Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I regret that I was unable to participate in a series of votes on the floor of the House of Representatives today.

Had I been present to vote on rollcall No. 180, a Bean (IL)/McMahon (NY) Amendment to H.R. 1664, a bill to amend the executive compensation provisions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, I would have voted ``nay'' on the question.

Had I been present to vote on rollcall No. 181, a Dahlkemper (PA) Amendment to H.R. 1664, I would have voted ``aye'' on the question.

Had I been present to vote on rollcall No. 182, final passage of H.R. 1664, I would have voted ``aye'' on the question.

Madam Speaker, today I am introducing the Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act. This legislation addresses the critical mental health needs of our children, and shortage of providers available to meet those needs.

In 1999, then Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher noted the crisis faced by our Nation's children who suffer from mental illness. According to this report, one out of every five children in America suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder, yet only one-third of them receive mental healthcare treatment. Part of the reason for this alarming statistic is that mental health services specific to children are in very short supply.

That is why today Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and I are introducing the Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act. This is a bill designed to help alleviate the scarcity of mental health services for our Nation's youth by providing incentives for mental healthcare workers to specialize in the treatment of children and adolescents.

The Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act creates incentives to help recruit and retain child mental health professionals providing direct clinical care, and to improve, expand, or help create programs to train child mental health professionals by establishing:

Loan repayment and scholarships for child mental health and school- based service professionals to help pay back educational loans;

Grants to graduate schools to provide for internships and field placements in child mental health services;

Grants to help with pre-service and in-service training of paraprofessionals who work in clinical mental health settings for children; and

Grants to graduate schools to help develop and expand child and adolescent mental health programs.

This bill also allows for an increase in the number of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists under the Medicare Graduate Medical Education Program and extends the board eligibility period for residents and fellows from four years to six years.

The Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act is not only about providing incentives for health care

workers, it is also a bill about expanding treatment options for children in need. Expanding treatment options expands the opportunities for children with mental health concerns and allows them to grow and become happy and productive members of our society.

The hope and the potential for endless possibilities that we, as a people. attribute to children are diminished with each child who struggles with mental illness and who does not receive adequate treatment. I, therefore, ask my colleagues to lend their support for my Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act.

Madam Speaker, today I rise to recognize and commend the efforts of the Spread the Word to End the Word Campaign; a grassroots organization founded by college and high school students toward promoting greater awareness and respect for people with intellectual disabilities.

Created by young people with and without intellectual disabilities, Spread the Word to End the Word promotes the undeniable truth that everyone matters, everyone is accepted and, most importantly, everyone is valued. Today, young activists across the country are leading local efforts to raise awareness and collect pledges from peers and the community to vow not to use the ``R-word'' and recognize March 31, 2009 as a national awareness day for The Spread the Word to End the Word campaign.

In 1966, speaking at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, my uncle, Robert Kennedy said, ``Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a

tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.'' It is with great honor that I am able to speak about this amazing group of young activists who are spreading hope each and every day; not just in their own communities but across the country, to those who suffer from intellectual disabilities and their families.

Too often the power of our words is underestimated and misunderstood. Today marks the culmination of a month long campaign to educate all of us about the positive and negative effects that our words can have. It is with great joy today, that I am able to use my words to support their courage and activism.

Thank you to all who pledge today to think of others before they speak and thank you to all who strive each day to promote universal human dignity.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which will renew our nation's commitment to promoting service and volunteerism.

Public service is something my family knows a little bit about. Nearly five decades ago, my uncle, President John F. Kennedy, challenged the nation's youth to serve their country. When he said that famous line, ``Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country'' he sent a message on the necessity for everyone to take an active role in our society.

It is my hope that with the passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, Congress and President Obama will create a new era of public service that goes beyond any one generation. The bill we are considering today expands opportunities for volunteerism to include disadvantaged youth, seniors and people with disabilities. It is my belief that if we are going to regain a sense of community and shared responsibility in this country, we must encourage national service among all people.

