Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

I appreciate that. That is the distinction that we need to make here. The Republican Party controls all the levels of government, the committees, the House, the Senate, the White House. What they say goes. We are an opposition party at this point, and they are the governing party. They are taking the country off the cliff is basically what is happening here.

The point I want to make to my friends in the 30-Something Group and to the Members who are watching and the American people is this. When this body was originally trying to figure out a way to pay for Katrina, all those pictures that you show, when they were originally trying to figure out a way to pay for this, you know what came up? Across-the- board cuts in all programs, 2 percent, in order to pay for this, across the board. Then, when the extreme right wing Republicans in the caucus came over and those corporate interests here in Washington, D.C., came over to the Hill and they started exerting their influence here, it changed because we cannot cut programs that the big-time lobbyists want. That would be wrong in Washington, D.C.

Notice what is being cut, notice. Look at the list: Medicaid, Head Start, college loans. There is not a program that is getting cut where the people can actually donate money to Congress. We cannot cut programs where people have to donate and they make big profits. Is that not a coincidence? Of all the programs we have, not one program is going to be cut in which a special interest would be hurt. What a shame. What a sham. It is a joke that we are going to ask Medicaid recipients, Head Start, free and reduced lunch, college loans. Those people are going to take the brunt of the hit to pay for a natural disaster.

I heard a columnist today say we are going to take from the dry poor and give to the wet poor, and is that not something?

Mr. Speaker, let me just say that it is great to have you here, and I think it shows that it does not matter whether I am a red State, Florida's a red State, Oklahoma unfortunately is a red State. You are the only blue Stater here, but I think what the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren) brings here is that there is this idea that we are trying to promote the Democratic agenda. This is about America. This is not a partisan issue.

I mean, help us out here. The kid who is getting Head Start or the kid that wants to go to college or the parents that are trying to pay for the school or whatever it may be, this is not a red State-blue State issue. I think the 30 Something Group is all about talking about what is best for the United States of America, and that means making sure that those people in your district have an opportunity to go to college, that they have a healthy start.

I think we have talked about that, and that is not a partisan issue. This is about what is doing what is best for the country.

That one program was for low-income folks?

This is almost hysterical, in a bad sense hysterical. We were in the Committee on Education and the Workforce today marking up the TANF bill. We offered an amendment to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Shot down. We offered an amendment that we wanted to give more money for people who were going from welfare to work, we were going to step in and provide them with child care, more money for child care. We have a study that says you need about $8 billion for these people to have adequate child care so they will actually get off the welfare rolls and get to work. That got shot down.

I appreciate that. I thank the gentleman. I thank the gentleman. The Republicans on the committee who have a majority of the folks on the committee shot all of those democratic amendments down. The Democrats offered to have a living

wage. The Democrats offered to increase money for child care so that you can go out into the work force and contribute to the economy and pay taxes. Now, our friend from Oklahoma says, well, even the program where low-income people want to strike out on their own and they want to start their own business, that program is getting cut.

What do you propose these people do? Is there an answer on that side? They are talking about this long and distinguished record of helping people. How? What do you mean? The poverty rate is going up, wages are stagnant, and it is harder to get into school, and tuition has doubled.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I think that is a tremendous point. The Democrats are offering up amendment after amendment on the floor, in committees. We have an agenda that we are trying to move forward here, and our agenda is pro taxpayer, and it is pro taxpayer because we make investments, just like you do in your home with your family. The best investment you can make with your kids long term: Education. It is going to save you money in the long run. That is what the Democrats want to do. We want to invest into health care and pay up front so that we do not have to pay more in the long run.

The Democrats are for preventative care with the community health centers, with clinics, so that people go to a clinic and get the antibiotics that they need or the basic care that they need, the preventive care that they need so they do not wander into an emergency room 2 weeks later with pneumonia and the taxpayer still has to pay for it. That is smart use of the taxpayer money. Investing in the student loans, I have said this a million times on this floor. We had a study in Ohio, University of Akron. For every dollar the State of Ohio invested into higher education, the State got $2 back in tax money. That is the investment the Democrats want to make. We are playing offense. We have an agenda here. We are not here just to criticize, although we could spend a lot of time making the proper criticisms.

Providing health care for young kids. If you do not get these kids health care at a young age on the Medicaid program, SCHIP, the programs that we want to fund, these kids are going to develop long-term diseases, illnesses that will cost us a lot more money. And not only that, if you have kids in the classroom and only half the kids have health care, they are going to get the kids that do have health care sick.

Let us reiterate that point right before we go. We have about 5 minutes left.

Every cut that is being made to fund the Katrina relief is being made to a group of people who do not donate to the Republican majority. They are Medicaid recipients. They are food stamp recipients, and they are college students and middle-class parents who do not have a big lobby group here.

Before I give the e-mail address, the cuts at the Federal level, it goes down to the States. The State has to make a decision to raise taxes; and then it goes from the State, the State is pushing it down to the counties, as was said; and many of us represent districts, the local communities which are some of the poorest in the country. So those people are choosing between raising their own taxes that they do not have, the person who does not have $10 because of the energy costs and everything else, versus funding for their local school because No Child Left Behind is not paid for or hiring more cops because the COPS grant has been cut. And that is the end line.

Our Web site is [email protected]. gov. We have been getting a ton of e-mails. Keep sending them. We love to get them.

I appreciate the strong cast we have here and maybe tomorrow or next week

we will be able to fill the whole Chamber up. Let us keep rolling.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman, and I want to welcome back the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), who we missed desperately last night.

And I announced last night that my brother had a baby last week.

Yes, that was my big announcement. His name is Nicholas John. So I will probably be saying that to every 30-Something for the next 6 months.

But we had a great discussion last night on so many different issues, and

the Katrina issue was one. I want to go back and sort of fill in the blanks here a little bit and let people know that the Democrats are proposing that we create an independent Katrina commission like we had an independent commission to oversee 9/11. And here is the bill, H.R. 3764.

We are asking for an independent commission, meaning Republicans or Democrats do not rule the commission. It is independent of this body. It is independent of the White House. It is like we had for 9/11. Because we feel, as Democrats, that what we all had to watch happen on TV was one of the great national tragedies, not only the natural disaster that happened but the response from a government that we have been promised over the last number of years would be adequately equipped to respond, would respond in a timely manner, and that they would have a coordinated response in order to save American lives if there was an emergency.

Because after 9/11, and since then, we have been told by this administration and by this Congress that we are protecting you. You are safe. It is okay. We are going to do it. We are the party that is strong with these kind of issues. Then we found out during Katrina that that just was not the case.

You throw that on top of what we are watching happen in Iraq, and we are losing our confidence. If you ask the American people, they are losing their confidence too. That is why over 80 percent of the American people in every poll that we have seen want this independent commission. But what the Republicans have set up is a real farce. They might as well put the Chair of the Republican National Committee in charge of the oversight committee of Katrina.

There are eleven Republicans and nine Democrats, which means the minority party is not allowed to subpoena witnesses. The Republican Chair of that committee and the other 10 Republicans on the committee will be the only ones who can subpoena people to come and testify before the committee and really give this thing a thorough overview and a good look-see and overturn every rock possible to figure out what the real problems were and what the real problems are.

This is not about politics. This is about making sure the United States post-September 11 has an adequate emergency response system in place regardless of where you live. Because that could very easily been New York, it could have been L.A., or it could have been Youngstown, it could have been Miami. It just so happened to be New Orleans and it happened to be a natural disaster instead of a terrorist attack.

But if it was a terrorist attack, we cannot explain how we would have responded any differently. It was about communication and coordination and all these other things that we need to ensure for the American people. And we believe that an independent commission that is free of politics is the only thing that is going to give us those answers. That is what the Democratic Party is asking for, that is what the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) is asking for, and that is what 80 percent of the American people are asking for.

That is a joke.

Does that not say a lot about what we are dealing with in the leadership today?

It is all about what is my title. After the greatest natural disaster in the country and everything that is going on, you are talking about your title.

That just proves what we talk about a lot here with the 30- Somethings. It is more politics than it is policy. It is more politics than it is actually fixing the problems.

Evident by, my God, this guy is worried about his title after Katrina. Give me a break.

Right.

Terrible.

It is not random.

Mr. Speaker, as far as I can see, there are not any.

Mr. Speaker, we can blame the FEMA people complaining about their title and all of that stuff, but who appoints these people? These people are appointed by the President of the United States. This goes to his judgment to hire a horse attorney, not a horse's attorney; but he is an attorney for equestrian activity, that is what this gets to.

This President appointed this person, and he appointed the other people. The top seven or eight people who were involved in the top FEMA flow chart were appointees from President Bush, and they were not qualified. They had no emergency management experience. We need change in the government today. We need to change the way the situation is. We need to change the leadership. We need to reform the way we do business. We need to change the way we do business, and you do that through an independent commission, not through politics.

Do Members think that the majority party here, the Republican Party, is going to somehow oversee this whole process and dig up and say, What were we thinking? This guy was asking about his title during the greatest natural disaster in the history of the country. They are not going to highlight that and say maybe that was a little bit of the problem. They are going to do their best to keep that out of the press. Fortunately, that stuff makes its way in. But why not have an independent commission, bipartisan, to figure out exactly what happened. If we do not implement this change, we are going to be in real trouble the next time this happens.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, they can e-mail us at [email protected]. They can e-mail and be a citizen cosponsor, but call their Members of Congress, call their Senators. I mean that is what really needs to happen.

Mr. Speaker, they can go to the website at www.housedemocrats.gov/Katrina or they can e-mail us. We will put them on either way. But I think it is important we also need to get ahold of the people who represent folks at home, who come down to Washington, D.C. for 3 and 4 days during the course of a week, and let those folks know that this is something they are interested in because it speaks to more than just this legislation. It speaks to the independence that we think needs to oversee this process. It also speaks to the kind of change that we need in government. We need this kind of independence. We cannot have people holding us back to make the proper decisions in government, and that is happening way too much down here.

Third-party validators.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, there is no doubt about it, to be so far removed. And if we look back, we have got three wars going on right now and four tax cuts primarily to people who make hundreds and hundreds of thousands, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800,000-plus, billionaires who are getting these kind of tax cuts, and then not only to do this. After Katrina we have got a $500 billion deficit. Now we are going to cut $10 billion out of the Medicaid program for low-income folks who need health care and their kids. $9 billion out of college students loans. What? It is so competitive out in the world today, and we are going to cut student loans? And throughout this whole process, through 9/11, the war, Katrina, natural disasters in the gulf coast, hurricanes last year, all this stuff that has been going on, not one time has the President asked those people who make more than $1 million can they maybe help us out a little bit? A novel idea. Please, somebody who makes more than $1 million, help us. And he is the President of the United States, for God sakes. He can call these people into his office and ask them for help. Ask them for assistance. We need to balance the budget. We need to make investments in education. We need to make sure that the poor folks and the middle class folks in our country have adequate health care coverage.

And then with the wounds wide open, to throw a little salt in it, he repeals the Davis-Bacon provision, which says that for the Federal money being spent to rebuild the gulf coast after Katrina that the people working would have to get prevailing wage in that area. And the prevailing wage in that area is 9 or 10 bucks an hour, and the President repealed that so the Federal money going to that area does not have to be prevailing wage. How much lower is he going to go? He is trying to help these people, and they want to go back and rebuild their community, and he is saying no. He is going to say we are going to pay them minimum wage. That is salt in the wound.

And those same people are going to be the same folks who will probably need Medicaid, who still want to send their kids to school and need the student loan and the Pell grant, which is being cut by $9 billion. Meanwhile, and I am going to just reiterate what the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) said before we got here, all the while we are spending $20 billion in reconstruction in Iraq, building and renovating 110 primary health care centers, vaccinated 3.2 million children, rehabbed 2,700 schools and trained 36,000 secondary teachers, funded 3,100 community development projects, and provided housing for tens of thousands of Iraqis. Meanwhile, we are repealing the prevailing wage provision for our own people? We are cutting health care and student loans for our own people? This is outrageous. This is absolutely outrageous what is going on.

