Floor Statements

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of House Resolution 1153, which recognizes the heroic efforts of the West Virginia National Guard and local responders for rescuing 17 persons from a Navy helicopter that crashed in the wintry mountains of that State in February of this year. I want to commend Representative Nick Rahall for sponsoring this legislation.

This incident, precipitated when a Navy helicopter was forced down in remote mountainous terrain, exemplifies all that is best about the National Guard and its ability to work cooperatively and effectively with local civilian responders in crisis situations.

Without the rapid, integrated response of the West Virginia Army and Air National Guard, the volunteer efforts of local citizens, the support of local emergency management services, and perseverance of State and local fire and rescue services and agencies, 17 people could have died from their injuries and from exposure. Thankfully, there were people at every level of government who were trained, equipped, and prepared to respond.

This resolution specifically honors those citizens of West Virginia, but it should also remind each Member to express appreciation to the people in our own States and districts, selfless Americans who willingly sacrifice their comfort and safety for others.

In my own district and State, Guards men and women have adopted a flexible ``plug and play'' organization model that enables members to report to the closest armory in time of emergency, thereby minimizing the overall response time during events like the unprecedented snowfalls we experienced this winter. Their round-the-clock vigilance exemplifies the spirit of the National Guard emergency personnel at all levels of government.

Thus it is fitting that we honor and thank the soldiers and airmen of the National Guard as well as the first responders and emergency and rescue personnel across our Nation, who, when disaster and tragedy strike, step forward to save and serve their fellow citizens. I urge all Members to support this resolution.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito), an original sponsor of this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the bipartisan bill, H.R. 5026, which has been approved unanimously by a vote of 47-0 by the Energy and Commerce Committee. That doesn't happen very often in today's Congress.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, this bill is necessary because there is one event that we will not avoid, and that is solar geomagnetic interference--a solar storm. If--really, when--we have a big one like the Carrington event that occurred in 1859, this will shut down our whole grid. It would cost us only about $100 million to protect the grid from EMP. This investment won't be made without H.R. 5026. The consequences of inaction are dire. If our grid is destroyed by EMP or by a Carrington event, which is an electromagnetic storm, the National Academies warn it will cost us between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in damages, and it will take 4 to 10 years to recover.

With the grid's being down, more or less, for 4 to 10 years, one can only imagine the consequences to our society. This is a really important bipartisan bill, and I rise in very strong support.

I would like to thank our Armed Forces Committee Chairman Skelton, Ranking Member McKeon, Committee chair Smith, and all of our colleagues for their contributions to this Defense Authorization Bill.

This bill was voted out of committee by unanimous vote because it maintains our objectives of balancing the health and capability of the current force with the needs of future capability. And I also want to thank, really thank the staff for their professionalism, dedication, and extraordinary hard work this year.

As an engineer with 20 patents, 20 years of experience with military R&D programs, and 17 years in the Armed Services Committee, I can assure you that the Defense Department's own data provides the proof that Congress must continue to approve the alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter which will ultimately lead 95 percent of all of fighting aircraft. The competition is crucial for our national security and that of our allies because the original engine awarded under a noncompetitive contract is 21 months behind schedule, and according to GAO is estimated to be $2 billion over budget. That's a 52 percent increase and one of the main reasons with redundancy the committee overwhelmingly supports continued funding of the competitive engine.

The Department asked Congress to permit the issue of a sole-source contract for over $100 billion for thousands of engines over the life of this program. I owe it to the American people and warfighters to object to something this irresponsible.

And, Mr. Chairman, I urge support of H.R. 5136 as approved unanimously by the Armed Service Committee, but a vote for the Don't Ask, Don't Tell amendment abdicates our Constitutional authority over military policy and gives this authority to the President and unelected executive branch leaders. Congress has yielded far too much of its Constitutional authority to the executive and judiciary. Therefore, if this amendment passes, I cannot support this bill.

