Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill.

While this bill does exempt the Department of Veterans Affairs from sequestration, that is the only good news in this bill.

H.R. 933 does provide the Department of Defense with a better balance between its operations and maintenance accounts and its longer-term investment accounts. However, it will do nothing to stop the $46 billion sequester for the Department of Defense, which will result in civilian furloughs, deployment and training cutbacks, and facility maintenance cuts.

The bill shortchanges our homeland security needs by denying a requested increase for FEMA State and Local Grants, locking the program into its lowest funding level in history and shortchanging disaster preparedness and anti-terrorism funds to states, urban areas, ports, transit, and first responders.

Communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy are also shortchanged by this bill. H.R. 933 does not include funding requests important for disaster recovery, cyber-security, water infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and weatherization, including a request to lower the local cost-share from 65/35 to 90/10 for Army Corps of Engineers projects in communities affected by Sandy, hindering ability of local communities to recover and rebuild.

The bill also violates the intent of the Affordable Care Act by failing to include a requested $949 million to implement health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, scheduled to begin enrolling participants in October. Funding is needed for IT infrastructure to process enrollments and payments, eligibility verification, call centers, and other assistance to help individuals and small businesses select and enroll in health plans.

I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing this badly flawed bill.

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be support this very good bill. I only wish it had been allowed on the House floor a year ago for a vote.

For the first time in years, the Congress is poised to pass a VAWA reauthorization that is worthy of the name. Finally, we will be providing real protections for a number of vulnerable populations among America's women.

Of course, this bill almost didn't make it to the House floor. The House majority was going to simply sit on S. 47 and offer their own VAWA substitute. After a massive public shaming, the majority backed down. They are still offering their own so-called substitute--which is a sham--but we will also have the chance to vote on the Senate bill, which is the true VAWA reauthorization.

This bill provides tangible, enforceable protections for LGBT, Native American and immigrant victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. The bill will help ensure the availability of services to all victims of domestic and dating violence, no matter their sexual orientation or gender identity. S. 47 also provides authority to Native American tribes to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators for a narrow set of crimes related to domestic, dating violence and violations of protecting orders. The Senate bill also adds stalking to the list of crimes for which victims can receive protection through the U-Visa program. Finally, S. 47 also includes authorizations for programs preventing human trafficking, sexual assault on college campuses, as well as additional resources to address rape kit backlogs.

Madam Speaker, this day has been entirely too long in coming, but I am pleased that it is finally here and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill and sending it to President Obama for his signature.

Madam Speaker, of course Congress should make sure the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration and other government agencies are funded sufficiently to help communities recover from natural disasters like Sandy. H.R. 592, the Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of 2013, would add ``houses of worship'' to the list of eligible entities that can receive direct government assistance from FEMA. Religious institutions are important to our communities. Unfortunately, as drafted H.R. 592 is unconstitutional.

In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a government subsidy used to construct buildings at colleges and universities was constitutional only if the buildings could never be used for religious activities. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court held that no taxpayer funds could be used for maintenance and repair of facilities in which religious activities take place. The types of buildings that this bill seeks to make eligible for direct government funding--houses of worship--are inherently used for religious activities and the bill would have the effect of unconstitutionally funneling taxpayer money for religious activities. Under current law, houses of worship are eligible for Small Business Administration loans to help rebuild in the wake of a disaster like Sandy. Thus, there is already federally available aid that is neutral in its application that churches, synagogues and other houses of worship can avail themselves of without implicating the government in providing direct support to religious institutions. And private insurance companies have long provided such policies for houses of worship.

As I have since Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, I will continue to push for the maximum possible funding--including disaster recovery loans--for all New Jersey communities impacted by this and future storms.

Mr. Speaker, all of us condemn this reckless, provocative nuclear test by North Korea. North Korea's pursuit of a nuclear capability is destabilizing and not in the interest of the people of that nation, who suffer daily under one of the worst dictatorships the world has seen.

