Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, climate change, in my view, is real, it's urgent, and we must make progress or ignore it at our peril. But whether we agree or disagree, whether you're a climate change believer or denier, there are things that we can do together for the benefit of the environment and the economy.

We can focus the debate on energy efficiency; we can save money through making our homes and buildings more energy efficient; we can put people back to work and buy American products; and, in the process, we can cut down on harmful carbon emissions and make progress on climate change and strengthen our economy.

That is why I've joined with my friend from West Virginia, David McKinley, in introducing the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act, which proposes practical solutions to bolster energy efficiency. This bill will speed our transition to a more energy efficient economy--increasing America's economic competitiveness in energy security--and build jobs.

By finding areas where we actually do agree and working together, we can make progress on the environment and on the economy.

Mr. Speaker, today, Vermonters across the state are donning the green and gold in honor of our own Lyndon State College. The Vermont State Legislature proclaimed Green and Gold Day in celebration of all this college means to our state: to the thousands of students who have gone there to learn and earn a degree, to the regional economy that depends on its graduates and its ideas, to the Lyndonville community that is enriched by its college neighbor. Lyndon State College, and its sister schools in the Vermont State College system, provide a lifeblood to our state and deserve this day of recognition and celebration.

Lyndon State is found on a hilltop in the small town of Lyndon in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. For over one hundred years, this college has symbolized the aspirations of Vermonters who believe that higher education is a means to better their lives. In fact, Lyndon State College is a leader in serving first generation students in this most rural area of our state.

This college delivers for Vermont: 90% of Lyndon State College graduates are employed or continuing their education at graduate school within six months of graduation. Its business incubator program is responsible for job creation and new businesses in the region.

The Northeast Kingdom is deeply rooted in tradition and community, and in the coming years economic development will bring significant changes to the entire area. We will depend on Lyndon State to be a key player in these changes. But we will also depend on Lyndon State to continue to help Vermont uphold all that is key to the Kingdom: the value of community, the environment, and lifelong learning.

Congratulations to Lyndon State College on the upcoming inaugural of its 15th president, Dr. Joseph Bertolino, and on the completion of another successful academic year. We join you in celebrating the Green and the Gold, and look forward to many years of your continued success.

Mr. Speaker, the ocean levels are rising. The ice cap is melting. Severe storms, more intense and more frequent. Climate change is real, not that you'd know it in this body. We're still having a debate about the reality. This is a fact-free zone in Congress when it comes to climate change. But we can still make progress, even if we debate the science.

We should do things that allow all of us to use less energy. Energy efficiency is good, regardless of what fuel source you use. It creates jobs for the folks who are out of work in the home construction industry, doing retrofits for commercial and residential buildings. It saves families money, and it saves businesses money.

There's an enormous amount of advocacy on both sides of the aisle to do this practical, commonsense step. It will have an incidental benefit, as well, of reducing carbon emissions.

So even as we have an unresolved debate about the science of climate change, let's take practical steps that are good for jobs, good for the economy, and good for saving taxpayers money.

I thank the gentleman, and I thank Mr. Ryan.

The focus and goal of this budget, as I understand it, is to eliminate the debt. That's a worthy goal. In fact, we all share it. But this budget, in my view, lacks ambition for other challenges. What about stagnant wages? Middle class declining? Lack of jobs? These are all fundamental issues that face the American economy.

The middle class is shrinking. Wages now are what they were as a level of our economy as they were in 1966. Just a week ago, when we voted for the sequester, it was a day when American profits were at a record higher than they had been since the 1950s, but American wages were back at 1966 levels.

There is an assertion here that we lack credibility and that we're taxers and spenders. I reject that. But let me remind the folks on the other side that a lot of the policies got us to this debt: a war in Iraq on the credit card, Afghanistan on the credit card, two tax cuts for the wealthy promising benefits to everybody else never paid for, and Medicare part D on the credit card. Then we had the collapse of the economy. Those were not our policies. Those were the policies of a previous President who erased a record surplus.

These are credibility questions, but there's also an economic policy question. There are two assumptions in this budget. One is that austerity will lead to prosperity, that getting the debt down by any means possible and any cuts possible will get us to the Promised Land; it's the pot of gold at the end of the Tea Party rainbow. There is no evidence for that whatsoever.

The second is a faith-based conviction that if you give tax cuts to wealthy people that will trickle down to the rest of us. No experience has shown that that can be successful.

