Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time, and I thank all of the members of the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Resources who have put so much time and effort into this. Yes, it was a long process, but I believe that a good result is worth the work. I wish we had got it done a year ago; but, hey, we are now finally going to get something in place long ahead of next year's fire season.

This bill, if properly implemented, will begin to carefully undo 100 years of mismanagement of our national forests. It recognizes that this is going to be a long and expensive process. It recognizes that it cannot be done for nothing. This bill includes a $760 million-a-year authorization. I think we could even go higher. Mr. Speaker, $1 billion a year could be productively spent in the West, given the magnitude of the problem; but it is a significant increase over the commitments we are currently making.

It will bring jobs to hard-hit rural areas in the forests. It sets a priority that half the funds should be spent in proximity to high-risk communities in the West, and it also sets priorities for protection of other high-value resources in high-risk areas.

If properly implemented and fully funded, I believe that we can begin to step incrementally away from the catastrophic, or potentially catastrophic,

conditions that exist throughout the West today.

It contains old-growth language that clearly reflects the intent of Congress that the objective is to return the forests to presettlement conditions, which means there will be large, fire-resistant trees more widely spaced, particularly in the inter-mountain areas; that we would leave native stands intact, but we would aggressively thin from below. We would remove ladder fuels, we would remove trees that are growing into the crowns of the larger trees.

I mentioned earlier the Davis fire in Oregon and the lodgepole that carried the fire into the crowns of the Ponderosa, that would have survived the fire otherwise, had we gotten in there and removed those lodgepoles, which have little commercial value. That is why this program will be expensive. In many areas, what needs to be removed has little or no commercial value. Where it has commercial value, we will use that to offset the costs and to amplify the program.

It does not unduly restrict the right of appeal. It does require that people participate meaningfully in the process if they are going to appeal, and that is the way it should be. I want people to be involved from the beginning in communities, meaningfully commenting on the plans and proposals of the Forest Service. It allows judicial review if the bill is misapplied by this or any future administration.

But it will move the process along, and we will begin to chip away at the backlog. But make no mistake, even if we get the $760 million a year, this is going to take a long time to return our forests to their natural state.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

Would every Member who is on the floor and who has read all 691 pages of this bill since it was made available at 1:30 in the morning please raise your hand. I do not see any hands raised, but we are going to vote on it very soon. We are not doing a service to the American public by violating the rules of the House and not allowing this bill to be held over for 3 days, as required by the rules, so Members of Congress, and maybe even members of the public and the fourth estate, could read it, analyze it, and report it so we could better hear the opinion of the American people. But from what I know of it and the bits I have read, it is not much of a benefit, and it is not what seniors need.

Americans pay more for U.S. manufactured, FDA-approved drugs than anybody else in the world. Our neighbors in Canada pay half as much, on average, for drugs manufactured in the United States of America. Now, how could that be? Well, the government of Canada bargains lower prices on behalf of Canadians. Well, maybe that would be a solution to the problem here in the United States: let us lower the extortionate price of drugs. Let us put the 40 million people in Medicare into a buying group, that would not cost anything, and let us negotiate lower prices. No.

This bill, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, a generous contributor to the Republican Party and the President, prohibits the Government of the United States of America, unlike any other industrial nation or democracy on Earth, from negotiating lower drug prices for its citizens with these multinational conglomerate pharmaceutical companies. There is no pain for the pharmaceutical industry in this bill. In fact, their stock has gone up dramatically in the last week. The analysts have read it, and they said, what a sweet deal for the pharmaceutical industry. Too bad it will not give seniors what they need.

Well, there are $400 billion of taxpayer money, copayments, premiums, deductibles, the doughnut exclusion. There is a nice $20 billion subsidy to private HMO insurance companies who might or might not offer benefits. But seniors, on average, are going to get a benefit that is less than they could get by mail-ordering their drugs from Canada. Oh.