We need change in the government. We need reform. We need people to come down here who are not going to be so tied to the special interests to be independent and make independent decisions for the best interests of this country, not any other, and in the process hurt our country.

We are not making this up.

I really think if I was not here and coaching some football in high school in Ohio and I was flipping through and watching us, if I was not exactly plugged in as much as we are, I would think they have got to be making this up. I mean, they just cannot be serious about all of this stuff. They have got to be fudging the facts or misrepresenting them or putting a certain spin on it like they do in

What is coming out of the conservative think tanks at this time, well, what is going to happen is these workers are going to get this extra money from the prevailing wage, and they are going to give it to the unions. Then it is just going to pad the union coffers.

I do not know if you have the chart there or not, union membership in the three hardest hit gulf States, the highest was 10. The lowest was four, and another one was like five. Five percent of the workers were union workers. It was just nonsense, and then you look how many union members are there, none basically. None.

I agree. We want to take the country in a new direction, in another direction.

Since 1994, the Republicans have held this Chamber. The President has been in for 5 years. They have controlled the Senate on and off for a good while over the past decade and a half. We want to take the country in another direction, because if you look at the leadership, I just believe that because of the lack of experience they just are not governing. They just do not know how to govern.

When you look at the increased poverty rates, when you look at wages, when you look at what is going on with companies like Delphi and General Motors, when you look at the health care crisis in this country, when you look at the poverty crisis, the cuts for school funding and local communities, libraries being cut, prisons and jails that cannot handle the load that is coming in, in every single aspect here, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, every single aspect here has been the ball has been dropped.

We want to take the country in a new direction, in a better place, with the changes that I think the Democratic Party wants to provide.

If you want to e-mail us, it is [email protected], and let us know if you want to be a citizen cosponsor of the independent Katrina commission, which we think would be the best way in a nonpartisan, bipartisan way to try to address the issues, and I thank my good friend from Florida for the opportunity to join both my colleagues here tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I want to welcome our newest 30- something member joining us from New Jersey this evening; but before I get into it, I want to make an announcement. Since we left here last week, we had last week off, and since we left here, there has been an addition to the Ryan family. My brother had a baby last Friday night on his birthday. Nicholas John Ryan. So I want to welcome him into the world officially, and say hello to his first two friends, Zack and Molly Leonard, who were all over to the house the other day, and I fed the baby for the first time the other day. So here I had the bottle, and I fed him. It was great.

Well, see, I took a week and I watched. I was very timid. I did not want to make any mistakes, so I watched for a while. I watched my brother. I was being a little hesitant with the bottle, and my brother is like, jam it in there, you are not going to hurt the kid. So you pick up and gain a little confidence, and then I burped the kid. It was great. Bingo.

And the godfather. I am also going to be the godfather.

Yes. So this is a lot of pressure. You think being a Member of Congress is a lot of pressure, try being the godfather to the first new baby in the family.

So that for me has kind of changed my perspective, and it makes all of the stuff we talk about here that much more important because you begin to see the timetable, the effect our decisions have over the long term.

I know a couple weeks ago when we left, we were talking about this administration, this Congress putting people in charge of key positions, in charge of key processes that need to happen here, whether it was in FEMA, Medicare, or regardless of what it is. There has been, over the past 5 to 10 years in this body and now in the executive branch, a host of cronyistic appointments to key positions. There have been people put in key positions, like FEMA, that have absolutely no experience whatsoever. All we are saying in this Chamber from the Democratic side is give us a chance to run this place. Give us an opportunity to be able to handle the levers of government and allow us to lead.

That is the opportunity that we are asking the American people for, my good friends, because our colleagues who have had the levers of government over the past, since 1994 in the House and since 2000 in the White House and in the Senate, have not been able to govern. They just have not been able to do it.

You do not have to look very far. Ask yourself sitting at home, what is going on here? I mean, we have higher energy costs, we have more people in poverty, we have tuition costs that have doubled, we have our FEMA administration that has been devastated financially. We have put cronies in key governmental positions. We are leaking information about CIA agents. I mean, what good is going on right now? Somebody please help me.

We are bogged down in a war that is costing us $1.5 billion a week. I repeat, $1.5 billion a week. We are getting our clock cleaned by China. Delphi, the largest auto supplier in the country, filed for bankruptcy. They are asking their workers to take 60 percent pay cuts. I have over 5,000 workers in my district, in Warren, Ohio. What positive is happening today due to the Republican leadership in the House, Republican leadership in the Senate, and the Republican leadership in the White House? I cannot seem to find anything.

I think this country deserves a lot better, and I think we need to start talking about that, my good friends. This country deserves better. After September 11, this President had more political capital than any President probably since FDR after Pearl Harbor, and he asked the American people to go shopping. That is the best leadership you can come up with in the United States of America? We deserve a little better than that, I think.

He did not start an alternative energy policy, not to fix the health care system that is a mess, not to take care of the millions and millions of young kids that live in poverty, not fund No Child Left Behind. What are we doing? The biggest leadership move is to ask the country to go shopping? What is that? That is terrible. That is terrible leadership.

We have given this President the opportunity time and time and time again to lead, and he has not done it. He has not done it. And now the whole Delphi situation, which I am a little too intimate with because of the workers in my district. And General Motors. I have a General Motors plant in my district. Believe me, I understand why the corporations are doing what they are doing. The rising costs of health care are crippling the American businessperson. Crippling the corporation and the small businessperson.

So now they are trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip in the form of asking middle-class citizens in the United States of America to get less health care or to pay for more health care, whether they are in a union or not in a union, instead of addressing the key issue, which is that the insurance lobby and the health care lobby and the pharmaceutical lobby which has a stranglehold around the United States Congress.

Let us be honest. How about a little straight talk from the House floor tonight? Check it out. When you are passing the Medicare prescription drug bill, there are four lobbyists for every one Member of Congress; and I know I did not have a lobbyist, I did not have one, let alone four, so somebody had eight. Now, imagine that. When we get this health care issue under control, that will release a lot of potential that can get freed up, investments that could be made back in the United States of America.

For example, and I am sorry because we have been dealing with this for the last week, with the Delphi situation, this money that this corporation saves, and we all want to save Delphi. We want it to be a solvent company and we want them to maintain the work that they have in Ohio. Of course we do. The way the system is set up is any savings that they get, they are going to invest that money into China. That is what they are going to do. So the whole system is screwed up to where you are forcing corporations to invest into these other countries.

Here we have an opportunity with this independent commission to oversee a problem with the government through FEMA, the problems that FEMA had, to oversee it in an independent manner like the 9/11 Commission, and the Republican leadership put the kibosh on it. They put together a bust-out committee that is 11 Republicans, 9 Democrats, that is going to totally, totally, whitewash this thing. Get out the Brillo pads because they do not want the truth to come out. The Democrats will not have any subpoena power. Get a Republican Governor, a Democratic former Member of Congress, put together an independent commission and let us try to fix this problem. Let us try to fix this in a way that we are putting partisanship aside.

Mr. Speaker, next we will hear from the newest member of the 30- Somethings, and we charge him two sets of dues because he is almost 30- Something twice.

Mr. Speaker, that is because the gentleman is almost his age. Tell the American people how old you are.

See, he graduates out of the 30-somethings next year. I am going to be a one-man show.

You are welcome here every time we are here, my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to highlight that fact. This totally puts into perspective what happens down here under their leadership.

We have a prescription drug bill that we spent $700-some billion over the next 10 years on, but we were told it was $400 billion. So that is another issue, to start a prescription drug Medicare program, and we are not doing anything to control the costs, whether it is reimportation from Canada or to allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to buy in bulk.

There would be every Medicare beneficiary behind that proposal. And you can say Merck, you want to negotiate this, we want 30 to 40 percent chopped off, and they would do it because they want the contract. We would not have to create a new bureaucracy. If people think the old Democrat Party wants to create a new bureaucracy, they are wrong. This is a progressive idea of giving the Administrator already in place the power. It is a progressive idea that makes sense, but you can only do it if you are not tied to the pharmaceutical lobby like our friends on the other side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) has been resilient in pushing us to get up to the floor once or twice a week. I just saw a poll last week that had 60 percent of the independent voters in the country are sick and tired of what has been going on in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Wagner from General Motors said D.C. better do something about health care. We are not doing anything. What we are doing seems like we are doing something, but the energy bill is not really doing anything.

The gentleman mentioned the $1.5 billion a week that we are spending in Iraq. I want to share one thing. This is a great article today in the Washington Post. The first line says it feels like the 1990s minus the good parts, all of the scandals that were going on, but the economy, energy costs and everything is bad.

There was a proposal made, and talking about dealing with the Chinese, we need to offer, and that is what we are doing as Democrats, we just need to convince the American people that we are offering alternatives and do have ideas, whether it is prescription drugs or alternative energy.

I want to share a proposal from the National Academies and it is a combination of a variety of different things to get our math scores up. Our math scores in 8th grade, we ranked 15th internationally and in the 9th grade we ranked 24th internationally. We are not going to stimulate the economy if we do not have engineers and math and science majors, and the 30-Something Group is calling for a million new engineers and scientists over the next 10 years because we believe that is going to be the greatest stimulus.

But let me share the proposal from the National Academies to spend money on math prizes for high schoolers, pay raises for math teachers and to boost Federal research funding by 10 percent annually for 7 years. That would cost $10 billion a year. That is it. We are spending $1.5 billion a week in Iraq. The American people judge, $10 billion a year on increased Federal funding for research and development and targeted investments to increase math and science scores in the United States of America among K-12 school kids. That is what the Democrats want to do, versus $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, versus hundreds of thousands and millions and trillions of dollars over the next 10 years in tax cuts for people who make more than $600,000 a year.

Pick what they want. Democrats, increased funding for Pell grants to lower tuition costs. Republicans, cut taxes for the top 1 percent. Trillions.

Democrats, fully fund No Child Left Behind, make sure every kid who is eligible for more funding, for afterschool tutoring, summer school, before school; Democrats are for full funding of that. Republicans, no. We have to give our tax cuts to our buddies.

And that is the difference. Time and time again and over the course of the next year, we are just going to hammer the differences between the two parties.

We have said it 1 million times. Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution creates the House of Representatives. The people of the country govern. Anything that is created from there we have oversight of, and that is the essence of this democracy. We try to represent the republic that we have. This is our job, overseeing FEMA.

We write the checks out of this body. The checks come if you are going to write the checks but not oversight.

Exactly. So they are picking their own personal political situation over what is best for the American people. Can you think of a better reason to take someone out of their leadership position?

We all play politics here. We are just here. You get 435 people in a room, there is going to be politics. We understand that, but when you consistently and constantly pick your own personal political interests over the public interests, even if it means not getting to the bottom line, not getting to the kind of reforms that are going to be needed, then that is a real problem, I think, and I think the American people from the polls and from the people we talk to in our district seem to feel the same way.

Let me do this, we want to give the e-mail address, [email protected].

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be back and continue our discussion here. I hope for the next hour, my good friend, we can talk about something that I think is very important for the Democratic Party and what the future of the Democratic Party is all about, and that is reforming government. We are the party of reform. We have offered alternatives, as we have talked about in the past hour and over the past several weeks, that have been ignored; but we are not going to let that stop us. We are going to continue to talk throughout the rest of this year and into next year about the different reform measures that we are going to propose, and we are going to be critical of what we think is a broken system in general and broken systems in general, all of these different systems in our government.

I was thinking about this and talking about this last night, about how our government runs today; and our government really runs today totally designed like an industrial-age system. It is almost like an assembly line. We have our health care over here and our education is over here and our foreign policy is over here and our research is over here, and none of the component parts are allowed to ever come together. That is an old assembly line kind of system. You deal with this part and you put that part on and then that part, and everything is separated.