We should be cleaning up the Tax Code. We should be fighting waste, fraud, and abuse. Whether it's in the Pentagon or in the health care system, we should be doing that together. This budget does not give us that chance.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, this is not a perfect bill. This is a disgraceful bill. And this process is not on the level.

Yesterday, Wall Street celebrated its highest close in history. And today it's going higher. A few years ago, they came here, hat in hand, insisting on a bailout. They got a bailout. And it was paid for by Main Street, who didn't cause the problem but suffered the consequences, and it was paid for by the middle class, who didn't cause the problem but suffered the consequences. And now we have a budget that is doubling down, grinding down on the middle class.

What economic philosophy is at work here? America has always been at its best when it has had budgets that promote economic growth and middle class opportunity. This budget has adopted a notion that austerity is a goal in and of itself. And how will we get to fiscal balance without economic growth and an expanding middle class? Our colleagues say in this budget it will be by putting the heel of austerity on the throat of middle class opportunity. That is wrong.

Forty-four percent of the cuts are focused on 14 percent of the budget. That's kids going to college; it's little kids showing up in school hungry who can get a meal; it's TSA workers who are going to get furloughed and who pay their bills month to month. This is disgraceful, and it is also a repudiation of what has made America great--a confidence that we are all in it together. And if we have a budget where we share the pain and we share the opportunity, we'll be the better for it.

Wall Street has a second reason to celebrate today because this budget is absolutely doubling down on promoting the well-being of the haves at the expense of the middle class in the great American tradition of middle class opportunity. Profits in this country are the highest they've been since 1950. Wages are the lowest they've been since 1966. We need to stand up for the middle class.

I rise to honor a person whose time was short, but whose contribution was great. Joan Mulhern passed away this past December at the age of 51. Joan graduated from the University of Vermont, and she very quickly made a name for herself as a fierce and extremely effective advocate for the environment in her position with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.

Although Joan then left Vermont to pursue a law degree here in Washington, D.C., and later went on to a very successful and effective career at Earth Justice, Vermont never left Joan.

The values with which she pursued her passion for a clean environment and for a sustainable environment were ones Vermonters know well. She was relentless, she was tenacious, she was tireless, she was kind, and she was very effective.

As Joan's friends have noted, she would have been uncomfortable with all the tributes that have been paid to her, but she'll have to give us a pass on this one because she certainly lived a life worthy of praise and honor.

I thank the gentleman.

We have sharp differences in this body on taxes, on spending, on the best path forward to resolve our fiscal situation. Those are fairly legitimate debates, but there should be absolutely no daylight between us on meeting our obligation to pay our bills. There should be no linkage between the obligation to pay our bills and getting our way on contentious issues in dispute among us.

This is just like a person with a credit card who buys a refrigerator. At the end of the month when the credit card bill arrives, they've used the refrigerator, they see they're above their credit limit, they don't tear up their credit card. What they do is they stiff their credit card company.

We have to pay our bills. That is not negotiable. A year ago August when we went through this spectacle with this linkage, we suffered our first downgrade in the history of the country. That is outrageous. And it's going to cost taxpayers money. If we mess around with the debt ceiling, creating uncertainty as to whether this is a political tool and gimmick, a 1 percent increase in interest rates will cost the taxpayers $1 trillion.

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for rollcall vote Nos. 627 and 628, I would have voted ``aye.''

I thank the gentleman from California, and I look forward to returning to the committee and working with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle as well.

I'm very pleased to be here supporting this legislation. Energy efficiency makes sense. We have brutal arguments here about climate change, about what is the right fuel source. They're dividing us. But the fact is whether you believe in climate change or not, even under the bill that was passed--not this session, but a session ago--we could have met one-third of our climate reduction, carbon emission goals through efficiency. There is an enormous potential in efficiency to make this economy better, to create local jobs, to save people money. This legislation starts down that road, and it's very good.

I look and see some of my colleagues over there, even my friend from Georgia. I think we accidentally voted the same on one or two pieces of legislation this year--and I'm not quite sure who made the mistake. But our eyes are wide open on this one with efficiency. We know that this is good for Georgia, it's good for Vermont. And it does not matter what your fuel source is--you can be a nuclear person or a clean energy person--using less is good for the pocketbook, it's good for the economy.