Well, the bill is going to take care of that problem too. Despite the fact that this House of Representatives is on record by a large margin allowing the free reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs for Americans from other industrialized nations that regulate safely those drugs, this bill is going to begin to block that process. They say, oh, well, that is not in the bill. We give the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to allow the importation if he sees fit. Yes, sure. Except he has already said that he does not see fit and he will never, ever do that; and the FDA commissioner has said oh, no, we are not going to ever do that. We cannot certify that those U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs that took a little vacation in Canada are safe.

This is simply legislation that is not going to provide the benefits that seniors need at an extraordinary cost to the ultimate detriment of the core Medicare program. Vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, Congress has one last opportunity to provide unemployment benefits for Americans who have lost their jobs and been unable to find new jobs.

It is quite astounding. We at this point have what is called a jobless recovery. In my State, tens of thousands of people are unable to find employment with their benefits exhausted or near exhaustion. Across America it is millions.

I know budgets are tight around here. I know that Congress can afford to borrow money to pay Iraqis for no-show jobs, but the President says we cannot afford to spend down the $20 billion balance in the Unemployment Trust Fund, taxes paid by employers and employees, for just such a situation. So we cannot afford that. We cannot afford to spend that. We can borrow money to send to Iraq, but we cannot spend down the trust fund for unemployed Americans.

Is he saying it is their fault they are unemployed? Is he saying he does not care they are unemployed? Is he saying he does not care they might lose their home; they cannot feed their kids; they cannot afford essentials; they cannot even buy gas for the car to go out and look for work; that they are having their phones shut off?

I am getting those kinds of calls. We have the highest unemployment rate in the United States in Oregon. It is chronic. And there are a lot of people who want to work and cannot find jobs. The least this Nation could do would be to help them with a modest extension of unemployment benefits.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened. Last year, Congress skipped out of town, the President did not raise any concern, and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans. This year, we are confronted with the same situation. Two days after Christmas, Merry Christmas, 90,000 workers will lose their extended unemployment benefits and have no income, and yet they cannot find a job. And it will be 90,000 workers a week. In 6 months, 2.2 million Americans will have lost everything, probably their homes, maybe their families, because this kind of breaks up families.

This is, of course, a family-friendly Republican majority and White House, but they just do not seem to care about these people wanting and needing jobs. Their jobs are being exported and have disappeared in the jobless recovery, or whatever. They cannot find work. In my State, it will be 43,000 people by February who will lose benefits.

Now, there is $20 billion, that is 20,000 million dollars, in the Unemployment Trust Fund. We do not even have to borrow the money to give Americans a little bit of help to stay in their homes and keep their families together. We do

not have to borrow it because they pay the taxes, their employers pay the taxes. All the President has to do is say, I think that is a good idea, and the Republican majority will jump to it. We could do it right here, now, on the floor, by voting ``no'' and bringing that bill up today.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman before me waxed eloquent about a $400 billion Rube Goldberg complete with subsidies for the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and price fixing. It is going to guarantee that there will be no reduction in the extortionate price of prescription drugs. Americans will still continue to pay the highest prices in the developed world despite the fact that the drugs are manufactured here by American companies who often receive the benefit of taxpayer-funded research.

We could provide a much more meaningful benefit for substantially less and that would be if we did two simple things: Negotiate lower prices like every other nation in the world has done, but this bill prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices on behalf of Americans or Medicare beneficiaries. And, secondly, we could just engage in free trade, allow the reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs. That would substantially lower the price. Many American seniors have already resorted to that, but this bill will prohibit the reimportation of drugs but instead it will engage in subsidizing private insurance, subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry, price fixing and protectionism. They are violating every principle they say they believe in.

Mr. Speaker, we have before us not a simple prescription drug benefit for seniors which they need and which is long overdue, not just a complicated, convoluted, expensive and inadequate benefit for seniors, it is the pharmaceutical promotion and profits protection act. It prohibits any mandated, or even negotiated reductions in the extortionate price of pharmaceuticals. Yes, it would outlaw the Federal Government negotiating for price reductions on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. It will block seniors who are seeking to import less expensive U.S. manufactured drugs from Canada. It provides a $20 billion subsidy to the private insurance industry to undermine Medicare. It is a cruel hoax targeted on the most vulnerable among us. It is not, as the gentleman from Florida said, bipartisan.

