Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the amended version of H.R. 4414 that was brought up today is a marked improvement over the previous version of the bill that was brought up earlier this month. I again commend Representative Carney for proposing fixes to the Affordable Care Act. I also commend him for trying to work with House leadership and the Administration to come to an agreement on how to properly treat expatriate plans under the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately the bill on the House floor today does not have the Administration's support. The potential of lawful permanent residents and other visa holders in the United States to erroneously be considered expatriates under H.R. 4414 still exists. I expect the Senate to fix this potential loophole and look forward to supporting final passage of the bill after the Senate has made targeted changes.

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

I would congratulate the gentleman from Kentucky on his eloquent description of Mill Springs and its significance in our history in the Civil War. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993, but the gentleman

makes an eloquent case that it should be upgraded from a National Historic Landmark to look at as a part of the National Park System.

This bill would allow the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study in anticipation of making this a part of the National Park System. And I want to congratulate the gentleman on his advocacy and thank him for his dedication to protecting and promoting this resource.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

This bill by the gentleman from Illinois, he has already eloquently described the history and the purpose. It is an extraordinary history in New Philadelphia, and it certainly deserves more national recognition. In this case, the gentleman's legislation, H.R. 930, would direct the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study of the New Philadelphia archaeological site and the surrounding land. It would require the Secretary to evaluate the national significance of the study area and determine the feasibility of designating the study area as a unit of the national park system. Therefore, we support this legislation.

I thank the majority and the gentleman from Illinois for bringing this up, and urge all of my colleagues to support this important legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The collection and the consumption of gull eggs is an integral part of the culture of the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska. Eggs were gathered at rookeries long before Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve were ever established.

The provisions of this bill are in accord with the recommendations of a study mandated by Congress on the issue, and the bill is widely supported throughout the environmental and conservation communities, as well as the Alaska Native community. The harvesting of gull eggs would only have a minor impact on the gulls, but the cultural benefits that would be realized by the Native community would be great.

I applaud the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) for his leadership on this issue, and I ask my colleagues to stand with him in support of this bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

H.R. 4032, the North Texas Invasive Species Barrier Act, provides a very specific and necessary exemption to the Lacey Act Amendments of 1981.

The bill would allow the North Texas Municipal Water District and the Greater Texoma Utility Authority to transport water that contains potentially invasive species from the Oklahoma side of Lake Texoma into Texas. However, all water would be kept in closed conveyance systems and would be fully treated, with all zebra mussels, quagga mussels, and other potentially harmful aquatic life being fully removed before being released into any water body.

Two years ago, we passed legislation that allowed the water district to pump water containing zebra mussel larvae from Lake Texoma, but now, quagga mussels have emerged as a threat there as well.

These species are the bane of many a power plant and municipal water plant operator. Hundreds of millions will be spent in the near future to deal with these problems in intake and outflow pipes and other infrastructure.

They also harm our fisheries by crowding out native species and taking their food. They are driving out our native mussels toward extinction. The Lacey Act is vital to our Nation's interests because it prevents--or hopefully prevents the spread of undesirable, injurious species like zebra and quagga mussels. A strong Lacey Act is vital to our economy and our environment.

That said, Texas needs access to this water. The aforementioned entities have a comprehensive plan for ensuring that these water transfers do not cause invasive species to spread.

For those reasons, we will support H.R. 4032; but we need to remember that this bill, which was put forward as a remedy to a very difficult and a very unique situation, is not a precedent for broad-spread exemptions to the Lacey Act.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

I want to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for his advocacy on this issue. It is critical that we recognize the sacrifice of law enforcement officers on an ongoing day-to-day basis here in the United States of America, those who have sacrificed and given their lives in the past and those who will continue to serve selflessly into the future.

In 1984, Congress authorized the Memorial Fund for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Nine years later, Congress passed the National Law Enforcement Museum Act to establish a National Law Enforcement Museum adjacent to the existing memorial in Judiciary Square.

Raising money, even for the most meritorious of causes, in developing a design acceptable to all of the affected parties, is laborious and time consuming. Tremendous effort has been expended on this. They are making great progress, but they need a little bit more time.

This legislation brought to us by the gentleman from Maryland would extend the deadline by 3 years, which most parties feel will be adequate to see the museum to completion.

