Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

We had, at the end of last Congress, a tremendous bipartisan vote-- 406 19--on repealing straight up the antitrust immunity of the insurance industry.

The American people, no matter where they are on the Affordable Care Act, agree on one thing: insurance companies should not be able to get together and collude to either exclude people from coverage or drive up prices. Yet they do. They have an exemption under a law from the 1940s.

Now, what the gentleman is offering sounds pretty good, but it won't get us there because 90 percent of the antitrust cases are private, and almost every single one of those cases is a class action. So if you preclude class actions, you can pretend you're being tough with the insurance industry while you can wink and nod and say, hey, don't worry about it because there really won't be any litigation under this; and you're still going to be able to skate, and you're still going to be able to collude, and you're still going to be able to drive up prices.

Think of the context in what we're doing. We're talking about IPAB today, but they've already voted to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act. That means no more restrictions on rescissions--the dirty little practice where you've been paying your premium for years and you get sick and the insurance company says, sorry, we're not going to renew your policy. That's been outlawed.

They're going to do away with the prohibitions on age discrimination. They're going to do away with the prohibitions on preexisting conditions. So now we're going to have an insurance industry that is, essentially, free from antitrust law, that can take away your policy when you get sick, that can discriminate against you because you're old, can discriminate against you because you're sick or you have been sick, and it would take away the protections and the review of excessive rate increases.

So if we were doing a straight-up, take away their antitrust immunity, make them play by the same rules as every other business in America, except for professional sports, who are exempt from antitrust law, that would be fine. But let's not have this phony fig leaf so you can wink and nod to the insurance industry and say, ``Hey, don't worry about it; it won't have any impact,'' but we can say to consumers we're with them.

This is a photograph from 1956, before we had a national transportation policy in the United States of America; and if the Republicans are successful with their budget and with their vision, this will be the future for the United States of America.

There are a substantial number of Republicans on that side who have drunk the Kool Aid of a guy named Grover Norquist, who says that he wants government so small, he can strangle it in the bathtub, and that we should devolve--devolve--this is interesting--not evolve--devolve transportation to the States. That's right. Our national transportation policy will be set by the 50 different States.

Well, this is 1956, before we had a national transportation policy. This is the brand spanking new Kansas Turnpike. Isn't that beautiful. Well, look where it ends--in a farmer's field in Oklahoma because Oklahoma chose not to build its section, which they had promised to build. That's the way things used to be, and that's the way they want things to be again.

We're now on the precipice of basically walking away from investing in our Nation's infrastructure. There are 150,000 bridges that need replacement or repair in the national system; 40 percent of the pavement needs total replacement, not just an overlay. We have a $70 billion backlog in our 19th- and 20th-century transportation systems in our major urban areas, in our transit. And that's not even talking about building an efficient 21st-century transportation system to deliver people and goods more efficiently.

And what's their proposal? A 31 percent cut in an already inadequate budget or maybe no money at all. Actually, it's a bit odd. Mr. Ryan's budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would not be enough to fund the uncontrollable outlays, i.e., projects already under way by the States for which the Federal Government has contracted to reimburse at the end of the construction of these projects. His budget wouldn't even meet that number. And in terms of authorizing the bill, they decided for the first time in history to make this a partisan issue.

Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican President, he came up with the idea of a national transportation network. Ronald Reagan put transit into the highway trust fund. They want to take out Ronald Reagan's step of putting transit in the highway trust fund as an interim step before they do away with the program altogether. That's pretty extraordinary stuff. Their vision is that we will go back to this state of affairs in America. We cannot afford that.

Next week or the week after, the temporary highway funding expires. The Senate has passed a bipartisan bill by an overwhelming majority. The Republican leadership has threatened that their right-wing devolutionists will do away with Federal transportation by saying, We might make you vote on that Senate bill. That passes for a threat in the Republican Caucus. We might make you vote on a good bill that would continue the current system with some improvements for a couple of years--that's what passes for a threat--unless you vote for our crazy H.R. 7, which does away with transit funding and basically dismantles the program over a longer term, or the Ryan budget, which would immediately end the program next year.

But they won't let us vote on that because they know that a bunch of Democrats--just like in the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans came together with an overwhelming majority and passed a transportation bill, they know that would happen here. So they got 80 or so ultraright-wingers who wouldn't vote for it. Big deal. I could match that with 150 Democrats, and we could have a bipartisan bill next week, putting millions of Americans back to work, rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure in this country. But instead, they want to devolve us back to the future.

