking lot at a department store late at night in Dallas. The responding officer had heard about the Silver Alert, knew there was a missing person from Austin in a dark green Buick. They were able to connect him back, after some treatment for dehydration, and get him back the next morning to his family in Austin.

A National Silver Alert program complements other existing programs like Project Lifesaver, the Missing Alzheimer's Disease Program Alert Program, and I believe that Silver Alert

will be effective with a unique ``wide net'' approach. The ability to broadcast the alert beyond the immediate vicinity will complement existing programs and assure more missing seniors are found within that crucial first 24 hours.

I especially want to thank two Texans, Bill Cummings and Carlos Higgins of the Texas Silver Haired Legislature, who first asked me to develop this legislation to replicate nationally the success that they experienced through Texas Silver Alert. This bill shows that it is still possible, at least on a rather occasion, for an individual citizen who has a good cause but no lobbyists to get the attention of Congress and get legislation, creative solutions adopted. Since they first proposed the bill to me it has gained the endorsement of the Elder Justice Coalition, the National Silver Haired Legislature, the Child Alert Foundation, the National Citizens Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, and the Assisted Living Federation of America.

I appreciate the cooperation of my colleagues in getting this measure approved. I urge its adoption, recognizing that by working together we can take an important step toward making our seniors safe.

The President offers a very simple Medicare fix: Seniors pay more. Taking a bigger cut from our seniors and our disabled individuals for their drug benefit premiums is hardly a true fix.

You know, down in Texas, Mr. Speaker, we have steers that have been cut. They've been fixed. They've been fixed for all time, and that's the kind of fix that I think these Republicans have in mind for Medicare.

Contrast the President's fix on Medicare this week with the President's veto on Medicare last week. These Republicans are so eager to privatize Medicare, they're willing to spend $1,000 of taxpayers' money every year for every person that they can get to leave traditional Medicare. By our overriding the President's veto, we saved billions of dollars in unnecessary waste. But there are tens of billions of dollars of additional waste right there in the system. And you know what? They deserve a Texas-type fix. They need to be fixed and removed.

The Medicare actuary's own reports show that that this $1,000 waste per person per year that the Republicans insist on, that kind of waste, tens of billions of dollars of waste, does not produce any quantifiable benefit, any quantifiable saving

through this failed Republican experiment in privatizing Medicare.

Improving Medicare's finances requires more than a trigger like the President talks about to extend it for a year. We need a willingness to pull the trigger on Medicare waste that these Republicans have plugged in with these unnecessary subsidies that cost more and deliver less.

I say it has something to do with the energy bill, and they're right. These seniors have been drilled by the Republicans for the last 7\1/2\ years. Drill here, drill now. These seniors get drilled when they go to the gas station. They get drilled when they go to the grocery store. What this resolution is about is preventing the President from drilling them on their Medicare also.

Let's approve this resolution.

I thank the gentleman for his leadership.

``Pay more, get less,'' that's the Bush Medicare plan. The President's veto

means that taxpayers get an opportunity to pay more unnecessarily to subsidize private insurers, while seniors and the disabled get less.

Each person in privatized Medicare costs American taxpayers $1,000 more each year than the cost for one relying on the traditional, more efficient Medicare system. Without change, $150 billion will be wasted on unnecessary subsidies to highly profitable private insurers. Even Medicare's only actuary reports absolutely zero quantifiable savings have occurred through private Medicare, and that savings will never occur through private Medicare as currently set up, a waste of $150 billion bestowed on the insurers. That's the waste that President Bush is so intent on protecting through his veto. We take some of that unnecessary waste and we use it to pay physicians who are working hard and ought not to have a cut in their reimbursement rates, and more importantly, for the many people around this country who rely on those physicians to care for them.

The Administration has refused time and again to offer us any legislative fix on this waste in the so-called Medicare Advantage plan, which is nothing but a disadvantage to American taxpayers and Medicare recipients.

Today, we must overcome this continued obstructionism of the Administration and its allies here in the Congress. We should reject wasteful corporate welfare, protect our physicians, and override this veto.