There's an old saying that reads, ``The most sacred thing one person can give another, outside of their love, is their labor.'' That goes to the core of why supporting programs that promote volunteerism and community service is so important. Specifically, today's bill will renew our focus on inclusion by investing $20 million in programs that encourage participation of people with disabilities.

The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act will create new programs like the Clean Energy Corps, to focus on environmental conservation. This new program will work in conjunction with our economy as we forge a new direction in energy. This legislation creates a

separate Veteran's Corps designed to help veterans meet the needs of their fellow servicemen and women; such as providing programs that help provide education, mentoring, and job training to fellow veterans.

More than 4,400 seniors in Rhode Island contribute their time and talents in one of three Senior Corps programs which will be expanded within the Serve America Act. Foster Grandparents in Rhode Island serve more than 3,200 young people who have special needs. I am pleased that this bill authorizes $115 million to encourage these efforts not only in my state of Rhode Island, but nationwide. In addition, The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act will allow seniors to earn a $1,000 education award for 350 hours of service, that may be passed on to their children, foster child or grandchildren.

I am pleased that this bill provides new incentives for middle and high school students to volunteer in their communities, and will allow them to earn up to $1,000 in education awards to be used for college. The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act will also establish Youth Engagement Zones, a service-learning program to engage low-income high school students and out-of-school youth in volunteer efforts.

In my home state of Rhode Island, programs like YouthBuild Providence will benefit from this important legislation through funding for the recruitment, training and professional development of coordinators for the program. The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act will also increase the number of AmeriCorps volunteers and increase the education reward to $5,350 for 2010, to match the maximum Pell Grant scholarship award.

Currently, more than 14,000 people of all ages and backgrounds are helping to meet local needs, strengthen communities, and increase civic engagement through 53 national service projects across Rhode Island. This year, the Corporation for National and Community Service will commit more than $7,300,000 to support Rhode Island communities through national service initiatives.

The benefits that this legislation would bring to our struggling communities, across this country, and in my home state of Rhode Island, are endless.

Like its namesake, this bill dedicates itself toward the promotion of solidarity, selflessness and courage. I will be proud to vote in favor of this bill, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey and thank him for his leadership on this issue and many others regarding mental health. I just want to concur with him and Mr. Rush from Illinois that this issue of mental health and postpartum depression I'm glad to see is on the agenda for health care. We are in the year of health care reform, and it's so vital that the issue of the total health of our people makes its way into health care reform.

We find that so many in our country seek help in our health care system and yet don't receive it because our health care system does not respond to the total health of a person. It responds to the physical part of the person but it does not respond to the emotional--the sympathetic part of the person; the psychological, which is the mental health part of the person; the spiritual, which is the sense of purpose that a person has for their life.

We have done such a good job in this country in training our doctors to take care of a person as if they were a machine, and we could fix a person if they had a broken bone or if they had something that we could show on an x-ray or we could test through a blood test, but if we can't show it on an x-ray or a blood test, then we really don't know what to do.

My friends, the fact of the matter is we are much more than just the sum of our parts. Really, a much bigger part of this is the mental health and emotional health of our people. That is why we need to do a lot more to address this if we are going to address people's health in this country.

Frankly, mental illnesses are the second leading cause of lost days in our country. It's quite surprising that even given that statistic, our health care system doesn't respond to this challenge.

So I'm glad to see that this legislation calls on greater research into this area because, frankly, there is a physical element to this. The body does change as a result of mental health problems. We now know, thanks to the new x-ray machines, that we can actually see biochemical changes in the brain. We can see these biochemical changes in the brain, thanks to these new functional magnetic resonance imaging exams.

Furthermore, I think it's so important for people to know that we want a vibrant and a productive people, and we want them to feel active and alive. The best way to do that is to make sure that we give them all the support that they need in this country.

So, to do that, we need to make sure that they get all of the support and get their checkup from their neck up, just as they get their checkup everywhere else. So I'm glad that this proposal is going forward.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate Representative Granger for her leadership on this issue and thank her very much for her outgoing efforts to bring this issue to the floor.