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

Mr. Chairman, we have noted two concerns relative to the Army Reserve line-haul tractors. The first concern is that they are procuring these tractors sole-source, without the benefits and advantages of full and open competition; and, secondly, their procurement is way, way, behind the need. They are in fact about 1,000 tractors short. So I have a very simple amendment which addresses these two concerns:

(A) Congressional encouragement of full and open competition. Congress encourages the Secretary of the Army to use full and open competition for the M915 tractor-trailer program beginning in fiscal year 2012; and,

(B) Report. Not later than February 15, 2011, the Secretary of the Army shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report on line-haul tractors, including possible courses of action that would accelerate meeting the line-haul tractor requirement of the Army Reserve.

We have vetted this with the Army Reserves, Mr. Chairman, and they are in support of it. I encourage a ``yes'' vote on this.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman from Oregon for the opportunity to clarify my amendment on the M915 truck program.

It was my intent to submit a request for unanimous consent to consider a revised version of my original amendment that had been made in order by the Rules Committee. In fact, I read the revised version into the official record.

The revised amendment only encourages the Secretary of the Army to consider full and open competition for future M915 truck procurements beginning in fiscal year 2012. The revised amendment also requires the Secretary of the Army to provide possible courses of action if it helps to accelerate meeting the Army's current requirement for M915 trucks.

As we proceed to conference with the other body, I would welcome the opportunity to work with the gentleman from Oregon on this critical issue.

Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased and proud to rise today in strong support of H.R. 5013.

I join my colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, and I especially want to thank the bill managers--Mr. Andrews, Mr. Conaway, Mr. Skelton, Mr. McKeon, Mr. Ellsworth, Mr. Coffman, and Mr. Hunter-- who worked so diligently on this bipartisan legislation.

I am very pleased to join my colleagues Congressman Quigley and Congresswoman Giffords in offering this amendment. This amendment provides the Department of Defense the full support of Congress to use energy efficiency as a key tool toward improving our national security and toward providing more value to taxpayers for our defense dollars. This amendment will send an important and strong signal to defense contractors that their bids will be more competitive if their products and services will use less energy.

I urge the support of this bill. I am very pleased that, among all of the institutions in our country, our Defense Department is the most aggressive in pursuing good energy policies. We and the world face a huge crisis in energy, so I am pleased that our Defense Department is leading the way in our country. I am very pleased to be here to support this good amendment and a really good bill.

Mr. Speaker, during the Clinton years, Washington was telling the American people that we had a budget surplus and that we were paying down the debt. After a number of months of bragging about this budget surplus we had and about how much we were paying down the debt, we had to raise the debt limit ceiling.

Now, I asked our leadership, Isn't it going to be a little difficult to explain to the American people why we have to raise the debt limit ceiling if for these many months we have been paying down the debt? Why would you have to raise the debt limit ceiling if you've lowered the debt?

Well, you may not be surprised that what comes out of Washington is not always altogether truthful.

I have a little chart here that helps to explain what happened and why we had to raise the debt limit ceiling when we had a so-called ``budget surplus'' and were telling the American people that we were paying down the debt.

Now, we had surpluses in Social Security and we had surpluses in Medicare, and we had a lockbox. You may remember the lockbox. We had a lockbox on Social Security and Medicare surpluses. The lockbox said that you couldn't transfer those moneys to the general Treasury, that you had to pay down the public debt with those moneys. So what we did was take the surpluses from the Social Security trust fund and the Medicare trust fund--and there were surpluses there--and we paid down the public debt; but for every dollar we paid down on the public debt, we incurred another dollar debt in the trust funds.

You see, the national debt, the debt that really counts, is the sum of the public debt and the trust fund debt. So, if you simply decrease the public debt by increasing the trust fund debt, you've done nothing to the national debt. It's a little bit like taking money from your right-hand pocket and putting it into your left-hand pocket. Obviously, if you do that, you are neither richer nor poorer after you've taken money from your right-hand pocket and put it in your left-hand pocket. That is what we were doing.