With that, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the legislation before us brought by the gentleman from New York has tremendous merit. This is a chapter of history that many of us have forgotten or didn't learn in school, but the 11,500 lives that were lost aboard British prison ships while our country fought for its independence during the Revolutionary War is certainly a very, very important national and nationally significant site.

The site has been managed by the New York Department of Parks and Recreation, but the gentleman from New York has rightly pointed out in his advocacy that this should actually be a site that has national significance. He therefore has authored--and hopefully today we will successfully see passed--H.R. 1501, which would direct the Secretary of the Interior to complete a study within 1 year on the feasibility of designating the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, New York, as a unit of the National Park System. I would hope that this legislation would be broadly supported.

With that, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries).

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

Mr. Chairman, if this budget balances, it balances in an alternate reality, perhaps on Planet Reagan. But it does take a very dyspeptic view of investments because they prioritize tax cuts for billionaires over investments. They purport or pretend or actually will cut out all Federal investment in roads, bridges, highways, and transit. That is a $52 billion cut. That is a couple of million jobs, and a lot more crumbling bridges.

We have something called the Land Water Conservation Fund. It is funded by taxes collected from offshore oil drilling. It is suppose to buy conservation lands. They will not allow a single acre of land to be purchased by the Federal Government, but they will still collect the tax from the oil industry.

And what about the looming crisis in wildfires in the West? Well, they are closing their eyes and are pretending we are not going to have drastic wildfires across the West, and they put zero budget in there in anticipation of drastic wildfires.

This is the most unbelievably unrealistic, and I would have to go almost to the word, and I can't attribute it to people's motivations, but hypocritical budget I have ever seen.

Mr. Speaker, I commend Representative Carney for proposing fixes to the Affordable Care Act. Since the law was passed, I have said that parts of the Affordable Care Act need to be improved or changed. As Representative Carney has identified, there is no question that Congress needs to clarify how the law is applied to expatriate plans. The Administration has correctly exempted these plans from some ACA requirements that do not make sense for plans used primarily overseas, but the Administration is only able to provide temporary exemptions without congressional action. I am confident that the Senate will be able to make the needed targeted changes to H.R. 4414 so that it can pass both houses of Congress and gain the support of the Administration. I look forward to working with Representative Carney to make sure that legislation providing proper clarity to expatriate plans is signed in to law.

Madam Speaker, let's talk about what is not in the Ryan budget.

The Federal highway trust fund, which funds all highway, road, bridge, and transit projects in the United States of America will be exhausted sometime this summer. A number of States are already delaying or canceling major projects, and there will be a flood of States doing that after the trust fund goes belly up.

For next year, under the Ryan budget, there will be zero--no, none, zero--Federal investment in roads, bridges, highways, and transit despite the deteriorated state of our infrastructure for somewhere between 9 and 11 months until we pay our past bills, and then there will be a little trickle.

Meanwhile, bridges will be falling down, people will be driving through potholes, delays, and congestion. We will walk away from or lose over 1 million construction, manufacturing, and engineering jobs, and it will have an impact on hundreds of thousands--millions--of other jobs across the United States of America, not even to begin to talk about our lack of competitiveness with the rest of the world.

The Ryan budget does address this in a rather novel way, so the trust fund is going broke. Probably what we have done the last couple of times when we get to that point, we say transportation is so important we transferred some general fund money over. The Ryan budget says you can't transfer general fund money over to transportation; it must go broke.

Well, the other thing is a new source of revenue or user fees. The Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, and that has been since 1993, the same tax in 1993 when gas was $1.11 a gal. Last weekend, I paid $3.71, and Federal tax is still 18.4 cents a gallon.

Where is that money going? It is going to ExxonMobil; it is going to Wall Street speculators. It sure is the heck not going to rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and putting millions of Americans back to work.

Under the Ryan budget, we are going to revolve Federal transportation. What does that mean? It means we are going to have a 50-State and territory Federal transportation policy. You know, we actually tried that once. This was 1956. This is the brandnew Kansas Turnpike.

Oklahoma promised they would build one, too. Well, they didn't have the money. They said: sorry, guys, can't build it.