This is simply a matter of public awareness. And like so many issues, it is a matter of getting the word out. Screening is what it is about. Obviously, with respect to colorectal cancer, it is the stigma. No one wants to talk about it. So as a result, no one gets screened. And when people finally get screened, it is too late and they die. That is the reason it is the second leading cause of cancer death in this country.

And while the rates of death may be about the same for men and women, there is an enormous, an enormous disparity in the rates of death between minorities and whites in this country. The reason for that is that there are huge disparities in the access to health care between minority populations and the rest of the general population. And that shows among the greatest disparities in health disparity outcomes in this country.

So for the African American community, this is an enormous issue, this is an enormous issue because it is affecting the death and mortality rates for the African American community and the Hispanic community over and above the general population by an enormous amount. So colorectal cancer is something that everybody needs to pay attention to and wake up to.

Now, why is it so important that we have the screening and we pay for the screening? Because there is no health insurance out there. That's why we need health insurance reform. And that is why Kay Granger is such a champion, because she stepped up to the plate and signed on to legislation saying, it is good to talk about it, but unless we start talking about paying for it, it's not going to do us a lot of good. That is what we need. We need to pay for screening. And as she pointed out, the evidence backs us up. If we screen, we save Medicare money, because you can imagine trying to take care of someone with cancer is a very costly, costly thing.

Now, first of all, we should do it because we don't want to see someone suffer. That should be good enough for all of us in Congress to want to pass this screening effort. But if it is not good enough for everybody to want to save a family the suffering of having to go through cancer treatment, then maybe we should want to do it because it saves dollars. And the Lewin group and others have said this saves dollars because when you detect it early, you don't have to spend all that money treating people for chemotherapy, radiation and all that expensive acute care treatment.

We have a sick care system, not a health care system. And we can do better in this country by taking care of people before they get sick if we screen them. And that is what we should do with colorectal cancer, screen people.

Sign on to H.R. 1189.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey), and I rise today in support of House Resolution 182, supporting the School Social Work Week.

I introduced this resolution in order to recognize and support the critical, unsung work performed by school social workers in and across this country. School social workers bring unique knowledge and skills to schools and to the student services team all across this country. They work together to achieve the goals as a Nation that every child needs in order to succeed in school.

Each day across this country, school social workers can be found assisting educators to understand family, cultural and community factors affecting students as well as meet the demands of providing quality education for students of diverse backgrounds.

Each day, they can be found working with administrators to design and implement effective prevention programs and policies that address school attendance, teen pregnancy, school violence, and school safety issues, as well as child abuse and neglect, special education and more.

Each day, school social workers can be found working with parents so that they may effectively participate in their child's education as well as improve parenting skills, understand special education services as well as access school and community services related to their child's needs.

In health care, we must treat the whole person, and in education, we must do the same, so that is where school social workers recognize the need to connect the school and home in order to relate to the needs of the children. It is a shame that fewer than 1 in 5 of the 17 million children in need of mental health services actually receives them. Improved and expanded school mental health programs would help provide these services, the kinds of services that so many students desperately need and that are precisely the kind of services that school social workers can provide.

As our economy continues to struggle and families all over the country are losing their homes and jobs, the need for school social workers only becomes magnified. When you think about the fact that we are fighting a war overseas and an economic war here at home, you think about the fact that our schools are our bases. We would not think twice about making sure that our military is provided with the latest of armaments and with the best of training. Then why would we not think of providing the same for our teachers and our school social workers? They are the ones who are making sure that our students are not left behind in the field of battle.

Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, too many of our children are left behind in the field of battle--in the field of battle of illiteracy, in the field of battle of mental health, in the field of battle of addiction, and in the field of battle of violence. These are the kids in our inner cities who are being held hostage to a different enemy, not the global war on terror, but to the enemy that is causing 35-40 percent of the students in our inner cities to not graduate from high school. That is an abomination, Mr. Speaker.

