The Deficit
THE DEFICIT -- (House of Representatives - October 07, 2005)
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Mrs. Jones) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I rise at a perfect opportunity to talk about the deficit.
The gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier), my colleague, would have the American public believe that we are in great shape. What he did not tell us was that the deficit currently is $8 trillion; that 20 percent of that deficit is owned by Japan, China and other foreign countries; that 40 percent of that deficit, in fact, is a trade-off between our various agencies in the Federal Government; and that our children and our grandchildren are going to be paying on that deficit. He then wants us to believe that, as a result of the tax cuts, the economy's in great shape, but give me a break. Stop trying to fool the American public.
The reality is, as a result of those tax cuts, this $8 trillion deficit currently exists, and as we continue to throw money after money over to Iraq and rebuild Iraq, give them education, give them health care, rebuild their infrastructure, we are failing to even want to spend time to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama, and in fact, have not even contemplated how we are going to pay for the Katrina loss. But let me give my colleagues some other news.
It is, in fact, true that the Republicans are proposing to offset the cost of Katrina against people who can least afford to lose dollars, and they are going to use dollars that go to low-income folks, Medicare, Medicaid. They are going to use dollars that go to college education. They are going to use dollars that go towards the HUD department that provides for housing, and the list goes on.
So I do not know how he could stand on the floor of this House and make people of America think that we are doing well. We are really not, and in fact, the trade deficit continues to rise, and people in America are still out of work, while many of the companies are going across the border or across the seas and giving jobs to people in China and other countries.
The gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier) needs a wake-up call so we can begin to tell the people of America the truth.
ENERGY BILL VOTE
Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Madam Speaker, let me switch horses just for a moment and talk about what just happened on the floor of the House.
We just had a vote on the energy bill, and my colleagues will recall that the vote, when it began, was supposed to be a 5-minute vote. Ultimately, it ended up probably being a 45-minute vote, and again, the Republicans are twisting arms of their colleagues to get them to vote in support of a bill when, in reality, they would not have done that. In fact, there are many times on the floor of the House when the vote should have been called and it was not.
I am going to quote some of my colleagues specifically on this issue. The gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), my colleague says, Once again, on an issue of critical importance to the American people, the Republican majority has chosen to trample the democratic process and manipulate the outcome of a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives after the vote was completed. This is unethical subversion of our democracy, and the Republican leadership has brought shame on themselves in the House of Representatives. Unquote.
One would think that this was the first time that the Republican leadership had made a decision to trample on the rights of the people and to engage in shameless conduct by twisting arms on the floor of the House, but let me give my colleagues some background when this has happened previously.
On October 7, 2005, this is the bill we are talking about right now, the Gasoline for America's Security Act. The vote began at 1:57 p.m., a 5-minute vote. It was gaveled down at 2:43 p.m., some 46 minutes later.
On July 27 and 28, the legislative day of July 27, on the CAFTA, the vote started at 11:00 p.m. and went on till 1:20 a.m. Vote 442, it lasted 63 minutes. It originally was supposed to be a 15-minute vote.
In previous Congresses, on July 8, 2004, it was the Sanders amendment on the PATRIOT Act to the fiscal year 2005 Commerce Justice State appropriations bill. That was a 38-minute vote.
On March 30, 2004, on a motion to instruct conferees on PAYGO on the fiscal year 2005 budget resolution, it was a 28-minute vote when it should have been a 5-minute vote.
On November 22, 2003, the final passage of the conference report on H.R. 1, the prescription drug bill, imagine this, a 3-hour vote. During this time frame bribes allegedly offered.
On final passage of H.R. 1, the prescription drug bill, it was 50 minutes.
On March 20, 2003, final passage of the budget resolution, it was 26 minutes long.
On July 12, 2001, the campaign finance bill, this was a timeout to determine what was to occur next on the floor, 13 minutes.
On October 9, 1997, passage of fiscal year 1998 D.C. appropriations bill, 33 minutes.
The longest votes prior to the Republican majority in the House, October 3, 1994, a timeout to accommodate changes in the floor schedule was only 44 minutes.
And the list goes on.
Madam Speaker, this is a specific example of how the Republican leadership has used the floor because they are in the majority to push and shove and make people vote the way they want them to vote instead of the way in which the Member had chosen to vote previously. I call upon the American people to pay attention because as time goes along, it will be revealed what is happening on the floor of this House.
Let me switch veins one more time. Everybody has been talking about Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Let us talk about Hurricane Katrina 1 month later. It has been 1 month since Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast region; yet as of September 27, less than one-tenth of the relief authorized by Congress has reached the 1.2 million households impacted by the storm and thousands of households have received no relief from FEMA at all.
Little wonder, since instead of providing relief to the survivors of the storms the Republicans continue to focus on special interests by appointing political cronies such as Michael Brown and David Safavian, who take jobs they are not qualified for and who unfairly award contracts to their supporters.
Here is a closer look at how the Republican failures are impacting the survivors of Katrina. Health care: Republican red tape leaves hurricane victims without care. Nearly one in four people living at the Houston shelters reported a time since the hurricane hit when they simply could not get the medical care they needed. This administration has failed simply to provide for basic health care needs of the Hurricane Katrina survivors.
Instead, they are pursuing a confusing and limited bureaucratic health care waiver approach that is making it difficult for Hurricane Katrina survivors to know what their health benefits are and which may leave many survivors, such as childless adults or poor parents, without any access to care at all and States without Federal funding to assist evacuees.
Democrats support a bipartisan simple and fair solution to ensure that all victims of the hurricane have temporary access to the basic care they need. They want to cut the red tape by allowing Medicaid to provide temporary health care coverage.