I knew Claude Pepper. I served with Claude Pepper. And FDR, I did not know him, but I know that he passed Social Security without a single Republican vote. And LBJ passed Medicare without support on that side. Now suddenly in defense of the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry, they want to attack Medicare but pretend they are doing this for the good of seniors.

Madam Speaker, here it is, the long-awaited, secretly negotiated energy bill, a bill carefully designed to perpetuate our dependence on foreign oil, brokered by national, international, multinational conglomerates which will be subsidized to the tune of $25 billion by United States taxpayers; the Enron provision to repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act, guaranteeing a new round of mergers, speculation and rip-offs of electric consumers.

I can see only one benefit in this bill. It is huge, it is heavy, it is made of paper. If we take and send a copy to every American taxpayer and consumer, they can throw it in the wood stove or the fireplace and get a little bit of warmth, but that will be the only benefit they get out of this legislation.

Madam Speaker, previous to today's debate the House has spoken definitively on what the American people want and today are only getting price relief on their prescription drugs by importing from Canada. Yet, through stealth maneuvers, the Republican majority, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and the White House, is going to close the border. They are about to say, to quote the FDA Commissioner, the FDA cannot guarantee the safety of Canadian drugs. Well, guess what? They cannot guarantee the safety of American drugs. In fact, it is well documented that the supply chain is more broken in the United States of America than it is in Canada where there is more government control.

That was totally a specious argument that they have drug out here to try and protect one thing: Not the safety of the American public and our seniors, not their health. I will tell you what jeopardizes their health: When they cannot afford the drugs they need for a chronic or an acute condition.

There are tens of thousands of seniors and others across America in that condition.

No, there is only one issue here. There is only one thing to protect, and it is not the safety of America's seniors; it is not the sanctity and the quality of our drug supply, because it is already compromised by phony closed-door pharmacies and hundreds of other loopholes that are getting counterfeit drugs, as is well documented, into the system in our country.

Not in Canada. Their system works a lot better. They are reimporting FDA-approved drugs through Canada, and we know they are probably really American drugs. Here there are a lot of counterfeit drugs being made available though phony wholesalers.

No, there is one thing that is being protected. Well, two things. One is the obscene prices and profits of the pharmaceutical industry; and two is political campaign contributions to the White House and Republicans. That is what is being protected.

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) mentioned the VA. I assume she is aware as a veteran that the VA negotiates on behalf of all of America's veterans, and they have negotiated prices and the extortionate cost of pharmaceuticals of about 60 percent. That is how we can afford to give them very inexpensive medications with a very small copayment.

Those are similar to the reductions in Canada, about 50-60 percent, but the Republicans have prohibited in this legislation that the government should negotiate on behalf of the 40 million people in Medicare any reduction in the price of pharmaceuticals at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. This bill also prohibits the importation of drugs from Canada. They say, no, it does not do that, we are going to give the authority of the Secretary of HHS to reimport the drugs, but guess what he has already said, he will not do it because they are not safe. But, in fact, arguably drugs, U.S. manufactured, FDA-approved drugs are safer when they come back from Canada because their supply chain is left corrupt in Canada because it is controlled by the government and because they negotiate 50-60 percent reductions in the price.

The gentlewoman talks about competition. Guess what, the insurance industry who the gentlewoman wants to subsidize with $20 billion is exempt from antitrust law. They can throw out any senior at any time. We may get a 1-year plan from a company, but it is like every other form of insurance in America today, file one claim, next year you are back in the Medicare fee-for-service plan where the premiums have gone up because the industry has cherry picked people out until they need the service. They will give them a service grudgingly until the end of year until they can cut them off.

The people in my district know HMOs, they know them really well. The HMOs pulled out. They said we are not making enough money in southern Oregon, we are pulling out of southern Oregon, and they did. Now, there are no options. So we are going to put people back into the plans and the graces of the private insurance industry, after giving them a $20 billion subsidy without subjecting them to antitrust law and exempting them from any negotiation by the government to reduce the price of pharmaceuticals. This is a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, plain and simple.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentlewoman just to clarify, is the VA part of the government and are we prohibiting the rest of the government from negotiating on behalf of seniors?