If we do not have more school social workers to make sure that they graduate, then our schools in this country are not going to be worth the teachers that we have in them, because they are not going to have the school social workers to do the job to help those teachers make sure that their students graduate. That is why we need school social workers: to make sure that those students graduate. It is an important complement to our education system. We need emotional and social development just as much as we need literacy and numeracy development. That is why we need social workers in our schools.

Now more than ever, while the economic pressure is on those families and social pressures are on those families and the burden is on those families, we need to reach out where we can, and that is through the schools. The school is where we reach those children and reach those families in dire need. That is where we need our social workers, and that is why we need to pass House Resolution 182. I ask for its consideration.

Mr. Chair, I rise in support of the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (GIVE) Act which will renew our nation's commitment to service and volunteerism. Public service is something my family knows a little bit about. Countless Americans were called to public service by President Kennedy's famous appeal: ``Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.'' It is my hope that with the passage of the GIVE Act, Congress and President Obama will create a new era of public service that goes beyond any one group or generation. The bill we are considering today expands opportunities for volunteerism to include disadvantaged youth, seniors and people with disabilities. If we are going to regain a sense of community and shared responsibility in this country, we must encourage national service among all people. I'm a strong believer in the abilities of the American people to confront our biggest challenges with perhaps our biggest asset: our manpower.

The creation of new programs like the Clean Energy Corps, to focus on environmental conservation, will work with our economy as we forge a new direction on energy. I am pleased that this bill provides new incentives for middle and high school students to volunteer in their communities, and will allow them to earn a $500 education award to be used for college costs. In addition, this legislation will increase the number of AmeriCorps volunteers and increase the education reward they receive to match the maximum Pell Grant scholarship award.

The benefits that this legislation would bring to our struggling communities, across this country, and in my home state of Rhode Island, are endless. When President Obama took office just a few short months ago, he called upon Congress to expand federally funded national service opportunities. Today, we fulfill that promise. I am proud to vote in favor of this bill.

Madam Speaker, every March, we celebrate women's history and we remember their struggle for justice and equality. It's an occasion on which we honor the brave women who fought to improve and redefine America.

My home state of Rhode Island has known its share of extraordinary women. From Anne Hutchinson, a religious and social activist who challenged male hegemony, to Isabelle Ahearn O'Neill, who became Rhode Island's first woman legislator, women have fought with courage and perseverance for the freedom and equality that are rightfully theirs.

In the last two years alone, we have witnessed the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives and the first major female candidate for the Presidency of the United States. In January, the first action taken by Congress and the President, was to make the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act law. This legislation brings us one step closer to making sure that our female students someday enter our workforce at a wage equal to their male counterparts. At a time when we celebrate women's achievements, we must not, however, lose sight of the work that still lies ahead. In the effort to empower women, we must continue their fight for pay equity, eliminating health disparities, and strengthening domestic violence laws.

As we look towards the challenges we face, we must not forget those that got us to where we are today, and continue to encourage and seek progress.

Mr. Chair, I rise in support of the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act and in support of President Obama's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.

We simply cannot overstate the effect that the housing crisis has had on our economy. Foreclosures continue to decimate both our financial system and the neighborhoods that we call home. In Rhode Island, we are suffering from the highest foreclosure rate in New England and housing prices have dropped 25 percent in the last year.

President Obama's plan is a welcome recognition that we cannot begin to resolve our economic crisis without first stemming the tide of foreclosures. Under his leadership, the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan will help up to 7 to 9 million American families restructure their mortgages to avoid foreclosure. This plan will help responsible homeowners in danger as well as our neighbors, our banks and our local economies. For example, this initiative will save the average homeowner from price declines of as much as $6,000 in the value of their home.

It is long past time for a President who recognizes that bold action is needed to curb the foreclosure crisis. Bankruptcy judges must be given the power to adjust mortgages on primary residences. The language in the bill we

are debating today is very similar to legislation I cosponsored earlier this Congress and I applaud President Obama for his leadership on this issue.