Government in the 21st century needs to be integrated and unified. A health care system that does not teach healthy eating habits and has a diverse physical education requirement in our schools or gives our kids good food in our schools, that is not a comprehensive health care system. Because at some point we are going to pay the bill for obesity or diabetes, or whatever may come from the long-term effects of not having a healthy diet. And one day, somebody is going to be on Medicare, and we are going to have to pay the price.

I want to just talk for a couple of minutes about what is going on with Delphi and their bankruptcy and how I think the system right now is a bit broken. Basically, over the last 30 years or so, this company and their workers have generated a lot of wealth over the past 30 years. A lot of people in Ohio and in Mississippi and all over the country have made money. Workers were paid well, and they had pensions and benefits and health care coverage and everything else. The wealth that these workers created was taken and invested in China, first in Mexico, then in China. And now, because of all of that that has happened, we increased the global supply of labor, that is driving down the wages here in the United States of America, which leads to Delphi filing bankruptcy because they cannot compete with their competitors who are doing a lot of business in China.

It just is something broken when a worker or a group of workers who create wealth and that money is taken

and invested somewhere else comes back to bite you on the behind. And now their company is filing for bankruptcy. The workers are going to be asked to take, they are asking them now to take about a 60 percent pay cut. Now, there is not a person in the world, there is not a person in the United States for sure who could take a 60 percent pay cut in the course of a few months and not file bankruptcy. How do you do that? I do not care if you are making $40,000 or $200,000 a year. If you are asked to take a 60 percent pay cut, you are going to have to file bankruptcy.

So the squeeze is on the workers here in the United States. Many people may say, well, those workers are making $27 an hour, that is a lot of money; and that is a whole other argument. But the bottom line is, there is going to be in my community $150 million pulled out of our local economy.

Absolutely, they are going to lose their homes.

Madam Speaker, the ultimate question is, and that is why we need to issue a reform agenda for the country, because it just seems like nothing is really working right now the way the system is currently set up, and there are a lot of arguments against it, but it is based on a world that really no longer exists.

The idea of comparative advantage, the great free trade concept of comparative advantage is from the 1800s. I mean, trying to apply it to a society today that is so much different than it was a few hundred years ago. So our reform agenda that the Democrats are promoting is to reform the way government works. Whether it is the way workers here who have created a lot of wealth and their wealth is then invested into China, to steal their own jobs and wages and benefits and everything else, or to argue literally for a supply-side economic theory where you cut taxes for the top 1 percent, and, the theory goes, they invest in the United States and that creates wealth here.

Well, who in their right mind thinks a millionaire who gets a couple hundred thousand dollars back is investing in the United States? They are investing the money in China or they are going to invest it in mutual funds in different investment schemes in China. They are not investing it in the United States. If people were investing in the United States, companies like Delphi would not be going bankrupt. And that is the bottom line.

The question for America is, Who is investing in the United States today? We have cut taxes; we have a huge budget deficit, so the government does not have any money to make any progressive investments like magnetic levitation trains or education or scientists and engineers, or research and development. And then you cut taxes for the top 1 percent, and they take that money and they invest it in China. Who is investing in the United States? That is the ultimate question. I think that the government has a responsibility. It cannot do it all, but we need to certainly create an environment in which it is okay to do business and it is worthwhile for people to make the proper investments, and that brings up why we need to reform the health care system.

I was just talking to a gentleman who runs a hospital in Youngstown, Ohio. The one hospital left in Youngstown, with a population of about between 80,000 and 90,000, almost 90,000, they do about $50 million a year in charity care. $50 million. These are people who walk into the emergency room because they have nowhere to go. Do you know how much money we are wasting by waiting until they come into the emergency room? That makes no business sense at all. You cannot be a businessperson and analyze our health care system and think in any way, shape, or form it makes any sense.

Would it not be smarter to maybe give them access to a clinic to where they could take some preventive measures, get their antibiotics, take care of a cold instead of pneumonia. Pregnancies, as far as pregnancies go, have the prenatal care, whatever it takes, expand SCHIPS, do these things that will take care of the preventive side, instead of emergency room care. The taxpayer is paying either way. The current system is cheating the taxpayer. It is no good.

They are open. They are open.

Right.

Bingo.

And the poverty numbers are up so there are going to be more people applying for this or qualify for this program.

They are not pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Can I ask a question? Where is the Christian Coalition? Where is the Christian Coalition when you are cutting poverty programs? Where are you? You know, they are fighting over Supreme Court justices and meanwhile poverty programs are being cut for poor people.

Now I do not know. 12 years of Catholic school, and I know you had a religious upbringing as well. Where is the Christian voice in all of this? All of a sudden silence. Medicare, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, which would help more in high poverty schools than any other. Where is the Christian right? Silence. Silence. Because they are getting overrun by the corporate greed and the corruption and the cronyism that is going on here. That is the problem. Right under their nose.

Join us. You talked about Medicaid. You talked about poverty. You talked about Head Start. You talked about helping people that cannot help themselves. I cannot think of anything more Christian. I do not want to get religious, because this is a public forum. But it has been invoked time and time again from the other side.

We hear it every day.

Let us put all this together here because as I am listening

here; I am beginning to see how this is coming together. Let us see if we can outline this here. If you are poor or working poor, which is the dark underbelly of the United States of America, the working poor that do not qualify for Medicaid so they do not have health care but they are working a couple of jobs and they are trying to make ends meet. So if you are in that class, this outfit, the Republican outfit that we have in right now wants to cut Medicaid, is not funding No Child Left Behind, they are cutting Head Start and we have a health care system that is a wreck. Watching health care in America is like watching a train wreck happen. It is terrible.

So if you are poor or working poor, those programs are getting cut, school lunches, all the other good stuff. And you probably live in a community where you are having criminal justice issues like we are having in a lot of our communities where you cannot afford the prison, the jail. You do not have enough sheriffs, deputies to run the jail. You do not have enough police on the beat. And if you do, you put them in the court system and they wait and wait and they get back on the street. A whole other set of the issues.

If you are in the middle class, the Republican majority has done nothing for Pell grants to try to reduce the cost of college tuition when tuition has doubled in just about every State in the Union in the past 5 years.

If you are in the middle class trying to provide health care, if you are a union worker in Delphi or some other UAW or something else, you are getting squeezed. If you are part of the 45 million or 50 million now that do not have health care, you are getting squeezed. If you are a middle-class small businessperson, you are getting squeezed. We get calls every day in my office about small businessmen and women who cannot afford to provide health care for their workers. Squeezed.

If you are in the upper middle class and you are trying to provide health care, it is not working. These systems that we have in place are broken; and instead of fixing them, instead of reforming the system or the systems, our ideas are so antiquated, old school, supply-side economics in a world where that does not work. Look around. I mean, look around. This does not work. It is crazy.

What are we doing here? We have a reform agenda that invests in education, invests in research and development, helps kids with math and science, fully funds No Child Left Behind, puts money into the Pell grants so your kids can go to college and afford it, reforms the health care system to move the investment on the preventative side instead of on the tail end when people are so sick and acutely ill that it costs so much more money.

The reforms that we want to make on the preventative side provide for mental health coverage so people do not go out and commit crimes who are mentally ill because they have medication or they have some basic counseling which saves us money. We are cheating the taxpayer right now. They want to tell us we were tax and spend. They are borrow and spend. And they are not even spending it right. They are spending at a billion and a half a week in Iraq. They are giving it to billionaires. That is not good government.

That stinks. That is not right. It is just not right because average people are suffering. Let me say this, we do not come to this floor for what this week will probably be 3 or 4 hours. All day we are here and we get an opportunity to come at night. We are not doing this for therapy. We are not doing this because we like to come down here and listen to each other talk. If we wanted to do that, we would go out and grab a hamburger and a Starbuck's and go talk and drink some green tea. We are here because the country is unraveling before our very eyes, and the Republican leadership is either doing nothing or doing something to make it worse.

The Democrats have an agenda on health care, education. We are ready to reform. We are ready to take over. We just need the chance. And I know from people in my district and from the gentleman's district and from the district of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone), people are suffering; and the government is part of the problem now. Maybe Ronald Reagan was right, government is the problem. Right now it is. But I think government can be a positive, progressive leading force in society with the proper leadership. And right now it is just not happening. But we are not doing this stuff for therapy.

We could be going out and having dinners and everything else. We have come here because this country needs reform; and if no one else is going to talk about it, then the 30-something group is going to step up and implement an agenda and talk about the agenda that is going to make this country better.

Where is the outrage? Where is the outrage? They are outraged about Harriet Miers? Wait a minute, here is a woman who has a distinguished legal career. And I do not want to give the whole Supreme Court thing here, because that happens on the other side of the Capitol, but here is a distinguished lawyer. Now, I am not so convinced that she may be the best Supreme Court Justice pick, but, my goodness, to be outraged at that? How about being outraged at both? How about that? Be outraged at both. Be outraged about Harriet Miers, and be outraged about this too. My goodness.

I want to just go back, and I think this week, whenever we get our next hour to come this week, I think that is a great idea, to talk about that. As you were going through the poor and the middle class that is getting squeezed harder and harder, you made a great point that it is our job as Members of Congress to advocate on behalf of those people. I think that has a moral component to it. I want to set that moral component aside. I want to talk for 2 minutes, because we are wrapping up here, about economics.

We talked about who is investing in the United States. Not many people. We are talking about even the government now is cutting programs that would invest in these young people and these poor middle- class people that we need economically, like the 30-somethings are calling for a million new scientists and engineers over the next decade in the United States of America to generate our economy again. That is what we are saying. That is investment into human capital here in the United States.

We need these poor people to turn into with health care, education, and we are going to talk a little this week or next week about the arts programs that we believe if started at an early age, afterschool programs, will increase math and science scores. And we are going to bring some third-party validators and some studies that have been done to back up that argument and why the arts are a good component of feeding into this math and science goal that we have.

We have to recognize that investments into Medicaid, with reform, and we need to reform the system too, do not get me wrong; but investments in Medicaid, and investments in Head Start, and investments in the No Child Left Behind, and investments in the Pell grants are going to lead to more wealth in the United States of America. We are going on the field right now with half of our society not eligible to play in the game.

All these poor kids that we saw down in New Orleans, it is the same in Miami, it is the same in Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Toledo, Cincinnati, and Columbus. There are core pockets of very, very poor people in our country. And all we are saying is, invest in those people so that they can go out and create wealth for the United States of America.

The Ohio State football team would not go on the field with five players. It does not make sense. You need to have everybody on your team. And quite frankly, our country is only 300 million. We are competing against over a billion Chinese citizens and over a billion Indian citizens. If you are going to compete with them, you better have every single player on the field prepared, conditioned, and ready to move forward.

So when we talk about Medicaid, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and Pell grants, we want reform on these systems because we want to make them better and convert them into the 21st century, but we have to make the proper investments into our people. That is the bottom line.

There is the moral component that we talk about, hopefully not just on

Sundays, but there is also this economic component too that I think is going to help stimulate the economy in the 21st century if we make those investments. But today we are not making them. So we cannot expect something to happen when we are not doing anything. It just does not make any sense.

I will let my colleague make a final comment or two and then we will wrap it up and give out the e-mail address.

I hope you feel better. My colleague from Florida was down last week, sick as a dog.