Smaller government. Smaller government. Yes, that's great, guys. A transportation policy for the United States of America, competing in a world economy, set by the 50 States without funding. What a great vision.

Repeal and replace, that's what the Republicans said they will do. Well, what's the replacement? Apparently, it's the Ryan voucher plan, which will stick it to seniors in the future--not too good of a replacement.

But the other thing they're repealing that they don't want to talk about is they're repealing restrictions on age discrimination by the insurance industry. They would be repealing the restrictions on preexisting conditions to discriminate against people--redline them, essentially, by the insurance industry--and they would be repealing the provision of reviewing excessive rate increases which has been already successful in California this year.

So the Republicans have come forward with this one part of the bill. They've already repealed all of ObamaCare, but now they're going to repeal it bit by bit because they don't want to do real things like deal with our transportation system and that.

But there is one particularly objectionable part of this. They're going to pretend that they're taking away the antitrust protection of the insurance industry. Remember, this is an industry that can and does get together and collude to drive up our premiums. And after the Republicans do away with age discrimination, preexisting conditions, and rate increases, the industry is going to have a field day.

So they're pretending that they're going to allow suits against the industry for antitrust violations. Unfortunately, not really. If someone wants to bring a suit, they can't do it as a class action. Well, more than 90 percent of antitrust suits are brought as class actions. Individuals do not have the resources to take on the insurance industry.

So they're going to take something that in the last Congress was bipartisan--a bill I had to take away, really take away, the antitrust immunity in the insurance industry and give a benefit to all consumers in this country, passed this House by 406 19--and now they're going to fake out, they think, the American people by pretending they're taking on the insurance industry while they're filling their pockets with contributions from them.

Good work, guys.

Mr. Speaker, I am submitting a letter from Colin Taylor Mays, a 12-year-old school kid in Oregon. He is very worried about the future of his education. The drive by some to make deep cuts in our education system is jeopardizing his education and the future competitiveness of our Nation.

While it is critical that we must not further burden our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt, we also must make investments in their future. With limited resources we must make smart investments that put people back to work by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure system. While we focus on creating jobs now we cannot forget about our youth and what future will lie ahead for them. We must invest in education to make sure that our children will be prepared for the workforce of tomorrow. It is possible to balance our budget and provide for the most critical needs of our Nation. We must look both at raising revenues and reducing spending in areas where appropriate. If we do not make these choices now we will continue to let our children suffer in an education system that is falling apart at the seams. I hope that my colleagues will heed this message and work with me on making the right choices for our youth by investing in their education and giving them the same if not greater opportunities than we had growing up.

(By Colin Taylor Mays)

I am age 12 and a boy scout of America. I'm writing this

letter as a view not a complaint. I haven't been learning

enough in school, because of all the budget cut days. It's

hard to keep track of what I'm learning. We need to put more

money towards schooling and education. I probably have only

12 full weeks of school and I have so many weeks that only

have 4 or 3 days in them. Unlike very few children I want to

learn and possibly get a very good job that I want. Please

consider this letter.

I paid $4.01 a gallon at home in Oregon last weekend. There's a lot of people who've got long-term plans, drill now, drill here, drill everywhere, conservation, whatever. They

say there's nothing we can do in the short-term. Well, there is.

Seventy percent of the oil futures, the supply of oil, is owned by speculators on Wall Street and other places around the world--70 percent. The head of ExxonMobil testified that about $38 a barrel is due to speculation. That's the head of ExxonMobil. He says we're paying 38 bucks a barrel for speculators on Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs says, well, it's only $22 to $28 a barrel. Let's take the lowest number, $22 a barrel. That would lower regular gas by 64 cents a gallon if we got rid of the speculators.

I've proposed a tax of 1/100 of 1 cent per transaction that would drive most of these speculators out of the market and raise some revenues.

It's time to get rid of the speculators, provide price relief to Americans, and then we can talk about a long-term plan for energy self- sufficiency.

Last December, the Speaker told us that the Republican signature jobs bill was going to be the surface transportation reauthorization. Yet, under pressure from the extreme right in his caucus 2 weeks ago, he said in the Republican caucus that this transportation bill is not a jobs bill. And they wrote for the first time since the founding of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Highway System a purely partisan transportation bill in the hope of jamming it through.