Mr. Speaker, I am perhaps the only Member of the House of Representatives who has trained in the field of gerontology, run a senior citizen program, perhaps someone else has, and actually gone with volunteers, delivered meals in homes, supervised volunteers who delivered meals in homes, and spent a lot of time at congregate meal sites.

Let me tell my colleagues this: If any motion to instruct should be nonpolitical and should receive the unanimous support of this body, that should actually be respected by the group negotiating the compromise here, it is this one, to provide the highest possible levels.

Now, the President, unfortunately, proposed to actually cut funding for Meals on Wheels. Now, he has a lot of ideas about people replacing government programs and that. This is essentially a nongovernmental program. It depends tremendously upon volunteers and community assistance and a lot of locally generated contributions matched with a little bit of Federal funds to leaven the mix. And the President's cut would have eliminated this program for many.

A lot of seniors, this is the only person they are going to see in a day. They are shut in. The only person they are going to see is the person that brings them that hot meal. It helps them stay connected to the community. It gives them a little bit of socialization. It allows people to know that they are doing okay in their homes. There are not a lot of other systems or places to do that. Many of them who I visited with on Friday get very nervous and they cry on Mondays when they see the people coming again. Over the weekend, they have the frozen meals and they had something to eat, but they did not see anybody. They were shut in.

Mr. Speaker, to cut this program as the President has proposed would be a tremendous disservice to those who have given so much to our country over so many productive years and now just need a little bit of help to stay in their homes in their later years, the congregate meal sites, to visit those, and the vitality of our senior citizens in later years. It is inspiring to me many times when I go and I hear and I see as I visit the congregate meal sites. But, again, it is also a tremendous socialization experience.

So this House could do no better than to unanimously adopt this, but not

only unanimously adopt this. We vote on an awful lot of motions to instruct here that are immediately tossed in the trash can by the negotiators. I would hope that this would be one motion that is respected, where we deliver and where we give back a little bit to our seniors who gave so much to us, our grandparents, our great grandparents and others. The greatest generation deserves better than a cut in the programs that are helping the most fragile and vulnerable of them.

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of confusion from the debate earlier tonight about what the so-called pharmaceutical benefit for seniors is or is not. Let us just clarify things a little bit.

First off, there are two bedrock principles in this provision of law. It prohibits the Federal Government of the United States from negotiating lower drug prices on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. It prohibits the government from doing that.

We heard a discussion from the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) about people who will be put together in groups and they will negotiate lower prices as much as 15 or 20 percent. Well, the government has done that with our veterans and they have lowered prices up to 60 percent for those drugs and the veterans group is much smaller than the Medicare group. So if we were to aggregate all of seniors voluntarily into a group without them paying a penny or premium of any sorts and have the government negotiate on their behalf for price reductions, one could expect that they might even exceed those of Veterans Administration. Maybe we would see prices even lower than in Canada.

That is the second bedrock principle of this legislation. Not only does this legislation at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry prohibit the government from negotiating lower prices in the extortionate cost of prescription drugs, the highest in the world here in the United States, secondly, it actually would say that not only can you not do that but it is going to stop the importation or really restrain the importation of less expensive drugs from Canada and other countries because it has a provision that says the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have to say that those drugs are safe, in his opinion.

Well, he has already rendered an opinion. He has already said they are not safe in his opinion. Now, there is a little problem with that. Actually, the supply chain in Canada has more integrity than the supply chain in the United States. In the United States we have a whole host of people who are out there. We have these closed-door pharmacies. We have unregulated middle men and wholesalers. The drugs really are not tracked and a whole lot of counterfeit drugs are getting injected into the system in the United States. But in Canada the Government of Canada negotiates on the behalf of the Canadian people very substantial price cuts from U.S. manufacturers of FDA-approved drugs; and when the drugs go to Canada, they are always within the purview of the government there. They track them much more carefully than in the United States.

So arguably you could say that FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured pharmaceuticals returning to the United States from Canada directly to a consumer would be less likely to be adulterated or counterfeit than many of those in the supply chain in the United States of America. That is very well documented. It was particularly well documented in a recent series in The Washington Post.

