Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 647 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks on House Resolution 647.

Mr. Speaker, I hope you were listening as the Reading Clerk was going through this rule, because there was a lot of meat in this rule today.

Ordinarily, and, in fact, historically, we will do a bill and we will do a rule; we will do a rule and we will do a bill. This rule today makes three bills in order, three important bills in order.

I am proud to be able to carry this rule today. I hope my colleagues will see the merits of it as I do.

The rule provides a structured rule for the debate of two bills out of the Financial Services Committee. One is H.R. 477, Mr. Speaker, the Small Business Mergers, Acquisitions, Sales, and Brokerage Simplification Act of 2017. The second is H.R. 3971, the Community Institution Mortgage Relief Act. The rule also provides for consideration of a continuing resolution, H.J. Res. 123, which provides appropriations through December 22, as final year decisionmaking and negotiating goes on. It also allows the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS, to reallocate existing funds for the CHIP program through December 31, 2017.

Mr. Speaker, I want to start off talking about the Financial Services bills. We will have some members from the Financial Services Committee come down. They can talk about it in details that I cannot.

It was a fascinating hearing that we had in the Rules Committee last night, Mr. Speaker. We had the chairman, Mr.

Hensarling from Texas, and we had the ranking member, Ms. Waters. It was a conversation about how we protect people, how do we serve people better.

Now, the Community Institution Mortgage Relief Act, Mr. Speaker, is the result of small community banks and local credit unions saying: We are having a tough time providing mortgages to our members because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has created rules designed to protect consumers that are protecting them right out of access to a mortgage at all.

Mr. Speaker, it is a legitimate disagreement that we have here from time to time about how to protect people best, about how to love people best, but it is the right kind of conversation to be having. If we pass this rule today, we will be able to get into debate on that underlying bill.

The debate will not be about should we protect people, because we all agree that we should.

The debate will be about how should we protect those people, an issue on which legitimate, well-intentioned, thoughtful men and women can disagree. I look forward to this body working its will.

The second bill, Mr. Speaker, from the Financial Services Committee, H.R. 477, was introduced by a classmate of mine in that big class of 2011, Mr. Huizenga from Michigan. He has worked this bill through the process one step at a time, trying to build consensus so that, Mr. Speaker, as we were in the Rules Committee last night, the conversation between the chairman and the ranking member was: Hey, if we can make one more amendment in order, one more amendment that Mr. Huizenga and Mr. Sherman had worked out together, if we can make one more round of changes, we believe we can get this through on a big bipartisan majority coming out of the Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Speaker, we don't celebrate those things, we don't talk about those things. The newspaper will be filled with discord coming out of this city tomorrow morning, but I can tell you that it gives me great pride to come on behalf of the Rules Committee today bringing forward these bills, not that are going to change the world overnight, but are going to make a big difference for real people facing real challenges across this country.

It turns out, Mr. Speaker, my experience is if we do a little bit together every day, a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit the next day, we wake up a year from now finding out we have done a whole lot together on behalf of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, finally, the continuing resolution. I am not a fan of continuing resolutions, I just want to tell you. I got to talk to you about my enthusiastic, optimistic part of this rule earlier. I am going to lay some tough love on you now, Mr. Speaker. We are not supposed to be in the continuing resolution business. You know with your leadership, the leadership of the gentlewoman from New York, the leadership of the two gentlemen from Michigan here on the floor, this House passed on time, ahead of schedule, the funding bills to fund the priorities of the American people for fiscal year 2018.

Folks said we couldn't get it done, folks said we couldn't do it all. We did, and we did. We sent that to the Senate, Mr. Speaker, before the end of the fiscal year, which was back on September 30. The Senate hasn't been able to take it up yet, Mr. Speaker. The Senate hasn't been able to debate it yet, Mr. Speaker.

I don't know if the Senate is going to get it done in the next 2 weeks, but there are folks in this institution, Mr. Speaker, who say: You know what? We couldn't get it done in the Senate over these last 2 months, so let's just go ahead and pass a continuing resolution for all of fiscal year 2018.

A continuing resolution, for folks who don't follow the appropriations process, means, hey, if it worked well last year, let's just do the same thing next year. Mr. Speaker, that is awful public policy.

We came together debating almost 500 amendments. Having moved every single appropriations bill through the Appropriations Committee, we came together not just in a bipartisan way in the committee, we came together here on the House floor, debated these issues, grappled with these issues, and produced a work product with which the American people can take great pride.

I don't want to give up on that work product, Mr. Speaker. I don't want to settle for the way things have been. I believe that we can do better.

By passing a 2-week continuing resolution today, we ensure that all the features of government continue to operate as the American people expect them to, and we provide another window for the Senate to come together and pass those appropriations bills as we have done here in the House.

I am optimistic about that coming to fruition, Mr. Speaker. I believe that we can get that done together.

Mr. Speaker, we can take up these bipartisan efforts from the Financial Services Committee, we can take up this important effort to continue the funding of the government if we pass this rule today.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I don't disagree with a lot of what my friend from New York had to say when it comes to the facts. I do disagree with the conclusions that are reached there, Mr. Speaker.

We do need to do a better job of working together. Now, sometimes that means Republicans and Democrats, sometimes that means the House and the Senate, sometimes that means the White House and the Congress. We need to hold each other accountable, but we also need to give each other credit for our successes.

The gentlewoman talked about important issues relating to education and improving workforce. We passed together in this institution a continuation of career and technical education funding. We reauthorized that program together, led by G.T. Thompson on my side of the aisle, by Mr. Krishnamoorthi on your side of the aisle, by Chairwoman Foxx on our side of the aisle, by Ranking Member Scott on your side of the aisle. We grappled with that issue together. We did it together, because it was the right thing for the American people, and now it sits in the United States Senate without action.

We came together, and we funded the government. We grappled, line by line, section by section, we did it together, and now it sits in the United States Senate.

Mr. Speaker, what needs to be said, one can describe it as Republican incompetence. One can describe it as Democrat intransigence. But we, as a House, have come together and gotten our work done. The Senate cannot, and why the Senate cannot is because it requires 60 votes to get something done over there under Senate rules. In order to have 60 votes, you have to have Democrat votes.

If the Senate changed its rules tomorrow and made it just a Republican majority institution, they could move all of these bills without delay. Far from being a reflection of incompetence, it is a reflection of a commitment to a bipartisan effort on the Senate side.

We can poke them and poke them and poke them and, just one day, folks might get their wish, and we may make that a completely Republican streamlined process over there. But be careful what you wish for.

We don't have to kick each other in the shins all day long, every day, over here. We have success after success that we have earned together. We should spend more time celebrating those successes, Mr. Speaker. Among those successes is the bill I mentioned earlier, offered by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Huizenga).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Huizenga) to talk about the hard work, the effort, and the success that he has been able to accomplish in a bipartisan way.

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

I would be interested sometime, Mr. Speaker, having a team building expert take a look at some of our proceedings here on the House floor and see if they think that the conversations that happen here bring us closer to working together on serious solutions, or push us further away.

I agree with my friend from Michigan; we need to get about the business of the American people. The business of

the American people is not figuring out who to blame, it is figuring out how to fix things. And to continue to perpetuate the inaccurate message that we don't collaborate on those issues is to do our bosses, the American people, a terrible disservice.

On bill after bill to combat the opioid epidemic, we have come together in this institution. We have passed these bills in a collaborative way and sent them to the United States Senate. Bill after bill on human trafficking, we have come together in this institution. We have passed these bills. We have sent those bills to the United States Senate.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about funding the American Government. I have been in this Congress since 2011. I got to vote, for the very first time, on funding the Centers for Disease Control, which sits right in my back yard in the great State of Georgia.

I got to vote, for the very first time, on funding the National Institutes of Health, which do such amazing research, both for our seniors and for our children. The kind of talent that we have there, Mr. Speaker, boggles the mind. We came together, and we funded those institutions in the annual appropriations bill for the first time ever.

Now, we can spend our time together talking about who hates children and who hates old people, and why it is everybody is an untalented buffoon; or we can recognize that, on issue after issue, we come together and get about the business that our bosses sent us to get about.

I don't think any of us are going to be rewarded by figuring out who to blame. I think we are going to be rewarded by getting it fixed.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Tenney), who has worked, through the Financial Services Committee, again, in a bipartisan way, to deal with local community financial institutions and local home buyers who are getting shut out of the process by an overly burdensome Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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

Mr. Speaker, I opened with a discussion about how we all care about these American homeowners who are trying to get, oftentimes, into their first home, and how it is that we protect them better.

We disagreed about how to protect them.

Do you do it through the CFPB and Federal regulation? Or do you do it through more local hometown institutions being governed by their neighbors?

We agreed on what the need was, but we disagreed on how to get there.

What is so frustrating to me--I still feel like a relatively new Member of this institution, Mr. Speaker. I guess I am not any longer-- is that we seem to have one standard when we are in the majority and a completely different standard when the other guy takes over the institution. It seems to me that principles should be principles irrespective of who sits in your chair.

The very first big vote I took when I got here in 2011, Mr. Speaker, was to fund the United States Government in February.

Why?

Because when Democrats ran every single facet of government--they controlled the House, they controlled the Senate, and they controlled the White House--they didn't get it done. They couldn't get it done. It is hard to do sometimes, Mr. Speaker.

I will take you back. You weren't in this institution at that time. The year is 2010. The first CR that they passed went from October 1 to December 3, about the same length of time as the one that we passed.

They weren't up to anything nefarious when that happened, Mr. Speaker, and I resent the implication that we have been during that same path. They needed a little extra time and they took it.

When that CR expired, Mr. Speaker, they then went and passed, lo and behold, a 2-week CR--a 2-week CR from December 4 to December 18. They needed a little more time. They passed one for 2 more weeks to get themselves a little more time.

That didn't work out, Mr. Speaker. They still weren't able to get it done in those 2 weeks, so their next CR, Mr. Speaker, went from December 19 to December 21. Three days is what they found to be the right number to extend funding of the Federal Government so they could continue to get their work done, Mr. Speaker.

When that 3-day CR didn't work, they then punted altogether; and when my freshman class came in in 2011, we took over and we funded the government instead.

Mr. Speaker, we can describe what happened when my friends last controlled this institution as an abominable failure, or we can describe it as a frustrating failure but something that happens in this institution. It happened when my friends ran it. It happens when we run it. We need, on behalf of the American people, to get on a better track. Let me stipulate that is true.

But let me ask my friends to stipulate, Mr. Speaker, that for the first time in a long time we are on a better track because we came together in this institution and we got our work done. The Senate hasn't, and I am frustrated by that, but I want to give them a little more time.

For my friend from Michigan who asked the question, ``What difference does 2 weeks make,'' I would ask anyone who has that question to Google ``continuing resolution'' and ``Department of Defense.''

If you think that continuing to fund the government one day at a time with a continuing resolution, or even 12 months of the time during a continuing resolution, if you think that is the definition of success, Google ``continuing resolution'' and ``Department of Defense.''

Every single day that we fail to take up in the United States Senate the large full-year funding appropriations bill, we do a disservice to every single man and woman in uniform.

If we have a choice here today, Mr. Speaker, between doing that disservice to those men and women for 2 weeks or 6 weeks or 8 weeks or 12 months, I choose to.

If you wonder what difference it makes, ask any man or woman in uniform. There is a reason, Mr. Speaker, as hard as the appropriations process is, that you and I took up the defense portion, the Homeland Security portion, the national security portion all the way back in the summer and passed it out of this House before the end of July, because we knew how important it was. We knew how mission critical it was, and we wanted to give the Senate the most time we possibly could.

I am frustrated, too, but let us not describe these failures as partisan failures, as an effort by one side or the other to subvert the process. These are failures. But 2 weeks, Mr. Speaker, is going to be less of a failure for our men and women in uniform than would be 3 weeks, 4 weeks, or 12 months.

I am sorry that we are here, but this is the best circumstance that we can create to allow our Senate time to succeed.

They cannot succeed alone. Republicans cannot succeed there alone. It requires a bipartisan majority to succeed. Let us not pretend this is a partisan problem. This is an American challenge, and I believe we are up for it.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

I thank my friend from New York for helping me to bring the rule today.

Mr. Speaker, I believe in truth in advertising, and of all the things that you heard the Reading Clerk read, when he went through word for word for word from this rule, you heard not one word about taxes today. Why? Because we are not talking about taxes today at all. Because nothing that we are doing today has anything to do with taxes at all. Because of all the successes that we are down here to partner on today, tax is not one of them.

What is on the list today?

Well, in the spirit of truth in advertising, Mr. Speaker, shutdowns aren't on the list either. In fact, the opposite is true. If we pass this rule today, we will fund the government. We will prioritize keeping the doors open.

Mr. Speaker, habits are hard things to break, and we are in two very bad habits in this institution. One is failing to see the merit in what the other side is offering. We have two Financial Services bills today that break that pattern, that see the merit in working together and collaborating together, and we bring two bills to the floor that this entire institution can be proud of.

We have another bad habit of ascribing to the other side's motives that I believe are not worthy of this institution at all. A government shutdown would be one of those things. We are, in good faith, working together--Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, Congress and White House--to get about the business of the American people, and it is hard. But it is worth doing, and it is worth doing right.

If I have to choose between fast and right, I choose right. We have got a chance today, with the passage of this rule, to bring up two bills that our colleagues, in bipartisan ways, have worked through on the Financial Services Committee that will make a big difference to families and businesses across this Nation.

We have an opportunity today, if we pass this rule, to bring up a continuing resolution that guarantees to every single American that the doors are open, the lights are on, and we continue and have an opportunity for the Senate to move final legislation.