This is Emil Schweitzer's farm field. For 3 years, people crashed through the barrier at the end here and went into his field, until Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican, passed the national highway transportation bill with a trust fund.

That would be undone by Paul Ryan. He says States can opt out. They don't even have to collect the 18.4 cents Federal tax; they can do whatever they want with that money.

Madam Speaker, counties are actually ripping up paved roads and turning them back to gravel because they can't afford them. There are 140,000 bridges that need repair or replacement. Forty percent of the national highway system has pavement that has totally failed.

There is a $70 billion backlog on our transit systems. These are millions of jobs foregone--productivity foregone, and if you are so darn proud, as I heard on that side, why aren't you proud of the future of America, putting people back to work and competing with the rest of the world with a world class, 21st century transportation system? You're going to kill it.

Mr. Speaker, as I have said since the law was passed, parts of the Affordable Care Act need to be improved or fixed. The employer mandate is no exception. For example employers in many sectors, from farmers to municipalities, face unacceptable uncertainty surrounding the definition of seasonal and part time workers. The federal government needs to provide clear guidance to these employers. As some Senators have proposed, I also support giving businesses with between 50 and 100 full time employees the option to either provide employer sponsored insurance or have their employees buy plans on the individual exchange. Instead of focusing on reasonable reforms like these, Republican House leadership today brought up H.R. 2575, a bill that the President has already promised to veto.

H.R. 2575 would not provide any more certainty to employers with seasonal workers. It would not give businesses with between 50 and 100 full time employees any more flexibility with regard to how their employees get insurance. What it would do, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is increase the deficit by $73 billion. It would also increase the number of uninsured Americans. For these reasons, I voted against the bill. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass real fixes to the ACA that will make the law work better for consumers and employers alike.

Mr. Speaker, well, it is here. We have been waiting with bated breath for the Ryan budget, perhaps some of the biggest and most immediate problems confronting our Nation, things that will put people back to work and boost the economy.

For me, number one is the exhaustion of the highway trust fund, meaning, as of October 1 or earlier, the Federal Government will end all new authorization for State highway projects and bridge replacement and transit for 8 to 10 months because the highway trust fund is depleted.

If you look through the Ryan budget, it is the subject of three pages of narrative and is screed full of blather, but a close reading gets to a blueprint for the future of the national transportation system. He has a simple solution. We will end it. We will end it.

The legacy of Dwight David Eisenhower and a coordinated approach to a national transportation system, in the Ryan budget, it ends. He will devolve it, devolve it to the States. The 50 States assembled and the territories will be responsible for funding their own transportation system, and somehow it will serve national needs.

Let's stop this madness.

I thank the gentleman. I thank Congressman Blumenauer for his leadership, a former member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

We have sent him over to the Ways and Means Committee because we can put forward the need, we can document what we need to build and rebuild; but, in the end, someone has got to be responsible for raising the money, and, ultimately, it is going to be Ways and Means, and Earl has certainly taken a point position there.

We are at an unprecedented point. We haven't been here before since the creation of the national highway program under President Dwight David Eisenhower.

On October 1--or before then even, the trust funds established by Eisenhower, financed by user fees, gas tax, diesel tax, and some other fees on excise taxes, et cetera--but, principally, the fuel tax--is going to be depleted to the point where, if we don't act before October 1, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the obligation authority, that is, the amount of money the Federal Government could invest, beginning next October 1, in any and all transportation projects across the United States of America--roads, bridges, highways, transit--will drop to zero--zero.

Now, this is not one of these other phony cliffs around here that have been created by an intransigent majority and a bunch of grandstanders. This is real. This is real.

Think of what that means to the States. To my State, it means a loss of about $450 million of Federal aid to fund our Federal highway system in the State of Oregon.

It means that all across America, you are talking about millions of jobs and incredible lost opportunities in terms of creating new jobs and dealing with a crumbling infrastructure, which has already been discussed a little bit before me.

So Congress has to get serious about this. You can't whistle by the graveyard on this one. You can't pretend it is not a fake crisis. It is a real crisis.

Congressman Blumenauer explained how it has happened over the years. We haven't raised the gas tax since 1993.

Now, a lot of people look at 4 bucks a gallon at the pump come Memorial Day, and they say: that damn government taking all that money.