So what is really at risk here? If it is not the health of seniors, which is suddenly of tremendous concern to the majority party here at the behest of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, what is really at risk? Well, what is really at risk is the extortionate price they are able to extract from the American people for pharmaceuticals. Americans pay far more than any other developed nation in the world for pharmaceuticals. This bill will do nothing to help that. In fact, this bill will guarantee that price gouging will be continued.

The other big benefit is that seniors would be allowed under this bill to go and buy private insurance at a price that is not yet totally determined but with substantial deductibles. And under the optimistic estimates, and these are only estimates because God forbid the government even after giving a $20 billion subsidy under this bill to the private insurance industry should mandate they do anything, we are hoping that they would offer an affordable benefit; and the estimates, optimistic, are that a person who has a drug bill of $1,000 a year would get a benefit of $109 a year after they pay their premiums, copayments, and deductibles. A person with a drug bill of $5,000 a year would get a benefit of $1,024. They would pay 80 percent of the cost. The person at $1,000 a year would pay 77 percent of the cost.

If those same people were just allowed to purchase their drugs from Canada, the price would be 50 percent or less. If the government negotiated on their behalf using the market power of the people in Medicare to reduce the price, it would likely be 50 or 45 percent. So what we are really doing here is providing a huge subsidy to the private insurance industry setting up the pharmaceutical industry to continue price gouging and setting up seniors for a very big fall; and this is such a great benefit, it will not even begin until year 2007.

This is really not a good deal for America's seniors, and AARP should be ashamed that they have lent their endorsement to this. I do not know what they got in return. I know what that side got and that was huge contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Mr. Speaker, Christmas has come early for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and it is going to be presented as a very large and complex piece of legislation that as yet no rank and file Member of Congress, no Democrat on this side of the Hill, has been able to review, and it will be voted on later this week.

It is being cast as simply a pharmaceutical benefit for seniors and some sort of a revision of Medicare to make it competitive and so on and so forth. But what it really is is legislation that was written by and for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the most powerful lobbies in this country and the most generous of campaign contributors, particularly to the President and the Republican Party; and it is first and foremost designed to protect their profits. In fact, perhaps we should call it the ``Pharmaceutical Promotion and Profits Protection Act.'' That would be an apt title.

Boston University School of Public Health has analyzed the bill and they said, 61 percent of the benefits will flow as increased profits to the pharmaceutical industry. The bill specifically prohibits the Government of the United States of America, on behalf of America's seniors and, indeed, all of the American people, to do anything to lower the extortionate price of prescription drugs in the United States. In fact, it closes the door on the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, which is the only relief that many Americans are able to find today. Oh, they say, well, we do not close the door; we are going to give the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to certify whether or not American-manufactured, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals that have had a short vacation in Canada, where their price goes down by 50 percent or more, would be safe if they flowed back into the United States. And, of course, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in his wisdom, has already said that he will not find them to be safe, just to reassure the industry. So they will give him a power which he will not use, or which he has already arbitrarily decided.

In fact, it is arguable that the chain of custody of drugs in Canada is safer than in the United States of America, and it would be arguable that, in fact, those drugs would be safer than those that are sometimes made available in the system here because of unregulated, unlicensed pharmacies, and phoney, closed-door pharmacies and other things that were exposed recently in a series by the Washington Post. But nonetheless, we are going to act to protect here, and what we are really protecting, the Congress will vote, and I am sure the House will

vote; the President is proposing and the conference committee has proposed to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Then, not to leave out the insurance industry, because they are almost as generous in their campaign contributions, we are going to set up a new market for them where we will subsidize the private health insurance industry to create competition. Now, is that not ironic?

The only industry in the United States of America exempted from antitrust law, an industry which can, and does, legally fix prices, collude with their so-called competitors, and, you know, collude also to determine who they might cover or not cover, we are going to bring about competition by subsidizing them.