I want my colleagues to support this rule. I want my colleagues to support the underlying bills. But, Mr. Speaker, more than anything, I want my colleagues to take pride in the successes that we have achieved here today.

CHIP funding, Children's Health Insurance funding, is at risk, but not because we haven't succeeded. We have. All we need is one more signature from the Senate.

CDC funding may be at risk, but not because we haven't succeeded. We have. We just need that bill to get across the floor in the Senate.

Our troops are on the cusp of receiving a well-deserved pay raise. Why? Because we came together and we passed it here. We just need it to get across the floor of the Senate.

And there is not one of those items or a dozen more that I could list, Mr. Speaker, that will move across the floor of the Senate in anything but a bipartisan way.

Do you want bipartisanship? If you want cooperation, if you want success, we have our chance today. Vote ``yes'' on this rule, Mr. Speaker. Vote ``yes'' on these underlying bills, and let's get together and get the Senate across the finish line as well.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 635 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to my friend from New York (Ms. Slaughter), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I just had a chance to visit with my colleague from New York. We were talking about, well, the same thing all Members talk about when they get together: those things they have in common, those things that make their day a little bit better, those things they are struggling with that make their day a little bit worse.

I regret that so often we come to the House floor and the debate that we are having seems like we just have absolutely nothing in common whatsoever. I am sure it has been your experience. I think you can ask any freshman Member of this institution, Mr. Speaker, ``What is the biggest surprise you have had in your first year in Congress?'' and they will say, ``I am surprised at how hardworking and conscientious and diligent and committed absolutely every single one of my colleagues is, because I was reading in the local paper back home, and it sounded like it was a big cesspool there in Washington, D.C. I am pleasantly surprised at how sincere my colleagues are at working for their 700,000 to 800,000 constituents back home.''

Mr. Speaker, we have two bills that this rule makes in order for debate today, and they are two bills that I will tell you are incredibly well intentioned. I plan to support them. I plan to enthusiastically support them, but they are on issues that are hard in their minutia.

The first bill that is made in order today under a closed rule, Mr. Speaker, is H.R. 1699. It is the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act. We had testimony in the committee yesterday, and the discussion was how do we protect buyers of manufactured housing from being exploited while still enabling those Americans who don't have other avenues for purchasing housing to get into that most affordable of housing, manufactured housing. We have common goals to protect people and to empower people, but how do we get that done?

This bill was worked through committee. I believe it is a good compromise. We didn't allow any amendments to this. There were no germane amendments presented in committee, so that is coming under a closed rule today.

This rule also would make in order a structured rule for H.R. 4182, the Ensuring a Qualified Civil Service Act of 2017.

Again, Mr. Speaker, when you go and read the headlines, it makes it sound like every discussion on Capitol Hill is among a bunch of partisan hacks. It is just not true.

The civil service, an incredibly important part of American Government, has dedicated men and women who show up every day to institute the laws that you and I pass, to be the interpreters of the bridge between the laws that we pass and the way they hit folks on the ground. We all want those employees to be protected from the swinging pendulum of partisanship.

I don't want a Republican President to get elected and fire all the Democrats serving in government. There are some bright-minded scientists, some great folks in law enforcement, some really talented people in education. I don't want them to lose their jobs because of the partisanship of a President.

Similarly, I don't want to see a Democratic President get elected and fire all the folks who are Republicans. There are some fantastic Republican minds in our Department of Agriculture helping our farmers to succeed, our Department of Labor helping our workers to succeed. You go right on down the list, there are strong men and women helping folks to succeed.

But we are also facing a reality that that same civil service system that seeks to protect those hardworking, those exceptional workers trying to serve America, that same system that works to protect them also protects folks who are completely derelict in their responsibilities.

We had that discussion as a conference, as a House. In fact, in a bicameral discussion, it went to the President's desk for his signature, as it came to the VA, to say: Can't we do more to reform a civil service system, to reform Federal labor union provisions so that folks who need the protection, because they are exceptional, continue to be protected; but those folks who are failing our veterans, that those folks cease to be protected from a system that seeks to require accountability? We passed that together. We did that together here, Mr. Speaker. We sent it to the Senate. They did it together. The President signed it into law.

This Ensuring a Qualified Civil Service Act does one thing and one thing only: it extends the probationary period of a new civil service worker from the current 1 year to 2 years.

The Department of Defense has done this already, and it has been working exceedingly well for them. The concern is: Have I been able to adequately assess an employee's ability to perform in a 12-month period?

We are committed to trying to train people up, Mr. Speaker. Nobody is trying to run folks out before they have had a chance to learn their job. The question is: Is a year long enough to uncover the flaws in an employee or is 2 years a wider window?

You will hear folks on the other side say: Rob, why in the world can't you all figure out if an employee is talented in year one?

That is fair.

They will say: Rob, if you are going to train somebody up, why couldn't you get it done in year one?

That is fair.

But as the GAO has looked at this issue, what they found is managers aren't getting that done in year one. Whether it is because they are ineffective as managers or whether it is because they keep trying to give people a second chance and get them trained up is an open question. This bill mandates nothing, but it allows this 2-year window so that managers can give their new employees a good first, second, and third look.

The data suggests that once folks get fully protected by the civil service system, it is very difficult to move underperforming employees out. That work should be done during this probationary period. This bill aims to lengthen that probationary period to 2 years.

Mr. Speaker, reasonable men and women can disagree on these measures. I believe they are important steps in the right direction. But what gives me so much pleasure to come to the floor to bring this rule to you today is the earnestness with which these two bills were presented.

These are common challenges: How do we ensure the very best staff for the American people? How do we ensure access to homes and protection for home buyers for the American people? These are sincere concerns, legitimate disagreements.

If we pass this rule today, we will enable a debating period. We will bring these bills to the floor so that we can air our concerns and challenge our assumptions. I hope, at the end of the day, my colleagues will decide to support this rule and to support the two underlying pieces of legislation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds just to let my colleagues know that this bill passed out of committee by more than a 2-1 margin, a big bipartisan vote out of committee to reform manufactured housing to provide more access.

Mr. Speaker, I don't profess to be an expert on that, so I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Barr), one of my colleagues from the Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus), a good friend and authority on the issue.

Mr. Speaker, I would share with the gentlewoman from New York that I have no further speakers remaining, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman raises a lot of important points. I am absolutely concerned about funding the United States Government, but, sadly, in a way that has become systemic as we talk about who we are as a people, Mr. Speaker, we can either be glasses half full or we can be glasses half empty.

Is it true that the number of days we have left in this continuing resolution are limited?

It is.

Is it also true that this House has fully funded the government ahead of schedule for the first time since the good people of the Seventh District elected me to Congress?

It is.

This House has nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, this House should be shouting it from the rooftops:

The United States Constitution gives the United States

Congress a job to do. The House has done its. Senate, get to

work.

This is the first time, Mr. Speaker, that we have been able to fund all the appropriations bills--there are 12 of them--before the end of the fiscal year since I was elected in 2011. The Senate has passed, I believe, zero appropriations bills so far this year.

Mr. Speaker, let's not give anybody a pass on getting the good work done. Let's do hold people accountable, but let's not chastise ourselves and create an atmosphere of failure.

Success begets success. We succeeded together for the first time in a long time. Let's not waste that opportunity to get that bill across the floor of the Senate.

Similarly, Mr. Speaker, we are talking about civil service protections today. There is not a man or a woman in this Chamber who doesn't want the absolute best Federal workforce that we could find; not one.

The question today is: Do we lock you in and give you all of those ironclad protections that every American knows the civil service system offers?

We all know that it is hard to get fired from a government job. We all know that.

Should we extend the probationary period where folks can be monitored, trained up, disciplined, worked with from 1 year to 2 years?

If that gets us a better Federal workforce to serve the American people, the answer should be a unanimous yes.

I say to my friends who oppose this bill: If it doesn't end up in that result, I will vote with you to repeal it. But I believe it will end up with a more highly qualified workforce, that it will end up with an American taxpayer who feels like they are getting their money's worth.

I will tell you the best thing we can do for our civil service employees is to end the narrative that civil service is a place of failure instead of a place of success, it is to end the narrative that substandard people work for the Federal Government as opposed to exceptional people work for the Federal Government.

I represent employees of the CDC in my part of the world, Mr. Speaker. The Centers for Disease Control is second to no one in the intellectual firepower that they assemble to serve the American people. Those men and women put themselves in harm's way to battle those pandemics that scare the bejesus out of the rest of us. They do it as an act of service, and they should be praised for it.

The best thing we can do for them is to make sure folks don't slip through the cracks and they get saddled with a substandard partner. We want them to have access to an exceptional partner. This bill would do that.

Mr. Speaker, as to access to manufactured housing, the bill from my friend from Kentucky, it is absolutely true that every man and woman in this Chamber wants to protect the American consumer from predatory lending. That is undisputed. But as my friend in Kentucky stated, when do we protect someone right out of the opportunity to have a home? In the name of protecting people, when do we fail those very same people?

We had testimony in the committee yesterday, Mr. Speaker, presented credit union after credit union after credit union that would no longer loan money to its members to purchase a manufactured home. They wouldn't do it. They couldn't do it.

Talk about predatory lending if you want to; it is not your local credit union that is doing it. Talk about big Wall Street banks exploiting people if you want to; it is not your local credit union who is doing it.

Talk about people who want to build your community; it is your local credit union.

Yet credit union after credit union said: The men and women whom we strive to serve, we will no longer help access the American Dream. We can't. Why? Because of the regulations coming out of Washington, D.C.

Do we want to protect the American consumer? We do, and we can, but we can't protect them right out of home ownership. We shouldn't, yet we have.

Passing this bill today that my friend from Kentucky brings forward corrects that mistake, puts us back on track for protecting consumers and enabling consumers.

Mr. Speaker, you can pick any day of the week on Capitol Hill, and you can find a way to describe everything that goes on as nefarious, as misguided, as contrived. But, Mr. Speaker, you can also look at days on Capitol Hill and see the earnestness with which men and women work together to move this country forward. That is the day we have today. I hope it is the day we have tomorrow and the next day and the next day.

I urge my friends, support this rule. Support bringing this bill to the floor for manufactured housing. Support bringing this bill to the floor to improve the civil service system.

We can do that with a vote right now, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, November 30, 2017, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I tell folks back home that they should watch this time at 10 in the morning, where any Member can come down and talk about anything they want to talk about, because you can learn a lot about one another.

There are folks who come to this floor every single morning to celebrate somebody in their district back home, to build up the country with optimism, and with the belief that if only we unite, if only we work harder, we can make tomorrow better than yesterday was.

There are those Members who come to the floor on a regular basis to tear things down. I tell you, Mr. Speaker, I have been in this world for 47 years. I know it is easier to tear things down than it is to build things up. Something has happened in this institution where the currency is how quickly can you tear the other side down instead of how quickly can you partner with them to build things up.

Tax reform is hard. I have a bill for folks who are uncomfortable with the elimination of special carve-outs, deductions, exemptions, and lobbyist loopholes. For folks who are uncomfortable with those things, I have a bill that repeals absolutely every one. It is called the FairTax Act. It is H.R. 25.

We are not going to vote on that bill today because this institution is not comfortable eliminating absolutely everything all at once. But there is a difference of opinion, Mr. Speaker, in what the Tax Code is designed for. Is it designed to punish people that you dislike and reward people that you do like? Or is it designed simply to raise the revenue so that the government can do the things it needs to do?

I believe the latter.

My friends have come to the floor today and they have said: Oh, we are eliminating this exemption and that deduction, and that carve-out and that loophole, and those things help with the cost of education.

Well, I say to my friends: If we want to help with the cost of education, let's deal with education.

The Tax Code is not the solution to every problem. Oftentimes it is the source of those problems.

For folks who believe that the cost of medical care is too expensive, I agree. Another carve-out, another loophole, another exemption, the Tax Code will not solve that problem. It may mask that problem, but it will not solve it. We have to come together to solve the healthcare inflation problem.

I say to my friends who are worried about the medical cost deduction: I worry about that, too. I worried about it when the Affordable Care Act made it 33 percent harder for Americans to claim that; when it raised that base level from 7.5 percent to 10 percent, meaning so many more Americans couldn't claim it.

This bill doubles the standard deduction so that families don't have to worry about the magnitude of their burden. Simply, the fact that they have a burden means that they will be able to exempt it.

My friend from Pennsylvania came and told the story of two families from Pennsylvania working in a picture tube factory. It was a powerful story of American manufacturing disappearing. If I looked around this institution to find a millennial here, they wouldn't even know what a picture tube is. That factory was going to go out of business because technology surpassed it.

We are losing American manufacturing overseas every single day, not because we are not the hardest working people on the planet, but because we have the most punitive Tax Code on the planet. Everyone here knows it.

In 1986, everyone knew it. America had the least competitive Tax Code on the planet, but Democrats and Republicans came together--Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill--and they took America from worst to first. Decades of economic prosperity ensued. We are doing that very same thing today: worst to first.

Would be that it were Democrats and Republicans together that were doing that, but I tell you, Mr. Speaker, the time is not too late to come together to do that. It was a worthy goal in 1986. It is a worthy goal today. The Tax Code should not be picking winners and losers. It should be creating an economic environment where the American worker can succeed; where the American worker and its commitment is not at a disadvantage to the rest of the world, but it is at least on a level playing field, if not advantaged to the rest of the world.