Well, it's all fallen apart now. Yet there are 150,000 bridges falling apart in the Federal system. Forty percent of the pavement on the national system needs to be restored, and there's a $70

billion backlog for critical equipment in our transit systems. These could be jobs--Made in America jobs.

But we need to work together. Transportation is not, never has been, and should not be a partisan issue. By trying to make it partisan, they've stalled and failed. It's time to go back to the drawing board and put together a bill that's good for America. We don't have to have partisan politics on every issue, and transportation investment should not be one of those.

Madam Speaker, well, we're going to take up legislation which is targeted to fix the reimbursement for doctors, which is absolutely essential to Medicare. This threat should go away forever. We should make a permanent fix and not pretend that we can just keep dragging this on without jeopardizing seniors.

Unemployment, we need to extend that for people who can't find work. They lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They can't find work; we need to help them out.

But borrowing $100 billion from the Social Security trust fund under the premise that the consumer spending generated will bring about economic recovery and create jobs, that's the Larry Summers principle from the stimulus era. Look, that doesn't work. You want to create jobs, you want to borrow $100 billion, let's borrow $100 billion, finance the transportation bill that the Republicans pulled from the floor this week, and put a few million people to work rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure in this country with all made-in-America goods. That would be an effective way to get this country back on track, not Social Security tax cuts.

Ronald Reagan signed legislation that funded transit out of the highway trust fund. The new Republican majority is going to end transit's eligibility for highway trust fund dollars--but they've created an alternative transportation account that will be paid for out of the general fund. The only problem is that paying for transit at current levels under an alternative scenario would blow another $40 billion hole in the budget.

But they have a plan.

They're going to require Federal employees to pay 6 percent of their salaries into a trust fund. That's about $40 billion over 5 years. But they're not taxing Federal employees to pay for transit--don't worry about that--because that money can't be spent on transit. It will make it look like they're not spending more money. In reality, they will borrow $40 billion to

pay for transit instead of paying for it with your fees out of the highway trust fund, but they're going to pretend that they didn't add more money to the deficit. At the same time, they're going to make Federal employees put 6 percent of their salaries into a trust fund for this illusory offset.

Good work, guys.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentlewoman from Oregon, the Honorable Suzanne Bonamici, be permitted to take the oath of office today.

Her certificate of election has not arrived, but there is no contest and no question has been raised with regard to her election.

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the entire Oregon congressional delegation, I'm pleased to introduce a fellow Oregon Duck, Italian American,

and the newest member of our delegation, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, from the First Congressional District of Oregon.

Suzanne is a former Oregon State legislator, an attorney who has worked on consumer and small business issues with a distinguished record of accomplishments and service for the people of Oregon. I know she'll be a strong and effective addition to our delegation in the House of Representatives.

Suzanne, welcome, and we look forward to working with you.

With that, I would yield to my colleague from Oregon.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I was named conferee. I have been on the aviation committee for 26 years. There was no legislative conference.

The most contentious provision of the bill was a deal that was struck between Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, and Speaker Boehner; and it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

Now, this bill is absolutely critical to the safety and security of the aviation system of the United States of America. It's critical for its modernization. It's critical for its competitiveness. These things are extraordinarily important to our country. Aviation constitutes, in aggregate, about 10 or 11 percent of our gross domestic product. It is not a sector that we can continue to ignore and underfund in terms of providing it with the tools it needs to be more fuel efficient and safer for the traveling public and more efficient for business transport and goods.

But those things should not be held hostage to the incredible anti- labor bias of the majority here in the House. The bill that passed our committee would have established a rule for the formation of a union that said anybody who was eligible to vote, who didn't vote, counts as a ``no.''

I went and reviewed the elections of every Member of Congress and, guess what, if we had that rule, if every person who was a potentially eligible voter would be counted as a ``no'' vote in your election, not one Member of Congress, even those who get 80 percent, would have been elected because you had more people who didn't vote than you got votes, not one Member of Congress; but that would be fair for the working people of America according to the Republicans here in the House. That was an incredibly egregious provision, outrageous.

So then we move to the Senate. Well, we go through this little thing last summer where we actually shut down the FAA. Now, I know you don't care about 4,000 Federal employees, that's fine. But you also put out of work 78,000 people who were working in the private sector on the modernization and updates of our aviation system at our airports--all over wanting and hating unions.

Now, I don't get it. I don't get why you hate unions and working people. I really don't understand that.