Yet, there are some banks that claim this legislation will make homeowners choose bankruptcy over working out their mortgages. These are the same banks that have flatly refused to help work out those mortgages over the last year. These concerns have been directly addressed. To make sure nobody abuses the courts, this legislation will require all homeowners seeking bankruptcy protection to certify that they first attempted to modify their mortgage with the banks.

Every time we try to reform our financial system, we are told by industry and skeptic alike that consumer protections like those in the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan might ``destabilize'' the market. Our government accepted that advice for much of the last decade and it landed us in an economic crisis. The great people of Rhode Island have watched their home equity plummet because of reckless behavior on Wall Street. Frankly, that is the kind of destabilization I am worried about.

It is true that this legislation will make a number of important revisions to the Hope for Homeowners Program. However, the real problem with Hope for Homeowners was that the lending industry never had any interest in participating. Until homeowners have some bargaining power and the lending industry understands that these loans must be reworked, there will be no real progress. Currently, bankruptcy judges can change the terms of loans for automobiles, stores, vacation homes and factories but not primary mortgages. It's time we let them do something much more important: help Americans to keep their houses.

This plan will empower homeowners and give lenders the incentive they need to save millions of mortgages from foreclosure. I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues in Congress and with President Obama to tackle the housing crisis and restore America's economy.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 738, the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2009. This legislation would mandate prompt reporting of prisoner and immigration detainee deaths in state and local prisons to the Attorney General. Under current law, many families of prisoners and detainees often do not receive timely information regarding deaths in custody. An inmate death in a local and state correctional facility is a serious matter that deserves full reporting to family members as well as federal regulators so that a full and transparent investigation can take place into the causes and circumstances surrounding a death. I applaud this Congress's action on this critical issue and would hope that I can work with my colleagues to implement widespread reform in our Nation's prison system.

For too long, America has turned a blind eye to abuse and neglect in our prisons and detention centers. In particular, immigration prisons have been the focus of great concern as recent deaths in facilities in Virginia and my home state of Rhode Island have made the need for transparency as important as ever. Immigration detainees, many of whom have neither been charged nor convicted of a criminal act and are in custody awaiting a hearing or deportation, often do not receive timely or adequate health care. Others are indiscriminately transferred thousands of miles away from family members and legal counsel. These issues must be addressed in our ongoing efforts to reform our prison system. This legislation lays the groundwork for those reforms and I applaud Chairman Scott's leadership on this issue.

I thank Chairman Scott, and I would urge my colleagues to support this important bill.

Thank you, Mr. Murphy from Connecticut. Let me just say what a tremendous honor it is for me to join you on what, I think, is the moral question of our time.

We have gone through historic times. We have just had a swearing-in that has galvanized this Nation, and now people are asking us: What has the country yet to challenge us? This country is now challenged with the most profound economic crisis that we have seen in over a century. We are coming to terms with the very basic system of government and what it should provide its people.

Every other single major industrial power in this country provides its people with health care. The exception is the United States of America even though in the United States of America, per capita, we spend twice what every other industrialized nation in the world spends on health care. As for our infant mortality rates, our health care statistics fall well below that of all of our industrial competitors.

If our Nation were a patient, we would be a sick patient. Tragically, for millions of families, this comes home to them ever so frequently when they have a member of their family get sick, and they come to realize that the insurance they purchased is not enough to cover the basic health care that they need to rest comfortably at night, knowing that their loved one is going to be cared for without bankrupting them. Health care in this country is the single leading cause of bankruptcies in this country. We have to change this.

It is immoral that everyone in this country has their health and no discrimination until they get sick. Then what happens? Then they are discriminated against because then the insurance companies start saying, ``You can get health care, and you cannot. You are too costly to cover, but we can cover you because you aren't as costly to cover. We are going to provide coverage for this healthy set of people but not for this group of people because they may be disabled; they might be older people; they might not be a people that we want to insure.''

This is not what America is about. We have come too far to include people in our society in order for us to continue to have a system that excludes people in our society, and our insurance system is really based upon the notion of exclusion, not inclusion.