Well, we are going to do our best. If you are not watching baseball tonight and you were watching the 30-something Dems, our e-mail is the [email protected]. We have been getting a ton of e-mails lately, so do not be afraid to drop us an e-mail. We appreciate everybody who is listening and watching, and I appreciate my colleague fighting through a cold to be down here with us.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the words of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek). I think we need to be absolutely clear that after all this time when we are talking about the committee that passed out of this House, this is a committee, 11 to 9, Republicans 11, Democrats 9; and what we are arguing from our side of the aisle, why not have an independent commission like for 9/11. That was a commission that worked, that solved problems, and that was bipartisan. Why would we not want that to happen again. We have seen time and time again, over the past 5 years in particular, when there was no check on the Republican power in the House and the Senate, that time and time again we have been getting bad information from the leadership here in the House of Representatives, the Republican leadership. We have been getting bad information. If you want to talk about the war, bad information. Why would we want the Republican majority in Congress to oversee the information and the intelligence and everything else that came from the war. It is the fox guarding the hen house.

And when we talk about the Medicare prescription drug bill, it started out $400 billion. That is all it is going to cost. Then we find out months later it was $700 billion. Why would we want the majority party who originally gave us the bad information to then oversee the investigation into the bad information that they gave us in the first place.

After Hurricane Katrina, after one of the great national and natural disasters in the history of the United States of America, decimated FEMA, terrible response on all levels, there is plenty of blame to go around, Federal, State and local, why would we want the party who is in charge to oversee their own investigation.

Give the American people an honest assessment of how things worked and what the mistakes were, because at the end of the day, this is about fixing the problem because that could have been, that very well could have been a biological attack in New Orleans. And the response was terrible. So why would we want the Republican majority to oversee the Republican mistakes and expect at the end of the day that we are going to get an honest assessment. It just does not make any sense.

Madam Speaker, I want to welcome the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) to the 30-something Group.

Madam Speaker, I think it is not only the corruption, and I think all of us here choose that word very carefully. I do not think that is the kind of word you just throw around here, because that is not right. But time after time after time, the White House, the White House, the procurement office, the FBI leaks, what we have here going on in the House, the Senate, we have a whole Martha Stewart scandal going on in the Senate. All of these things add up. At some point you have to use the ``C'' word because it keeps coming and coming and coming.

But the problem for the American people is that the corruption leads to incompetence and an inability to govern. This side has proven time and time again that they do not know how to govern in the United States of America.

You look at Hurricane Katrina, the economy, education, health care, gas prices, energy, pick a topic. It is incompetence, and they cannot handle the levers of government.

Madam Speaker, I welcome the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

If they don't like the science, change the science.

Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, the gentleman is exactly right. They are not qualified. They are ideologues. And I want to share with my colleagues a couple quotes here. They are not competent to hold a position, but yet they hold an ideology that they want to implement. And I want to just share with my colleagues that a gentleman from Heritage Foundation says that conservatives at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere have advocated regarding Katrina that any recovery package begin with the understanding that the liberal social welfare programs of the last century failed the poor in every imaginable way. He added that the unique circumstances created by Katrina are an unprecedented opportunity to push for radical change.

They want to implement their ideology, and they want to say that the social programs that the Democrats put in over the last 40 years somehow failed. What? Social Security that lifted 50 percent of the seniors out of poverty, Medicare that provided health care for seniors a failure?

Save their political appointments for the ambassadorships with a lot of beachfront property. That is where they put their political people. And we understand that happens. Do not put them in charge of FEMA. Do not put them in a position where if they do not like the science, then change the science.

FDA? They have got to be kidding me.

Madam Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, if I may add something, the shame of the whole matter is, it is about priorities. We have time to pass tax cuts through this Chamber that give billionaires and millionaires hundreds of thousands of dollars, billions of dollars for the oil industry, to pass a prescription drug bill that does nothing to contain costs, so it is a billions of dollars in giveaways to the pharmaceutical companies, and then the reality is, that money has to come from somewhere. So this kid does not have goggles and some average American has to go out and buy them.

People say, well, what is the government doing? You know what we are

doing here? You know what the Republican leadership here is doing? They are giving billions of dollars in tax credits and subsidies to the oil industry. That is what they are doing. They are giving Warren Buffett and Bill Gates a tax cut. That is what they are doing.

Here is where we ask for the opportunity to lead the country. Democrats are asking the American people for an opportunity to lead this country, and say if your priority is for that kid to have the goggles he needs, that is the priority of the Democratic Party; in health care and education, that is the priority of the Democratic Party.

We want a chance to govern, because this outfit has dropped the ball.

This is the Democratic bill that establishes a congressional commission to examine Federal, State and local response to the devastation by Hurricane Katrina. It is an independent commission.

What we are doing, we want to ask the American people and other Members of Congress to support this and become a citizen cosponsor of this bill, at www.housedemocrats.gov/katrina. This is an opportunity for all Americans to participate in the movement to try to establish an independent commission. Get rid of the partisanship, get rid of the nonsense, let us get some real oversight here.

If the gentleman will yield further, the reason we want to do this is because the record over the past few years has been simple: Everything that happened, everything that was told to us prior to the war, has not been true. No one has been held responsible for that at all. No oversight. We were told that the prescription drug bill was only going to cost $400 billion. We find out after it is $700 billion. No oversight, no one is held responsible for it. And on and on and on. The budget projections, the economy, gas, energy costs, everything, no oversight, no one is being held responsible, and we think that it is in the best interests of the American people to have an independent commission.

Pork.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity for us to just grab a few more minutes here and finish up, the 30-something working group that we have here, and we want to kind of end the conversation tonight talking a little bit about a recent periodical that we like to call Newsweek. It is about the power outage. And we have mentioned a couple of words here tonight, competence or lack thereof, and cronyism.

Now, we like, at the 30-something working group, to get third party validators. And here on the cover of Newsweek, GOP, a mounting crisis of competence and cronyism, which I think is exactly what we have been talking about here tonight.

Madam Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record an article here, Tom DeLay's House of Shame, by Jonathan Alter.

Before yielding to the gentleman, I would like to just share a little bit a couple of the quotes. I want to share a couple of quotes from this article today or this week. This gentleman is saying, Mr. Alter is saying that historians will regard this as the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives. That is pretty sad. And that Congress has always had its share of extremists, but the DeLay era is the first time the fringe has ever been in charge. And when we talked about Katrina, we talked about trying to implement this extremist agenda, regardless of what the circumstances are, and using Katrina as an opportunity to implement this agenda. I want to just share one more quote before we open it up here of what then House majority leader Mr. DeLay said after the hurricanes, and I quote, that Katrina and Rita ``introduced a valuable forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democratic controlled Congress of past decades.'' The crumbling or the triumph of our ideas. Triumph of our ideas. I mean, let's just look at where we are right now. Triumph of the Republican ideas? What? Increased poverty? Stagnant wages? Health care going up by 15 to 20 percent a year? Pharmaceutical costs going up by 20 percent a year. What triumph of ideas?

A deficit, $500 billion? Now that is not even factoring in the war, a war that we got ram-rodded into, lied into. Is that the great triumph of ideas?

We are borrowing it from China. We do not even have the money.

And how many years the majority said about the Democratic controlled Congress tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend. Well, the last 10 years and the last 5 years in particular, borrow and spend. We are borrowing the money from China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, a lot of people who do not have really friendly interests with the United States of America. And the problem is, we have got to pay interest on the money we are borrowing. Reckless fiscal policy, incompetence, corruption, cronyism, time and time and time again.

Tom DeLay's House of Shame

(By Jonathan Alter)

A decade ago, I paid a call on Tom Delay in his Ornate

office in the Capitol. I had heard a rumor about him that I

figured could not possibly be true. The rumor was that after

the GOP took control of the House that Year, DeLay had begun

keeping a little black book with the names of Washington

lobbyists who wanted to come see him. If the lobbyists were

not Republicans and contributors to his power base, they

didn't get into ``the people's House.'' DeLay not only

confirmed the story, he showed me the book. His time was

limited, DeLay explained with a genial smile. Why should he

open his door to people who were not on the team?

Thus began what historians will regard as the single most

corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House

of Representatives. Come on, you say. How about all those

years when congressmen accepted cash in the House chamber and

then staggered onto the floor drunk? Yes, special interests

have bought off members of Congress at least since Daniel

Webster took his seat while on the payroll of a bank. And

yes, Congress over the years has seen dozens of sex scandals

and dozens of members brought low by financial improprieties.

But never before has the leadership of the House been

hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a

ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their

richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for

ordinary people. These folks borrow like banana republics and

spend like Tip O'Neill on speed.

I have no idea if DeLay has technically broken the law.

What interests me is how this moderate, evenly divided nation

came to be ruled on at least one side of Capitol Hill by a

zealot. This is a man who calls the Environmental Protection

Agency ``the Gestapo of government'' and favors repealing the

Clean Air Act because ``it's never been proven that air

toxins are hazardous to people''; who insists repeatedly that

judges on the other side of issues ``need to be intimidated''

and rejects the idea of a separation of church and state; who

claims there are not parents trying to raise families on the

minimum wage--that ``fortunately, such families no not

exist'' (at least Newt Gingrich was intrigued by the

challenges of poverty); who once said: ``A woman can't take

care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure.'' I

could go on all day. Congress has always had its share of

extremists. But the DeLay era is the first time the fringe

has ever been in charge.

The only comparison to DeLay & Co. might be the Radical

Republicans of the 1860s. But the 19th-century Radical

Republican agenda was to integrate and remake the South. The

21st-century Radical Republican agenda is to enact the wish

list of the tobacco and gun lobbies, repeal health and safety

regulations and spend billions on shameless pork-barrel

projects to keep the GOP at the trough. Another analogy is to

Republican Speaker Joe Cannon, who ran the House with an iron

fist a century ago. But Cannon had to contend with

Progressive Republicans who eventually stripped him of his

power. DeLay's ruling radical conservative claque remains

united, at least for now.

Comparisons with fellow Texan Sam Rayburn fall short, too.

Rayburn was respected on both sides of the aisle for his

rock-solid integrity. He and most other House speakers

carefully balanced their support for corporate interests like

the oil depletion allowance with at least some sense of

public good. And they had to share much of their power with

committee chairmen. Today, seniority is much less important.

Chairmen are term-limited (six years) or tossed if they

displease DeLay. And this crowd views ``the public interest''

as strictly for liberal pantywaists.

How have they succeeded? A new book ``Off Center: The

Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American

Democracy,'' by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, explains

how the GOP is simply better than the Democratic Party at the

basic blocking and tackling of politics, including the

exploitation of cultural and religious issues. The authors

argue that even if DeLay goes down, the zealotry and

corporate shilling will continue as long as the GOP controls

the House. Consider DeLay's temporary replacement, Missouri

Rep. Roy Blunt. The Washington Post reported last week that

Blunt is respected by Republican members in part because he

has ``strong ties to the Washington lobbying community.''

That's a qualification for office?

The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is

that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas,

making the bills merely bad, not disastrous. What next for

the House of Shame? If DeLay's acquitted, he'll be back in

power. If he's convicted, his proteges will continue his

work. Reform efforts by fiscal conservatives determined to

curb their borrow-and-spend colleagues are probably doomed.

The only way to get rid of the termites eating away the

people's House is to stamp them out at the next election.

I would be happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

Well, I am just going to wrap up here in the final, unless the gentlewoman has any final comments.

It is a little late tonight. If you are still up, [email protected]. Send us some e-mails. We have been getting some really great ones, and a lot of them lately.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Friday, October 7, 2005, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of my amendment offered with the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar), and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak). I would like to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) for their work on the reauthorization. I would also like to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier) and especially the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter) for allowing me to offer this very important amendment on domestic violence against pregnant women.

My amendment authorizes the Office on Violence Against Women to provide grants to States for carrying out a campaign to increase public awareness of issues regarding domestic violence against pregnant women.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to join in, and I thank the gentleman again for having me here. There is a lot going on here in Washington. And just to kind of follow up where the gentleman was going, we had about 70- or 80-some e-mails just last week talking about we want to have an independent commission and it should be removed from the traditional partisan bickering that goes on in this Chamber; there should be an independent counsel and independent commission that oversees what is going on with Katrina.