No. 18.4 cents went to the Federal Government in 1993 when gas was about a buck a gallon, and in 2014, when ExxonMobil jacks it up over $4 for the Memorial Day holiday, 18.4 cents will go to the Federal Government.

I would be a lot happier at those higher prices if I knew some of it was going to rebuild our crumbling bridges, some of it was going to fill in the potholes and deal with the failing pavement, some of it was going to the deficit in our transit infrastructure, which is about $70 billion. The nice thing, if we make those investments which have already been mentioned, it creates about 20,000 jobs for every $1 billion dollars we spend--and not just construction jobs. You have engineering jobs. You have technical support jobs. You have small business suppliers. In transit, you have manufacturing jobs. You have even high-tech jobs, computer-driven transit vehicles, and et cetera. All across the economy, it would create jobs, 20,000 jobs per $1 billion dollars.

And we have the strongest Buy America requirements of any part of the Federal Government, way stronger than the Pentagon. So when we invest those dollars, Americans go to work or go back to work.

But guess what, the other side works. If we stop spending that money on October 1, hundreds of thousands, millions of people will lose their jobs across many sectors in this country, and we will become the laughingstock of the world. The greatest nation on Earth can't afford to invest in its future, in its competitiveness, in rebuilding the Eisenhower-era infrastructure and building an infrastructure suitable for the 21st century to make us more competitive? It is not too hard. One simple way to do it would be to take the existing gas tax and index it.

What does that mean? Well, part of the reason that we are in this pickle is because the gas tax has remained 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. That means, with inflation, it has been eroded. And as cars and fleets become more efficient, people are driving more miles with fewer gallons of gas, which is a good thing. So if you indexed it and said, okay, we will index the gas tax for construction cost, inflation, and fleet fuel economy, you would see a big increase in gas, about 1.4 to 1.7 cents a gallon next year. Wow.

Well, guess what. Just when I was home recently, I drove to work; and when I came home, gas was up a nickel a gallon because of the crisis in Ukraine. Where did that go? That went into the pockets of ExxonMobil.

I thank the gentleman. I think it is an excellent point.

If we fully implemented Dodd-Frank and reined in some of the commodities speculators, it wouldn't be quite so volatile. But the point is, if we took a tiny fraction of the way they jack it up when you are driving to work every week and invested it, your friends, your neighbors would go to work, your commutes would be better, there would be less damage to your car, the country would be more efficient, and we would lose less jobs overseas.

So, if we indexed it and we paid it back over 15 years, we could put somewhere between $120 and $150 billion into the trust fund that would be paid for and paid back over a 15-year period.

Another alternative would be to put $1 on a barrel of crude oil. For every $1 you tax a barrel of crude oil today--Texas is at $101.70, I think, when I last checked--that would be less than 1 percent. That raises $4 billion a year to invest in the future of America, its infrastructure, and putting people back to work in this country. It would also help to rein in some of the speculation on the price of crude oil. And it would also help because OPEC and other suppliers would have to be paying a part of rebuilding our infrastructure.

The proposal I put forward exempts all manufacturing; it exempts all heating oil; it exempts all agricultural uses; it exempts school buses and other things that are currently exempt. So it would only be the fraction of the barrel that goes to current taxable transportation use as $1 dollar a barrel, which is $4 billion a year. Again, we could use that future cash flow to bond and fill in the giant pothole in the trust fund.

Let me just give one example. I have a company in my district called Johnson Rock Crushers. They produce a wide range of rock crushers. They are a major exporter from the U.S., and they are competitive in the world market. They are employing skilled labor and also engineers and others to design these materials. They are sourcing virtually all of their components in the United States for these very large pieces of equipment.

So there is an incredible multiplier effect. They are employing people who are in niche manufacturing somewhere making one big gear or making parts for the conveyor or the giant tires that go on these things. They are employing engineers to make the future designs. They just have finished a major contract for the Seabees with affordable equipment for the Seabees. So they are just covering an extraordinary range of things.

They showed me a chart, and the chart is what happens to their business when the future funding for the highway trust fund comes into question. They can show me what happened back when we did the SAFETEA- LU bill, how much business fell off. They can show me recently a fall- off in domestic business. They are doing pretty well internationally because other countries--somehow other countries can figure out how to invest in their infrastructure. They are concerned about becoming more competitive in the world economy, and they are making massive investments in China, Brazil, and in many of our competitor nations.