Now, very few people know that there is a difference between the public--oh, the public debt is the Wall Street debt. That's all those instruments that we give to people when they loan us money. The trust fund debts, of course, are debts that we owe to our trust funds because, for many years, we've been taking moneys from the American people for Social Security, for Medicare, and for about 50 other trust funds--the Highway Trust Fund and so forth--and we presumably are taking that money and putting it into trust for them.

Is that what happens? No, that is not what happens.

What happens is we take that money, and if we have any surplus money after meeting our Social Security and Medicare obligations, we then take that money and immediately convert it into a nonnegotiable U.S. security. We move it over to the general trust fund and we spend it. So there is, in fact, no money in the Social Security trust fund or in the Medicare trust fund. That is really a misnomer. It is not a trust fund. I guess you might call it a ``trust debt'' because there is nothing there but IOUs.

Now, this year, for the first time, we've spent more money on Social Security than we took in in Social Security. We didn't expect that to happen for several years, but we still have about, I think, $2.5 trillion of surpluses in the Social Security trust fund, so we'll be paying Social Security for a while if we can collect or can borrow enough money from other places to make up for the money that we took from the Social Security trust fund and spent.

So, for those months and a couple of years, we were telling people we were paying down the debt. I talked to the CBO, and I think there was never a moment in time, if we kept our books on the accrual method-- which, by the way, we require every small business to do--when the national debt went down.

Now, another thing: The debt will always go up more than the advertised deficit. How can the debt go up more than the advertised deficit? The debt goes up more than the deficit because we make the silly statement that the Social Security surplus and the Medicare surplus offset the debt. Of course, if you take that surplus and spend it, it simply incurs another kind of debt.

Well, I hope this helps you to understand. I just thought you'd like to know.

I rise in opposition to this bill.

Health care costs are increasing at two and three times the rate of inflation. Obviously, if this continues, it will bury us. So any health care reform needs to address health care costs. There are two major cost drivers in health care. This bill is silent on one and makes the other worse.

The one that it is silent on is tort reform. Some people think the defensive medicine associated with the threat of malpractice suits may account for a fourth of all health care costs. This bill does nothing to address that. A second cost driver is administrative costs, which may again represent a fourth of all costs. This bill makes that worse by

proposing to give to poor people a policy and incur all of the health care costs associated with that policy.

We need to give poor people health care. Give the doctor, the clinic, the hospital a tax credit for giving them their health care. Then we avoid all of the administrative costs associated with that. This bill fails on both of those counts.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I want to thank him very much for his initiative in this effort. Dr. Ivins was my constituent, the laboratory at which he worked is in my district, indeed, just a few miles from my home, so I was very much involved in this case. His colleagues say that he would not have done it, and the FBI said early on that he could not have done it because the spores were weaponized, and he had no ability to do that. More recently, they have been saying something a bit different than that.

I have here some quotes that I think will be relevant here. Jeffrey Adamovicz, the former chief of bacteriology--``former'' is important here, because they would not let the current scientist at Fort Detrick talk to me. He just left. The former chief of bacteriology for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland, where Ivins worked, wrote to The Frederick News-Post expressing serious misgivings about the FBI findings that Ivins sent the deadly letters that killed 5 and sickened 17 in 2001.

``The evidence is still very circumstantial and unconvincing as a whole,'' he wrote. ``I'm curious as to why they closed the case while the National Academy of Science review is still ongoing. Is it because the review is going unfavorable for the FBI?

``Ivins' death came about a month after the Justice Department agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement valued at $5.85 million to scientist Steven Hatfill, who had long been the key suspect in the case. Hatfill had sued the Justice Department, which had labeled him `a person of interest.' He alleged that the Federal Government went on a smear campaign and leaked information that was damaging to his reputation.''

Apparently they agreed they had. They paid him $5.85 million. They subsequently agreed, conceded that he was not involved in the case.