Yet even as we condemn this test and seek to prevent future ones, we must not make the mistake of believing--as this resolution asserts-- that supporting more money for a ballistic missile defense system is the answer. America has wasted literally tens of billions of dollars since the 1980s in pursuit of a ballistic missile shield that is not technically feasible and is viewed as destabilizing by our international partners, especially Russia. While I support this resolution's condemnation of North Korea's test, I do not support its call for spending more money on a failed missile defense effort.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the birth of Charles Darwin. Only rarely in human history has someone shown a fundamentally new way of thinking about the world, an insight so revolutionary that it has made possible further creative and explanatory thinking.

In my previous field of physics, we have Galileo and Newton and Einstein. In biology, at the top of any list would be Charles Darwin. Without his insights--without his recognition that natural selection enables ever-increasing complexity and functionality and enables the development of ever-more wonderful forms of life--our modern understandings of biology, ecology, genetics, and medicine would be impossible, and our comprehension of the world around us would be vastly poorer.

I've introduced a resolution to honor February 12 as a ceremonial Darwin Day, to recognize the importance of scientific thinking in our lives and to honor one of humankind's greatest thinkers.

I rise in opposition to this bill.

Madam Chair, it is already over one month since Congress temporarily avoided the so-called fiscal cliff, and the clock is ticking on sequestration: the across-the-board spending cuts triggered on March 1 that will devastate our economy. Yet the majority in the House is wasting time voting on an unnecessary bill (H.R. 444) which shirks their responsibilities, while pinning the blame on the President.

This legislation does nothing to address the urgent priorities of the American people--to create jobs, grow the economy, and reduce the deficit in a balanced way. It does not prevent the next self-imposed crisis, thereby threatening our recovery, risking job growth, and harming the middle class.

The majority calls this the ``Require a PLAN'' bill, but this bill is a stunt, not a solution. Now is the time to take action to avoid the harmful effects of sequestration, not for political posturing.

I urge my colleagues to reject this partisan gimmick and join me in voting against it.

Mr. Speaker, 40 years ago today the Supreme Court affirmed the dignity and independence of each American woman. The result of the decision was an understanding that our Constitution guaranteed decisions about a woman's own body should be left up to that woman, in consultation with her doctor, her family, and her religion, not the Federal Government.

There is now a generation of women who do not remember the time before Roe v. Wade, a time when men assumed they could say what women could and could not do about their personal private health care and reproduction.

We still have a lot of work to do. Unfortunately, over the past 40 years there have been numerous legislative attempts to deny this right to women and treat women who exercise control over their own bodies as criminals.

We have to make sure that we defend also Title X, maternal and child health care programs, public access to reproductive health care, and that we reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. But we must remember the time before Roe v. Wade and what is at stake.

Madam Chair, I rise in support of the Disaster Relief Act. This bill brings much needed aid to the residents of central New Jersey.

I am concerned that several amendments to H.R. 152 would impair the ability of money in the bill to be spent wisely. The amended bill includes a provision that would block funding that enables coastal communities to develop mitigation plans for future hurricanes and other severe weather events. We should not be limiting NOAA's ability to forecast and respond to hurricanes in an emergency appropriations bill that is designed to respond to a hurricane.

I intended to offer to H.R. 152 an amendment that would have lifted the $250,000 cap on Community Development Block Grant Funds (CDBG) that can be used by towns and municipalities to finance critically need infrastructure projects. There are towns in my district that would benefit from upgrades to existing flood management infrastructure, yet are unable to afford the costs associated with these projects. Unfortunately, my amendment was not made in order by the House Leadership.

While I support strongly passage of H.R. 152, I want to reiterate that our fellow citizens affected by Hurricane Sandy have already waited far too long for help from Congress. In other natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, Congress acted swiftly, and aid reached those in need. And yet, the 112th Congress adjourned before passing a much-needed disaster relief package. The Senate had already acted to pass a well-constructed aid package bill. The only reason that this bill is not law today is that House leadership refused to act.