In fact, I recall once when my colleague, Mr. Blumenauer, heard me giving a speech. I was saying how I kind of thought the U.S. was becoming a Third World nation because of the deterioration of our infrastructure, which we have already talked about tonight. He came up to me afterwards and he said: Hey, you know, that was kind of insulting. And I'm like: Earl, what do you mean? You know how bad it is. I mean, at that point we were at a D, and now we are up to a D-plus for our infrastructure. And he said: No. No. It was insulting to Third World countries, because they are investing a higher percentage of their gross domestic product in their infrastructure than the United States of America.

We can afford these investments. In fact, we cannot afford to forgo these investments because we will lose more ground internationally; we will waste more fuel; people will spend more time in congestion; and we will kill more people on obsolete mass transit units like they did right here in Washington, D.C. These are investments we must make.

We have, in the past, led the world. We have been number one, number two after World War II up through near the nineties sometime. We are now number 26 in the world in terms of the state of our infrastructure. We are duking it out with Romania these days, I think. This is embarrassing. It is embarrassing for us not to be pushing forward with solutions now and not creating another cliff and eking it out to the end.

As Representative Titus pointed out, some States are already cutting back their construction program for this construction year. Kansas is one I know of. They have said: Look, the way we run our State, we have got to be sure that the Federal reimbursement is going to be there when the project is done. We can't wait. Our constitution doesn't allow us to borrow money for these things. We can't go into deficit, unlike the Federal Government.

Therefore, just the prospect that the money might not be there is causing many States to say: Well, wait a minute. We are going to pull back here on these projects this coming year, and then if it actually happens on October 1, it will be a massive cutback next year.

I don't know what happens to transit. There is no transit system in the world, except maybe Hong Kong, that makes money. So to say we are going to withdraw all Federal support from transit would mean one heck of a loss of options for people in the United States.

The problem here in D.C. is that a lot of people, particularly the Congress, don't discriminate between investments, capital investments, and expenditures. You know, if

you buy fuel for the Federal fleet or a battleship or something, okay, that is an expenditure; it is consumed. But if you build a bridge that lasts 100 years, we count that the same as buying something that will be consumed in 1 day. That doesn't make any sense, but that is the way Congress works.

So they treat needed investments in the future mobility of the American people and saving fuel as being competitive, moving goods and people safely, they treat that exactly the same as a consumptive, 1-day expenditure for fuel for the Federal fleet or something else. That makes no sense. We need capital budgets. That is probably a longer term project around here. They need to at least recognize the need for these investments.

What I hear from a lot of naysayers is: Hey, you already did that. You did the stimulus, and that didn't work, did it?

Well, actually, if you look at the so-called stimulus, under the most generous interpretation of infrastructure, 4 percent went into traditional surface transportation infrastructure--4 percent, 4 percent of the $800 billion--and it created a heck of a lot more than 4 percent of the jobs that that bill created; a really generous infrastructure interpretation, you are up to 7 percent.

So I say, no, that was not a test. That money was well invested and spent, but it was totally insufficient for the job to repair and rebuild our infrastructure and bring it up to a good state of repair for the 20th century, let alone to begin to build out an efficient 21st century infrastructure. That is no test. That money was well spent and well invested.

There are some prominent commentators who say, oh, I don't know where that money went. I had a debate with one of them on television, actually. We can show exactly where that money went and exactly how many jobs were created, and it was certainly a net large return compared to many of the other things that were in that legislation. No, that wasn't a test.

A test would be if we made a commitment now to build a 21st century infrastructure and to rise from 26th in the world back to number one in the world within 10 years just like JFK said we will put us on the Moon in 10 years. Well, in 10 years, we could go back to having the number one infrastructure in the world, and in the meantime we would create a few million more jobs, and the long-term impact of that creates sustainable jobs of untold numbers over the years.

To just boil it down to something pretty simple, I would say let's think about the future. Let's think about today, and let's think about the future. And those who would disinvest or devolve our obligations to create a national transportation system that is world class, devolve that duty to the 50 States assembled, or just ignore altogether that obligation, they really are showing that they don't take a long-term view for America, they don't have much faith in our future.