We can do that together today, and I hope that we will. It will always be easier to tear things down and than to build things up, Mr. Speaker. But I know the men and women in this Chamber on a personal level, and I know they didn't come to tear things down. They came to build a better day tomorrow for their children, their grandchildren, and the constituents that they represent.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that we will fulfill that promise together.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 580 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, it is budget day. I don't know if you were as excited about that when you got out of bed this morning as I was, but, to be fair, I sit on the Budget Committee.

I have the great honor of serving on the Rules Committee, and that is why I have the great honor of bringing this rule to the floor today. But I serve on the Rules Committee by night. By day, I serve on the Budget Committee with my friend Mr. Pascrell and others, and we have been working since January to produce a budget for the United States of America.

I have got to tell you, Mr. Speaker, we produced a whale of a budget coming out of the House Rules Committee. You remember that budget, you supported that budget. We did a fantastic collaborative job bringing that budget to the floor, and then it went to the United States Senate.

Now, you know how this happens, Mr. Speaker. We all grew up watching, ``I am just a bill sitting here on Capitol Hill. Well, it is a long, long journey to the capital city, it is a long, long wait while I am sitting in committee.'' We all know the song from our childhood.

It is a long process to move a bill through, and nine times out of ten, it comes back differently from the United States Senate than the way we sent it over there.

Well, Mr. Speaker, we have an opportunity today by concurring with the Senate amendment, and if we pass this rule, that is what we will have an opportunity to do. If we pass this rule, we will have an opportunity to have the debate, concur in the Senate amendment, and bring a unified budget to the floor.

Now, what does that mean, Mr. Speaker?

We have already been working on appropriations bills this cycle, and for the uninitiated, that is the bulk of the Federal spending that goes on. All of the mandatory spending that you and I both know about, Mr. Speaker, Medicare, Social Security, those important income support programs on which so many Americans depend, that money is already going out the door.

So today what we have an opportunity to do in passing this budget is to create what they call reconciliation instructions, because contained inside this unified budget of which the House and the Senate agree are reconciliation instructions that allow us to bring what I believe will be the most comprehensive, fundamental reform of our Tax Code since Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan did it in 1986.

Since 1986, 4 decades ago, Mr. Speaker, we have an opportunity today to do something that no other Congress has been able to do since I have been an adult, and I am excited about that opportunity.

Now, to be fair, we are going to have a lot of disagreement about how to get that done. That is not the debate we are having today. For any of my colleagues or anybody back home, Mr. Speaker, who is worried that right here in this debate on a Wednesday, we are going to sort out our entire Tax Code, fear not, fear not. That is not the debate we are having today.

The debate we are having today, Mr. Speaker, is will we or will we not take on the challenge of reforming our Tax Code. I believe that we will.

The debate that we are going to have today is will we or will we not confront the fact that America has one of the least competitive tax codes in the world, but Americans deserve one of the most competitive tax codes in the world.

The debate we are going to have today, Mr. Speaker, is not about the details of tax reform, but about the premise of can we do better for the American people or can we not.

I have the great benefit, Mr. Speaker, of not having to learn what I know about this Chamber from watching it on TV or reading it in the headlines. I consider myself very blessed to have the opportunity to serve among these men and women. If I just had to read about them in the headlines, I would have a very low opinion of them. I confess, I would have a low opinion. But because I get to work with these men and women, Mr. Speaker, I get to see the real commitment to their constituencies, the real commitment to their home States, the real desire to deliver on behalf of their constituencies and on behalf of the United States of America.

We may have a divisive debate today. We sometimes do. But my prediction here in hour one, Mr. Speaker, is that by the time we leave this floor, we are going to have an agreement to take on one of the challenges that no party has been able to take on since Democrats and Republicans came together in 1986 to get it done.

It is my great hope that we will use that model, that we will repeat that model, that we will improve upon that model, and that we will produce something that all of our constituency can be proud of. I know that America is hungry for tax reform, and I believe we can deliver it for them.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to support this rule, support the underlying concurrence in the Senate amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I had an opportunity to mention at the beginning that we might be debating the details of the tax reform plan that does not exist today. I see that we are, in fact, going to do that.

There are a lot of studies out there on this tax reform plan that does not yet exist, but let me tell you that we can all agree that we have the single least-competitive Tax Code on the planet today. We can all agree that with the click of a mouse, a company can transfer its assets overseas and grow jobs there instead of growing jobs here.

Let us have the debate that we want to have about who should bear the burden of American taxation. That is a legitimate debate and we should have it. But let us not have the debate about whether foreign workers should benefit or American workers should benefit from American capital, because that answer should be clear in the hearts and minds of every single Member of this Chamber.

We have an opportunity, Mr. Speaker, to go from worst to first. Now, I confess that I don't actually expect to get all the way to first. I will settle for getting up in the top five and getting out of the bottom five when it comes to being able to lead in this country. But I want to mention, Mr. Speaker, what I think is a source of frustration of constituencies on both sides of the aisle, and that is the us- against-them conversation that goes on day in and day out.

I looked at the chart my friend from Massachusetts brought down to the House floor. It happened to be in university colors of Georgia's red and black, but I can see that as a representative of all the hardworking families in my district, that chart didn't do anything to inspire me about the impact of tax reform going forward.

My friend quoted the Tax Policy Center. Now, The Wall Street Journal called the Tax Policy Center a shill for those groups that don't want to see any tax reform of any kind, but that is currently. The Tax Policy Center has been doing research for a long time. The research my friend from Massachusetts quoted was a study of a bill that does not yet exist. The research I am going to quote is of historical tax rates in this country.

What my friends at the Tax Policy Center said is that about 30 percent of Americans--one-third of Americans--pay no income taxes today; that the Tax Code, as it exists today, protects them from any tax liability at all.

Now, what we are proposing when we get into fundamental tax reform, Mr. Speaker, is to double the standard deduction. For those families that are already claiming the standard deduction, we are talking about doubling it. Now, the brackets are still in question, the details are still in question, but we are talking about doubling the number of folks who don't have to deal with the IRS at all.

Today, about 30 percent of American families don't pay any income taxes,

and that same 30 percent gets a refundable tax credit that rebates to them their entire Social Security and Medicare contribution that they make and the entire Social Security and welfare contribution that their employer makes on their behalf.

Now, these are not my numbers; these are the Tax Policy Center's numbers, that a full third of Americans aren't paying one penny in Federal income tax or Federal payroll tax of any kind.

Now, I am not here to debate the wisdom of that, Mr. Speaker. I am here to tell you that I don't know how much lower I can cut taxes in that group. I don't know how in the world I can lower the tax burden on folks who are not only paying no income taxes, but are having all of their payroll taxes rebated to them also.

Is this a group we should talk about, Mr. Speaker? Should we talk about folks who are grabbing onto the bottom rung of the economic ladder and struggling to climb to the top?

We should, and we do.

Should we talk about how it is that the entitlement system, the benefit system in this country, is trapping people at the bottom of the ladder and not allowing them to climb to the top?

We should.

I would say to you, Mr. Speaker, that it would be misleading to the American public to suggest that this tax bill is focusing its attention in one direction instead of another direction. The fact simply is that I can't lower taxes any more at the bottom of the spectrum.

We are talking about lowering taxes on corporations. That doesn't inspire many people. I have that conversation regularly: Rob, what in the world are you doing lowering taxes on corporations?

I support the FairTax, and in the spirit of folks who are not particularly enthusiastic about tax reform, I am not in that camp. I am enthusiastic about tax reform. I just thought there was a better way. I couldn't get the votes to have my better way done.

My better way is the FairTax, and what I would say to you is corporations don't pay taxes. Corporations do not pay taxes. They collect taxes from their consumers in the form of higher prices, from their employees in the form of lower wages, or from their shareholders in the form of lower capital--lower capital returns.

Now, lest you think: Rob, you are just a conservative Republican from the Deep South. What do you know about this?

I will again quote the Tax Policy Center, which says that a full 20 percent of the corporate income tax burden falls on workers. Fair enough. If we want to argue about where the tax rates are going to end up and how the cuts are going to look and what the policies are going to be, let's have that debate.

Let us not mislead the American people into believing there is a free lunch anywhere in this Tax Code. We have an opportunity to move from worst to first, and every single American, regardless of their region, regardless of their politics, is going to benefit from that change. They benefited from it when Democrats and Republicans came together to do it in 1986, and they will benefit from it when we come together and get it done today, as I believe that we will. We must.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, if you have wondered what kind of passion we have on the Budget Committee, I will just once again recognize how much I enjoy serving with my friend from New Jersey on

the Budget Committee. Everything you just heard from him was from the heart. I get to hear it in committee day in and day out, and I will tell you, we end up with a better product as a result of that. It is a legitimate debate to have about the State and local tax deduction. It is perfectly legitimate.

There are those from low-tax jurisdictions that ask: Why would the Federal Government and the Federal taxpayer want to subsidize those States that are higher-tax jurisdictions? There are those jurisdictions that are low-tax jurisdictions.

Because the gentleman's constituency in New Jersey makes so much money, they pay so much more in Federal income taxes. And States like mine in Georgia, States like Alabama, States like Mississippi are the beneficiary of those dollars as the Federal Government distributes them. Undeniably, there is a case to be made on both sides of this issue.

The falsehood, Mr. Speaker, is to suggest that we are deciding that issue today. We are not. We are not.

I don't blame any of my colleagues for fighting for their constituency at the height of their ability, at the highest vocal point of their capability, because issues are, at their core, local and personal to each and every one of us.

We are going to have to have this conversation and we are going to have to sort it out, and I believe it is not going to be a partisan conversation. In fact, I know it is not going to be a partisan conversation.

I know Republicans who share my friend from New Jersey's opinion, and I know Democrats who share Shelley Moore Capito's opinion on the Senate side. We know this to be true. We are going to sort this issue out, Mr. Speaker.

What I fear, though, is that emotions are going to run so high that we are going to miss an opportunity to figure these things out. For example, to conflate personal deductions with business deductions is to create confusion where there needn't be any.

Every business in America can deduct the meals that they serve throughout their day as a business expense. I will share with the gentleman that my family cannot deduct our meals from our income taxes.

Every business out there that has rented an apartment somewhere in order to conduct business, they can deduct that rent from their income taxes as a business expense. I will share with my friend, in the great State of Georgia, I am unable to deduct my rent as a business expense from my income tax.

There is just a fundamental difference between families and businesses, and that fundamental difference goes back to what I said at the very beginning, and that is there is only one taxpayer in this country. It is not Walmart, it is not Apple, it is not Microsoft. It is the American consumer. We are the only ones. At the end of the day, the buck stops with each and every American family.

The debate over how to structure a corporate income Tax Code, Mr. Speaker, is perfectly legitimate. To suggest that the fact that the personal code and the business code look different and that is somehow nefarious is to deny what is just now over 100 years of income tax policy in this country.

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Reclaiming my time from my friend, Mr. Speaker, what you hear is absolutely right. I want to make that clear. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion; they are not entitled to their own facts. The words my friend is reading are absolutely accurate. What they are not are absolutely binding. That is what they are not.

What this is is such a personal and important issue to folks on both sides of it that it got its own personal line out of the United States Senate.

I can't even get nominations out of the United States Senate, Mr. Speaker. I am sitting here trying to staff out region four down in the great State of Georgia. Folks are delaying debate. Folks won't let me get my people in place.

This is so important to the United States Senate that it came with its own line.

Mr. Speaker, I don't want to diminish the importance of this issue on either side. What I do want to insist upon, though, is that it will not be decided during this hour today; and I want to insist, Mr. Speaker, that it will not be decided on partisan lines.

I would just ask of you, Mr. Speaker, and of my friends here on the floor, we have two things we can do with our voices: we can either sow consensus, or we can sow discontent.

I know that we are passionate about these things in which we believe, but to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that we are not going to come together and sort it out and do the very best we can for Americans is to sell this institution short and is to further the misunderstanding, the misimpression, the misinformation that the media sends out about us every day. I know we are better than that, and I am proud to be a voice saying that here on the floor today, Mr. Speaker.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

We have heard a lot about the distributional analysis of tax reform, and, as I have suggested, it is hard to do. Folks who make a whole lot of money, like my friend from New Jersey's constituency, they pay a whole lot more in taxes. I hope that one day my constituency makes as much money as my friend from New Jersey's constituency, and if we can stimulate the economy the way that I believe that this tax proposal will, we are going to have a shot at getting that done.

But we have to have these conversations about limiting tax deductions for the wealthiest Americans if we are going to solve the issues that my friends have raised. And reading right out of that Senate budget report, the whole purpose of considering the State and local tax deduction and considering modifying it, capping it, eliminating it, whatever you want to insert there, Mr. Speaker, is designed around limiting those tax deductions that only benefit the wealthiest among us--that only benefit the wealthiest among us. That is the conversation that folks are trying to have.

Again, Mr. Speaker, there is so much more that we agree on than that we disagree on in this Chamber. But it appears, time and time again, we come to the House floor and focus, in the most shrill voices, on the 20 percent of those things that divide us instead of the 80 percent of those things that we could come together and deliver on for our constituency.

Tax reform doesn't have to pass with 51 votes in the Senate. We move reconciliation bills through the Senate with 60 votes. We have moved them through the Senate with 70 votes. We have moved them through the Senate with 80 votes.

Growing the American economy, Mr. Speaker, is a commonsense goal that is shared in every single region and in every single political quarter. Let's not make this about us here. Let's make this about our bosses back home. We can, and we should, and I believe that we will.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to agree with some of what my friend had to say.

There will be absolutely no family that goes untouched. If you would like to go to the Council of Economic Advisers web page, Mr. Speaker, you can see their most recent report, which suggests, on average, $4,000 in additional wages for every wage earner in this country, every family in this country, making a difference for economic growth.