So we need to demand of this Congress and of this President that they follow through on the commitment to include all Americans in health care and not just those who are privileged enough to have access to the best in

health insurance. Certainly, that includes those of us who serve in Congress. If it is good enough for Members of Congress, it certainly should be good enough for all of the constituents whom we represent.

To my colleagues in government, I want to thank you for including me in this debate. Let me say this is a moral issue, but it is an economic issue, as you said. Far be it for us to think that we are going to pass this stimulus package and then a banking bill but not address health care. If we do not address health care, this economy is never going to come out of the doldrums because double-digit interest rates and increases of inflation every year are going to continue to drag our economy down.

This is the time for us to address health care from not only a moral point of view but from an economic point of view. So I am glad to join my colleagues in this hour of debate.

And very many more Americans who have insurance that is inadequate such that they fear getting health care because the deductible is so high that they don't go for the necessary preventative services. And then what happens? They get even sicker. And then once they get so sick, then they come in when it's so costly to take care of them; when if we had a health care system rather than a sick care system, we could have taken care of them, and it costs a fraction as much as what we end up ultimately paying for taking care of them at the end of the line, which is what we end up doing in paying for our current health care system is a sick care system where we pay for it at the end of the line.

Mr. Chair, I rise today to state for the record the intent of the legislative language in the Special Rules section H.R. 1--American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Title V--Medicaid Provisions, Section 5001, subsection (f) STATE INELIGIBILITY AND

Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of Israel's right to defend its citizens from the terrorism and extremism of Hamas. The United States and this Congress have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with Israel as it endures a difficult moment in its history. We must understand that this conflict was created by Hamas's unwavering commitment to violence against both Israelis and Palestinians. Since 2001, Hamas has fired over 7,500 rockets and mortars at villages and towns in Southern Israel. More alarmingly, Hamas has recently acquired rockets with an increased range that have the ability to levy even more destruction on Israeli society. As their rocket technology becomes more sophisticated, Hamas could potentially strike airports, major cities and nuclear power plants. Would we as Americans accept living under an incessant barrage of violent air attacks? We would expect our leaders to take the appropriate action against these perpetrators of violence. Israel has correctly taken steps that will ensure that terrorism against its nation will be eliminated with the hope that one day its nation can live in peace. I firmly believe that a two-state solution is the only way in which peace and stability can come to Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Madam Speaker, for over 20 years, Palestinians have been subject to the terror, intimidation and militancy of Hamas. This terrorist organization openly recruits suicide bombers to launch attacks throughout the Middle East. Earlier this month, a female suicide bomber killed over 100 innocent Iraqis without causing the slightest outcry from Hamas. In Gaza, Hamas has committed a litany of human rights violations including the arrest, tortures and imprisonment of political opponents. In December 2008, Hamas terrorists refused to allow Palestinian pilgrims in Gaza to travel to Mecca, Islam's holy site. Hamas represents a great threat to international peace

and will continue to do so as long as it remains a significant threat in the Middle East. I urge the swift passage of this resolution.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I rise to engage the chairman in a colloquy.

Mr. Chairman, I am extremely concerned at the current state of affairs with credit card regulations as my constituents see these extraordinary interest rates affecting their credit cards. I am appalled that companies continue to engage in predatory practices, like double-cycle billing and inadequate notification periods and retroactive rate hikes for these credit cards.

I am seeing these predatory practices continue, in spite of the fact that the Federal Reserve has recently finalized a rule that will ban many of these predatory practices. Unfortunately, these reforms are not scheduled to go into place until July 2010, and then they will save our consumers over $10 billion a year.

I think it would be outrageous to see us bail out these banks, and yet see them also continue to gouge these consumers of ours, these taxpayers at the other end of the ledger on these predatory practices. I would like to work with the chairman to see that we address this issue in forthcoming legislation.

I want to salute the gentleman for the transparency and accountability standards that he has in the manager's amendment, and encourage additional funds to go to the foreclosure problem that he has identified in his manager's amendment.