I have a heck of a lot of faith in our future, and it is going to take some leadership to get to that future. Doing simple things like maintaining the existing purchasing power of the gas tax through indexation and then using the future income to bond, and make a heck of a lot of investments now, will return more in the long term than it will cost, and it won't add a penny to the deficit. Just like the Federal highway trust fund has not been a net contributor to the deficit over time; it has been funded through user fees. We need to continue that principle.

In the future, we can probably evolve to something more high tech, vehicle miles traveled or things like that. We are not ready today to get there, and we sure as heck can't get there by October 1, so we have to work off the basics that we already have, that we have had since Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican President, and it was Ronald Reagan who added mass transit into the highway trust fund. This has been truly a bipartisan issue over the years. We lost our way for a bit here, and it should become bipartisan again. We should all join together, and we should show that we really believe in America's future and make the investments that are necessary to get us there on a better national transportation system.

I thank my friend and colleague for the time.

Mr. Chair, since Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, both Republican and Democratic Presidents have used the power granted under the act to protect some of our most recognizable, most beloved natural wonders: Grand Teton in Wyoming, Zion in Utah, Olympic in Washington, and the Statue of Liberty. That is a few.

Last week, I had the opportunity to backpack for 7 days in what is the best known and most visited--4.4 million people last year--the Grand Canyon of the United States.

In 1908, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt granted national monument designation for the Grand Canyon under the Antiquities Act, and all but two Presidents since then have used this authority.

At that time, it was critical to protect the Grand Canyon because tremendous development was being proposed, both for tourism purposes and for commercial uses and mining and other issues, so that was an extraordinary step that that President took back then.

Why would we turn back the clock? Why would we strip this President or future Presidents from having this authority to preserve and conserve national treasures when they are indefinitely stalled, as was the Grand Canyon, in the morass of Congress?

It was dysfunctional for a different reason back then; but it is just as dysfunctional or more dysfunctional today as it was back then. There is going to be no protection passing this House easily or freely with this majority in charge.

Now, it is true that there have been some controversial designations, one mentioned previously and earlier by Chairman Bishop; but I would also note that no one--no one--has proposed legislation to repeal that designation by President Clinton.

If they are so aggrieved and it is so egregious, I wonder why they haven't done that. Perhaps because it enjoys tremendous popular support, except from among a few people.

Now, they say this is about more control. Let's take a look at what they have done with control. Over the last 4 years, the Republican majority has proposed legislation to sell off public lands.

They have passed multiple bills that would open our public lands, virtually unregulated, as of yesterday, to mountaintop removal, mineral, and energy extraction. They shut down access to our national parks because of their stupid government shutdown last fall, and they found out that wasn't too popular.

Then they held a hearing to find out why the parks were shut down when the government was shut down. Look in the mirror, guys. That is why the parks were shut down. They found out that the parks and these monuments enjoyed tremendous support from the American people.

There have been 89 conservation bills introduced from both sides of the aisle in this House in the last two Congresses, and only four of the 89 have become law. This Republican majority is genuinely openly hostile to conservation designations; yet, today, they are pretending that they actually really care about these iconic places, and they are just making a couple little changes to the law to include more public input.

You know, I have an experience from the Clinton administration for the Steens Mountains in Oregon. We only got it done because President Clinton and Secretary Babbitt said: we are going to make that a monument.

Now, we don't have as much flexibility in designation, but if you would legislate something, we will work with you.

We had a meeting in my office with the Republican Senator, a Republican Member from Oregon, myself, a couple of other Members came in and out, and the Secretary, and we hammered out a bill to protect the Steens Mountains in Oregon, and it passed on a bipartisan basis in a Republican Congress, with a Republican House and a Republican Senate. Unfortunately, those are the old days.

As I said earlier, 16 out of 19 Presidents have used this power. Teddy Roosevelt said it best, I think, about the Grand Canyon, that we should:

Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do

nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity, and loveliness. You

cannot improve on it, but what you can do is to keep it for

your children, your children's children, and all who come

after you, as the one great sight which every American should

see.

Today, the majority here would undo the potential for future legacies under the Antiquities Act.