We all know that economic growth matters. More jobs mean more pressure on labor. More pressure on labor means higher wages. Higher wages mean more income for the Federal Government in taxes and more income for families to put into their pocket.

We are hearing about zombies and surprises and tricks. You can tell that Halloween is right around the corner, and scaring folks is kind of the tagline of Halloween, Mr. Speaker; and, sadly, that is what we see going on here today.

I promise you, you have not heard a single bipartisan word about this tax plan from my friends on the other side, so I am going to provide those words for my friends. I will read from yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Mr. Speaker: ``In 2012, President Obama and his advisers proposed lowering the corporate tax rate because it `creates good jobs and good wages for the middle class folks who work at those businesses.' ''

We can argue about what the tax reform ought to look like. What we can't argue about is the benefit for American families of tax reform.

In 2013, Lawrence Summers, President Clinton's Treasury Secretary and

Chairman of President Obama's Economic Council, argued that the tax on corporate profit creates a burden without commensurate revenues for the government, and that changing it is as close to a free lunch for the American taxpayer as reformers will ever get. That was President Obama's Treasury Secretary.

Again, we can argue about what it looks like. What we can't argue about is what it is intended to do and what leading experts believe it will do. In 2015, Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Rob Portman cosponsored a Senate bill to reduce the top corporate tax rate, which is the highest of the 35 countries in the OECD today.

As Chuck Schumer says: ``Our international tax system creates incentives to send jobs and stash profits overseas, rather than creating jobs and economic growth here in the United States.'' We can fix that together, and we will fix that together.

Bill Clinton, in 2016, said he regretted raising the corporate tax rate to its current level for exactly those reasons.

Who is advantaged by trying to persuade the American people that something nefarious is going on here? Who is advantaged by that? I don't know about my friend's constituencies, Mr. Speaker, but my constituency wants to believe we are making things work together. My constituency wants to believe in rolling up our sleeves and sorting things out together. My constituency wants to believe that we are united in making a difference for them together.

We have this opportunity. If we pass this rule and we concur in the underlying Senate amendment, we will move forward on tax reform that will leave no American family behind.

The best government program we have in this country is the program that allows jobs to develop so folks can have one. The best program we have in this country, Mr. Speaker, is one that allows wages to rise so that folks can earn more. My constituency is not looking for anything from the other side of the aisle except cooperation on freeing up the marketplace so that my constituency can go to work, so that folks can go and make their own pathway and future forward. We can do it in ways we haven't done together since 1986, Mr. Speaker.

Who is advantaged by convincing folks that cooperation, consensus, making a different together is dead? I don't believe anyone. In fact, I would tell you that not just the debate but the body politic is damaged by those concerns, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I hope we will join together and refute those. I reserve the balance of my time.

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

I actually want to associate myself to my friend from Wisconsin's comments. I can't disagree with a word he said right up until it got to the end where he said to vote against the budget. Right up until there, we were on the same page.

There is so much that we could do together. My friend spoke out on behalf of small businesses and family farmers. As the Tax Code exists today, when you see my friends put up charts about tax benefits going to the top 1 percent, they are talking about those small business and family farmers. They are talking about that small business in my district that has plowed every single penny back into the business-- back into the business for new technology to make their employees more productive, back into the business to open up a new facility, back into the business to add more distribution, because they have got 350 families who depend on them to make that business successful so that those 350 families can put food on their table.

But when the Tax Code is analyzed, Mr. Speaker, when the IRS sends back the statistics, that small business in my district that sends every single penny back into the business, they look rich. They look like they are the wealthiest, and they are not. They are those small family farmers. They are those small family businesses that are trying to make a difference.

I want to say, because my friend from Wisconsin had a very significant concern about blowing holes in deficits, Mr. Speaker, as you know from your experience, one cannot pass tax reform that is permanent through reconciliation if it adds to deficits in the out years. That is what is so wonderful about this process, Mr. Speaker. I support what my friend from Wisconsin said about keeping an eye on deficits. I

support what my friend said about making sure Medicare and Social Security are growing, which they do when people go back to work and when folks earn more money.

I don't want to be in the business of lecturing my colleagues, Mr. Speaker. I want to be in the business of working with my colleagues. But folks have a choice when they show up to work every day. Are we going to make this a day about arguing with one another? Are we going to tear something down today? Are we going to build something up today? I stand for building something today, Mr. Speaker. Unabashedly, let's build something together today.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds to say I don't want to sneak anything past anybody. I want to claim full and total credit for what we are about to do together. I don't want anybody to be confused about whose fault it is. It is my fault.

When we get tax reform and get this economy growing again, blame me. When we can see wages rising in this country again, blame me. When we have an opportunity to go from worst to first in the international business community, blame me.

I don't want anybody to believe there is anybody hiding here, Mr. Speaker.

I share with my friend from Massachusetts that I do not have any speakers remaining, and I am prepared to close when he is. Truth needs no defense, I would say to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, sometimes I wish I could bring school groups down here onto the House floor just to help the next generation understand why we face some of the challenges that we face. We are down here today confronted with a tax bill that folks are certain is going to give away everything to everybody whom they don't want it to go to, and we are down here confronted with the fact that there is

no tax bill whatsoever to look at and it is going to get sprung on folks with absolutely no notice and no ability to read it.

Now, either one of those things could be true. It happens to be that neither of those things is true. But how in the world do folks listening to this debate think that we are advancing the cause of reform?

Deficits do matter, to my friend's point. They do matter, and the stranglehold that the Obama regulatory economy created here in America on economic growth reduced economic GDP growth by a full one-third--by a full one-third.

For every 0.1 percent of GDP growth, we talk about 200 billion additional dollars coming in to the Treasury over the 10-year window. So a full percentage point that we have lost is $2 trillion coming in to the Treasury.

Mr. Speaker, if we had Bush-era growth instead of Obama-era growth over these last 5 years, the budget would be balanced today. But we are where we are, and the question is: Can we do better tomorrow? We can.

Now, before I talk about that, Mr. Speaker, I want to recognize some of the folks who helped to get us here. My friend from Massachusetts and I come down here and carry the debate, but the work goes on behind every single one of these doors and in every single one of these committee rooms.

I serve on the Budget Committee, Mr. Speaker, and our staff director over there, Rick May, has done an amazing job shepherding this process, standing up for the House's work product.

Jenna Spealman, Andy Morton, Tim Flynn, Robert Cogan, Patrick Louis Knudsen, Jim Bates, Mary Popadiuk, Jonathan Romito, and Elise Anderson are all working day and night--and weekends, many times--to get this product to the floor.

Steve Gonzalez, Eric Davis, Robert Yeakel, Ellen Johnson, Emily Goff, Brad Watson, Brittany Madni, and Steve Waskiewicz are folks, Mr. Speaker, who don't come here because they have political passion; they come here because they have policy passion. They want to do those things that matter. They could go anywhere they want to in town and make more money, but they stay here working for the American people because they believe they can make a difference, and they are right.

Mr. Speaker, they are right. They can make a difference. We can make a difference. This rule--this rule--if we pass it today, Mr. Speaker, will allow us to concur in the Senate amendment. Concurring in the Senate amendment does not bind us to the Senate process, but it enables us to move a bill that direction that they can process.

We have seen the holdups in the Senate, Mr. Speaker. I am not happy about that. That is just the way Senate process is. We can do better. Reconciliation allows us to do better, and passing this rule enables us to do better.

Vote ``yes,'' Mr. Speaker. Vote ``yes'' on this rule, and vote ``yes'' on the underlying budget and open yourself up to doing together what has not been done together in 31 years. I don't just believe we can, I believe that we will. I am excited about it, I am proud of it, and I am ready to get to it, Mr. Speaker.

Vote ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I have the honor of serving on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and I rise today in support of the 21st Century Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization Act. We call it the AIRR Act in the committee.

H.R. 2997 is a unique opportunity in a bipartisan way to do something big together for the American people.

I know we hear that a lot in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, but so often it seems like it is just out of our reach. That is not the case today.

Under Chairman Shuster's leadership on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues and I have worked to craft the kind of bold, forward-thinking reform that America's 21st century aviation system needs. It is in reach today to make that the law of the land.

When we sit together to reauthorize the FAA, Mr. Speaker, it isn't just about attending to the Nation's business of ensuring safety of air travelers across the country. Of course, that is a priority, but it is an opportunity to implement the kind of innovative reforms that we have seen across the globe and that America needs to reestablish itself as the world's aviation leader.

We have an opportunity together to deal with a bloated bureaucracy, to reduce taxpayer costs, to improve efficiency all in an industry that is designed to prioritize customer's experience and customer service.

Mr. Speaker, Americans pioneered air travel, and we remain the safest aviation system on the planet. But our own outdated bureaucracy, our own outdated rules are standing in the way of American innovators and making air travel more time consuming, more costly, and safety innovations more difficult.

Mr. Speaker, with this legislation, we have a chance to empower our innovators, to better serve our travelers, and to preserve the world's finest commitment to safety, as we always have.

As is the case, Mr. Speaker, with any heavy lift, with any big task, there are always concerns in keeping America's system safe and the American people safe a highest among those concerns.

Mr. Speaker, what you need to know today is that with the support of General Mattis, with the support of the Department of Defense, the AIRR Act has focused on preserving the primacy of preserving national security in our aviation infrastructure.

Mr. Speaker, the bill has the support of those dedicated public servants at the Pentagon because it has been sensitive to these issues. It maintains the DOD's access and management of airspace. It doesn't allow user fees that are charged to passengers to be passed onto taxpayers through the DOD. It leaves intact the President's and the DOD's proper authorities to manage this space.

In addition, it provides unequivocal definitions about the importance of defense to the American people and balances the needs of general aviation with the needs of the Department of Defense. The oversight will always remain with the FAA, with the DOT, and with the United States Congress.

Mr. Speaker, after we preserve national security, we turn our attentions to the general aviation community. And if you have talked about this bill at all with any of your constituents back home, Mr. Speaker, you heard the concerns of the general aviation community about what it will mean to them to completely reform America's air traffic control system.

Mr. Speaker, we have to balance the role of government oversight and accountability with private innovation. Our bill is designed to empower those innovators but to preserve the protections that GA has today.

Mr. Speaker, I want to refer you to a graphic. You will find it at the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure's website. It is transport.house.gov. You can't see it from where you sit, but I have line by line by line the law that we are talking about, the bill that we are talking about, the reforms that we are talking about, and how it protects our friends at the general aviation community.

No fees. No new fees for our friends in general aviation, Mr. Speaker. If you have a doubt about that, look at section 9313, you will see ``charges and fees may not be imposed for air traffic services provided.''

Continuing airspace and airport access, Mr. Speaker, so important to American citizens involved in general aviation, again, I refer you to chapter 907: ``General rights of access to airspace, airports. . . . The Secretary shall take such actions as are necessary to ensure that an air traffic services user is not denied access to airspace or air traffic services. . . .''

The stakeholder board, Mr. Speaker, the cooperatizing of air traffic services that we have seen done so successfully in Canada where they say they are getting twice the safety and modernization input for half the cost, getting it done in a third of the time, having done away with their bloated bureaucracy, the stakeholder board, Mr. Speaker, is defined by general aviation nomination. Transport.house.gov, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 553 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all of my colleagues may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, it is going to be a great day. I don't know how your Wednesday has gotten started, but we are now in the throes of budget day.

Budget day only happens on the floor of this House once a year, and it is one of those times where I would tell you the House operates as every man, woman, and child across this country believes the House should operate every day.

I have the great honor as a member of the Rules Committee and as a member of the Budget Committee of bringing this structured rule to the floor today.

Mr. Speaker, H. Con. Res. 71, the rule that we will be debating for the next hour, makes in order every single budget substitute that was offered in the Rules Committee. Now, let me tell you what that means in practical terms.

Over the next 2 days, we are going to hear visions laid out for what the American government should spend, what American policies should look like, what the Federal budget should include.

Over the next 2 days, we are going to hear visions laid out from every single Member or group in this institution that cared enough about this process to craft a budget of their own.

Mr. Speaker, I serve in the Republican Study Committee. I was once chairman of the Budget and Spending Task Force on the Republican Study Committee. I had the honor of crafting a substitute budget to bring to the floor to offer for my colleagues' consideration.

Over the next 2 days, any Member who has a voice that needs to be heard

has had the opportunity. We put out the call last week. My friend from Massachusetts and I, we sit on the Rules Committee, Mr. Speaker. We send out the call to the membership in advance to say this is what we expect to happen in the Rules Committee, this is what we are going to be considering in the Rules Committee. We sent out the call for any Member of this House to craft their substitute amendment, and we received four.

We received one from the Congressional Black Caucus, we received one from the Progressive Caucus, we received one from the Republican Study Committee, and we received one from the Democrats on the Budget Committee. Every single one of those has been made in order by the rule that I will ask my colleagues to support today.

We are going to debate those. We are going to vote on those each individually, allowing everybody to have their say. That budget that this House ultimately agrees on collectively, collaboratively after these days of debate, we will then send to the United States Senate for its consideration.

Mr. Speaker, they say that budgets are a reflection of values. I believe that to be true. We are going to have budgets on the floor of the House to consider that cut taxes, budgets that believe that the economy has not grown to its full potential, budgets that believe that the American workforce participation rate is still at historically low levels. We have to get men and women back into the workforce. We have to reward that dignity of work. We have budgets that are going to cut taxes in an effort to stimulate that job growth across this land.