There are quite a few seniors in my district that have a rather bitter taste in their mouths about the HMO Medicare+Choice and all these other foolhardy things that have been levied upon them. Those companies walked away one day and left them high and dry. And under this bill they will be able to walk away again and leave people high and dry or they will be able to choose the people they want to cover and tell the rest of them to go over to the Medicare fee-for-service plan which will be more expensive. It will get ever more expensive because all the low-risk people will be moved out and taken by the insurance industry and these subsidized plans until they become high risk, until they have to actually file a claim. That is the way the insurance industry works in America today: they will cover you until you ask them to cover something that you have been paying premiums for. And the next time renewal comes up, sorry, we will not renew you. This does not go on just in health care; it is going on in homeowners and car insurance and everything else. But it is particularly egregious in the area of health care. This bill is going to do nothing to rectify that problem.

Let us look at what the great benefits will be. In the first year, next year, there will be discount cards that will come out before the election so the President can say he did something for people, which will be to give a discount, maybe as much as 15 to 25 percent. That means that seniors will only have to pay 50 to 75 percent more than they would have to pay for those drugs imported from Canada. Oh, what a benefit that is. No, but it is a wonderful windfall for the pharmaceutical industry. They will still be paying prices higher than people covered by other private insurance plans, as are Federal employees, as am I, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and many others; but they will get that juicy 15 to 25 percent discount.

Then the big plan kicks in in 2007. Why 2007? Because people, if it went into effect sooner, if it was such a great deal, people might figure out what a turkey it is before the next election. So they will dangle it out there 4 years in the future and say this will be really great, you just wait. It is so complicated, few people can figure it out. But here are a couple of numbers. A person who pays $1,000 for pharmaceuticals under this great plan would only pay $945 for their pharmaceuticals after they did their premiums and co-payments and deductibles. They would get a benefit of $55 on an annual $1,000 prescription drug benefit.

Well, let us look at someone who has much bigger costs. Someone who pays $3,700, $300 a month. Their benefit would be a grand total of $855. Only about, you know, half of that they could get purchasing the drugs from Canada. This is a sham.

Mr. Speaker, the disabled veterans tax: more than one- half million disabled veterans, career military, have their disability benefits offset dollar for dollar against their retirement. What does that mean? It means a retired master sergeant, 100 percent disabled, is taxed at a rate of 50 percent.

Now, the President rushed through relief for millionaires who had to pay a tax of 35 percent on the dividends they clipped off their stocks, and this House accommodated that, but he says there is no money to help out those disabled veterans. We cannot afford, the President says, to offset or reduce that tax or eliminate that unfair tax on our disabled veterans.

Well, that is pretty strange when we can do that for millionaires and billionaires; but somehow, as Veterans' Day comes upon us, we can only give a tiny bit of relief phased in over 10 years to some of these veterans who are subjected to this outrageous tax, despite the fact that almost every Member of the House is a sponsor of a bill to totally repeal it. But they are afraid to put their names from the Republican side on a petition to force that bill to the floor of the House.

Sign the petition. Have the guts to deliver for your veterans.

Mr. Speaker, Veterans Day, November 11, 150,000 veterans will have waited 6 months or longer for appointments for medical care; 14,000 veterans have been waiting 15 months or longer for expedited disability claims; 560,000 disabled veterans will be forced to pay the disabled veterans tax. It does not have to be this way. But we are confronted with the most anti-veteran, anti-veteran administration in Congress in history.

The President refused to spend $275 million in emergency money. He cut off veterans' health care for 160,000 Category 8 veterans. Although there are 373 cosponsors to do away with the disability tax, the President has threatened to veto the bill if we do away with the veterans' disability tax, and Republican leaders refuse to bring up that bill here in the House.

It would be better to celebrate Veterans Day with actions that delivered on our promises to veterans than laudatory words; but I fear that we will just hear words and not see actions from this Congress and this administration.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, inaction is not an option for this Congress. We must have this legislation as well as some other essential legislation before we leave town. I feel strongly about that. I felt more strongly, or as strongly, a year ago when what was previously the largest fire in recent Western history burned between my district and the district of the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden), the Biscuit Fire. We entered into discussions last fall and came very close to bringing a bill forward into the House. Unfortunately, the clock ran out because of the elections. This year we are not operating under the imperative of pending elections. We can stay here as long as we need, and we should, to get this legislation done.