This devastating storm has left many people hurting in many different ways--shopkeepers, homeowners, fishermen, hotel and restaurant owners-- and has damaged the entire economy. H.R. 152 responds to this variety of needs and concerns. I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Madam Chair, I thank my colleague from New Jersey, Chairman Frelinghuysen, for yielding but also for putting together a very thoughtful amendment. A lot of thought has gone into this amendment. It is compassionate, yes, but it is thoughtful compassion, not dumb compassion.

I rise in opposition to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Texas. It's a misguided amendment that would strike funding from NOAA's Regional Ocean Partnership grants program. These grants help scientists understand where and how the shoreline has changed, evaluate the long- term effects of storm damage, and prepare mitigation plans for future severe weather events. The whole point is to rebuild better and smarter. The Flores amendment eliminates such funding for coastal mitigation, which means Congress would lose the opportunity to ensure that the money is spent on recovery from this disaster in a smart way that makes coastal communities

stronger and safer. It's nonsensical to impair the ability of NOAA to prepare properly for hurricanes in an emergency appropriations bill designed to respond to a hurricane.

I strongly urge my colleagues to reject this misguided amendment, and I thank my good friend from New Jersey for all the thought that has gone into his amendment.

Madam Chairman, this misguided amendment by the gentleman from Georgia would strike funding for the National Weather Service's ground readiness program.

Now, the ground readiness program means that weather satellite signals can be collected on the ground and those data can be used in operational models and forecasts. This satellite data is critical for forecasting hurricanes. In fact, the National Weather Service used data from these NOAA satellites to accurately predict the scope and the path of Hurricane Sandy.

Now, this amount is a relatively small dollar amount in the overall disaster relief bill, but this amendment is of outsized importance in its misguided intent. A recent study showed that without the polar satellite data from the weather models, the forecasters would have said Sandy would stay out at sea, would not have hit the mid-Atlantic coast. Imagine how much worse the storm damage would have been if the emergency management officials said it would never make landfall.

It's hard to overestimate how important accurate forecasts are. Let's accelerate the program, not slow it down. It's completely nonsensical to impair the ability of the National Weather Service to predict accurately. This is reminiscent of that ludicrous proposal a few years ago that we abolish the National Weather Service because there is a successful private cable weather channel.

I urge my colleagues to reject this misguided amendment.

``No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States which shall have been created or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no person holding any office under the United States shall be a Member of either House during his continuance in office.''

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from the District, and I commend the work of my colleagues on this bill. It has some good features and should help smooth the way for recovery from Hurricane Sandy.

The delay in getting this bill and, more importantly, the delay in getting the supplemental appropriations bill for Hurricane Sandy to the floor has only compounded problems for Sandy's victims in New Jersey and elsewhere. And I wish that this bill had included language removing a real impediment faced by our towns.

I'm told that the appropriators, in the legislation coming to the floor tomorrow, are showing unusual respect for House rules and won't use their supplemental appropriations bill to change legislation but only to appropriate funds, so that the standard 65/35 Army Corps of Engineers formula will

not be changed. In other words, towns must put up 35 percent of the project cost for the Corps of Engineers to make the repairs that they would make. The construction costs are high. Many towns in my State will not be able to come up with the 35 percent cost share match for a multimillion dollar construction project. But the appropriators aren't authorizers, they say. Well, what we have before us now is coming from the authorizing committee. They could have fixed this, and I wish this bill had been brought up in such a way that we could fix this match, as the President had asked in his request for the emergency funds.

This bill should streamline the process, but we should have a 90/10 match so that these towns that are strapped for funds because of the damage of Hurricane Sandy and because they've exceeded their borrowing limits would be able to come up with a smaller amount of money so that the construction by the Corps of Engineers could get underway.