Mr. Speaker, we certainly do need a balanced, enlightened trade policy. But this debate is not about trade, it is about the guiding principle of the Bush Administration--arrogance-- arrogance that has served our country so poorly.

This President, personally proclaiming himself to be a ``uniter, not a divider'' at the beginning, quickly transformed himself into the ``decider.'' And that lone decider has unleashed one divisive, disastrous decision after another on our land. Mr. Cheney's current chief of staff, he summed up this attitude very directly: ``We're going to push and push and push until some larger force is going to make us stop.'' Well today, our Speaker, backed up by this House, says ``Stop.''

The go-it-alone, disdain for allies, dismissal of anyone who has a different point of view, has left this White House isolated. It has left us with a disastrous war, and now Mr. Bush's recession.

We'll secure a more responsible, enlightened trade policy, but we won't secure it until we trade it for a new President.

(Mr. DOGGETT asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute.)

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, recent proceedings in this House served one and only one valuable public purpose--Hopefully, this totally unproductive exercise will ensure that the Democratic leadership never again yields to demands that the public business of this people's House be conducted in secret.

Linking secrecy and political power is a dangerous recipe. Accountability often ends where secrecy begins.

Yes, there are always those whose self-importance grows when they participate in mysterious hocus-pocus, who insist that their judgment is superior to ordinary mortals because they possess confidential information not available to mere citizens. Rarely is that true. It was not true before the costly and troubling invasion of Iraq, and it is not true now.

Reserving the right to object, Madam Speaker, certainly if the minority leader or any other Member of this House has classified information about a sensitive, important subject like foreign intelligence and there is no other way to present it, this is an appropriate way to do it. I want to be sure that I understand the parameters under which that's being done.

It is occurring pursuant to a unanimous consent agreement that sets forth the conditions of this meeting?

And the minority leader has mentioned there were secret sessions in this House in 1979, in 1980, and 1983; and apparently there has not been one since 1983, to the best of your knowledge?

So in the history of the United States Congress since its founding, there have been secret sessions no more than five times?

Do you have an estimate of it?

So since 1825, three times in the history of this country, and at no time since 1983 we have done what you are proposing in this unanimous consent agreement to do.

Now, in this session, so that I understand the parameters and assure that we are not really doing the public's business in secret that ought to be done out here in public, will the session and the debate be limited to the presentation of classified material or the discussion of the significance of that classified material?

Let me just get clarification of that.

I would not want to limit the ability of anyone to debate any aspect of this. If their points are clear and justified, I would want them to do that in front of the American people and not in a secret session, unless it in some way compromised the confidentiality and the classified nature of the material.

And that is why I am trying to be sure that if I come tonight, as I intend to do, to this session, and I hear an hour or 15 or 20 minutes of debate that has nothing to do with these classified materials, I want to know if I am going to have the right to raise a point of order that this is conducting the

public's business in secret and that we have been brought here under false pretenses. I assume that won't happen, but I want to be clear before going into this session what my rights are pursuant to the unanimous consent agreement. Because if the unanimous consent agreement does not protect that, then it would be appropriate, I suppose, at this time, to ask that the agreement be amended to provide something along those lines.

I understand. If there is discussion and debate of matters that do not concern classified materials, then under the terms of the unanimous consent agreement and the rules of the House, is any Member of this House who is present for that discussion free to openly discuss in public, during later debate, what was said during that session?

I believe I control the time under the reservation, but I yield to you.

You are saying you were here in 1979, 1980 and 1983 for those three sessions?

I would just suggest that we could be better off having this done in the unanimous consent agreement itself, since that is what's setting out the terms of this discussion. It is a very, very serious matter when we do the public's business in secret. That is why it has only been done three times since 1825. And it is a very bad precedent for this House to get into the business of conducting any of its business in secret, except, and Mr. Blunt appears to provide the exception, except under a circumstance where there's classified material on something as important as the security of our families. And so long as we have set out all the parameters of the meeting in the agreement, then I have no problem with it. But I don't want it to wander off in debate, which now my friend tells me I can't talk about afterwards, because I came to this secret session about something that maybe didn't need to be secret.