I would like to expand on this when we come back next year, find that area where we're in agreement on efficiency and energy and intensify it. When I served on the committee, we did pass HOME STAR. I've partnered this session with Mr. McKinley of West Virginia on a version of that, the HOMES Act, where we would give some incentive to homeowners to retrofit their homes. The evidence is that if you did this in an aggressive way, 95 percent of the materials that are used in retrofitting a home are manufactured in America, so we put those manufacturing jobs back online.

Number two, the folks who do the work are the trade folks, who are really still reeling from the housing slump. So they've got the skills and they need the work; we put them back to work. Then your bill at home, as a homeowner--whatever your heat source--goes down. This is sensible and we can do it.

It's going to take some decisions on spending. I hope we can get past this notion that every dollar spent is a bad dollar spent. There are times when it makes sense to invest because you get a good return on it, and that's from somebody who does believe that we've got to bring our budget in balance.

So I say to the sponsors of this legislation, our leaders on the committee, and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, this is a tremendous down-payment on efficiency that will be good for this Congress to work together on and good for this country to get it done.

Thank you. This is such an important issue about the future. We can get a deficit deal. The President is committed to doing it. It's got to be balanced. Balanced means there's got to be revenues. Our taxes, especially from the high-income, are at historic lows. We have to have health care

reform, and that can get the cost of health care down, bring that rate of growth of spending down.

In Vermont, that's what we're trying to do. We're a single-payer State. We're trying to move towards a single-payer. And the reason is that it's the best way to get our arms around health care so you can continue the access. And we know that there are reforms that we can make in Medicare. Just for example, if we purchase drugs wholesale, why do we pay retail? In the VA and in Medicaid, the government is a big purchaser and it negotiates price discounts with the pharmaceutical companies that are quite eager to sell their prescription drugs to Medicare.

It's illegal to be a smart shopper. That's exactly right. You can't make that up. It's illegal. It would be like telling you, if you went into CVS to buy some aspirin, and you knew you were going to use them for a year--you had a family, if you wanted to buy the bottle that had 100 and the per unit price is one-third of what it is if you're going to buy the bottle of 20, it would be illegal for CVS to be able to sell it to you at a lower price per unit. That's what we have in Medicare.

Everybody understands you've got to pay for what you're going to get. But the fundamental debate here--and this is what was reflected in the Ryan budget with the voucher plan--is: are we going to try to address what are obvious failures in the system of the delivery of health care, like not allowing for prescription drug price negotiation? That would save $165 billion, and it wouldn't cut a single benefit. Or, are we going to go allow that system that makes no sense continue and instead take $165 billion worth of benefits out of Medicare so that if you go to the doctor, they may treat you for a broken wrist but not a broken forearm. It doesn't make sense. And it certainly doesn't make sense to start talking about benefit cuts before you have the system reform and can get savings that are literally right on the table in front of you.

So we can deal with this debt situation that we have in this country. It is serious. Democrats understand that. The President understands it. It's a serious problem. It's a solvable problem. But to solve it we have to have a significant contribution from revenues. The top 2 percent can afford have their taxes go up to the Clinton year rates. That's number one. And number two, we can have reforms in health care that would benefit not just Medicare sustainability but health care expenses, whether you get your health care at work through your employer or whether you're a private-pay person.

The nice part of this is that we are all in it together. Thank you for doing this. We can solve this problem. And let's do it.

Mr. Speaker, it's been 141 days. That's how long it's been since the House Agriculture Committee, on a bipartisan basis, passed the farm bill by a vote of 35-11. That's the high watermark of bipartisanship in this Congress. It represents something that is too lacking in Washington today: a serious attempt at progress through bipartisan work.

We need a farm bill. America needs a farm bill. Our farmers, our folks dependent on nutrition programs, our folks who are farming and want to conserve the land, they're entitled to have Congress act.

You know, it's one thing to vote ``yes'' and it's one thing to vote ``no,'' but it is unacceptable not to vote at all.

The decision on whether we will vote on a farm bill is up to the leadership. They owe it to each one of us so we can be accountable to the people we represent and give America a farm bill. There is absolutely no excuse for Congress to not even try to do its job, which will occur when a farm bill is brought to the floor.

I thank the gentleman.

You know, on the farm bill, we've got the worst drought we've had in 50 years. We've got people who need nutrition programs. We've got farmers who need certainty about what the price

support programs are going to be, what their future is going to be. We've got livestock farmers that are in desperate straits because of the drought.