Gary Andrews, another former chief of the bacteriology lab in Frederick, said it wouldn't have been unusual for Ivins to work odd hours because he was working with animals, and it was more convenient to do it then. He says that ``Bruce didn't have the skill to make spore preps of that concentration. He never ever could make a spore prep like the ones found in the letters.''

Thank you very much for your lead in this.

This has been devastating to my constituents and the scientists at Fort Detrick. This needs to be brought to a proper close. They did not believe he would have done it; the FBI said earlier on he couldn't have done it. Thank you very much for leading in this.

Madam Speaker, during the Clinton administration, Washington was telling America that we had a budget surplus and we were paying down the debt. Now, while we were telling America that, we had the embarrassing necessity of raising the debt limit ceiling. Why would you have to raise the debt limit ceiling if you're paying down the debt? Surprise, surprise; Washington was not being truthful.

What we were doing was taking money from lockboxes, surplus trust fund moneys, Social Security and Medicare, and paying down the public debt--one more dollar of debt in the trust funds, one less dollar of debt in the public debt. That did nothing to reduce the national debt. And we had other trust fund surpluses for which there was no lockbox. We happily took and spent that money. If we kept our books on the accrual method, there never was a moment in time when we, in fact, reduced the national debt.

Now, talking about accounting methods, our government keeps Enron kind of books. If we kept our books the way we force all but the smallest businesses to keep their books, using the accrual method, we would be showing about $60 trillion in debt. That's $200,000 in debt for every man, woman, and child. Clearly, clearly unmanageable.

We should be ashamed that we're here today talking about raising the debt limit ceiling once again. We should be here debating how we're going to balance the budget and then pay down the debt, because I have 10 kids, 17 grandkids, and two great-grandkids, and we have already mortgaged their future. We don't need to do anymore.

Madam Chair, it's not surprising that this legislation, like much of the legislation, might have an unintended consequence. And one of my constituents pointed out just such in this legislation.

I took the problem to the chairman, and he very graciously has fixed it in his manager's amendment.

I yield to him so that he can explain.

I want to thank the chairman very much for helping to solve this problem.

This bill would mortgage the future of my 10 kids, my 17 grandkids and my two great-grandkids.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 895, which honors the lives of the soldiers and civilians wounded or killed in the horrific tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas on November 5, 2009. Neil Abercrombie and I, as chairman and ranking member of the Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee are profoundly saddened by the loss of life at Fort Hood. We extend our condolences to the injured and the families of those who were killed.

The most appropriate course for us, however, is to continue to provide the most effective force protection possible for our military personnel--the proper vehicles, the best counter-improvised explosive device capability, the proper body armor and helmets, and best weapons.

And of course, we will continue to work with Chairwoman Davis and Ranking Member Wilson to support their activities of the Military Personnel Subcommittee to ensure that oar men and women in uniform are provided the proper health care and are fully prepared for their overseas assignments.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday a member of the Mennonite Amish community called my office very concerned that if this bill passes, they're going to be fined because of their religious conviction. The members of this community do not buy health care insurance, and they don't cost the taxpayer anything. This community takes care of all of their health care needs. There is a conscience clause on page 300 of the bill. I read that. It's not clear to me whether they'd be protected or not.

But one thing is very clear to me: that those who wrote this bill didn't communicate with this community. This is a big community. We know there are problems. We know there are issues. This is just one more reason to reject this bill, start over and get it right because clearly they didn't get it right here.

Mr. Speaker, this morning, I had what was, for me, a very emotional meeting in my office. Representatives from the home health care industry were there, lamenting the fact that tens of billions of dollars will be cut from home health care in this bill that we may have to vote on.

It was emotional for me because I thought of my mother, who, during the last months of her life, would have liked nothing more than to be home, and her family wanted her there. She would have been happier, and probably would have lived longer, but because of limitations of funds and because of regulations, she had to be in an institution. The toughest moment of my life was when I would go there to visit her, and she would say, ``I want to go home.''

Please, we've got to get it right. This bill doesn't get it right. It's just one more place where it doesn't get it right. Let's get it right before we finish it.