I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

I understand the distinction, but I think of my history with the Texas Open Meetings Act, and just the discussing of these matters is part of public business.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

You ease some of my concerns. But when you talk about the seventies and the eighties and the like, it is three times since 1825.

Let me just be sure that I'm clear, because maybe we are in agreement on this. The only purpose of your requesting this secret session is to present to the House, or have others present, matters that you feel you cannot present in public concerning matters that are classified. It may be necessary to discuss other interrelated matters, and you can anticipate what questions you may be asked, but the only reason for convening the House tonight in secret is because there are classified matters that you feel would jeopardize the security of our country if we discussed them in public.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Madam Speaker, I will at this point withdraw my reservation, but would want noted by the reservation my concern as a former member of the Judiciary about the precedent-setting nature of this. This is the fourth time since 1825, and I just ask that we stick to the purpose for which the gentleman has said we are gathering, and we give the most careful consideration before embarking on any such secret sessions in the future.

I withdraw my reservation.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, some folks think that President Bush's term ends on January 20, 2009. Many Americans have a big red circle or a happy face on their calendar already on that date, or perhaps on their key chains, and their watches that tick down ever so slowly, backwards toward that happy time.

But while President Bush may be gone from the White House in 314 days, this administration and its congressional enablers have done so much damage that generations of American families will be footing the bill for their fiscal recklessness, with compounded interest, long, long after President Bush retires to Texas. This administration has consistently chosen to sacrifice long-term fiscal stability on the altar of political expediency. They have offered the ``free lunch'' plan, the ``pain-free'' solution to almost every challenge that our country has encountered. And the greatest sacrifice that they have demanded at a time of national peril for most Americans is to tell them to ``go shopping''.

Well, this administration has now created a record $3 trillion of additional national debt on its own during the Bush years. What would even just one of those trillions of dollars of debt have accomplished had it been expended in a more appropriate manner?

One trillion, that's millions of public school teachers; that's health care for hundreds of million children; that's university scholarships for millions of students. And in Iraq, this administration this week, every week, week after week, month after month, year after year, $3 billion. With the cost of the war in Iraq in 2 weeks, we could pay for the entire cancer budget of the National Institutes of Health for a year. Showering tax breaks on the richest, the most privileged few, while hemorrhaging $12 billion every month in Iraq, this administration has created more than a Federal deficit; it has created deficits, opportunity deficits, for millions of American families.

The administration's failure to address our educational needs means that there's an opportunity deficit, that millions of young people are not able to achieve their full God-given potential because of the lack of support at both the public education level and for student financial assistance.

The failure of the Bush administration to address our health care problems means a health care deficit for millions of American families, the largest single cause of personal bankruptcy in America today, the health care crisis.

And the failure of the Bush administration to address our energy deficit, that is a deficit that every American feels at the pump when they get all their money taken out of their pocket and shifted over to some tyrant in an oil-producing area. The cost of the Bush administration's budget approach, their fiscal failure, is felt the most by those, who are least able to bear it: our students, our uninsured, our minimum wage workers, the elderly, and small business owners.

This Democratic budget attempts to bail out, to bail us all out. But it's mighty hard to keep this country afloat and keep our families afloat when the administration is still so busy drilling holes in the bottom of the boat.

I urge support for the rule and support for the Democratic budget as the best hope we have to do that in this difficult time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, with this veto, President Bush has once again failed to safeguard our families.

And what is this ``waterboarding'' that the President so readily embraces? It sounds a little like a cousin of skateboarding or snowboarding. But, in fact, it is a new name for an old water torture in which a human being is drowned. The drowning is controlled to force a response, but waterboarding is simply a euphemism for torture by drowning.

Now, President Bush is not the first Texan to think of this and to believe that horrific wrongs can justify drowning of the culprit. An earlier Texas waterboarder is not in the White House; he was sent to the Big House. A Texas judge said that this waterboarding Texas sheriff put law enforcement ``in the hands of a bunch of thugs'' that would ``embarrass a dictator.'' The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years. That judge was right, and this administration is so very wrong.

America seems to have been sentenced to 8 years of Dick Cheney, who claims that such water torture is a ``no brainer.'' ``No brainer''-- that sounds like a good way to describe how so many of this Administration's policies have been made.