We know about the appointments, and we know that we had a gentleman who was a lawyer for equestrian horse shows that was not qualified, and seven or eight of the top brass in FEMA were political appointees. We know all this stuff, but we need to figure out how to get to the end and how to respond next time. Because next time it may not be a hurricane. Next time it may be a biological attack. The next time it may be a 9/11-type of attack. And though we do not like to talk about these things, our constitutional obligation here is to talk about worst-case scenarios and prepare for them.

If the President and this administration is not going to appoint the proper people, and I saw today or yesterday that Michael Brown, Brownie, is now being hired as a consultant for FEMA. So he is still in the mix.

No doubt about it. This goes right to the heart of every single thing that has happened here in the last 5 years. This outfit does not know how to govern. They do not know how, period, dot, end of story. They just do not know how to govern. They do not know how to control the government. They do not know how to utilize the government for good purposes. They cannot do it with FEMA. They screwed up Medicare. The tax cuts are not working. Their tax policy, it stinks. Our trade policy is no good. Our international relations are atrocious. There are very few countries in the world that even like us any more. We are having hearings on global threats. Who likes us? China is going in and scooping up all the people we have upset over the past few years. What are we doing right, I ask my good friends from the 30- something Group?

And since we are talking about homeland security and communicating with people, most people at home that are watching now understand what has happened here today. Unfortunately, it is a very, very sad day in the history of this institution where someone in leadership has been indicted on the Republican side. And as I am going through my notes here, I am realizing that the leadership over there can get hold of Homeland Security if we have an issue in Texas, a political issue. They can call the FAA and have them track down some information.

There was no hesitation in the calling and using of a Federal Government agency to track down Texas legislators during the whole redistricting deal, so we know how to get hold of them if we need the Federal Government for political purposes. But if we need to rescue people or to cut through bureaucracy during a natural disaster, all of a sudden we do not know what we are doing.

Let us be sure how this works. This is a grand jury. This is not a prosecutor, this is a grand jury.

Just get around the airport.

Mr. Speaker, I want to try to break this down because we do not want to accuse anybody, and I want to make a different point. The indictment today that was filed against the majority leader, and everyone will read it in the newspaper tomorrow and hear it on the news, I am not explaining anything new, but the basic charge is in Texas there is a law that does not allow corporate money to get involved in political campaigns.

The charge is that corporate money went into this leadership PAC and that money made its way into the State elections for senators and legislators within the State of Texas. The Republicans then, with that money, ended up winning seats and taking control, then using that power to then reapportion congressional districts off-cycle. We normally do it every 10 years. So every 10 years when you do the Census, you reapportion congressional districts. But they did this 3 years after the Census. This did it in 2000.

This is the allegation. They took this corporate money, won the seats, did the redistricting again and got rid of four out of five Democratic Members in Congress because of the redistricting. It is alleged this corporate money made its way to influence elections here in the United States Congress and Democrats lost five seats.

Now that if it is true is horrendous and a total breach of trust for the American people, if that is true. But I want to make another point. This highlights, whether this is true or not, this highlights the number one problem in the United States Congress. There is so much money in this institution it sickens me, and I know it sickens the 30- Something Group, because that money influences too much of the policy that comes forth, and every single decision that is made in this Congress is about money. It is about fund-raising, it is about how we can squeeze somebody else for another dollar for our front-line candidates.

The policy that comes through here consistently reflects how can we raise more money. That is the problem. I think that is the issue that the incidents today lead to. This institution has become more about money than about governing. When you have your policies set around money, you end up getting bad policies and you end up getting an abuse of power. That is exactly what happened.

Look at the Medicare bill. At 3 in the morning, they told us it was $400 billion, that was a lie. It ended up being $700 billion, and the actuary was told not to tell Members of Congress, elected officials in the United States of America, that they were not allowed to know the true cost of the Medicare program. Give me a break. They knew there were Members who would not vote for a bill that cost more than $400 billion, so they said $400 billion. Weeks later we find out it was $700 billion. That was a lie.

The war and all of the nonsense leading up to it was a lie. Every single thing. We are safer now since we elected this new President and we have the Republicans in control; wrong. We saw what happened with Katrina, another lie.

We are good stewards of the government, less government more efficient; wrong. Cronyism at FEMA, eight of the top people all political hacks, and people died because of it.

Our responsibility here is to oversee this kind of thing, and everyone keeps telling us we are safer and we saw it was not true. After September 11, we do not have time to be nice. We do not have time to sit here and accept everything at face value. This has all led to an abuse of power.

Homeland Security and the FAA was used during this whole Texas debacle to track down Texas legislators who feared their government so much they flew to Oklahoma. They feared their government and they flew to Oklahoma. And then the war, again misinformation coming from the government. Again, FEMA, cronyism, abuse of power again.

And now, which really, really frightens me, we have this President talking about getting rid of the Posse Comitatus law in the United States of America which means if you do not think using Homeland Security and FAA to abuse power is not enough, if you do not think appointing cronies at FEMA to oversee emergency management in the United States of America is enough of an abuse of power, now the President is suggesting that we get rid of Posse Comitatus, which means the military can take over emergency situations and have police powers in your communities. Now wait a minute, this has got to stop somewhere.

This has got to stop somewhere, and it all comes back to this money being so ingrained into this system that it drives everything. And too much money, too much power, one party control here, House, Senate, White House, leads to an abuse of power. That is what you are seeing on the news tonight and that is what you will see on the news tomorrow. You will hear about it for the weeks and months to come because one- party rule in the United States of America is bad for our government. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Mr. Speaker, maybe if we were not so concerned in this House, the other body, the executive branch, about raising money and putting our political friends into certain positions all over, maybe this government would do a better job of actually executing its job. We spend so much time, not we, but the ruling party here, the Republican Party, spends so much time trying to raise money and squeeze donors and appoint their college roommate's friend to the head of FEMA. Maybe if we spent, if this government spent as much time and energy and the resources to actually govern the country, maybe we would be doing a lot better.

Poverty is up. Our education levels are not where they need to be. There is a widening gap between the wealthiest people in the country and the poorest people in this country. We saw a good example of that in New Orleans, but it is the same in every city in United States of America, structural poverty that is here in this country. Maybe if we were spending a little more time actually trying to run the country instead of raising money and appointing political hacks, maybe we would be a little better off.

We talked about the money and how it influences everything here. Is it a coincidence that through all this, all this money that is involved in this whole system, it is a coincidence that the wealthiest people in this country are getting tax breaks? That is like a direct connection. A lot of money donated from the wealthy people in the country, and the wealthy people in the country get a tax break, and everyone else seems to suffer.

We are not saying for one moment that we do not think that our government needs reform: Education, health care, it needs reform. We are the reform party. This group has had control of this Chamber for over 10 years now.

No reform at all. Numbers are not up where they need to be up. They are down where they need to be up, and they are up where they need to be down. It is about reform. But to see the influence of money in this Congress and then to see the wealthiest people who are contributing get the tax cuts just does not seem fair.

``Brownie.''

That was beautiful. You know, you play sports when you are a kid, and I know the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) was a college athlete, a college football player, a great athlete back in his day, a little slower afoot now than he used to be. But if you used to play sports as a kid and if you would not start or you did not get in the game right away, you would be watching everybody play and you knew you were better than everyone else that was playing, and you just thought, put me in coach.

Well, the Democrats are saying, put me in, coach. We will do better than this. And quite frankly, it does not seem that hard, given everything that has been going on, the corruption, the cronyism.

Democrats know how to run the government. Are we perfect? No. But we had a great FEMA director, we knew how to respond. We passed the first Family and Medical Leave Act. We know what families need and we know how to deliver.

In 1993 we balanced the budget, leading to the greatest economic expansion in the history of the United States of America, without one Republican vote. Al Gore had to come to the Senate to make the tie- breaking vote. Many people on this side of the aisle lost their seats because they made a tough vote that was in the best interests of the country, but not in the best interests of their own political careers. If you get a chance to read President Clinton's book, he highlights a couple of those people who made those tough votes.

My point is that the Democrats know how to govern. Are we perfect? Absolutely not. But you do not see this nonsense going on. They had to spend $40 million to chase our President around for something that had nothing to do with the public affairs of government. Was he wrong? Absolutely. But we are talking about the public affairs and public responsibilities.

Put us in, coach.

The website is [email protected]. If you think we have cronies in government, do you think there is an abuse of power, a waste of money, things are tilted too much, the website is [email protected].

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentleman, and I think this is an opportunity for us to step up and do this in a way that the American people will see this as an honest attempt to try to figure out what the problems are and what the problem was and what the problem is, and if we continue down the road, what the problems will be.

The real issue I think and why over 70 percent of the American people want an independent commission, bipartisan, half Democrats half Republicans, people who do not sit in this body, people who do not have to ask the administration for favors during the appropriations process, or through the regulatory process, that is, the problem is we have Members who will be on this floor who will need favors from the administration, will be cutting deals in here, will be the same people who are going to try to figure out what the problems are.

I want to say on behalf of myself, I hate this. I hate the fact that we have to come to the floor and talk about this stuff. We spoke about Social Security for months and months. I hate the fact that we have to be critical of this administration. I hate the fact that we have to be critical of Michael Brown and the whole process, but that is our constitutional obligation. When we raise our hands the first week in January every other year, we swear an oath to the Constitution.

The outfit, the gang that is running this place, just cannot seem to shoot straight. They did not tell us the truth with the Medicare prescription drug number. It was $400 billion the night we voted on it, and it turned into $700 billion or $800 billion. There was misinformation before the war on terror. The budget numbers that were given daily, weekly over the past few years are not accurate, never are.

The spiel about the tax cuts are going to create all these new jobs, not true. That is why 70 percent of the American people want an independent commission. They think this is the gang that cannot shoot straight, and it is.

And for the President to be giving a speech on Social Security two days afterwards when all of America is watching this on their television, how far removed is he? How insulated from the average American is he? That is the problem: we have a disconnect between this government and the American people. I hope that this independent commission that we are pushing for, like the 9/11 Commission, will be one that will bring some credibility back to the government, one that will take an accurate look at what happened here and bring us the facts.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, it does not look like it. And I think David Broder had a great quote saying that majority Republicans see themselves first and foremost as members of the Bush team. Well, this is not about their team winning. This is not about politics, and we know for the last 5 years it has been all politics all the time here, as I talked about Medicare and all the other issues. And now here we go again.

Here is the thing I think that we need to recognize. When we have this colossal of a screwup, somebody is going to get embarrassed. It is not going to be pretty. Someone has got to hang for this, and someone has got to take responsibility. And that is the thing I think the American people want from their government. They want responsible Members, but they want accountability. And accountability means someone is going to get embarrassed, and it means that someone in FEMA screwed up. But do my colleagues know what? It is not about President Bush. It is not about that one person who screwed up. It is not about the series of people who contributed as the days went on from the screwup. Do the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) know what this is about? This is about fixing the problem, as they said earlier. And if someone needs to get embarrassed, they need to recognize that this Chamber, this country, and the way we respond to emergency situations, whether they are natural disasters or terrorist attacks, that response and our responsibility is bigger than the couple of people who are going to get embarrassed.

There are certain things that are bigger than winning and more important than winning, and that means we have got to make sure that we do this in the right way. This cannot be a whitewash. We cannot get out the Brillo pads and try to make this look clean. We have got to find out where the ugliness is, where the lack of communication was.

Knowing about the simulation last summer in July of 2004 of Hurricane Pam, a simulated hurricane that FEMA did a study on that, if it hit New Orleans what would happen, and they predicted right down the line every single thing that would happen. A category 4 in New Orleans, levees would break, a million people would need to get evacuated. And every other situation that happened, FEMA's response, the simulated Hurricane Pam told us exactly what is going to happen.