The Senate bill is not a perfect bill. It is not the bill that I would have written, but it is, in my opinion, in a number of areas, which I will touch on briefly, far superior to the House bill; and it does have a statement of support from the administration. So we know that if we were to just take up that bill and pass it from the desk, which is no longer an option having gone to conference, that we could enact it into law. So hopefully there lie the seeds of an agreement here.

Why do I feel that the Senate bill is superior? What I say briefly, and it is hard to quantify things around here a lot, but the Senate bill is 760 million times better than the House bill. Someone may say, how did you come up with that number? The Senate bill included a $760 million annual authorization to do the fuels treatment. Why is that important? This is something that cannot be done for nothing. The House bill omitted any new funding for fuels treatment. The national fire plan, which is supposed to deal with these fuels issues, is chronically underfunded as the gentleman from California mentioned previously. So is firefighting. So every year the Forest Service is confronted with major fires; they then freeze and begin to borrow from other accounts and almost every year they borrow from the national fire plan fuel treatment accounts.

So instead of acting to prevent future fires, we borrow the money to pay for current firefighting because we always start the year underfunded on firefighting. This year was no exception. And despite the actions last week on other legislation, the Forest Service is still going to have to eat $300 million of those fire costs out of its budget, which means reductions in recreation and in fuel reduction and other programs that are already underfunded. So we need a substantial sum of dedicated funds to deal with this problem.

The only good study out there was done at the Northwest Research Station in Oregon. They said, looking at the Klamath forest, which is fairly typical of a lot of the intermountain forests, dry, not a lot of commercial value in there but a tremendous amount of fuel accumulation, that after backing out the commercial value of anything removed, it would still cost $1,684 an acre to do the work.

If they say there is 20 million acres that are critical and need work, that would be $34 billion. So the Senate bill, at $760 million a year, does not get all the way there, but it gets us down the road. It would provide for a big boost in rural communities for jobs to get people out there and do the work, because it would not pretend that we can do this for nothing.

Further, even more instructive, the President was to go to the Metolius basin to hold a press conference regarding the fuel reduction legislation this year. He could not because of a fire. But that Metolius thinning project was to be conducted of large trees of substantial commercial value in an area that is already eroded and virtually flat. But even given all that and given the fact there was going to be 20 million board feet of high-value commercial timber taken out of that fuel reduction, it was still going to cost a net of $400 an acre for the Forest Service. So that just underlines the point that even in the areas where there is viable commercial timber to be removed, unless they remove it all, which would not make a lot of sense in terms of protecting the values of the forest and the old fire- resistant trees, they are not going to be able to do it without paying for the work. That would cost $400 an acre. So inclusion for an authorization for funding hopefully at the Senate level, maybe even higher, would be absolutely essential to pass a bill that is going to get the job done.

Two other issues. I do not totally trust the government to always do what is right, no matter who is sitting in the White House. I did not trust the Clinton Administration to always do what was right. I do not trust this administration to always do what is right. And removing any right of meaningful appeal or judicial review is not an option, as far as I am concerned, in actions that affect public resources and the public generally, and the Senate bill does a much better job of preserving people's right to appeal and to go to court, but limits it so that there will not be frivolous appeals. It requires meaningful participation. And I believe if we adopted something like the Senate bill that there would be few, if any, appeals. And very few, if this is done right, successful appeals that would delay projects.

So the bottom line here is we do have the possibility of getting a bill done this year, and I believe we must get a bill done this year. It must include robust funding. That will not only begin to move us forward in dealing with this huge backlog of fuels accumulation and doing it the right way, leaving the large, old fire-resistant trees, returning the forests to more of a presettlement condition, a natural condition, but it will also put rural communities to work, and it will avoid sometime down the road, and unfortunately not immediately, some of these absolutely massive fires and massive costs that are incurred with the fires because after these forests are treated, fires can become more of a natural regime, and we will not have to fight them as aggressively. They will not present the threats to life and property that they do today.