Now, with regard to housing, the Republicans have left thousands without a place to call home. A full 3 weeks after Katrina hit, fewer than 13,000 of the 200,000 families in need of housing assistance have received any help from the administration, even though there are more than one million low-cost rental units available in the South.
First, the administration proposed purchasing 300,000 travel trailers, recreational vehicles and manufactured housing, only to find that some of the orders may take a year to fill and only one-third of the proposed sites for the housing and the necessary infrastructure are in place. Then FEMA chartered cruise ships as temporary shelters, with little understanding that living on a ship at sea would make it difficult to find jobs and schooling. Then the President announced an urban homestead initiative which will provide little more than a lottery of properties held by the Federal Government that will help only a fraction of the affected families.
It was not until nearly 1 month after the disaster struck that the Bush administration finally announced it would begin to provide rent payments to families displaced by the storm.
Democrats have proposed using emergency housing vouchers to meet immediate needs and support funding for construction and repair of affordable housing in the disaster area. Let me take a note from this and say that also Democratic Members of the Congress have proposed various tax initiatives to encourage people to move back to the areas from which they left.
One of the pieces of legislation that I introduced provides specifically a tax credit or a tax incentive for families to go back and build where they lived. It would be like a first-time home buyer program that would allow them to build back in the community where they lived. Because basically it is possible, based on all that we can see, that many of the families who would want to move back to the various areas which have been affected would not be able to afford to move back to those communities.
I also have proposed in a piece of legislation that I have authored that the low-income housing tax credit be doubled in order to encourage developers to build in many of these areas. Currently, it is 1.78. Under the proposal that I have presented, it would be doubled to 3.50 to allow developers to be encouraged to build in those communities.
It is high time that we stop talking about assisting the victims of Katrina and Rita and give them what they need to be successful.
In addition, let us talk about economic security. As many as 400,000 individuals have lost their jobs as a result of Hurricane Katrina; yet the Republicans have proposed no changes to extend unemployment assistance. Unemployment benefits are the lowest in the country in the three impacted States, averaging less than $200 per week, or about 50 percent of the poverty level of a family of four.
Rather than acting to help working families, the Bush administration has cut the wages of workers working on Katrina reconstruction by suspending the Davis-Bacon rules in the gulf region which requires a payment of prevailing wage. Now, if we are going to talk about poor people in the United States of America, and then we are going to pay them below the prevailing wage, how do we expect they are going to be able to take care of their families and to afford health insurance, if that is the case?
It does not make sense at a time when the President says that poverty and racism are actually the outcome of what we see with Katrina and across this country that we would want to pay families at below prevailing wages. Also, in the process of putting in place these economic programs, the President has proposed that affirmative action policies not be put in place. Again, most of the people involved in the Katrina and Rita hurricanes were African Americans. Why would you not want to include in there some chances or opportunities to include affirmative action?
And the list goes on, as we talk about education and the opportunity for these young people to move into school systems or move into other colleges to be successful. We go on to talk about the process that the administration has instead chosen to advance the controversial agenda for education vouchers to private schools.
Some people may want to attend private schools, but many of the children may want to attend the kind of school they were attending before, a public school, where you have a diversity of students in the system. It is a shame that after all that we have gone through, after all the suffering that we have seen as a result of Katrina that we would not have in place a system, some 30-some days later, to support and encourage the people of the particular areas.
I also want to talk about the problem that we see with regard to first responders. They were supposed to, meaning the administration and this Congress, provide dollars to the various areas to support first responders. Instead, they have decided to not meet the needs of the first responders. Additionally, when Hurricane Katrina hit, emergency personnel were on at least five different channels, which was making communications difficult. Instead of fixing the problem for first responders in communicating with each other, the Republicans allowed it to fester.
We all recognized the problem we saw on 9/11, that the first responders had no way of communicating with one another. You would have thought, understanding that, that before another event occurred, such as Katrina or Rita, that we would have put in place a system and dollars for first responders to be able to communicate with one another. But we did not fix that.
One hopes that as the weeks and months go along that this Republican Congress, this majority Republican Congress, would attempt to address the issues that are important to the people of America, such as our first responders; that they will look at a real energy bill, instead of the one they placed on the floor and beat people into submission to vote for; and that they would also look at this culture of cronyism, wherein only their friends have an opportunity to bid on contracts.
Excuse me, they do not even have to bid on the contracts. Only their friends have access to contracts, wherein they have an opportunity to do the work that is created as a result of the disasters in our country.
As I close, Madam Speaker, this afternoon, I would say to the American public that there is a lot for you to take a look at and understand what is happening here on the floor of the House of Representatives, this pushing and arm twisting, the cronyism and the like.
Because, Madam Speaker, in the upcoming weeks we will be involved in a lot of issues that are going to come before this Congress that will be important to the American public, such as additional issues with regard to energy. And this happening at a time when the American public expects that we are going to be operating aboveboard and we are going to be operating in a way in that all of us can stand up and say that we are proud to be Americans; that we are proud to be a part of a Congress of the United States that acts appropriately; and that we are proud to support and help those who are most in need of our help.
CONGRATULATIONS TO CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL PRESIDENT, FRANK JACKSON
Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Madam Speaker, if you would allow me, on a wholly different issue, I would like to take this opportunity at this time to congratulate the council president of the city of Cleveland, Frank Jackson. Frank Jackson just won the mayoral primary in the city of Cleveland, beating out the current mayor by some 4,000 votes. So this gives me a great opportunity to congratulate him for the work that he has done.
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