So my point is that someone is going to get embarrassed here and it is not going to be pretty. But at the end of the day, the system is going to be stronger because we are going to know what the mistakes were and we are going to know how to fix them. But if they are not willing to find out what the problem is, then they are not going to be able to fix it. And our responsibility is to fix it. So although this may be painful for the majority party and it may be painful for the Bush administration, this system that we have is bigger than all of them put together, and that is what we are here to do is preserve this system.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, let us put a little meat on this bone. Let us put a little meat on this bone. Why do they not want us to look at this thing? Because they know what we are going to find out. They know we are going to find out that FEMA became a haven for political hacks, period; end of story, dot. Political cronyism at its best. College roommates, the campaign manager's college roommate gets the head of FEMA. They get the head of FEMA? They have no emergency management experience at all, none. James Lee Witt, who was there for President Clinton, was the FEMA emergency manager for Arkansas. So if we have a bipartisan commission that maybe is not run by this House, that will come out. It will come out that eight of the top-level people in FEMA were all political cronies, all political hacks given a job. We do not give people jobs in FEMA. We give people ambassadorships who make big campaign donations. We know that happens. But we do not put them in charge of FEMA.

What would come out is that we would find out that FEMA's budget was slashed.

All the offense that the Clinton administration was playing with FEMA to prevent some of this stuff: budget cuts, tuck FEMA in with Homeland Security, make it more bureaucratic, and you put a bunch of political hacks in charge of it. That is what is going to come out. That is what is going to come out. You cannot run down government at every turn. For the last 10 or 15 years down here, everybody has just been running down government: Government cannot do anything right, government is the problem, government is bad, government is in our way, government this, government that. Every problem in the whole world was the government's. And then when we need the government there to help, well, no wonder it is ineffective. It has been disrespected, the budget has been cut, we do not have professionals there. We need the best and brightest in government. If you keep running it down, you are not going to get them.

So that is the meat on that bone, is that they are going to find out it was a haven for political hacks, the budget was cut, no professionals over there, no certified emergency management specialists. And that is what happened, and that is what will come out if there is a bipartisan commission.

And let us be honest. This outfit, this gang has had their chance for the last 5 or 6 years, in Congress for the last 11 years, going on 12 years. They have had their chance. Look at FEMA. Look at the economy. Look at the tax structure. Look at the Medicare program. Look at the health care situation. Look at the poverty that we saw, with no real attempt to even try to fix it. I mean, let us be honest, there has been no attempt, none. Tax cuts? Wait a minute. How are tax cuts helping people that can barely survive?

Maybe we made a bunch of mistakes. Maybe we made a couple mistakes.

Before I give away the magic address here, I think we just need to call this what it is. This is a Republican committee. This is a Republican committee that will oversee a Republican mess.

Period. End of story. Dot. And you might as well put Ken Melman or Ed Gillespie in charge of the committee, because you are going to get a political response. You are going to get a political whitewash from this whole thing.

And the American people are going to let this stand. I made the prediction last week, and I stand by it today, the American people will not let this stand. When there are 11 Republicans there tomorrow organizing this committee, you will be able to do it in a phone booth, because the Democrats are not going to be around. We are not going to lend any credence to this at all.

And put Ken Melman in charge of this committee because that would reflect accurately the end response in what it is going to be. 30somethingDems, 30 the number, [email protected].

E-mail us. Let us know what you think. Tell us your thoughts. Share with us.

Mr. Speaker, this is what has been going on in this chamber for years, I mean, since we got here, since the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I got here, and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) got here. Everything has been partisan. The committees have been partisan. Eleven-nine they want the oversight committee to be, which means basically the Democrats do not have any say.

If you have the majority in the committee, that majority party will dictate everything that goes by an eleven to nine vote. We saw it happen with the prescription drug. We saw it happen with all these other ones.

The bottom line is the committees that are set up now in Congress do not have proper oversight, do not reflect, I think, the will of the American people and I think ultimately do not reflect the truth of what is going on.

These are facts.

Nonpartisan.

Smarter than us.

That is exactly right.

And so Republicans do not want certain people to testify. They have votes to prevent the Democratic group from saying, hey, we need to talk to this guy from FEMA or wherever, homeland security.

We do not need the government to come in here; we will investigate it. You are exactly right. That is what is going to happen. It is going to be the same kind of cover-up and whitewash, get out the Brillo pads because we are going to clean this up. We need accountability and I think the American people want it and demand it right now.

And I think the 30-something Working Group is encouraging and 100 percent behind Leader Pelosi on this. We do not want to appoint anyone to this.

Why justify this? Why give some kind of credence or credibility to this nonsense that is going on? This is America, and so America should have 50-50. The Presidential election was about 50-50, and we should all be right down the line.

Bingo.

If I can say something here. We are taking from the poor to give to the poor. That is exactly what we are doing. My district is one of the poorest in the country, and they say they want to take the $15 million, which is not really a whole lot of money, for projects that are going to increase economic development in a district like mine, and I know my colleagues have some areas in the same way, and shift it to poor people?

Well, what have the wealthiest people in the world or in the country been asked to sacrifice in the last 5 years? Nothing. Bill Clinton said he got four tax cuts. This guy makes millions of dollars a year. He gets four tax cuts in the last 3 or 4 years. This President needs to have the guts, and I choose

my words carefully, the guts to ask his wealthiest contributors to pony up and actually help the country.

This is not partisan. This is not about a particular insurance industry or pharmaceutical industry. This is about the country. Can we for once make a decision that is based on the whole country, blue States, red States, everyone included? We are all going to help them. We are even going to ask the wealthiest people.

And if we just had the leadership, my friends, to ask those people. It is not like the American people are not generous at this point. They have given everything, if you just ask them.

And we are not even asking average Americans to give. We are just saying the top 1 percent of the people; $70 billion in tax cuts over the year, primarily to the top 1 percent. Will somebody in Washington, D.C. who has the hand on the lever of government ask these people to contributes to what is going on here?

No, they want to come to Youngstown, Ohio, where 50 percent of the kids going to the school district in Youngstown live in poverty. They want to ask them to give up the millions of dollars in transportation money that will build a roadway to build an industrial park so that we can get jobs to help grow our economy so that people can actually pay property taxes and so that we can fund the schools so that maybe some of those kids do not live in poverty. They want to take it from us.

And honest to God, honest to God, I raise my hand right now, if the President was willing to ask the top 1 percent to give up their tax cut, I would be willing to give up some of my transportation money. I really would. Honest to God, as much as it would hurt my community, I recognize the situation that the country is in right now and I would be willing to say, Mr. President, how much do you need? As long as everyone is sharing the burden here.

I just cannot accept the fact that they are going to ask us to give up our money for poor districts and not ask the wealthiest people in the country. That is insanity. It is criminal.

We need some adult supervision.

They are right-to-work States.

Those union dues, and let us make that quite clear, the argument against having Davis-Bacon involved in FEMA is that the money will go to union dues in those States. And 4.2 percent of the workers in Mississippi are union workers, and this administration is trying to give us a bunch of bunk that the FEMA money is going to go to union dues when only 4 percent of the workers are involved in unions. It is bunk.

And, Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, it is important to understand that there is not the oversight that he talked about earlier tonight and we talked about last week; there is not the oversight of the contractors. We have got Halliburton. The same people that have been the contractors in the war, the same process, the same procedure, is the same thing that is going on down in the Katrina States.

So we are taking the workers and we are saying they cannot make the prevailing wage here with 8.8 percent, even lower in some of the States, and then we are also not going to have the oversight of the contractors. So what are the contractors going to do? They are going to squeeze the worker. They are going to take the money without the oversight. They are going to get everything that they want. And I do not think that the American taxpayer is going to be happy with that. If people have got problems with this, give us a ring here on the Internet: [email protected]. Send us an e-mail.

We are going to continue this discussion in the weeks and months to come because we are not going to sit by and let this administration steamroll the workers that want to go back and help rebuild their own community.

We have a constitutional responsibility to make sure that this institution has proper oversight. Article I, section 1, this House right here governs the country, the people. And 11 to nine in the committee is not going to be sufficient. So we are going to keep the pressure on, and we are going to make sure that this administration adheres to the standards that the American people want, not what the majority wants.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague is exactly right. What happened here today, H. Res. 437, is a tragedy. What happened right here on this floor today is a tragedy for the exact reason the gentleman just mentioned.

Now, for those people who are at home and who may not completely understand the whole situation, this body is run by the majority party, which is the Republican Party. And the majority party appoints to the committees members to the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committee on Appropriations, the House Homeland Security Committee, the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs, and all these different committees and subcommittees. The majority appoints more people to the committee than the minority, so they basically control the committee process in the House of Representatives.

Now, some committees have subpoena powers and they can subpoena witnesses. But they will only subpoena witnesses that the majority party wants to subpoena. If the minority party would want to subpoena somebody, they could not because they could not get the power out of the committee without majority party votes. So the majority rules.

What is happening in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate is that the Republican Party controls both Chambers. So the Democrats in the minority have no subpoena power. And what has happened over the past few years here, and the great example is the later Clinton years, with Ken Starr, with the House Committee on Government Reform, the Republican Party that controlled this Chamber, they were the ones conducting the investigation into President Clinton because they had the subpoena power and they had the opportunity to do it.

So what we were trying to say, what the minority party was trying to say, the Democrats were trying to say with H. Res. 437, is this select committee that will oversee and look at how the screwups went about down in the gulf coast should be equal. It should be Democrats and Republicans both having equal subpoena power to oversee the process, because the record for the majority party over the past few years has been atrocious.

Now, let us look at a couple of things. We have talked here many, many times regarding the war, with the weapons of mass destruction, all the prewar intelligence. Has anybody looked into this in a real way, in depth? Subpoenaed witnesses? Anybody? No. Has anybody been fired? No. How about the Medicare bill that we passed at 3 in the morning. Everyone was told here it was $400 billion. It ends up being 700 or $800 billion after we already voted for it.

This majority party does not have the credibility, I say to my colleague, the credibility to oversee what is going on here because they are going to do nothing but whitewash this thing. Get out the Brillo pads because we are going to scrub this thing clean, and nothing is going to happen and the country is going to be worse off for it. So, my colleagues, H. Res. 437 is a joke. It is a joke. And there will not be proper investigation.

I just could not believe the debate on the floor today. The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), a Democrat who lost his home, for God's sake, was here. He is saying, should he not, as a representative of a State in a congressional district that lost lives and homes and property and everything else, should he not be able to subpoena somebody, just like every other Member of Congress, if I am on that committee? Or should the Democrats, who many lost constituents of the 700-some that we lost, and some of those people were actually represented by Democrats, should the minority party not have the opportunity to subpoena somebody?

But, no, this thing is going to get scrubbed. Where is the transparency? Where is the equal opportunity? Where is the bipartisanship? What this bill says is there is going to be nine Democrats and 11 Republicans.

There is not even subpoena power.

This thing is a paper tiger. It is going to be a song and dance. So let us get ready. Get out the music and the popcorn because this is going to be nothing but a dog and pony show.

I do not think anything is going to happen here, and it is going to be consistent with a lot of the other pieces of legislation that either came through this body or did not get reviewed.

So I just want to say to my colleague from Florida how disappointed I am, how disappointed the Democrats are, and I encourage the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), our minority leader, to continue her stance and not appoint anybody to this committee. This is a toothless tiger. It is a washing machine to clean up this mess politically. I hope that our leader stands her ground and our leadership and our party stand their ground and just say that this is a joke and to appoint people to this committee would literally be contributing to the problem and lending our credibility to this issue, which I think is a joke.

Unless the majority wanted to help us.

Everybody knew.

Mr. Speaker, The Washington Post reported, just to support the gentleman's argument, five of the eight top Federal management agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since 9/11. Five of the top eight FEMA people had no emergency management experience at all. What did we think would happen if we had this kind of tragedy?