So I am supporting this resolution with the hope that before this Congress leaves that we will have a viable bill that can be passed by both Houses by a large bipartisan majority and signed by the President of the United States, so we can begin this absolutely vital work before the next fire season.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time and for his indulgence.

Mr. Speaker, November 11, Veterans' Day, more than 130,000 of our troops are in Iraq and at risk, thousands more in Afghanistan and elsewhere and around the world; and here at home we have 25.3 million veterans, 376,000 in my State.

What are we doing in celebration of Veterans' Day? Well, unfortunately, the Congress has done little. In fact, I would say this is the most antiveteran Congress under the most antiveteran administration in recent history.

Mr. Speaker, 150,000 veterans have waited 6 months or longer for basic health care appointments; 14,000 veterans have been waiting 15 months or longer for their expedited disability claims; 560,000 disabled veterans are subject to the disabled veterans tax. Yes, that is right. They are taxed because they are disabled veterans. It is a special tax levied on them.

The President refused to spend $275 million in emergency money, but they have figured out a way to cut down the waiting list for health care. We can thank President Bush for that. His administration actually cut off 164,000 veterans from eligibility for health care this year, those who do not have service-connected disabilities but make as little as $25,000 a year. He did find a way to reduce the waiting list by eliminating the eligibility of yet another group of veterans. Not the first time this administration has done that, not the last.

They proposed to double the drug copayment for veterans from $7 to $15. That was the President's and the Republican majority's proposal in this House. Luckily, it has not gone forward.

Finally, the House majority Republicans in their budget resolution cut $14 billion over the next 10 years from veterans programs.

Now, to focus particularly on the disabled veterans tax, it is odd in a Congress that can borrow money, which is what we are doing because we are running deficits, that can borrow money to give each millionaire an average tax cut of $93,000, that can borrow money to relieve the horrible burden from people who invest for a living, do not work for wages, but invest for a living, of paying taxes on the dividends on their dividend-paying stocks. Not too many of these vets that are disqualified have dividend-paying stocks. In fact, most Americans do not have dividend-paying stocks. But that investor class, they are going to get exempted from paying that horrible burden. The millionaires, $93,000. We are going to borrow the money to give them that benefit. But somehow we cannot repeal a tax on disabled veterans which says that they will be offset dollar for dollar their veterans disability benefit which they earned against their military retirement pay. These are people who gave a career, a lifetime in service for their country, and somehow we cannot do that.

Now, there is a bill pending that would actually repeal the entire tax.

We tried to do this last year. The President threatened to veto the bill. He said we cannot simply afford to take care of those veterans. We can afford as much or more per year to exempt people who earn dividends on stock. We can afford as much or more per year to give millionaires an average of $93,000 each in tax relief, but somehow we cannot afford that for our disabled veterans.

In fact, for the lifetime of these veterans, it would cost $40 billion. Now, that is still a lot of money here. That is almost half as much money as the Congress borrowed just the other day to send to Iraq. That is a lot of money. But somehow the President says we cannot afford $40 billion to deliver on our promises to these veterans for their lifetime for their disabilities.

There are, in fact, in the House 373 cosponsors of the bill. Then what is the problem? That is almost the entire House of Representatives on the bill. Well, the Republican leadership is the problem. They will not let the bill come up. And, of course, the President is a problem because he is threatening to veto the bill because we cannot afford to take care of these disabled veterans.

Now, there is a way to bring a bill to the floor when the Republican leaders refuse to bring a bill to do away with the disability tax on veterans. It is called a discharge petition. Need 218 people to sign it. Force the bill to the floor of the House over the objections of the Republican leadership. 203 people have signed it. Only two of those are Republicans. There are 158 Republicans who put their name on this bill, go home and tell their disabled veterans they want to help them, but they will not sign the discharge petition. They will not force the bill to the floor of the House.

Now, that would be a wonderful gift for our veterans for Veterans' Day if just another 15 Republicans who are cosponsors of the bill, claiming credit for it, have the guts to come down here and sign the petition, which is right behind me, to recognize our veterans properly for their service to our Nation. Now that would be a real Veterans' Day celebration.