We have other budgets that are concerned that we are not bringing enough revenue into the government coffers. It is true, Mr. Speaker. I know you are thinking it. We are bringing in more tax revenue today than we have ever brought in in the history of the United States of America. That is true, but we are still running budget deficits. So we will consider those budgets today that don't necessarily believe that spending is the problem; they think it is tax collection that is the problem.

We will consider budgets that raise taxes by about $2 trillion. We will consider other budgets that raise taxes by about $4 trillion. Mr. Speaker, I think we will even consider budgets that raise taxes by $9 trillion.

Mr. Speaker, there are only two things that can happen in this institution. We either have to raise more revenue, or we have to cut spending, or we have to mortgage our children's future. Three things: raise taxes, cut spending, mortgage our children's future.

Over the next 2 days, we are going to have that debate and we are going to have that discussion.

I know where my constituency lands, Mr. Speaker. There are tough decisions that have to be made, and they believe they sent men and women to Congress to help make those tough decisions. We sit on the Budget Committee. That is what we do.

If you have not gotten a chance to work with her this season, Mr. Speaker, Chairwoman Diane Black on the House Budget Committee, if there is a more patient and more persistent Member of this body, I don't know who that would be. She has worked tirelessly to move this process along, to get us to this point where we are today, trying to bring people together around a unified vision of what we can do and what we should do not just as an institution, but as a nation.

I expect we will have some disagreements over the next 2 days, Mr. Speaker. It won't surprise me at all. In fact, I think this institution is characterized by the things that we disagree about. Certainly that is what the media would like to focus on. But at the end of this process, what will have to be said is that we have considered every idea, that we have considered every point of view, that we have made room for every voice, and that we have now come together on a common pathway forward. That is what is ahead of us, Mr. Speaker, if we support this rule that we are debating now.

Again, I urge my colleagues to support this rule. I hope you will find that budget that meets your constituency's needs, support that underlying budget, and then let's move a budget to the United States Senate and speak with one voice for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, you heard the passion of my friend from Massachusetts, and I have had an opportunity to work with him on the Rules Committee for 7 years now. I can tell you that every bit of that passion is sincere.

So often I think folks turn on C-SPAN, they look at a group of politicians talking, and they think it is all for the cameras and it is all for show. I will tell you that while I sometimes have that same suspicion when I turn on a program of folks I don't know, with folks I do know, I can tell you that that passion is sincere.

What I can also tell you is that many of those concerns are misguided, and I think that is important. What happens here in this institution matters. Our ability to have that debate with one another matters. The truth is, as you know, Mr. Speaker, most of that debate doesn't happen here on the House floor.

My friend from Massachusetts and I are here today because it is time to vote. We are here to bring the rule, we are here to bring the substitutes, we are here over the next 2 days to vote. The conversation has gone on not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, but for the better part of this year on what the budget is going to look like.

I happen to have a copy of the budget report right here, Mr. Speaker. It captures all the votes we have taken. It

captures all the debates we have had. It captures what the intent of the institution is.

Now again, we are going to have a choice of which budget we want to support. If you think taxes are too low, you can vote to raise taxes. If you think taxes are much too low, you can vote to raise taxes a whole lot. If you think the tax code as it exists today is a ridiculous compilation of confusing provisions stitched together by a patchwork of Congresses over the last 40 years, you can vote for fundamental reform.

If you are tired of the fact that America used to be number one in the world in terms of tax competitiveness and now we are at the bottom of the list and you want to take America back to being number one, you can vote for that, too. I happen to put myself in that category.

I want to read, if I may, Mr. Speaker, from the budget report. The fact is, I can't. I imagined myself a younger man when I grabbed that report.

If I can now read from the budget report. ``The resolution's reconciliation instructions,'' that is what is in the budget, Mr. Speaker. That is what allows us to take a tax package from the House to the Senate. You have heard about how the Senate is having a tough time getting anything done because it requires a supermajority. It requires 60 votes. Through reconciliation, you can get things done with less than 60 votes. That is how the Affordable Care Act was passed, with less than 60 votes. You can get the tax bill passed with less than 60 votes.

It says this. ``The resolution's reconciliation instructions that the Committee on Ways and Means will develop will be a deficit-neutral tax reform legislation and report such legislative language to the Committee on the Budget.'' Deficit neutral. Nobody wants to blow a hole in the budget, Mr. Speaker.

What the discussion is, is can we do better than today's tax code? Candidly, Mr. Speaker, if any Member of this body wants to take the position that we can't do any better, the IRS is as good as it can be in implementing the American Tax Code today, the Tax Code that is twice as long as the Bible is absolutely as concise and succinct as it can possibly be, those Americans who spend dozens of hours, even dozens of days, even dozens of weeks trying to put together their taxes, that is just the best we can do.

Mr. Speaker, I have seen it happen. Sometimes folks throw their hands up and think: We can't do any better. Not me. Not today.

We can all agree that we can do better than what we are doing today. Passage of this budget gives us that opportunity.

You heard my friend from Massachusetts speak from the heart, Mr. Speaker, about the ability we have as a government to care for one another. I would tell you that responsibility isn't uniquely a government responsibility. I would say it is a faith responsibility, it is a family responsibility, it is a community responsibility. It is a responsibility that begins at home. It doesn't begin here, it begins at home, but it is a sincere responsibility, and it is one that we want to do better at every day.

I am sure you are aware, Mr. Speaker, the labor force participation rate in America is the lowest it has been since the President from my great State of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, was in office. The labor force participation rate. There is not one of us in this body who can drive down the street without seeing a ``help wanted'' sign. There is not one of us in this body who can go out to a business without seeing someone asking folks to come in and help, yet fewer Americans are working today than ever before. Why? It is a hard question.

Fewer Americans are working today than since the 1970s. Why? It is important that we ask that question.

The budget is not designed to answer it. The budget can't answer it. I sit on the Budget Committee. I don't have the jurisdiction to answer it, but I know this: you will find in this budget a discussion of whether it is better to support people in poverty or lift folks out of poverty.

It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. I would tell you that we can support people until we can lift them up, but that lifting them up must be our goal. Supporting them is not enough.

You will find it here, Mr. Speaker, in these pages. This is a vision document. This is what we are gathered together to do today, and we will have legitimate disagreements about when we are doing enough in a particular area and when we are doing too much.

There are those in this body, Mr. Speaker, who believe passionately in education. I am one of those people. I come from a district with amazing school systems.

You can go to any public school in my district, Mr. Speaker, if you work hard and apply yourself. I don't care what your background is, I don't care where your family is from, I don't care what you have stacked against you; if you work hard and apply yourself in our public schools, you can be anything you want to be.

I know everybody wants that for their constituency back home; and I have colleagues who believe that only Washington, D.C., is successful enough, has a track record of success strong enough to implement that vision back home.

I don't come from that camp. I see a lot of failure come out of Washington, D.C. I see a lot of bureaucracy come out of Washington, D.C. I see success come out of parents and teachers and principals back home raising taxes, supporting those institutions, making sure every child has a chance. We do that together as a community.

The discussion that we might have in this institution, Mr. Speaker, is not: Do you believe in education?

It is: Do you believe educators in Washington, D.C., have the best answers, or educators back home in your district have the answers?

The truth is that we don't have many educators in Washington, D.C. We have bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who oversee educators. I side with my educators back home. It is a legitimate disagreement that we are welcome to have.

What can't be said, though, Mr. Speaker, is that there are any disagreements over these next few days that we are not going to be allowed to have. I have said it before, and I will say it again because it makes me so proud. We don't always have time or make room for all the voices in this institution, Mr. Speaker. You know, sometimes we pick and choose winners and losers, whose voice is going to be heard. Not today. Any Member of Congress could submit their budget to the United States House of Representatives Committee on Rules.

It is a hard thing to produce a budget. I told you I have done it before, Mr. Speaker. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of commitment. But if you believe that you have a better idea, you can do it. And if you did it, we made it in order in the Rules Committee last night and we are going to debate it on the floor and we are going to vote on it on the floor.

We can't always say that every single idea, every single substitute is going to make it to the floor for a vote. We can say that today. I am proud that we can.

It is not going to stop the disagreements, Mr. Speaker, but what it is going to do is air those disagreements; what it is going to do is allow us to talk about our differing visions; and what it is going to do is allow us to come together on a common vision at the end of the day.

I hope my colleagues will support this rule so we can begin that process, and I hope my colleagues will support the underlying budget of their choice.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

If you have not tuned in to this debate until just these past few minutes, you might not know that this is the budget debate today. We have been prepping for the budget debate today for about 10 months now, and we are ready today not just with one budget, but with a variety of budget choices. And what is wonderful about this process is it has been such an open process.

You can come down to the House floor and air absolutely any idea that is on your mind. That has not just been true today, Mr. Speaker, but that has been true throughout this entire budget process. In fact, I have a letter signed by literally hundreds of groups that support not just voting on the rule to bring the budget to the floor, but groups that support passing the budget as we passed it out of the House Budget Committee.

Now, if my colleagues have any concerns about that, I hope they will come and knock on my door, Mr. Speaker, because I promise you that one of these groups is going to be from their part of the country.

Certainly, in Georgia, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce is on that list. So our folks back home are supportive. If you are from Alabama, I have got Alabamans on here. If you are from Baton Rouge, I have got Baton Rouge. If you are from Battle Creek, I have Battle Creek, because what we are working on here isn't a Republican budget, Mr. Speaker.

What we are working on isn't a regional budget. What we are working on here is the national budget for the United States of America that can be transformational for absolutely every citizen in absolutely every corner of this country.

We have that opportunity. I think we are going to seize that opportunity, but we can't do it until we move this rule to get to the underlying bills. I encourage my colleagues to do that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would say to my friend from Massachusetts that I have no further speakers remaining. I would be happy to close when the gentleman is prepared.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, what I love most about budget day is the fact that we do get to talk about our competing ideas. I do reject some of the implications that we have heard that what we are talking about is whether we love people or not. That is actually not the debate today.

I want to stipulate that I know the men and women of this Chamber on a personal basis, and each and every one of them that I know personally loves and cares for their constituency back home. The debate that we have is not whether we love people; it is how to love people best.

Do you love people best by giving them a check or giving them a job? That is a legitimate debate.

Do you love people best by leaving their children with them or taking their children away from them? That is a legitimate debate.

I believe in families. I believe in the dignity of work. I want to have those debates.

I think we do ourselves a disservice when we describe what is going on here today on the floor of the House as anything other than our absolute legal and governmental responsibility to pass a budget for the United States of America. Wherever you sit on the continuum, the political continuum, the economic continuum, the regional continuum, there is a budget for you today.

If what you believe, Mr. Speaker, is that the problems we have in this country are because taxes are not high enough, there is going to be a Democratic substitute coming out of the Budget Committee that will raise taxes about $2.4 trillion. If you think taxes are too low, we can raise them $2.4 trillion. That budget never balances. That budget never stops borrowing from our children and our grandchildren. That budget never stops mortgaging America's future. But it is a legitimate debate because folks are taking those funds and they are investing them in America. They are prioritizing that investment over balancing.

If you believe $2.4 trillion is not enough, Mr. Speaker, we will have a budget from the Congressional Black Caucus today that will raise taxes by $4.2 trillion. We can raise taxes by $4.2 trillion. Again, that budget never balances. It spends all that money and more, but it is a legitimate debate about where those dollars come from and where those dollars are going. I am glad we are going to be able to have it.

If raising taxes by $4.2 trillion isn't enough for you, Mr. Speaker, we have the Congressional Progressive Caucus' budget on the floor. It raises taxes by just over $10 trillion. Again, the budget never balances. It spends all of that money and more and continues to borrow from our children and grandchildren, but it is a legitimate debate and it is a conversation worth having. I am proud that the Rules Committee made that debate in order.

To describe what is happening on the floor of the House today, Mr. Speaker, as anything other than what is exactly expected of this institution is to do us all a disservice.

I talked about making taxes higher. Let me talk a second about making taxes lower.

I talked to some friends back home; I talk to constituents; I talk to folks for whom I work, and some of them might say: ``Rob, I have enough to feed my family, and if it means paying down the debt and deficit, I am willing to pay a little bit more.'' Other members in the community, Mr. Speaker, say: ``For Pete's sake, I am trying to grow a business here, Rob. I am trying to employ your friends and neighbors. I am trying to keep the community working. I am plowing everything I have back into the business. If I don't have to pay as much in taxes, I am going to be able to hire more people.''

The Republican budget, Mr. Speaker, takes a shot at once-in-a- generation tax reform--once in a generation. This isn't what we talked about last year or the year before that or the year before that. This is a conversation we have not had since Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill had it in 1986. This is a conversation that we have not had since America slipped from number one in the world to almost last in the industrialized world in terms of tax competitiveness. This is a conversation that America has longed for and that we can deliver today.

Mr. Speaker, let's have these debates about what our priorities are. Let's have these debates about whether or not we can do better. At the end of the day, let's agree that we, in fact, can do better, that our bosses back home expect us to do better, and that by supporting this rule and supporting one of the underlying budgets, we, in fact, will do better.

I encourage my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, support this rule, begin this debate. Let's pass this budget. Let's fulfill our promises. Let's make the difference that we all came here to make.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate my friend from California for yielding to me. As you know, Mr. Chairman, he is not just down here as the ranking member on the House Budget Committee. He is also the leader of the Republican Study Committee's Budget and Spending Task Force. The leadership he has provided in all those areas means a lot to the entire institution. I am grateful to him for it.

I also want to say I am grateful to my friends in the Progressive Caucus. I disagree with their budget, and I plan to vote against it.

Mr. Chairman, how often do we come down here and folks want to complain about what is not going right, but they don't want to do anything about it?