Torture is no proper tool in the arsenal of democracy. Torture is foreign to our values, foreign to our history, foreign to our religions, foreign to our laws, and it is foreign to our international commitments. There can be no compromise, no middle ground. We must have zero tolerance for torture.

If we abandon our American values, we lose who we are. We lose our identity. We lose our pride as the greatest Nation in the world. And if the Administration and its apologists continue forcing America to abandon the rule of law and our long commitment to human dignity, we will lose the war.

The use of torture, which President Bush's veto endorses, is not only un-American; it is ineffective. That is one reason why the Army Field Manual prohibits its use even when our military is in harm's way. As General David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops last year: ``Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.''

I say follow our generals, not the Cheney ideologues, not the apologists. Override this veto.

Mr. Speaker, this debate is not nearly so much about fossil fuels as fossilized thinking. Conceivably there was a time in this country when federal tax policy that was ``of, by and for Big Oil'' meant dependable energy for our families. But now that approach of overreliance is as outdated and ill-conceived as eight-track tapes and President Bush's ``Mission Accomplished'' banner.

Today's legislation would mean more renewable energy production, more solar energy, more wind energy, and provisions that I authored to encourage plug-in hybrid vehicles and geothermal heat pumps. And we don't borrow the money to pay for this renewable energy policy as the spend-and-borrow Republicans always insist. We pay for the measure by asking Big Oil to share just a tiny part of the tax subsidies that they have received for decades with these emerging renewable energy sources.

One of the new tax loopholes that we close in this bill would otherwise have allowed Big Oil to claim a dollar for every gallon that it produced by simply dropping a little dab of grease in petroleum, ironically a provision intended to assist biofuels companies to help us achieve energy independence. And the cost of this modest increase in addressing these unjustifiable tax breaks for Big Oil is so small that I doubt it will even warrant a footnote in the astronomical earnings report of ExxonMobil.

The charge made here today that the price of gas will go up if this bill passes is ludicrous. Does anyone here remember the price of gas going down when the oil companies got this unjustifiable tax break? It didn't go down a dime. And this charge comes from the same crowd that stood idly by while the cost of gas at the pump skyrocketed and did absolutely nothing.

Of course the biggest subsidy of all for our fossilized foreign energy police is the military presence that we must maintain in foreign lands, places as volatile as the petroleum underneath them. We need real change in our energy policy that will bring us closer to a solution for both global warming and global war. I am proud that the City of Austin, Austin Energy, and people throughout Central Texas have taken a leadership role to move us in that direction.

The bill we have today is green. It is a green light to green jobs and a green environment. And the only folks that are seeing red today are those whose padded profits compel them to block the door to progress that this legislation would open.

Madam Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Madam Chairman, I yield myself two minutes.

This is the time of year when millions of families all over the country are working with their high school seniors. The college applications are in, but now it is time to try to figure out how to pay for college and higher education.

The task of completing these complex forms for student financial assistance can be very daunting. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, as it is known, is 11 pages long. It includes more than 100 questions and it has three worksheets. The Secretary of Education has called it ``longer and more complicated than a Federal tax form.'' In trying to complete the current application, students would actually probably benefit from having gone to college to do the accounting necessary to be able to set foot in a college classroom.

As David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times reporter comments in his new book, ``Free Lunch,'' each year an estimated 1.5 million students decline to seek federal student financial assistance for which they are eligible because the form is too complicated.

A report produced by the Institute for College Access and Success supports the approach that is taken in this amendment, and it identifies about a third of the questions that it highlights in its report as being questions that could be deleted if we could simply get two bureaucracies to communicate with one another.

That is really all that this amendment is about, trying to make the forms less complicated by getting the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education to communicate with each other and eliminate the confusion, to share data that is already available. This amendment would authorize the Secretary of Education to provide for the use of tax data that the IRS has available when the student aid form is due in February.

Under this proposal, students would not lose their ability to correct any information that the Department of Education gets that might not be accurate.