So here we come to the final product, and the final product will make it much easier for someone in the anti-labor airline out there, perhaps, to deunionize in, say, a merger or even in an election because their furloughed employees would count in an election. You don't know who they are, where they are. They get to vote. And you have to have an election to have an election, and you have to win the election to have an election.

This is not a fair provision. We need the changes in this bill, but we do not need to attack the working people of the United States of America.

PIPA, Protect Intellectual Property Act; SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act. Now, who could be against bills like that, to prevent the theft of intellectual property or online piracy, to prevent online piracy. Clever names, great. Content, not so much.

Now, the worst, organized, government-sanctioned theft of intellectual property in the world goes on day in and day out in Communist China. And this government has done precious little to rein that in. We run a huge trade deficit with China. We're buying their goods. They are dependent upon our purchasing of their goods. And yet we allow them to get away with that. This bill does nothing to deal with the organized theft in Communist China, which is the greatest problem that confronts us in the theft of intellectual property.

Now, concealed behind these really benign names and embedded in the text is something that's kind of like what we call malware. Now, we all know what malware can do to our computers. We've seen it; the black screen of death. Well, this is a little bigger than malware that gets on your computer, steals your data, or crashes your computer. It could crash the entire Internet and the productivity of the Internet.

Now, eventually this legislation could threaten the existence of an entire domain because of one blog entry, one user link. A whole domain could be taken down. Wow. That's pretty incredible. Imagine how some of these user-content sites are going to have to try and police things.

Well, they can always err on the side of censorship because there are broad provisions in this bill to allow you in good faith to censor something because you thought maybe it was a problem. So they could start censoring rather dramatically. The legislation also includes very broad language for so-called anti-circumvention, that is any site that provides information that could--could, maybe, possibly--help users get around censorship would be a target. Well, that's kind of an interesting contradiction for the government of the United States because actually we promote through the State Department software that helps democratic activists in Communist China, which I already mentioned, and in Iran and other vicious dictatorships around the world to get around their government's online censorship. We're now going to enshrine principles that would allow this sort of censorship, sort of mimicking some of the actions of the Iranian and the Communist Chinese, I guess, in regards to the Internet here. Of course, we're going to allow private companies to impose this censorship instead of the government imposing this censorship; but they would have government enforcement behind their actions, the private right of actions that would be allowed in this bill.

This is pretty extraordinary legislation, very poorly drafted. If you didn't care about the Internet, if it didn't exist and you wanted to put in the toughest possible protections theoretically for piracy and intellectual property, maybe you'd write something like

this. But there's a better way to go than to kill the Internet at the same time as you're trying to get at these few bad actors that are out there, let alone the state bad actors, like China.

I'd love to see a bill drafted to take on the Chinese on their multi- billion-dollar annual theft of intellectual property from the United States. Everybody says we can't take on China; no, they're too big. So instead, we'll go after small, creative people who could tread across this line unknowingly who are participating in a much larger site. They have their blog as part of that site or they have their post as part of that site. The whole site could be taken down.

This legislation, I'm pleased to say, that it seems like the White House has woken up to the dangers here; the fact that we are essentially creating the PATRIOT Act national security letter provisions for private companies to censor the Internet. We cannot let that happen. We must stop this legislation. We also need to take on meaningfully piracy and the theft of intellectual property.

Congress excels at doing nothing; but sometimes doing nothing or empty political posturing, as we've just seen from the Republican majority, ignores our Nation's critical needs.

By leaving town without extending unemployment insurance, the 2.3 million long-term unemployed Americans who want to work and can't find work in this economy is especially cruel on the eve of the Christmas season. And for 48 million seniors and disabled, the new year will dawn with a 28-percent decrease in physicians' reimbursement. Many will find that they can't get in to see a doctor. It will be slammed in their face.

So with these actions, or rather these inactions by the Republican majority, they truly embody the spirit of the season: the Grinch.

Well, we've all heard of too big to fail when the Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and President Bush bailed out a bunch of miscreants on Wall Street for their gambling and mistakes and putting taxpayers at risk, some principle that does not belong in the policy of this country. But now we have another one: Too big to be counted. Too big to be counted.

This year, the Pentagon will spend $670 billion, about $2 million a day, and it doesn't know where its money is. In fact, it often doesn't even know if it has spent money. Here are a few examples:

In March 2000, the Pentagon inspector general found that of the $7.6 trillion--``t,'' trillion dollars--in accounting entries, about one- third of them--$2.3 trillion, or $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, was completely untraceable, completely untraceable. $2.3 trillion, don't know where it went. Don't know if they bought something, if it was delivered. Who knows.