To my friends' credit in the Progressive Caucus, they laid out a vision, and that is exactly what I came here to Congress to be a part of. Let's lay out our visions. Let's have some votes. Let's count those votes and see where we go from there.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, absolutely any group could offer a budget today, yet we only have four alternatives being considered. That tells

you something about how hard it is to put your ideas forward. So I want to thank my friends on the Progressive Caucus for doing that.

I want to run through a couple of things that their budget includes, Mr. Chairman. It includes a 4 percent pay increase for Federal workers across the board. It includes $500 billion in green energy incentives. It imposes a carbon tax to deal with greenhouse gases. It cuts $70 billion from the Defense Department and, in fact, eliminates altogether the spending on the global war on terror.

Mr. Chairman, these are all legitimate policy disagreements.

Their budget also increases revenues, taxes, by $10 trillion, but spends so much more on American priorities that we continue to end up with almost a $1 trillion annual deficit in year 10.

Mr. Chairman, this is the kind of debate that we have to have. I want to understand the priorities of my friends. I want to understand where they want to see more investments. And then I want to understand how it is we are going to balance this budget together. Because what is lacking in this plan, Mr. Chairman, what frustrates me the most about the Progressive Caucus plan is not the investment in green energy, it is not the investment in the Federal workforce, it is not the investment in healthcare; it is the fact that they don't believe we can do these things while raising taxes by $10 trillion on the American people and balance the budget at all.

Mr. Chairman, if folks want to raise taxes in this institution--I think our problem is a spending problem. I don't think it is a taxing problem, but I am willing to have that discussion with them to understand their point of view.

But the reason I will ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this budget is not because it raises taxes $10 trillion; it is because it raises taxes $10 trillion, yet continues to borrow from our children and our grandchildren in the form of annual debt and deficits.

I think we can do better. But we cannot do better without an honest discussion of the issues, Mr. Chairman. Say what you want to about the budgets you are going to see on the floor here, these alternatives that we are going to discuss.

There are a lot of talking heads on TV who just want to talk about it and don't want to do anything about it. If you are looking for a ray of hope today, look at the Progressive Caucus, which I disagree with about almost everything as it comes to how to peg the numbers, but they put their vision forward tonight. They said: Let's take a stand tonight.

If we can work together across that aisle, Mr. Chairman, there is absolutely nothing that we cannot do on behalf of the American people.

Vote ``no'' on this budget, but applaud the effort that has gone into it such that we can try to find common ground going forward.

If we have but one thing to agree on in this institution, let it be to agree to pay for those things that we think are important. Whether it is wars or whether it is green energy, whether it is troops or whether it is Federal employees, let us agree that we should pay for those things today with our dollars, and the borrowing from our children and grandchildren should be ended forever.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 504 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, it is going to be a good day. It is going to be a good day.

I don't know if you came down to Washington as a young man. I remember sitting right up there on the second row of the gallery, and I came into the Chamber and I was so excited. It was my first visit to see the people's House.

The Reading Clerk was standing there at that podium and read and read. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, and here nobody hands you a pamphlet or anything to tell you what is happening on the floor of the House. I thought the activity was going to happen down here, and it was all going on up there at the podium.

That has been 40 years ago now. I now see that however long that conversation happens, it lays the groundwork for what is going to be an even greater conversation here on the floor of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I am fond of saying that if you come to this institution on the right day, you are going to see a festival of democracy take place right here. Today is going to be one of those days.

If you were on the House floor yesterday, you saw us take up the first of these divisions in this appropriations bill. Today, because of the work that my friend from New York and I did with the rest of the members of the Rules Committee right up there last night, we are bringing to the floor the remaining four divisions of H.R. 3354; 224 additional amendments. 224 additional amendments. Division A is the Interior section; division C is the Commerce, Justice, Science section; division D is the Financial Services section; division F is the Labor, HHS, and Education section.

When I was on the floor yesterday, Mr. Speaker, I talked about how proud I was of the work that we have all done here together. This annual appropriations process has been conducted in a more comprehensive fashion this year than in any other year in my memory.

When we get jammed, you end up with one of those long-term, yearlong continuing resolutions that shut out every Member's voice. In a good year, maybe, you end up with one of those giant leadership-negotiated White House and the leader of the House and the Senate omnibus appropriations bills that shut out all but two or three voices.

This year, the Appropriations Committee, beginning its work way back in April, has worked through every single appropriations bill one by one at the committee level, and we are seeing the culmination of that effort here on the floor today.

Mr. Speaker, it has been since 2010 that the House has finished its work before the September 30 fiscal year deadline. It was the 2009 calendar year. They were doing the work for the 2010 fiscal year. It is hard to get this done, and it doesn't happen because Democrats are successful or Republicans are

successful. It happens because the collaboration that we have together is successful, and we are seeing the result of that today.

If we pass the underlying rule, we will make in order those 224 amendments, we will begin that process of debating the last four divisions, and we will have the voices of this House heard.

We went until midnight last night, Mr. Speaker. We went until midnight the night before that. I suspect midnight is going to seem early to us where we are headed over the next couple of days. But at the end of that process, Republicans, Democrats, folks from all regions of the country, are going to be able to look each other in the eye and know that--in a way that makes folks back home proud--we worked through each and every appropriations bill and we got our work done on time.

That is why I ran for Congress, Mr. Speaker, to deliver results back home, and that is why I am proud to be standing with my friend from New York today delivering on those promises.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

My friend is absolutely right, there is a lot of work to get done. That is why we both ran for Congress, to get that work done. I am incredibly optimistic that we will get that work done.

I wish from time to time we would celebrate our successes as fiercely as we observe our failures. My friend is absolutely right, there was a time in congressional history where appropriations bills came to the floor and any Member could offer any amendment they wanted at any time, and the process could go on for days or weeks or months.

To my friend's point, we can reminisce about those days and celebrate them, but we can't do it at the same time we observe the very limited deadlines that we have now trying to get work done.

It was back on August 24 that the Rules Committee created a deadline and said: We want to have every Member have their voice heard. We want to hear from every single Member on every single appropriations bill to understand what it is you would do differently to have the bills serve America better.

We created that deadline, Mr. Speaker, for exactly the reason my friend from New York suggested, and that is so folks would have the time to look at those amendments, to digest those amendments, to be thoughtful about those amendments.

Now, it turns out even in a body of 435 Members, you can have some repetitive ideas. It turns out a lot of us think a single amendment is a good idea. The Rules Committee looked at amendments and found multiple Members had exactly the same idea. In order to speed the process along, we let one of those Members offer the amendment; we asked the other Members not to.

That is not closing down the process. That is a good use of the American people's time, because we have so much that we must get done together.

Mr. Speaker, for folks who care about openness--and I am one of those Members--I just want to remind you that it is not just the 1,000-plus amendments we looked at in the Rules Committee. It is thousands upon thousands that were worked through the Appropriations Subcommittee process, and then the Appropriations full committee process.

The appropriations process is one of the best opportunities for any Member

in this Chamber to make their priorities known, act on those priorities, change the law of the land for the men and women they serve back home. Every single Member of this Chamber knows of that process, avails themselves of that process, and if we pass this rule, we will make several hundred more amendments in order and complete this process for the first time since 2009.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), one of our leaders from the great State of California.

I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that admonition. As my friends all know, the truth is, the vote in the Senate was a bipartisan vote against the consideration of that bill.

We are going to find a bipartisan solution to this difficult problem and continuing to characterize this as a partisan issue does nothing but harm to our shared cause.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Alabama (Mrs. Roby), one of the great leaders of the big freshman class in 2010.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to associate myself with the comments of my friend from California. She is absolutely right. When Republicans took control of this Chamber, they committed themselves to having a more open process. I was a part of that freshman class that came in to give Republicans a majority, and we have made good on that process. I want to talk about that just for a little bit.

My friend from California serves on the Appropriations Committee, and I thank her for her service, Mr. Speaker. When you want to talk about an open process, that Appropriations Committee went through every single bill one subcommittee at a time, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, indeed, month after month. I am grateful to her for that service. The bill would not be as good as it is but for the men and women who serve on the Appropriations Committee.

But I mentioned earlier, Mr. Speaker, that one of the reasons I was proud to be carrying the rule today is that we haven't gotten the appropriations process completed on time since Democratic leadership was able to achieve that back in 2009. They couldn't do it in their last year in power, 2010. In fact, they didn't do the appropriations bills at all. They punted it off to the next Republican Congress. But in 2009 they did.

When I talk about that commitment to openness, let's remember, last time we had this shared success together and my friends on the other side of the aisle were leading, they allowed 17 amendments to the Financial Services bill. We are allowing twice that many today.

When my friends were leading this institution the last time we completed this process, they allowed 13 amendments to the Interior bill. We are allowing six times that many.

When my friends on the other side of the aisle were leading this institution, the last time we successfully completed this process, they allowed five amendments to the Labor-HHS. We are allowing 10 times that many.

When my friends on the other side of the aisle were leading this institution, the last time we successfully completed this process on time, they allowed zero amendments to the Commerce-Justice-Science bill. We allow 49--infinitely more.

My friends, can we always do better together? We can. I am grateful to my friends for the hard work they put in showing up day after day to do that better. But this bill is better, and if we pass this rule, we will move to the debate on this bill, and we will complete this process on time in the most open fashion that any of my colleagues have seen in decades.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

We have a long and proud history in this House, but it is sometimes tough to remember exactly how that history goes, Mr. Speaker.

My friend from New York has her picture up on the wall in the Rules Committee room. If you haven't been up there, Mr. Speaker, you should go see it.

My friend from New York is the first woman to have ever led the United States House of Representatives Rules Committee. She led it ably and proudly for the 4 years that the Democrats were in the majority the last decade.

It is a hard job because, as the chairman of the Rules Committee or the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, you have to make decisions. When the bills come to you from the committees of jurisdiction--the authorizing committees--you often have to completely reorganize those bills. You have to meld those bills together. It is a powerful committee because it has a solemn responsibility.

Yes, in the area of Rules Committee jurisdiction and the melding of all of those pieces of legislation is what amendments get added and what amendments get taken away.

My friend from California (Ms. Lee), has an absolutely legitimate gripe, as does my friend from Virginia (Mr. Scott). Mr. Speaker, we all think our amendments are the greatest amendments to be known.

Mr. Scott led, to his credit, with saying: I am glad so many of my amendments were made in order, but I am appalled my one amendment was kept out.

We all want all of our amendments in. But to my friend from New York's comment that Democrats don't get a fair shake, I will remind you, Mr. Speaker, when my friend was leading the committee, the entire House of Representatives was offered 139 chances to change the appropriations bill in 2009, the last time we completed it.

With Paul Ryan leading the institution, with my friend from Texas, Pete Sessions, leading the Rules Committee, we made 214 Democratic amendments in order. We have made more minority amendments in order in this process than my friends on the other side made in order for the entire House.

Mr. Speaker, we have nothing to fear from openness. We have nothing to fear from a robust debate. I am so glad that we have had a chance to do that. But history should be reported accurately. The accuracy is: we can always do better. But we are doing better today than we were just a few short years ago.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Will the gentlewoman yield?

I will say to my friend that I have no better days than the days that you and I are working together. I absolutely look forward to that.

Mr. Speaker, I would say to my friend from New York that I do not have other speakers remaining, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I don't dispute the polling numbers my friend from New York cites. In fact, I am as saddened by those numbers, as she is. But I also feel culpable; not culpable because of the work we are doing today--I think we should be proud--I feel culpable because we all find ourselves in conversations with one another where, instead of building the institution up, we run the institution down.

What my friend from New York said about Ms. Lee's amendment being changed in the Rules Committee, she is absolutely right, the amendment was changed. But, Mr. Speaker, let's be clear: it wasn't changed in some backroom deal with smoke-filled air where no one knows what is happening and can't read the bill. It was noticed. There was an entire paragraph dedicated to saying: Hey, this is unusual. This doesn't happen that often. We want all the cards on the table so everybody knows. Just understand we made this change this time around.

Mr. Speaker, getting the work done in this institution is hard. It leads to conflicting goals. You heard folks from the other side of the aisle say: We are not spending nearly enough time on this bill. We need to make even more amendments in order. And you heard folks on other side of the aisle say: This whole bill is an exercise in futility. I don't know why we are wasting even one moment on it.

It is tough to satisfy both of those concerns simultaneously.

We have got this rule book called the United State Constitution. It doesn't ask a whole lot of the United States Congress. It does ask us to appropriate the money. Under the leadership of both parties, Mr. Speaker, this House has failed to get that done on time year after year.

This year, the bipartisan Appropriations Committee in subcommittee, in full committee, worked tirelessly, as I said, not for days, not for weeks, but for months. One bill at a time. In fact, one line at a time.

That product was brought together by the Rules Committee last month, August 16, Mr. Speaker. That amalgamation of bills was posted on the internet for all the world to see and read. Every Member of this Congress had a chance to bring their ideas about how to make it better.

The Rules Committee got together, looked at those ideas, made more of those ideas in order for debate than we have seen in decades for bills that get completed on time.

I yield to the gentlewoman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, I am always compelled to yield to my friend from New York because I am so fond of her and because her leadership has meant so much to this institution.

My friend has served on the Rules Committee for even longer than I have, and so my friend understands how the Rules Committee works even better than I do.

I don't want to engage my friend in a colloquy, at least not in my closing statement. We should have this conversation on day 1. Please, my friend from New York, give us one more word.

Mr. Speaker, I welcome my friend's constructive counsel, but I know for a fact that her calendar looks just like mine does, and that means that we are going in in the early afternoon and we are not getting out till late at night.