I'm happy to see this streamlined process that will get aid to individuals and municipalities in the wake of future storms like Hurricane Sandy. I wish that we could have used this opportunity to fix the 65/35 match and make it a 90/10 match, as the President had requested. That certainly would have helped the towns in New Jersey and Connecticut and New York.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding me the time.

Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 41. I am a cosponsor of this must-pass bill and I urge my colleagues to vote for it.

FEMA announced yesterday that its ability to pay claims under the National Flood Insurance Program would be exhausted by the second week of January. Congress must act now to approve additional borrowing authority and bring much-needed relief to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy flood- related damages to their homes and property.

While I strongly support passage of H.R. 41, I want to reiterate that our fellow citizens affected by Hurricane Sandy have already waited far too long for help from Congress. In other natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, Congress acted swiftly, and aid reached those in need. And yet earlier this week, the 112th Congress adjourned before passing a much-needed disaster relief package. The Senate had already acted to pass a well-constructed aid package bill. The only reason that this bill is not law today is that House leadership refused to act.

This devastating storm has left many people hurting in many different ways--shopkeepers, homeowners, fisherman, hotel and restaurant owners-- and has damaged the entire economy. The Senate-passed Sandy relief package responds to this variety of needs and concerns. I urge Speaker Boehner to bring the Senate disaster relief package to the floor without delay.

Well, you've heard it. Our constituents' lives were devastated by the Sandy disaster. It has now been about 9 weeks since Hurricane Sandy brought the winds and the tidal surges.

In central New Jersey and Connecticut, in New York, people are hurting. Towns have exhausted their emergency funds and exhausted their borrowing capacity. In other disasters, such as the disaster associated with Katrina or with wildfires or with any number of other natural disasters, this body has acted and aid has been provided quickly.

And yet today, the Speaker is going to allow the 112th Congress to adjourn before passing the much-needed disaster relief package. The Senate acted on this bill. The aid package here was well constructed. It was ready. All we needed was a vote. And the delay is significant. It adds significantly to the hurt. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives are on the line. People are living wherever they can. They don't have the shelter. They don't have the businesses. They don't have their lives. And the Speaker just walks away. That compounds the disaster. The delay compounds the disaster.

It has been said: Well, FEMA has some money already in their account that will last for many weeks. But we're not just talking about FEMA, we're talking about HUD. More than a billion dollars, actually billions of housing aid. The Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, the Department of Interior, the Agriculture Department for food and emergency watershed protection, the EPA for safe drinking water--all of this was in this well-constructed package.

Now, it has often been said that the governing principle of the Republican leadership is ``you're on your own.'' That might actually be a conscientious principle if they really believe in their hearts that your Social Security should be privately invested or you should pay for a college without government help. But this, to say you're on your own after a disaster is inconsiderate. It breaks our trust. It violates an understanding, and it hurts people.

Madam Speaker, I regret that this bill, like so many of its predecessors over the past several years, does nothing to address some the urgent need for real reform in our intelligence community.

I am particularly troubled by the failure of this bill to address the deepening militarization of the Central Intelligence Agency, a process that began long ago but that has accelerated dramatically in the post- 9/11 era.

Throughout most of its history, the CIA has--at the direction of successive presidents--veered between two organizational paths. The first, and the proper one, is for the CIA to do what President Truman intended when he created it: to collect information about the world around us, synthesize and analyze that data, and provide it to the executive and the legislature for their information and action, as appropriate. The other path--the one that has caused the CIA and our Nation so much grief--is the path of militarized covert, and not-so- covert, action.

Today, it is manifested in a quasi-publicly acknowledged CIA assassination-by-drone campaign on which the Administration has refused to provide information, despite my own request and the request of many other House and Senate members for the information. In the previous decade, we saw what happened when lines of responsibility and accountability for secret programs were fuzzy or not observed. The result was a detainee and interrogation program that was a national embarrassment morally, and an albatross politically with our allies around the world. The not-so-covert ``drone wars'' are on a similar glide path, and this bill does nothing to provide a much-needed course correction for the policy.