Then, in 2003, they found--and this is something I've talked about all through my years in Congress, the so-called inventory system at the Pentagon, which is absolutely absurd. The Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 missile command launch units. And while military leaders back in 2003 were scrambling around trying to find chemical and biological suits for our troops because of the risks in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was selling suits at surplus on the Internet for 2 cents on the dollar. No suits for the troops. They're very expensive. Over here, we're selling them for 2 cents on the dollar to the general public. What is this all about?

Another year, they spent $100 million for refundable airline tickets that they didn't use. Hey, what's $100 million at the Pentagon? Chump change. They didn't ask for the refunds. They just stuck them in a drawer. That is $100 million that didn't go to serve our national defense, supply our troops, or be saved and defray our deficit.

In fiscal year '10, half of the Pentagon's $366 billion in contract awards were not competed. Half.

Now, these are pretty shocking numbers. And actually, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) and I on the floor here last spring got a little amendment in the Department of Defense bill to require that they conform to a 1994 law. In 1994, Congress said the Pentagon should be audited by 1997. Unfortunately, every year, the appropriators have said, Oh, no, no, no. That's too much to ask of the Pentagon.

Well, we got a little amendment in the bill here. We kind of snuck it by the DOD hawks over there who are protecting the incompetence over there, and they would have been audited. The Senate did the same thing. But to the rescue, the conference committee, behind closed doors. I was one of very few on the floor here who voted against closing the doors of the conference because they don't close the doors of the conference committee over there to talk about classified things that could risk our national security. They do it to cut deals like this.

So yesterday, they decided the Pentagon will not be audited. It can't be audited. In fact, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway), one of our colleagues, said it would be insulting to require that we audit the Pentagon in a mandatory way by 2014. I mean, that's only 2 years from now. That's only a couple more trillion dollars from now. Boy, we wouldn't want to know where that money is going. We wouldn't want to know whether they are surplusing out stuff our troops need while they're paying for a contractor who didn't have to compete to buy the same stuff, and they say there is a shortage and we don't have enough. We wouldn't want to know these things. So we closed the conference and cut these stinking deals.

So here it is, once again, too big to be counted. This does not serve our men and women in uniform well. It does not serve the national defense needs of the United States of America, and it sure as heck doesn't serve the interests of the American taxpayers. The Pentagon must be audited like every other agency of Federal Government, and we should also throw in the Federal Reserve.

Mr. Chair, today, my Republican colleagues missed an opportunity to pass targeted, nonpartisan legislation to protect farmers and small businesses from unnecessary federal regulation.

There is widespread and bipartisan agreement that ``farm dust,'' dust produced during activities on farms and ranches, should not be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clean Air Act. The EPA doesn't want to regulate it. And Members of Congress do not want the EPA to regulate it, myself included.

But instead of writing legislation to codify a simple ban on regulating farm dust--legislation that would have won my support and the

support of most of my Democratic colleagues--the Majority wrote a bill creating major loopholes in the Clean Air Act that would have significant consequences for public health and the environment.

H.R. 1633 imposes a blanket, one-year moratorium on any regulation updating the national ambient air quality standards applicable to all coarse particulate matter, which includes: fly ash, diesel soot, asbestos, arsenic, lead, mercury, and heavy metals.

None of these harmful toxins are defined as farm dust. Yet, this far- reaching bill would prohibit EPA from protecting American families from these harmful toxins for at least a year.

H.R. 1633 would also exempt major industrial activities, including open-pit mining and aluminum smelters, from EPA's review. Again, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, nickel, and mercury--all particulates emitted from mines and industrial activities--would be exempt from federal oversight, even though they have nothing to do with ``farm dust.''

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not regulate farm dust. The EPA has no plans to start regulating farm dust. And, if the EPA ever proposed regulations for farm dust, I would vociferously oppose them and sponsor legislation to prevent their implementation.

But that's not the bill before the House today. The bill before the House today is a distraction from the most pressing issue facing our country and economy: jobs, jobs, and jobs.

Mr. Chair, I support a ban on regulating farm dust. That's common sense. But I do not support creating Clean Air Act loopholes for big industry under the guise of helping small farmers and businesses. I am voting no on H.R. 1633.