Just one side note: Chairman Bishop made much of talking about, in a Dear Colleague letter, that there was a provision in legislation, of which I was a sponsor, critical and unique to my State, designating the O&C lands, and he said it precludes new monument designations.

Yes, he is right. That was in there at the insistence of the Republican majority. I would have been happy to take it out, but I will cut him a deal. I would be happy to negotiate.

He voted for that bill, but it also includes 1.2 million acres of old growth preservation, 90,000 acres of wilderness, 300,000 acres of riparian set-asides, and 150 miles of wild and scenic designations.

If he will fully support those conservation provisions in my bill, I will, perhaps, negotiate with them, that they could say: well, we won't do any more monuments in that area because we have already had a massive conservation victory.

But that is why it is in the bill. They insisted, not me. Let's not create phony arguments here.

With that, I urge my colleagues to reject this horrible legislation.

To the previous speaker and others who have complained about Grand Staircase-Escalante, you could introduce a bill to repeal it. Why don't you?

I appreciate the gentleman's statement and leadership.

What are we doing here today? We are going to take a rule established by Ronald Reagan, the first modest attempt to protect water quality, stream quality, forests, and other environmental values in cases of strip mining mountaintop removal.

So the Republicans today are going to overrule the judgment of Ronald Reagan, preempt him with a rule that basically says it is okay to blow the top off a mountain, dump it into a stream, and it doesn't affect water quality because the stream doesn't exist anymore. Except there is a little problem. The water does still leach through all the toxic soils and it does cause problems downstream. But let's not worry about that too much.

Secondly, they are going to preempt states rights. Hey, the party of states' rights. They are all for local control. They hate those one- size-fits-all Federal rules, don't they? No, not today.

We are going to impose a Bush administration midnight rule which a court found to be laughable in terms of its compliance with Federal law. They are going to impose that on all the States of the United States of America as the law of the land. We are going to preempt the judgment of any State that wants to do more to protect water quality than allow the tops to be blown off mountains and mining waste dumped into streams and saying there is no problem. But we will study it for 5 years, as we heard previously. Okay, sure. How much harm will happen in that time?

So those are a few of the problems and the inconsistencies I see here today. We are preempting a Reagan rule that was quite modest and not overly burdensome on the industry. It should have been improved upon. The Bush administration tried to totally undo it. It was laughed out of court. The Obama administration fumbled and messed up writing a new rule with an incompetent contractor. And now we are going to impose the Bush rule on all the States.

They are going to deem, as we heard earlier--that is, pretend--that it meets the Endangered Species Act, and give that pretension the force of law. What they are saying is there were at least two or three people in the Bush administration who had a conversation. That meant they talked about the Endangered Species Act, so that meets the intention of the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, they are talking about a war on coal. We will hear from some well-intentioned people later here today who are going to talk about the potential job impact of this, and I appreciate that. There has to be a balance. But this is not a balance.

This is yet another imaginary war being waged by the Obama administration on coal. A war on Christmas, a war on coal, a war on jobs, a war on whatever. At least it is not an overseas war that is unnecessary in Iraq that cost us many thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

But the war on coal? When the Obama administration came into office, there were 5,000 less jobs in coal mining than there are today.

The Obama administration leased out 2.1 billion tons of coal in the Powder River Basin in its first term. That is twice what the Bush administration leased in the 4 years before that. Recent accounts from the GAO lead us to believe that maybe they were a little too cozy with the industry and in fact that those deals were a little too sweet for that 2.1 billion tons of coal.

So that is a war on coal? No. What they are talking about is actually less coal is being used to produce electricity.

Now they are also the party of market forces and capitalism. Well, guess what? Market forces and capitalism have reduced the use of coal. Natural gas was really, really, really cheap a couple of years ago. Coal used to generate electricity. It totally tanked. It

had nothing to do with the Obama administration. It had to do with market forces, and they worship the market. I hope they are not trying to undo market forces here and have some kind of socialist dictate.

So what has happened is coal use has bumped up a little bit as natural gas has become a little bit more expensive. But that was about economics and not policy.

The bottom line here is should we allow, without any regulation, blowing the tops off mountains, dumping them into valleys, filling in streams, and pretend it has no impact on the environment. And I would say ``no.''