And we've got a Senate that's passed a farm bill. We've got a House Agriculture Committee that's passed a farm bill, on a bipartisan basis, Democrats and Republicans working together to pass that bill. And the House leadership, who has the authority to bring this bill to the floor, won't do it. That's the first time in the history of the House of Representatives where a farm bill passed by the Agriculture Committee has not been brought to the floor for a vote.

Mr. Speaker, we could defend, each and every one of us on both sides of the aisle, a vote of conscience, whether it was ``yes'' or ``no,'' on the farm bill. None of us can defend not even taking a vote on the farm bill.

That decision is not within the authority of any individual Member of Congress. That is the decision that the majority leader and the Speaker of the House have the authority to make, and their refusal to bring this bill to the floor will be absolutely an indictment of Congress' inability to do its job.

America needs a farm bill. This Congress needs to do its job. We've got the time to do it. We should act. That bill should be brought to us for a vote.

Mr. Speaker, 1 year ago, Congress took action finally to reform out-of-control debit card swipe fees charged to our small businesses and customers every time they swipe a debit card. For years, the card companies and big banks have essentially been ripping folks off, overcharging them on swipe fees. With no one watching just because they could, they were charging the highest fees in the world, running up billions of dollars in profits but all at the expense of small businesses and consumers. That's just too much. There is no justification for this.

A year ago, Congress finally took action on the debit cards. That's good for our economy and fair to our small merchants. But we need to do more.

Abuses continue in credit card swipe fees. The credit card companies and the big banks should step back and have a business model where they charge a fair price for an important service but not rip off their customers.

Mr. Speaker, the American people are going to make a decision on November 6 about the future leadership of this Congress and this country, and they face, as they do every 4 years, two fundamental questions. The first: Who can be in charge of the cash register? Who will best manage the economy? The second: Who will be a firm hand in protecting America's foreign policy interests? If we look at the past 2 years with this Republican-led Congress, which has accomplished nothing and, in fact, has done damage, the question on who is best in charge of the cash register is quite clear.

The Ryan budget that was passed by this House and that stalled in the Senate would actually increase the debt. The whole point, supposedly, of the Republican agenda coming into Congress was to lower the debt. The budget they passed would increase it by $6 trillion. Why is that? Well, first of all, many of the proponents of this budget are the folks who voted for policies that actually exploded the debt: the war in Iraq

on the credit card; nation-building in Afghanistan on the credit card; the prescription drug program unpaid for on the credit card. Those policies played a very big role in getting us into the debt that we have.

Then the Ryan budget, which is supposedly the blueprint to reduce the debt, increases it by $6 trillion in 10 years. Why? Because it increases those Bush tax cuts that were never paid for and would lower their Republican Presidential candidate's effective tax rate to 1 percent. Secondly, it vastly increases Pentagon spending beyond what even the Pentagon is asking for. Even though it then imposes savage cuts on domestic discretionary spending--making it really difficult to do scientific research, to help our kids go to college--the net result is a $6 trillion increase in the debt.

On foreign policy, no responsibility is so vested in one person--the President of the United States--when guiding American foreign policy. It needs a firm hand, a calm voice, a person who thinks before he speaks, who aims before he fires. The recent tragedy of losing our ambassador and three other brave civil servants from the State Department is an indication that the Republican Presidential candidate lacks the temperament to do that job.

Why is it that in the first statement that he made after the loss of four American lives he descended into what essentially was tactical politics--arguing about the wording of a communique from the American Embassy in Egypt? Is it really the case that we in America cannot defend the right of free speech and promote religious tolerance?

We need a President--and have a President--who is thoughtful, who is firm, who can act with conviction and clarity, and does it in a sober way that is going to defend and promote American political and foreign policy interests.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to bring attention to the town of Waterbury, Vermont.

There was an article in The Boston Globe identifying it as the best beer town in New England. In this small town, beer pilgrims from across the country flock to appreciate and enjoy the finest beer in America. It's the quality of the beer that's brewed that's really revered. Let me just tell you about a few.

It's the home to the Alchemist cannery, which makes an IPA called Heady Topper. I can tell you personally that it's really good. The Beer Advocate, the bible of the beer community, rates it as the third best in the world. The beer is sold in cans, but it sells out early, so get there early.

It's not hard to see why it's so popular when it's the third best in the world, but there are others there. Waterbury is the home to a number of restaurants: the Prohibition Pig, the Blackback Pub, and Arvad's, to name a few with great beers.

Vermont is coming back from Hurricane Irene. In Waterbury, it's one beer at a time.