I still say it had a lot to do with the number of electoral votes in Louisiana and Mississippi than anything else. Because if it was Florida, with all due respect, they would have been there with billions of dollars prior to. If it was an election year, everybody would be down there, and the President's brother would be running around campaigning.

I think it is terrible that we have this kind of cronyism going on. We understand. We are not simpletons. We know that a President appoints his friends who make a lot of donations to posts in the executive branch. We know that. That is how it goes. But to appoint these people to FEMA? During a rise in hurricanes? Come on. It is irresponsible.

As far as the committee goes, as far as having a committee, CNN Gallup Poll taken a few days ago, 70 percent of the American people supported an independent panel to investigate our response to Hurricane Katrina. That is 70 percent of the American people, 70 percent of those responding. I think it is important for this body to recognize that this toothless tiger, this paper tiger that we passed today, H. Res. 437, is not what the American people want. They want an independent investigation, bipartisan, equal power among both parties to investigate it so there is no coverups, no whitewashing going on. That is what the American people want.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start talking about something that I think is very important. We are going to do this. This country is going to make sure that we rebuild. The problem that we were talking about with the administration is a big hurdle for us. The money is another hurdle. I cannot believe that with all of the challenges that we have right now in this country that this President cannot go to the wealthiest Americans, his top campaign contributors, and ask them to give back just a wee little bit of their tax cut that they got over the past 4 or 5 years, just a wee little bit to help us fund Hurricane Katrina, to help us fund the war.

We are giving millionaires hundreds of thousands of dollars back, and our deficit is ballooning. Now, today, it is reporting we are going to need another $50 billion to keep the war fund going. We are already hundreds of billions of dollars into the war, and now we have Hurricane Katrina. Hindsight is 20-20, but you do not get into elective wars that bog you down because you just never know what is going to happen.

We do not overextend ourselves, because we do not know when a Katrina is going to happen, when a national tragedy is going to happen. That is prudent leadership.

And now we are running budget deficits as far as the eye can see. We are borrowing the money from the Chinese and the Japanese. We are giving our country away, and we have got to pay interest on it. And one would think, and I hope, as the President is talking right now, that somewhere in his speech he has the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the country to help us here because we need help.

I ask the President to take the leadership role that the American people have given him and have the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the Nation to help us rebuild the gulf coast, to help us fund this elective war that he got us into. We pay them back. They have got their tax cuts. We do not even have to take all of them back. We just need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war and to pay for Katrina. Have the guts to ask them for it. If they are in the health care industry, I am sure they are doing okay. If they are in the oil industry, I am sure they are doing just fine. Record profits as far as the eye can see in the oil industry. The greatest quarterly profits, billions and billions and billions of dollars for BP and a lot of these other folks. The big money people are doing okay. But those little kids on the covers of those magazines, those are the ones that we need to help. And to not have the courage to ask the wealthiest people in the country to help out, I think, is poor leadership.

So I think as much as we are talking about restructuring and trying to figure out what we are going to do and how we are going to make the government run more efficiently and how we are going to take care of FEMA and fix the problems that we have been talking about here the past few weeks, a component of that is what are we going to do with our budget deficit. Because, again, this was something we have been talking about with the 30-somethings for months and months and years even now. So I ask the President to please ask these people to contribute. They are the only ones doing really well in the country right now. Ask them to help out.

I am sure in the gentleman from Florida's (Mr. Meek) district, as in my mine, people who do not have a lot of disposable income are the ones bringing the canned goods. And I am not saying that the wealthy people are not doing it. Of course they are. But right now our government needs funds, and we need the wealthiest in the country to contribute. And we have got to have a President that is willing to ask them to help out. And to see the disparity between those who have and those who do not highlighted through this whole tragedy, I think, really is a call for all of us in public office, especially those in high-ranking leadership positions, like the President, to make the proper request; and we need to ask those who have been doing very well to contribute to this fund.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, he highlighted a point. This outfit that is in the executive branch right now, it is all politics. It is all politics all the time. It is not about policy. It is all about politics and trying to keep the Republicans in the majority. And I think when we see that five out of eight of the top appointments at FEMA are political hacks, I think when we look at passing a drug bill that does not have any cost controls for the drugs, does not allow for reimportation, all politics all the time. Weapons of mass destruction, go through all the war information we had before, all politics all the time. How do we sell this to the American people? Whether it is true or not, irrelevant. We need to go to war, and we are going to say whatever we have to say to get it done.

Now, as the gentleman mentioned earlier, talking about Davis-Bacon, Davis and Bacon were two Republican Members of Congress who passed a prevailing wage law that allows for when Federal money is being spent in a certain area that the Feds will pay the

prevailing wage of that area for the workers. Because if they are paying Federal money, then they should obviously be paying for whatever the going rate is in that area.

So what the President did was he repealed the prevailing wage provision, basically saying that we are not going to have any oversight over the contractors. We are going to send them billions of dollars. Halliburton is going to get their money. We are going to pay them whatever we have got to pay them, $50 billion, $100 billion without any oversight from a bipartisan commission here; and at the same time as we are not overseeing what the contractors are doing. We are going to repeal the basic provision that allows for workers to at least make a decent wage in that area.

And today in the Hill newspaper, these gentlemen from Americans for Tax Reform are saying that this repeal will make it obvious that Davis- Bacon is nothing but dead weight. So here these guys are wasting all of their time, all their energy on putting the screws to the workers, guys in New Orleans that are now living in Baton Rouge or in Mississippi or in Houston who want to go back home and help rebuild their community and make the going rate in their community, the prevailing wage in their community, and these guys are wasting all their time and energy trying to screw them to the wall instead of overlooking and seeing what Halliburton is doing.

We are using the same administrative process with the reconstruction of Katrina as we have been using in the war, which wasted billions of dollars, no oversight of Halliburton, no oversight of all of these people who make tremendous contributions back to the President; and to have the audacity, with the great human tragedy that is there and the human suffering there, to say that you are going to waste your time and your energy making sure the workers do not get their fair share because that is dead weight, that is wasteful government spending.

These are the people who are going to go back and be able to actually do some work. It is tremendous. It is unbelievable. It is all politics all the time with these guys, and this is just one more component of that. They want to get rid of the unions, they want to get rid of prevailing wage. This one gentleman in here, he says something along the lines of it is a waste of money because the Federal money will go to the worker and if it is a union worker, the union worker will pay union dues per hourly wage. You have to be kidding me. These union workers pay like 5 cents an hour to go for the union dues, 10 cents an hour, it depends on what union you are in. But to say that this is somehow going to bankrupt the government by paying a gentleman or a woman the prevailing wage and, at the same time, billions and billions and billions are getting wasted without any kind of oversight from a select committee in Congress is a joke, and I think it just keeps reinforcing ``all politics all the time.''

Mr. Speaker, I am going to make a prediction. The hour is late, but I am going to make a prediction. The American people will not allow, will not allow the Republican Party to get away with having another white wash. They are not going to allow them to scrub this up and cover this up and clean it up without having proper oversight. Seventy percent of the people in this country want an independent commission to look at this, or a bipartisan commission to look at this. And I think until that happens, the Republican Party will continue to get pressure from the American people.

I think the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) is going to stand strong. And, quite frankly, again, we should not appoint anybody to this commission. Eleven Republicans, nine Democrats, we do not have an ounce of power on this thing, and we will get slammed just like we do every day down here, and the end result will be a FEMA that continues to be inept and inadequate in its response to natural disasters.

So I say that the American people, that 70 percent of them who want this independent commission will not let this go, will not let the corruption and the cronyism continue. Mr. Speaker, [email protected]., send us an e-mail. We will be back here next week for a couple more nights and keep hammering away. We are not going to let go until we get the kind of commission that the American people want, that is only fair, and that will best fix the problems that we have in FEMA right now, because it will have proper oversight.

Mr. Speaker, today I pay tribute to the life and work of community leader Attorney Clair M. Carlin of Youngstown, Ohio. His life was marked by distinguished service to his country, the state of Ohio, and the Youngstown area.

Mr. Carlin was born on April 20, 1947 in Sharon, Pennsylvania to Charles W. and Caroline Vukasich Carlin. While acquiring his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from The Ohio State University in 1969, Mr. Carlin served as a Second Lieutenant in Ohio State's ROTC program. In 1972, he graduated from the U.S. Army Signal Officer Basic Course at Fort Gordon and simultaneously obtained a law degree from the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Mr. Carlin subsequently attended the Military Police Officers Advance Course in 1979 as well as the Command and General Staff College in 1980. Until 1982, he served in the Army National Guard.

Throughout his career, Mr. Carlin held many distinguished positions including Special Counsel for the city of Youngstown and the Ohio Office of Attorney General, Hearing Examiner for the Ohio Department of Taxation, State Director of Catholic War Veterans, and Law Director for the City of Newton Falls. Additionally, Mr. Carlin served as the President of the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers and was the Governor of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. He was also a member of the American Bar Association, the Ohio State Bar Association, and was President of the Mahoning County Bar Association.

Finally, Mr. Carlin contributed greatly to his community. He was an active member of the Mahoning County Volunteer Services Agency Board of Directors, the Ohio Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the American Legion Post in Poland, Ohio. Mr. Carlin's proudest personal achievement, however, was attaining the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.

Mr. Carlin was a loving husband to his wife, Pamela Rodehaver, and a caring father to his children Elizabeth, Alexander, and Eric. So today, I wish to honor Mr. Clair Carlin whose life's work prevails as a model for all.

I appreciate you carrying the load a little bit here while I was away.

One of the issues, and I do not think you have touched upon it just yet, is President Bush's decision to repeal the prevailing wage provisions that are normally intact in which anybody who would be working down in that area, the workers who would be down there getting paid, would get paid the prevailing wage of that area.

President Bush has rescinded that requirement; and so now there is talk of people going down there who will be making wages much, much less than the prevailing wage for Federal Government projects that live in that area.

So, in essence, these people who have been hit by the hurricane, who have been moved out to Baton Rouge or Houston or wherever, who want to go back to that community, go back to New Orleans and work, they are not going to earn the same wage that they would have earned had they been there before Katrina hit. And I just think this is kind of symbolic, or one example of what has been happening.

And you talked about some of the corruption. You talked about some of the contracts. This is absolutely ridiculous to tell these people who are trying to reconstruct their lives that they should not be making the prevailing wage of people who live and work in that community.

And, believe me, the money in the South is not that high of a wage. So it is not going to cripple the Government. This is Federal taxpayer money that is going down there. And what is happening is, in many instances, for the

rebuilding effort, and I was having a talk with some of the electrical workers tonight, basically what is happening is the wage is going to be so low it just has to go down to minimum wage.

So you have, say, a union electrician who is going to make $20 to $25 an hour. The union wage may be $25; the prevailing wage may be $20. So they would make $20 on a Federal project. Well, if you eliminate and you rescind that regulation, that worker will make $10 or $15 an hour, maybe no benefits. It can go all of the way down to the minimum wage.

And what is happening now is that workers are looking at coming in from some of these other foreign countries, from Mexico, from some of these other countries. So the contractors who are getting the unbid contracts are going to start hiring foreign workers to come in for the rebuilding process and paying them a little bit above minimum wage, displacing workers who have lost their family who need to go back and rebuild.

Part of the reconstruction effort should be to try to get a little bit of money in the pockets of those people who want to go back and help rebuild the city. I mean, my goodness, that does not seem like too much to ask. I know many Americans feel like that. Even through a tragedy, and you want to go back, you should be working. Here are these people that want to go and actually work that are having their wages cut, and it just seems to me that is very shortsighted. It is, again, another bend in favor of the contractors, who, you know, have a job to do but not at the expense of everybody else.

You know, from the beginning here, and I am sure you have already touched upon all of the appointments of the members of FEMA in the upper echelon of FEMA, all political appointments, and we all understand that that happens, we are not trying to play dumb here. But give the guy an appointment who is not qualified, give him the ambassadorship to a country that has got a lot of beach front property. That is where you go. You do not put him in charge of FEMA. That is criminal what happened here.