Why? Because you and I are sitting just three Members apart listening to Member after Member make their case, and in the spirit of accuracy, don't let it be said that our Members coming and testifying doesn't make a difference because it does. You and I both believe that. We know it to be true, and it is important that it be true.

Those Members come and they testify, they make their case, and then we vote up or down on those amendments.

Mr. Speaker, can we do better? We can. And I will work with absolutely any colleague of any political stripe of any region to do better at any time, but let's do recognize that we made a commitment to ourselves to get this job done for the first time in a decade.

By coming to the floor right now, Mr. Speaker, quarter of 2 on a Thursday afternoon passing this rule, we are going to get this job done together for the first time in a long time.

Will we wake up tomorrow and try to do better? You know that we will. Should we take a moment to thank the folks who helped us get here? You know that we should.

Mr. Speaker, you are surrounded left and right by Members of the House team. The parliamentarians worked tirelessly to approve the amendments, to make sure they are all written and drafted properly. I want to thank the parliamentarian team for the work that they do.

Mr. Speaker, we kick CBO a lot in this place because we don't like their score one day, we like it the next. CBO has to go through these amendments, score these amendments. I am grateful to them for the work they did to make this possible.

Legislative counsel goes through, with each Member of Congress, making sure that every ``i'' is in the right place, every ``t'' is crossed. It is not a small task. It is a gargantuan task, and they do it on these big bills day in and day out. I am grateful for that.

You are starting to see some of the appropriators come down, Mr. Speaker. Long after my friend from New York and I have left this Chamber, the appropriations team is going to be here until the wee hours of the morning once again going through each and every line and each and every amendment.

I think about what my friend from Louisiana said about the school children who are turning on C-SPAN and watching this process. I don't know what they think goes into making this happen, but what I know goes into making this happen is a lot of hard work, staff work, Member work, a lot of big hearts, and a lot of big brains sitting down together hashing through these issues.

This rule is worth supporting. The underlying legislation is worth supporting, Mr. Speaker, and I ask all of my colleagues to do exactly that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Will the gentleman yield?

I appreciate the gentleman yielding.

I was not here for opening statements. I imagine that all time was yielded for the purpose of debate only.

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

Mr. Speaker, I don't think my colleague is confused about where he is on this issue, and I don't think any amount of talking on the floor is going to change his mind on this issue. I would say that the underlying bill, which makes in order over 140 amendments so that we can have a conversation about different ideas and different outcomes and lets the people's voice be heard, is the right way to craft legislation. With the support of this body and this bill, we will move on to that underlying debate, and we will have that voice heard.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to thank you for that admonition.

Mr. Speaker, these are very serious issues that my friends on the other side were trying to have a debate on the appropriations bills. My friends have a very legitimate concern about an immigration issue, characterized with terms like ``cruel'' and ``nasty'' and ``rotten'' and ``no courage.''

I would say to my friends we can try to belittle each other into a compromise. I have not seen that work before. We can try to insult each other into a solution. I have not seen that work before.

I have seen my colleagues coming down the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, one after the other to tell a compelling story about a man or a woman they know who they believe would make an amazing United States citizen, who they believe would add value to our communities, and who they believe is serving admirably in our church and is working admirably in our community. They have a story to tell, and they should tell it.

Guess what? I have got a few of those stories to tell myself. But I would say to my friends, I don't believe, Mr. Speaker, that the insults and the acrimony are going to get us where any of us wants to be.

For my friends who believe differently, I would tell you I think we have tried that path before, and it didn't take us where we want to go.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would say to my friend from Massachusetts I am prepared to close when he is. I have no further speakers remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I fear you are going to have to use that admonition a great deal in the coming days, and I regret that.

I regret that folks have begun to confuse civility with weakness. My experience is, when you are strong, you don't have to insult the people around you. When you are strong, you don't have to call folks around you names. Civility and weakness are confused. In fact, more often than not, there is a loss of civility when folks feel at their weakest.

My friends on the other side of the aisle right now, Mr. Speaker, with good reason, feel very restricted. Being in the minority in the House of Representatives is a hard place to be. For my friend from Massachusetts, Mr. Speaker, being in the minority on the Rules Committee is among one of the hardest places to be. So I don't fault him for his frustration one little bit. If I was in his shoes, I would be frustrated as well.

Let me be clear: we are in this position with DACA today for one reason and one reason only, and that is because instead of leading the Congress and leading the Nation, President Obama chose to act alone in a way that he knew would not be permanent.

The instability that you see today is the result of folks acting in a way that was not stable. The confusion that you see today is the result of an administration that committed itself to that confusion instead of committing itself to consensus.

I have been in this Congress for 7 years, Mr. Speaker. That is 7 years. For 4 of those 7 years, the United States Senate was led by the Democratic Party. Not once in those 7 years has an immigration bill come to my desk from the United States. Not once. I know, as we sit here right now, the House Judiciary Committee has acted on immigration bill after immigration bill after immigration bill.

Let's be clear, Mr. Speaker: the situation that the DREAMers find themselves in today is the symptom of a Nation that does not have the security of its borders. Had America had security for its borders, we would not have allowed these families to put their children in these positions.

Today, we have an amazing opportunity to have this debate. I tell you that our President is in a unique position to lead us.

It frustrates me so much, Mr. Speaker, that folks want to assume the worst about one another and that the media is all too anxious to report the worst about one another. The President could have just canceled the DACA program. He could have instructed DHS to start proceedings today. He didn't. It wouldn't have been the right thing. It wouldn't have been the prudent thing to do. He didn't do it.

What did he do?

He said: I have read this thing called the United States Constitution. It turns out that only one group in the land has the opportunity to write the laws. It is me and my friend from Massachusetts. It is the majority leader from Kentucky and the minority leader from New York across the way.

He said: Congress, there is only one way this should have even been done. It should have been done in the Halls of Congress. That is not the way President Obama chose to do it. He should have done better. He didn't. We can do better. Let's do.

Now, to the sky-is-falling reports that came out one right after the other almost with glee from the fourth estate, the President spoke again to say: Listen, you know what? If Congress doesn't get it right, I may have to act myself.

I hope he doesn't. I think that folks have too little confidence in what we can do together when we set our minds to it, but we do have to ask ourselves, watching the display here on the floor today, watching the displays we have had here on the floor in the past: Do we have a serious group of men and women here who want to work together on solutions? Or do we have a group of men and women here who want to just get the next headline, who want to just send out that next tweet, who just want to just make that next front page story of hysteria?

I believe the former is true. I know the men and women on this floor, Mr. Speaker, not the caricature of the men and women that you read in the newspaper, but the real men and women on this floor, who each come here every single day to diligently serve the almost 700,000 men and women that they report to back home. And I am proud to do it.

I plea, Mr. Speaker, for you to use your leadership to not allow us to devolve into the name calling and the acrimony that the fourth estate would like to suggest characterizes this Chamber, but to lead us to the sincere debate of caring about people, caring about the rule of law, caring about families.

Let me just say, the best part of this job is the casework that each one of us does back home. You all know it. People think the job happens in Washington, D.C. It doesn't. It happens one family at a time back home.

You have heard the comments on the floor of the House today, Mr. Speaker. I have families in my district separated from one another. You want to talk about uniting families? I have families separated from one another standing in line to come to this country legally.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker: How many folks have you heard standing up for my constituents whose families have been separated because they have been standing in line to get here for more than a year? How many folks have stood up for them? Not one.

What about those families standing in line 2 years, Mr. Speaker? I have got them in my district, too.

What about those families who have been separated for 3 years and standing in line trying to get to America the right way? Who is standing up for them? I don't hear those calls on the floor of the House. I have got them in my district, too.

What about 4 years, Mr. Speaker; 5 years, Mr. Speaker; 6 years, Mr. Speaker? If you wanted to bring your adult child in from Mexico, you had to file in the 1990s for their number to be coming up today. That is crazy. It is crazy.

Where is the conversation about reforming the system that got us here to begin with? I applaud my friend for trying to solve the symptom. I beg my friend to work with me to cure the disease.

We have a President who can lead us in that direction, Mr. Speaker. He has the credibility of being tough on borders and he has the heart of someone who wants to keep families united. We have an opportunity, Mr. Speaker. We can take it or we can reject it. I believe we are going to take it.

But that is not for the business today. The business today is an appropriations process. My friend from Massachusetts called it unprecedented. He is right. I take no small amount of pleasure in talking about how right he is. I have been in this body for 7 years and we don't generally get the appropriations bills done before the end of the year, Mr. Speaker. Deadlines don't tend to mean anything to us. We are about to make that happen.

Mr. Speaker, 1997 was the last time Congress funded the government ahead of schedule, before the deadline. It has taken a continuing resolution every other year since 1997. We have an opportunity this year to do it. I don't know if we will take it or not. I hope that we will.

We can't solve everything every day, but we can solve something every day. We can make something better for someone every day.

If you support this rule, we will bring to the floor four appropriations bills and 119 amendments, give or take. We are up in the Rules Committee right now making even more amendments in order, Mr. Speaker, to have even more voices be heard, to have even more opportunity to make a difference for the families that we all represent back home.

Support this rule. Be proud of this rule. Be proud of the work the Appropriations Committee did. Mr. Speaker, you don't hear it on the floor of the House, but it so frustrates me. If you had been in the Rules Committee last night, you would have seen Democrats and Republicans sitting side by side talking about the amazing work they did together on the appropriations

process in the Appropriations Committee, talking about the great admiration and respect that they had for one another because of the work they do together on the Appropriations Committee.

We don't hear that here on the floor of the House, and we should. We should hear more of that. We should hear more about the good work we are doing together. If we support this rule, Mr. Speaker, we will get a chance not to hear about it, but to experience it, to do it.

I know my colleague from Massachusetts and I have another 6, 7, 8 hours of Rules Committee work to do together tonight. I know my colleague is going to challenge us to do even better than what we are doing. I am prepared to accept that challenge.

But for today, Mr. Speaker, for this moment, I urge my colleagues to come to this floor; support this rule; move the appropriations process forward; finish the appropriations process before the September 30 deadline; and serve your constituents back home, like I know every man and woman in this Chamber does.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the rule and support for the underlying bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment to provide the maximum flexibility to States that are being asked, under this bill, to rescind $800 million in an obligated budget authority.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, we put money in a lot of different pots and send it out to a lot of different places to do a whole lot of good for a whole lot of people, but when you have a bill that is going to ask the States to pull back some of that money, historically, we have limited the ability of States to make those decisions.

With all due respect to anyone's hometown team, I will tell you no one knows more about how to take care of the safety of the citizens of Georgia than do the citizens of Georgia and our local elected officials.

What this amendment would do is allow our local Departments of Transportation, our State Department of

Transportation, maximum flexibility in meeting this Federal mandate to rescind those $800 million worth of unobligated funds.

I ask my colleagues for their support in providing that maximum flexibility, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

I am one of those authorizers. I sit on the Transportation Committee, so I will make myself available to anyone who has questions about the intent of the Transportation Committee on that measure.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart).

Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend for those comments.

Again, I want to provide maximum flexibility to what is a very difficult job, and that is reclaiming those obligated funds from each one of our districts back home. The question is: Will we trust our local officials to make the best decisions or will we structure how those decisions are made here? I trust our local engineers, our local builders, and our local folks in charge of our public safety.

Mr. Chairman, I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the chairman for yielding me the time, and I want to thank him for his leadership.

Madam Speaker, the amendment that you mentioned, the bill as amended, was actually an amendment from the chairman to perfect the bill. I want to thank the ranking member for her support on the committee, and I want to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Brownley) for her work on the amendment.

Madam Speaker, I wish more high schoolers were in the Capitol today, I wish there were more American Government students in the Capitol today, because this amendment is exactly the way that the American people expect the process to work.

As the ranking member pointed out, we made a great step in the FAST Act to try to put more veterans to work, to try to fill more empty spots in commercial truck driving. We did a great job together in a bipartisan way.

A lot of folks do a job, and then they are embarrassed to admit that they didn't get it done 100 percent. We have had folks come into our offices who said: Listen, you have made a great step to help our veterans access these certifications, but you could do more, and let us tell you how.

As the ranking member pointed out, as the chairman pointed out, before the FMCSA has even finished the original regulations, we are back at work perfecting this, adding more healthcare providers to the rolls so that more veterans can get to work faster--not because we are particularly brilliant folks up here, but because folks who do this every single day as a job back home noticed it, told us how we could do it better, and then we created the partnerships up here to make it happen.

Madam Speaker, it makes me so proud to be associated with folks like the chairman, like the ranking member, the Transportation Committee in general, showing up every single day to see what we can do to make a difference. It is not a difference for 300 million Americans at the time, but if you were that one veteran who is trying to feed your family, who is trying to get your certification, who is trying to get yourself back to work, this bill could make all the difference; this amendment could make all the difference. I am grateful to the entire committee team of members and team of staff for making that possible.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak after my friend from Texas. He is absolutely right. We have an incredibly vibrant fabric of folks across this country. My district looks very much like his district. I appreciate him recognizing those things that unite us and bring us together.

You know, it hasn't been much over a week, Mr. Speaker, since we committed ourselves to changing the discourse here, and just in the last 5 minutes of listening to speakers on this floor, I have heard sinister accusations of what our healthcare bill will do, of mean bills and meaner bills, of cruel bills.