This state of affairs is all the more regrettable because there are many dedicated professionals working in the CIA and elsewhere in our intelligence community who are forced to implement these questionable programs and policies. Some would agree with me that the entire enterprise is out of control and would benefit from much more focused and effective Congressional oversight. If this bill contained whistleblower protections for intelligence community employees, some of those individuals might well step forward to report what they know, and what they believe needs to be changed. But this bill contains no such protections, ensuring that the chilling threat of job retaliation remains in place. We will not restore true accountability and oversight over the intelligence community until such reforms are enacted, and which are absent from this bill. Accordingly, I cannot support it.

Mr. Speaker, as the Congress lurches from self-imposed crisis to self-imposed crisis, it is easy to understand why members of the public shake their heads in disgust at the inability of the government to do the important work of America to help Americans.

The negotiators of this deal should never have agreed to bargain under a hostage-taking deadline. Of course, for long term economic stability and growth we must have greater balance between revenue and expenditures. That means Congress should pay close attention day to day, month to month, to revenue and to spending and should bring them more into line. That should always be true, though, not just whenever someone says there is a crisis.

And say what you will, there is no good reason for a crisis now. The deadline is artificial. This ``fiscal cliff' is the result of a deal agreed to in August 2011 when some congressional members who dislike government tried to prevent the U.S. from paying our debts, and the White House and Congressional leaders allowed them to hold the government hostage and then to impose automatic spending cuts and tax increases in the most thoughtless, ham-handed way. And the negotiators should never have negotiated with hostage takers, or after the debt- ceiling confrontation was past, should never have let the hostage- takers demands live on.

As I see it, the big problem with the fiscal package before us today is that it was debated and negotiated on the terms set by the hostage takers in 2011. Instead of talking about what our government needs to do put people to work, to reduce unemployment, to educate Americans, to rebuild our roads and bridges, to stimulate vibrant and innovative industry, to tend to the nourishment, the housing, the cultural well- being of all Americans--and then doing those things--Congress and Administration have spent several months neglecting all the important work in front of us--drought relief, elementary and secondary education act, violence against women act, bridge repair, better transportation, better communication, reliable mail delivery, etc. etc. and instead focusing on such things as whether the marginal tax rate should be 36 percent or 39.6 percent for income earned above $250,000 or $450,000.

Why should the President, why should the Democratic leadership in Congress, have agreed to negotiate with hostage takers under contrived, media-fueled deadlines. Why should the President, why should the Democratic

leadership in Congress, have accepted the inane premise of the Tea Party and the Peterson Institute that our nation is defined by its debt and that we are in effect a poor, debtor nation and that the government is helpless in the face of that debt. There is no good answer to a bad question.

The premise of the deal before us is false, and the Democratic negotiators have been trying hard to find a good outcome based on that false premise. In fact, we do have a long term problem with the debt. We should work to correct it, but also we should recognize that it is long term. Meanwhile we have some immediate problems-- stubborn unemployment, a sluggish economy, crumbling infrastructure, and millions of Americans in need of housing and food. We should not allow our concern for the debt to paralyze our government, and thus prevent action on the immediate, critical problems affecting our people in the here and now. The blatant, sad irony is that dealing aggressively with those immediate problems--the very problems whose solutions are being pushed aside by the artificial, self-imposed debt crisis--also would be the best way of dealing with the long term debt problem. It would be the best way of generating the economic activity and growth necessary to put our people back to work and our debt in its place.

This deal was done in the wrong way. The postponed crisis will reappear with the debt crisis and sequestration and tax increases in March, and the President will be in a weaker, not stronger, position to deal with the crisis then. However, I do not want to make the situation worse by weakening the President's hand and weakening the economy by allowing the government so to speak to ``fall off the cliff', so with great reluctance I will support this bill.