You know, again, I do not how far you got in, but I think the main point from the past few weeks and the review of this was the administration saying, how are we supposed to know the levees were going to break? And we find out that last summer FEMA sponsored a simulation called Hurricane Pam, was the name of the simulation, and it brought a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane up through New Orleans and what would happen.

Well, in July of 2004, the FEMA simulation said the levees would break, there would be flooding, millions of people displaced, and all of the tragedy that we watched on TV over the past couple of weeks was simulated to happen if New Orleans got hit by a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane. Then for the administration to come out and say how were we supposed to know is so disingenuous.

Then you look at FEMA. It is packed with political hacks, political appointees, an equestrian horse show organizer is supposed to be in charge of the most important emergency management organization in the country. I think it is criminal. I really believe it, and I choose that word specifically.

It is criminal because that short-sighted appointment led to people not getting the kind of treatment, the immediate response that was needed. We have been looking at this for a while now, over the past couple of weeks and have had a chance. You would just think, and I will yield here in a second, your job, what you should expect from your Government is that you pay taxes. And your taxes go, and some get wasted, just like in corporations or anything else. Some of the money gets wasted. But your money goes to FEMA, and you should have an expectation that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be able to have a person in place that just deals with Hurricanes in the Gulf, because there is a hurricane season every year.

So what happens if a hurricane hits New Orleans? We have hundreds of people employed here who make good money from the taxpayers. You have to meet your responsibility. So I feel like the President's appointments hurt.

I think the unbid contracts are continuing the process. The elimination of the prevailing wage is another slap in the face of those people who have been hurt and want to go back and actually work and earn enough money to rebuild their families and their communities.

I think this is continuing to go down the wrong road. I hope that some of what we are talking about here tonight brings that to light, and hopefully we can try to change it.

Listen, we want to work with the administration. We want these people to get help. That is why we are here. We are not here to demagogue. We are not here to beat up any one side or the other. But they are in charge, and they are not making the necessary changes that need to be made. Our constitutional responsibility, people send us here to do this, is to make sure that we keep those people in power in check. They do not seem to be listening, and they do not seem to be following some basic, I think, business procedures that would otherwise be implemented.

If I may make a couple of points. I agree with the gentlewoman so much and this 30-something Group has really improved since the gentlewoman has gotten here.

I just want to make two points. One is the Davis-Bacon provision, the prevailing wage issue. Davis and Bacon were both Republicans, so this is not a Democratic issue. This is just something that seems to be fair. If Federal money is going to a certain area, they should pay the worker the wage that is prevalent in that area. That is number one.

And, two, and I know we have all talked about this, the disparity in income between those people in this country who have and those people who have not is tremendous. I hope that the good that we can derive from Katrina is that.

And, third, and the most specific point that I want to make, is that this has shown that our government has gone backwards as far as administration and execution; and we see it every day here.

We pass a prescription drug bill that is spending $700 billion worth of the taxpayers' money and does nothing to allow for reimportation that would drive drug costs down or does not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to buy in bulk because the pharmaceutical industry has a strangle-hold on this place. We do not see the proper reforms on distribution of health care. We do not see the proper investments in medical information technology that would help drive down the cost of medical care.

We have a school system that is based on a society that is agrarian, and kids are supposed to go home in the summer and work on the farm; and only three or four percent of the country still works in agriculture. These are things that are structural problems. And I think the FEMA issue just shows and highlights and puts the spotlight on it.

It is because there is money, and there is political appointments, and we have got to get our friends in, and we have so many friends that gave us so much money that we even have to put some in FEMA, which probably should not have political appointments, but we have so many debts that we owe.

I have an uncle that I had a very interesting conversation with and he may be watching right now and I think my aunt is watching for sure who worked for Proctor and Gamble for God knows how many years. And we had a nice conversation one night about how this political body and political decisions are made every 2 years. We run very short-term political decisions that are made. The same in the business community. What are our next quarter profits going to be? Very short sighted. And I think we do not get the country back on the right track until those of us who are in this body are willing to make those long-term structural changes that need to be made to adjust the way government is administered in a 21st-century economy based on technology and knowledge.

That was the issue with FEMA. If we ran a Hurricane Pam situation in 2004, where was the breakdown in getting that information to those people who needed to actually make a decision once there was an actual hurricane in that area? What was the breakdown?

Until our government begins to run in an efficient way and in a way that is reflective of the communication abilities in the 21st century, the technological advancements, and everything else, we are going to be behind the eight ball whether it is FEMA, education, health care, whatever it may be. We have got to start making decisions that have a long-term impact on making our government run more efficiently. It should be able to run a heck of a lot more efficiently than it did in the 1930s and 1940s. And that is our job.

I really believe that the 30-somethings have a responsibility here because we grew up in an age that was much different than most of the people in here grew up in, with computers and technology and cell phones and now the ear pieces and what else is there. But we grew up in that different kind of scene than the echo boomers who are going up now, we have a responsibility to try to apply that technology to government. And I think my friend from Florida wants to be a part of that.

Are we not using the same formula, the same administration processes that we used during the war and are using during the war. The same exact ones that we lost billions applying this system or using this system for the war, we are applying the same system now.

Article I, section 1.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I agree 100 percent with the gentlewoman. And to look back and hear all the information that FEMA had beforehand, an article here from Cox News and the New Orleans Times, Dr. Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center, was talking to FEMA. They were going through simulations on what exactly could happen and what the worst-case scenario could be, what the storm surge capabilities were for overtopping levees.

I think it is important, if this is not pointing fingers, we get paid to oversee administrative government, and that is what we are doing here. The thing that is outrageous is that the people who are in charge and who are incompetent for those early days are the same people that are running the operation now. Thank God we have got some military in there now to actually fix some of the problems.

But I think it is important that we share with the American people, not to be critical, but so the problem gets

fixed. This is our responsibility here. This is our constitutional responsibility here.

Dr. Max Mayfield, and you can get this on the Internet, the Cox News article said, knew storm's potential. Just to read through here a little bit and share with you, there were briefings by this Dr. Mayfield who told FEMA that the strength of the storm and the potential disaster it could bring were made clear during both briefings and an informal advisory which warned of a storm surge capable of overtopping levees in New Orleans and winds strong enough to blow out windows of high-rise buildings.

``We were briefing them way before landfall, Mayfield said. It is not like this was a surprise. We had advisories that the levee could be topped.''

These guys had the information and they failed to respond. And the most insulting part of this whole thing is to have the President say days afterwards, ``I do not think anyone anticipated a breach of the levees.''

I mean, it is just not true. It is just not true because the FEMA people knew, and there were these advisories and there was all this information that FEMA had, and it is unacceptable that this is the way the government is supposed to work. Because after 9/11 the American people charged this Congress, reelected this Congress, reelected this President because he had the capability supposedly to keep us safe. I do not think there is one American out there now that would even feel close to safe if something happened here.

I do not know, and it seems like the goals that we wanted to try to communicate, intraoperability where people could communicate with each other because they would have the proper communication equipment, the predisaster mitigation which they used out West for an earthquake where they actually went in early and secured buildings and spent $20 million, which ended up saving $500 million out there, that program that Mr. Witt started was called Project Impact; and the day the earthquake hit on February 28, 2001, was the same day the President cut that program. This was a lack of foresight for many, many, many years.

Because why?

Say that again.

Mr. Speaker, I think this gets back to a basic concept that we have seen over the course of the last couple of years here. The outfit that runs this body and that lives in the White House and this administration, they just hate government. They just hate it, and they think that if it was gone and abolished, everything would be fine. So, if you bring that attitude to government, that government cannot do anything good.

And then your philosophy leads you to a point where you put an attorney for Arabian horses and a guy who used to run horse shows in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that is where that philosophy takes you, and then you get someone who is incompetent to handle the job, not a professional emergency management specialist, but just a political appointment, because government is for supplying our friends with graft, and that is all this is.

Now, the gentleman mentioned something, and I want to go through this and I read a little bit of this article earlier. And this is Dr. Mayfield and what he said. He participated, he and his staff participated in a 5-day Hurricane Pam exercise, which was sponsored by FEMA and the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness last July, that assumed a similar storm as Katrina would hit Louisiana, and they called it Hurricane Pam at the time, on July 23 of 2004.

So FEMA released, after they simulated this Hurricane Pam in Louisiana, FEMA announced the exercise and basically summed up the simulation. Here it is, quote: ``Hurricane Pam,'' and this is FEMA talking in July of 2004. ``Hurricane Pam brought sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana, and the storm surge toppled levees in New Orleans. More than 1 million residents evacuated, and Hurricane Pam destroyed between 500,000 and 600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, State, Federal, and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a 5-day exercise held this week at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.''

Then, a year later, this same government says they had no idea that could possibly happen. How disingenuous is that? You ran a simulation. You war-gamed Hurricane Katrina and you called it Hurricane Pam a year ago. And then you come to the American people and say, the best you could come up with is, who would have thought the levees would have broken. Thinking everybody is stupid? Thinking this would not come out?

It is criminal, criminal, what happened. You put an Arabian horse purchaser in charge of FEMA, you war-game it the year before, and the guy still does not know what he is doing, and people died because of it. That is the sad part of this whole thing.

They have proved they are not the party.

Mr. Speaker, that was the same, almost the same identical phrase that we heard from the Secretary, the new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about 9/11 when she was National Security Adviser: Who would possibly think anyone would take a plane and fly it into a building like a missile? Well, we found out later that people knew that was going to happen. They knew that was an option.

It is the same old rhetoric with these people over and over and over again. It does not make any sense. It just does not add up. Now, all of a sudden, the spotlight is on, and we have all of this information here, and we have pages and pages and folders and folders full of how much they knew beforehand and played dumb.

That is exactly right. We are not going to let that happen.

It almost brings up the point, whether it is black or white or whatever, number of electoral votes the way this group operates. You know, if you have got a State that has enough electoral votes, we will maybe even be there before anything comes. But if you do not have enough, you know, you are on your own, and we are going to absolutely roll the dice.

And as we are kind of creeping into the final few minutes here, I want to just touch upon what the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) has just said, that I hope the ultimate point that we can all carry out of this whole tragedy that is still going on for thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and I hope when New Orleans is rebuilt and we are all down there, you know, hanging out again, that the point that we all remember is this: this tragedy highlighted the clear disparity between many people in this country and many others in this country. Whether it is black or white or rich or poor, there is a huge, tremendous rift between those people who have a lot of money and those people who do not have anything.

And we saw it today, or this past week because people were saying, well, why did they not leave? Well, 35 percent of the African Americans, I believe, in the city, did not have cars. Now, regardless of how the whole thing was structured, and we will have arguments about everything else, they were at a clear disadvantage. They were reliant upon someone else. And you go through education and health care and basic skills that kids test on, it is unbelievable how poorer kids do so much worse.

And this is going on in Youngstown, in Akron, in Cleveland, in Milwaukee, in Detroit. Pick a city, as the gentlewoman said. And I hope that after all this we realize that that is unacceptable and to give millionaires trillions and trillions of dollars and see what the end result is, whether it is through kids, education, health care or levees being built, the government has a role to play, and those people who benefit from society have an obligation to meet their responsibility to everybody else. And that is really, I think, the ultimate point in this. And I hope that the reaction to this is the same reaction that we had in 1927 when the big flood hit in 1927, which eventually led to a very progressive era in government and into the 1930s and 1940s and, quite frankly, into the 1980s.

So I hope that we all realize that, you know, we are pretty lucky, most of us. But there are some people that we need to reach out to and find ways to reform government and put the money in the right places to make sure that those people have the kind of opportunity that many others have.

[email protected]. We are going to be trying to recruit college kids to go down and help with the clean up too. So it is [email protected]