W. J. (Billy) Tauzin

Mr. Speaker, today I cast my last vote in this august Chamber, and today I spend my last day with my colleagues here with nearly 25 years of service on behalf of the third congressional district and the great people who live there in Louisiana, and I wanted to take a minute to say good-bye and to say a few words of thanks.

First, I want to thank the good Lord for giving me this week. Were it not for this lame duck session following a year of illness with cancer, I might not have had the chance to come back and spend this week with you where I could renew friendships and thank all of you on a personal level for the many acts of kindness and the extraordinary times we have had together over the last 25 years.

Secondly, I want to thank all of you on both sides of the aisle for the amazing amounts of friendship.

One of our esteemed colleagues who we lost to a brain tumor, Mr. Mike Sarne of Oklahoma, one of my dearest friends, once said the only reason he kept running for reelection was the immense honor and privilege of serving with such an amazing group of men and women who come to this great capital and serve their country and their individual districts and the honor and privilege of getting to know them and to work side by side with them, and I feel that today after this nearly 25-year term of service.

I have served the people of the 3rd district of Louisiana longer than any other Congressman has served, and I have that enormous privilege, and I want to thank them in Louisiana who have shown such patience and such amazing amount of tolerance to put up with the likes of me for the last 25 years.

I have served them 15 years as a Democrat and almost 10 years now as a Republican. I do not know if any other district in America would tolerate a Congressman making those sorts of shifts and turns in a political career as well as the folks in Louisiana have tolerated me, but it has given me some insight, and I want to quickly share them with my colleagues.

Like few people in this Chamber, I have come to know the Members of this side of the aisle for over 15 years, not as partisan enemies, but as friends; and I have come to know now the people on this side of the aisle for the last 10 years, not as partisan enemies but as friends. I wish that all of my colleagues had that opportunity in this House. I wish they could somehow cross this aisle and get to know one another the way we used to know one another in this Chamber.

The politics and personal attacks and personal destruction have almost taken hold in this place in a way that we cannot reverse it, and we need to reverse it soon if this Nation and this institution are to survive.

This institution is a place for diversity, for great clashes of ideas, for great principles to come together and in a great crush of public debate so that it might redefine itself on a regular basis. It is not a place we ought to be constantly attacking each other and questioning one another's motives, but we have somehow gotten there.

I plead with my colleagues as I leave this place, this place that has been so important to me and the folks of Louisiana who have put their faith and trust in me in the last 25 years, please end this system and go back to a time and place where we can begin debating one another and recognizing we all come over here as patriots, as Americans first and as party members second.

I leave with a great fondness for my colleagues, a great amount of appreciation for all the days I have spent with you, and I want to say a fond farewell on behalf of the 650,000 people of Louisiana who have allowed me the chance to work with you. I want to wish you well in the upcoming sessions. I will try to be in touch and to stay close to you as we go forward. You have made for me a home in this Chamber that I shall not forget, and you have given me a most extraordinary honor and privilege of being a part of the greatest democratic institution on the face of the Earth, and I thank you for that and bid you farewell.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time; and, on a very bipartisan note, let me first thank the Members of this House and of the Senate, and particularly my friend from Massachusetts, Mr. Kennedy, for the great success we had in passing the Public Health Security Act and the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act.

As my colleagues will recall, right after 9-11 it became clear to us as a Nation that we were under serious threat of attacks from agents like anthrax or perhaps even such horrible agents as botulism toxin or ebola or other similar viruses and that we were so unprepared in this country for that kind of attack that we got together, in a bipartisan fashion, and immediately passed an act to bolster the competence and the ability of the Center for Disease Control and of agents across the country to better respond to an attack of that nature.

Since the passage of those two very important actions that have better armed our country for this danger that we face perhaps even more increasingly as years go by, it has come to our attention that there were some holes even in that great act. The most important hole which this act seeks to fill is the concern we have that when it comes to some of these agents, whether they be a botulism toxin agent, ebola, or whether it is a radioactive type of attack we have to deal with in this country, that we have not done enough research and development into the antidotes, the vaccines, the treatments that victims of these attacks might find are critically necessary to save lives and prevent injury.

I do not have to tell my colleagues that this House and the Senate recently received another briefing on national security threats. The concern levels are up about an attack that might occur in this country from al Qaeda or other enemies of this country. As we fight them overseas, they are thinking about planning an attack on us here at home again. We know that. We know the attack may come in a place we do not know, in a place we are unprepared for, and it might involve radiological materials or it might involve some horrible virus or some agent the likes of which we are unprepared to deal with.

This bill seeks to make sure that the private sector does the work along with government to find the antidotes, the treatment for these kinds of agents that might be used in such an attack which might not otherwise be developed in the private sector.

What is the incentive today to develop a vaccine for ebola or for the plague when there is no real market for such a vaccine in this country? This bill and the appropriations we have already provided in the advance funds, some $5.6 billion, is designed to make sure that that research and development occurs and that those vaccines and those treatments are indeed available to our country in case the worst happens and we are subject to that kind of an attack by al Qaeda or other enemies of this country within our borders as we saw on 9-11.

Secondly, the bill tries to do something else, and that is to say we are going to change our law a little bit when it comes to the government's approval of treatment and/or it might be

a vaccine or some treatment that has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration but yet has a greater ability to cure and help people than the risk involved with allowing it to be used. In other words, we are streamlining the law to make sure, if we do come under attack, if there is some vaccine, some treatment under study that has a lot of promise but has not yet been approved, that we are not forbidden to use it to help people who might be hurt or in need of that kind of treatment.

In short, this Bioshield Act, an incredibly important new step in protecting our country at a time when we are increasingly learning of the hatred and evil that exists out there that wants to inflict more damage on our country, this new act, passed again in, I hope, a very strong bipartisan way, reaching the President's desk for his signature very soon, I hope, will add this new element of protection for our country that Senator Kennedy and I tried to provide in the first bioterrorism act for our Nation following 9-11.

This is an important step in protecting our country at a time when we are under, as you know, this increasing warning that these evil individuals are thinking about planning and trying to figure out how they might hurt us again. It is a critical two-step process in making sure that we have the protective vaccines and treatments in place when the worst might happen to our people. So I urge its adoption.

I want to congratulate all of those who have worked on completing the conference on this bill with the Senate. I want to thank the other body for its cooperation. The sooner this reaches the President's desk, the sooner all of us can feel a little better this country is becoming safer as fast as we can from the threat of these kind of agents, and I urge its final approval by this House.

Mr. Speaker, my State, Louisiana, is suffering the worst national ecological disaster in the history of this country. Every year we lose up to 35 square miles of the most precious wetlands in America. The comprehensive energy bill we passed yesterday on this House floor and sent to the other body contains money, for the first time, billions of dollars, to address that national economic disaster.

Louisiana contributes over $5 billion a year from offshore development. We get less than 1 percent back. That bill we sent to the other body contains billions to begin to restore and protect those vanishing wetlands, the biggest environmental program, bigger than the Chesapeake Bay, bigger than the Everglades.

I cannot speak about the other body and how they vote, but let me issue a warning: No one in this Congress who votes against that comprehensive energy bill and that environmental package, no one in this Congress better show their face in south Louisiana if they vote against that comprehensive energy bill.