The access would be improved; the accuracy would be improved. And it works both ways: just as we want to be sure that no student eligible for aid is denied that aid, or as is currently happening, because of the complex form, we also want to be sure that no student ineligible gets that aid.

That's one of the reasons that the Bush Administration proposed something similar to what I am advancing, because they were concerned that about $350 million every year in assistance is provided and lost as a result of inaccurate information. So it will be a two-way street: get the information that is needed, minimize the confusion and the bureaucracy, and help more students obtain the opportunity to get a college education.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Thank you very much, and I thank Mr. Keller and Mr. Hayes for their important comments and yield 1 minute to Chairman Miller for his observations.

I thank the gentleman for his comments and for the support and encouragement that he and his staff have provided us on this amendment. I also want to thank the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce for bringing this to my attention.

Austin is an area that has a very dynamic economy, and so much of our success results from the fact that our business leaders are enlightened and recognize that one of the best investments we can make is in our people. We have been concerned with a workforce shortage, with needing more highly skilled, highly educated people, and this is a measure that the Chamber identified as part of its ``20,010 by 2010'' initiative of trying to get college graduates from our area that can staff our many high-tech and other companies.

I salute Sandy Hentges and Drew Scheberle and the many other members of the Chamber staff and leadership for their work that led to this amendment.

Let me just say in conclusion, thanks for the bipartisan support for this measure. I hope only that with our measure, for which we have considered a variety of different versions during recent months while working with the committee, I just hope that both of the bureaucracies involved here will really heed this amendment and will move expeditiously because it will ensure more young people have an opportunity to obtain a college education and have the support they need, and it will also reduce the cost from those who are receiving assistance improperly.

Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time and urge adoption of the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, while the Bush Administration's reaction to

the economic downturn was to continue whistling ``Don't Worry, Be Happy,'' we were at work on a prompt response. But today's stimulus is far less effective than it could have been and should have been because those who doubted that we needed to do anything insisted on supporting only action that would give one of every $3 to corporate America and would delay until this summer giving any assistance to ordinary working families.

And now there is even an effort to add tax cut rebates to this bill for multi-millionaires. That is hardly ``stimulus'' unless they decide to increase their tips to the butler or the limousine driver.

Although the risk of recession is very real and it requires a bipartisan response, let's be very clear: this danger did not result from any bipartisan cause.

Like the Republican mythology that tax cuts pay for themselves, this downturn had its genesis in the wrongheaded notion that markets can do no evil, whether the subject is environmental protection or economic stability. They think the only desirable action is for the government to get out of the way. Well, the Bush Administration got way out of the way, and as a result we had overzealous lending and sometimes fraud in the subprime market while the Bush Administration stood by.

We wouldn't need a $150 billion stimulus today if they had done their job. Whatever we do here, it can still be a stimulus without letting go of the pay-as-you-go rule and adding to our soaring national debt.

Borrowing too much is what helped create this Bush economic mess. Borrowing even more can make it even worse. Political expedience should not trump sound fiscal policy.

Madam Speaker, this pathetic excuse for a Medicare bill is made necessary by a Republican refusal to tackle waste, fraud and abuse. To fulfill an ideological dream, taxpayers are compelled to continue wasting billions of dollars to fund abusive private Medicare Advantage plans run by Bush administration buddies, rather than less expensive, more effective traditional Medicare.

And while doctors are rightly protected from a scheduled payment cut, how about the millions of poor seniors who are cut off from access to extra help for prescription drug coverage? As with so many battles in this Congress, where it is a contest between the poor and a well- financed special interest, guess who gets knocked out?

This shell of a bill actually means that millions of our youngest Americans will still be barred from access to the Children's Health Insurance Program, and, of course, it will enable my State, Texas, to maintain its dubious distinction of being number one, the number one State in the country with children who have no health insurance, due largely to the indifference of then Governor George Bush, now the ``vetoer in chief'' when it comes to children's health insurance.

This House had approved the CHAMP Act. Today, about all that remains of it, thanks to continued Republican obstructionism and one veto after another, is what could be called the CHUMP Act because it reeks of fiscal irresponsibility and social inequity. Something may be better than nothing, but this is barely something. In 18 months we'll correct it.