Mr. Speaker, there is not a man or woman in this Chamber who doesn't work every day to serve their constituents better than they did yesterday. There is not a man or woman in this Chamber who doesn't want to do better for America tomorrow than we did yesterday. And I promise you that that pathway is not paved with accusations of ``sinister,'' ``cruel,'' and ``mean.'' It is paved with confessions of common ground, common goals, and common opportunity. I urge my colleagues to remember our commitment that we made to one another last week.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 348 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I found myself listening to the Reading Clerk as he read through the rule. It is a fairly straightforward rule, but it sounded pretty complicated as he was going through it. And I am reminded that

standing to your left is one of the gentlemen that helps us sort through those issues.

As every Member of this institution knows, who was listening to the colloquy last week, Brian Cooper is leaving this House after 35 years of public service, honorable service, showing up day in and day out. My friend, Mr. McGovern, and I, working on the Rules Committee, sometimes go until 2, 3, or 4 in the morning. Well, folks like Mr. Cooper can't go home until the Rules Committee goes home.

So day in and day out, with absolutely no pomp or circumstance, just dedicated public service, Brian Cooper served this institution. I fear this will be the last time he and I are on the floor together while I have control of the microphone. And I did not want to yield control of that microphone without telling how much his assistance has meant to me.

You know, Mr. Speaker, standing in that chair is a powerful responsibility. The burden sometimes is a lot to bear. When you are surrounded by a team of excellence, as you are today, with Ethan to your right and Brian to your left, I know you do that with great confidence. I am grateful to folks who help us to succeed.

Thank you, Mr. Cooper, for all of that service.

Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 348 is a structured rule. It provides for consideration of H.R. 953, the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act of 2017. It makes in order two amendments from my Democratic colleagues-- one from Ms. Esty and one from Mr. Huffman.

As you might remember, the House passed a nearly identical version of this bill last year, Mr. Speaker, but, unfortunately, it did not get across the finish line in the Senate, so it did not make it to the President's desk. We are trying again this year. My sincere hope is that we will succeed.

Mr. Speaker, I know that you hear from constituents, as I do, talking about regulatory burdens, and why can't we bring commonsense rules and regulations to Washington. H.R. 953, the bill that this rule would make in order, is an attempt to do that.

This bill prohibits the EPA from requiring unnecessary and duplicative pollution permits for certain pesticides. Now, so often when we start a sentence with ``this prevents the EPA,'' folks think: Oh, there go those Republicans again going after the environment, waiving those regulations that protect friends and family.

Well, as you know, Mr. Speaker, that accusation is never accurate. But, in particular, it fails to address this situation.

For decade upon decade, the EPA has regulated pesticides in this country. If we pass H.R. 953 today, for decades and decades to come, the EPA will continue to regulate pesticides in this country.

As a result of litigation, Mr. Speaker, the courts are forcing the EPA not to regulate pesticides as pesticides, but to regulate pesticides as pollutant discharges, as if there is something else to do with pesticides other than to spray it.

They are saying that you can't just get a permit to use your pesticide, Mr. Speaker. You can't just read the label and the proper application and get a permit to apply, as indicated on the label. You must also get a permit to discharge a pollutant as if the pesticide is not already regulated as a pesticide itself.

Mr. Speaker, it makes no sense. The good news is I am surround by a team of excellence here in the United States House of Representatives and, in a bipartisan way, we have already agreed that it makes no sense.

You will recall, Mr. Speaker, we brought a substantially similar measure to the floor, and we passed it under a process called suspension of the rules. It is a process we save for those bills that are relatively noncontroversial. It passed in a bipartisan way, but didn't make it across the Senate floor.

We brought it back again, Mr. Speaker, to this floor. We brought it under a rule, as we are doing today. It passed again in a bipartisan way. We sent it to the Senate, but couldn't make it across the Senate floor.

Mr. Speaker, we added it to the farm bill that we passed here in the House, which, again, passed in a bipartisan way. We sent it over to the Senate and it was stripped out on the Senate side.

Mr. Speaker, we have come together time and time again as a body to move this commonsense regulatory reform forward. It is my great hope that I will get support from both sides of the aisle again today not just on this rule, but on the underlying legislation, and that we will move forward in a bipartisan way again.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would advise my friend from Massachusetts I do not have any speakers remaining, and I reserve the balance of my time to close.

Will the gentleman yield?

I appreciate that. I would like to inquire of the Speaker: Is my friend from Massachusetts working on my yielded time or is he working on his time?

I thank my friend.

If my friend would yield, I was advised that I had yielded an abundance of time. I just wanted to make sure that I was not being more generous than you and I would have intended.

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

I want to recognize that, if you locked my friend from Massachusetts and me in a room together, it would be over both of our objections, but we would be able to solve about 50 percent of the challenges that face this country.

There is something different that happens in conversation and dialogue when the cameras are turned off than happens when the cameras are on, and of course we are going to keep these cameras here on the floor of the House for as long as you and I are here because the American people have a right to see and a right to know.

But just like Mom and Dad don't want to have all their conversations in front of the kids, and the kids certainly don't want to have all of their conversations in front of Mom and Dad, there is a role to be played for folks to be able to close the door and sit down and visit with each other and try to make things better.

My friend from Massachusetts is absolutely right. The only job that we have is to make a difference for our constituency back home. Sometimes we legitimately disagree on how to do that. The budget is a good example.

You will remember, Mr. Speaker, President Obama, in his 8 years as President of the United States, never once introduced a budget that balanced. He borrowed from our children and our grandchildren in every single budget.

And when I say he didn't introduce a budget that balanced, I don't mean that he didn't balance in year 1, I don't mean he didn't balance in year 10. I mean never, ever, ever looking forward in his budgets did he ever stop borrowing.

Mr. Speaker, there is not a man or woman in this institution who believes that you can run a country that way. There is not one. There is not a man or woman in this institution who doesn't understand that balancing budgets is going to mean hard decisions, and so it is absolutely the right place for the dialog about what those hard decisions should be.

But let us not be confused for one moment. There is no pathway to balance that isn't hard. Borrowing from your children and your grandchildren to pay for what you want today is always going to be easier, Mr. Speaker, than paying for it yourself. We are going to have to have that conversation.

I agree with my friend from Massachusetts. We do not work for the President of the United States in this institution. If anything, he works for us.

I sit on the House Budget Committee, Mr. Speaker, and I promise you, we are promulgating our own House budget, a work product that is going to make this institution proud. I am particularly pleased to be working with Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black on that budget, even as we speak.

Mr. Speaker, it will balance by making commonsense changes to Federal programs, one of which is included in this bill here today.

Take the EPA, for example. Mr. Speaker, I encourage you, if you have not read the comments of our new EPA Administrator, to get into those because what he would tell you, which is absolutely true, is that we have Superfund sites in this country that are so polluted they cannot be utilized for other purposes.

They have been on the Superfund list for decades through Republican Presidents and through Democratic Presidents. They have been sitting on that list. There is no plan to clean them up, no plan to make a difference in those communities, and no plan to serve those constituencies. That is wrong.

Instead of spending its time and resources making a difference for families, making a difference for the environment, what is the EPA having to do?

Respond to court cases that tell it to treat the reasonable and labeled application of pesticides; not as spraying pesticides in your field, but as if you were operating a factory and just having as an effluent, pesticide flowing out of your factory. That is just nonsense.

The reason we produced pesticides is to spray it in fields. We do not need an effluent discharge permit as if we are running a factory, pumping it into our streams. We are not. We are spraying it on our plants to do what?

Address the food needs of this Nation.

My friend from Massachusetts is absolutely right when he talks about hunger in this Nation, Mr. Speaker. He is absolutely right. I dare say that there is not a community in this country that is not affected by hunger. But the biggest advocate we have in the fight against hunger is the American farmer, Mr. Speaker.

There is nobody in the world who does it better; there is nobody in the world who produces it cheaper; there is nobody in the world that has the capability of producing the food to go on the grocery store shelves in America except the American farmer. And these pesticides and herbicides make a difference in getting that food out of the field and onto those store shelves.

We want to do it with strict EPA regulation. That is what is lost in this debate. There is not one Member of this body that wants to repeal EPA regulation. We want to keep that EPA regulation. It is called FIFRA, that regulation that pesticides are regulated under. No one wants to change that at all.

All folks want to do is say: Wait a minute, this is not a factory discharge issue. This is a pesticide issue.

My friend from Massachusetts is absolutely right. I sit on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mr. Speaker. We did not have a hearing or a markup on this bill, and it was absolutely referred to our committee.

Why, Mr. Speaker?

It was referred to our committee because we have jurisdiction over the Clean Water Act, but this has never been a Clean Water Act issue, except the courts tried to make it one. This has never been a Clean Water Act issue, except the litigants tried to make it one. So when we tried to fix the problem, we didn't waste a moment in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee dealing with the Clean Water Act because this has never been a Clean Water Act issue. It is an ag issue, which is why it went through my friend of Massachusetts' Agriculture Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I don't begrudge anyone the job that they have to do in this institution. We have different constituencies. They ask different things of us.

We all have to come and do our work. But I will tell you what, Mr. Speaker, everything doesn't have to be an us-against-them battle. Sometimes it is just about us. Sometimes there is more that unites this country than divides this country, and that is okay. Sometimes we are able to work together on commonsense solutions, and that is okay.

Mr. Speaker, when this bill came to the House under suspension of the rules, again, that process that we use for things that are noncontroversial, my friend from Massachusetts supported it at that time. He supported it because it is good legislation that is going to make a difference for folks back home. It is going to make a difference in combating hunger in every jurisdiction across this Nation.

When this bill went through the Agriculture Committee, Mr. Speaker, there were no amendments offered. The Agriculture Committee is composed of Republicans and Democrats. It is a place where discussion takes place. It was the markup of this bill, which is when you go and try to amend it and make it better. Not one amendment was offered from either side.

Why?

Because we have discussed this issue, we have litigated this issue, and we have worked together on this issue, and it is a collaborative work product.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

I thank my friend. He is absolutely right. When the experts on the Agriculture Committee considered this, when the folks who spend their entire careers on Capitol Hill working on pesticide and pesticide safety considered this, they had absolutely no amendments to offer whatsoever.

When it came to the Rules Committee and the entire House could offer amendments, folks absolutely offered amendments. The Rules Committee, on which the gentleman from Massachusetts and I serve, made two of those amendments in order. We rejected others. You heard my friend's opening statement, Mr. Speaker, that one of the amendments we rejected was to protect pregnant women.

Well, Mr. Speaker, for Pete's sake, I have served with these men and women in here. I have been in this body for 6 years. There is not one Member of this institution who doesn't care about pregnant women. There is not one Member of this institution who doesn't care about children. There is not one Member of this institution who doesn't care. What we do in this institution is care. And when my friend from Massachusetts supported this bill, when he supported this bill, there were no amendments along those lines.

When the gentleman supported this bill without the amendment dealing particularly with pregnant women and children, I don't believe for a moment the gentleman forgot about those pregnant women and children. I don't believe for a moment he decided he was going to punish pregnant women and children. I believe that he thought those protections were inherent in the base text, and he was right when he thought it, and he was right when he supported it.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Reclaiming my time, I will tell my friend two things that he already knows. Number one is we do accept amendments from the entire Congress. That is the purpose of the Rules Committee being in existence, and we have added two amendments to this bill for consideration.

When the gentleman supported it in the 112th Congress, we considered no other amendments. That is a change this time. We are going to do that. When it passed the last time we did a rule, no one offered any amendments. This is a change from that time. When we passed it in the Agriculture bill, no one offered any amendments. So it is a change this time. We absolutely are opening up the process more and more with every time the House considers this bill.

But I would also tell my friend something that we are going to have to grapple with as an institution, and that is that I don't need a Rules Committee if what we are going to do is make every amendment that comes to this institution in order.

The only reason we have a Rules Committee is to pick and choose. The only reason we have a Rules Committee is to set up a timetable on which we can debate and consider things in a reasonable manner. The only reason we have a Rules Committee is because we are not operating under unanimous consent as our friends in the Senate do, though we absolutely could. And I would refer him to my friend, Daniel Webster, who has some marvelous ideas about how we might do that.

But, Mr. Speaker, I think it is legitimate for folks back home to wonder what is going on in that United States House. They passed it in a bipartisan way once. They passed it in a bipartisan way twice. They passed it in a bipartisan way three times, and here it is on the floor today, and it is as if the sky is falling and going to open up and swallow everything that is good and decent about this land.

Why is that, Mr. Speaker? Why is that the conversation we are having today instead of the one we had not once, not twice, but three times about how we could use this legislation to improve the lives of citizens across this country?

Perhaps that is just the environment we are in. Perhaps that is just the cards we have been dealt in politics across America today, Mr. Speaker, but we have a chance together as an institution to stand up and say it does not have to be that way. We have a chance together to stand up and say that we can do better than those partisan shenanigans. We can get together on things that are going to make a difference, and the first opportunity you are going to have after this speech, Mr. Speaker, to do that, is in supporting the rule for this bill. The first opportunity we are going to have to do that is in supporting this rule, and then supporting the underlying legislation and sending it back to the Senate one more time. It is the right thing to do, Mr. Speaker, and we have the opportunity to do that together.

Mr. Speaker, I urge strong support for the rule and the underlying bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. Speaker, the Committee on Rules has issued announcements outlining the amendment process for three measures that will likely be before the Committee on Rules next week. The amendment deadline has been set for Monday, May 22 at 10 a.m. for H.R. 953, the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act of 2017; for Monday, May 22 at 3 p.m. for H.R. 1761, the Protecting Against Child Exploitation Act of 2017; and Tuesday, May 23 at 10 a.m. for H.R. 1973, the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse Act of 2017.

The text of these measures, Mr. Speaker, is available on the Committee on Rules website at this time, and Members can feel free to contact the Committee on Rules with any questions regarding the amendment process.