Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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

Mr. Speaker, here we are with another short-term extension of the highway trust fund. It is silly; it is counterproductive. Anybody who knows anything knows this is ridiculous. They say we have got to have time to work out a compromise. How many years do you need time?

When I served in the State legislature in my home State of Washington, a businessman once told me that businessowners don't care what the rate is or how long; they just want to know how long they have to deal with something.

Now, how can businesses do any kind of planning in this country when they get 1-, 2-, and 3-month extensions? This is the 25th time that we have done a short-term extension of the highway trust fund. Put another way, this is the 25th time the Congress has shirked its responsibility to the taxpayers and businesses to provide reliable transportation infrastructure across this country.

Now, as I thought about this debate, I was reminded of a tube of toothpaste that lays in my bathroom. It is about one-third gone. All of you have one of these at home that is laying there.

You know what you do; you keep squeezing it one more time. You say: Can I get one more brush out of this? Will I get one more? Can I get one more? That is what we have been doing here. We are squeezing the tube one more time. We are going to be back.

You save your toothpaste because it is going to be back; it is going to be back in November or December. We are going to be right back down here squeezing to get a little bit.

Now, my belief is that it is time that we stop this. It is time for a long-term funding bill, and we should have done it this time.

Now, in order to make this bill even worse, they wrap in the toothpaste tube of the Veterans Administration. Let's give a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there; and we will see if we can kind of move it along and then stay out of trouble. We never fix anything here.

This Congress is the Congress of the half-empty toothpaste tube. I will probably vote with everybody else because you don't want the Veterans Administration to be having problems and you don't want the hospital construction to stop.

We will vote for it, but it is foolish, and it is a statement about the failure of the Republican Party to deal with major issues.

I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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

Mr. Speaker, let's review this week. When I got on the plane from Seattle, we were supposed to be here on Friday. By the time I landed at Dulles Airport, they had already given away Friday. We weren't going to have any votes on Friday. So now the week is 1 day short. They continued to ineptly manage this place in such a way, Mr. Speaker, that they are now giving away Thursday.

Now they want to hurry out of here. They want to get out of here. They don't want the American people to see what they are really doing.

If you look at this transportation issue, what is making us uncompetitive in the rest of the world is that everywhere else they are spending money on infrastructure. People know you have to have roads, you have to have high-speed stuff in the ground that will carry a little bit of a message here and there. All that wiring, all that stuff that we could be doing, we should be doing. We should be planning. But there isn't any State that can plan with this kind of a highway bill.

Now, why aren't we doing the thing today that is right? Well, because the Senate has come up with a great proposal. They have a 6-year authorization, but they come up with 3 years of money. How does a State plan with that? We are authorized for 6 years out to whatever that would be, and we are going to wind up only getting money for 3 years. How do we do bond issues in the State when we don't know what the Feds are going to do? This kind of planning makes government fail. And it is what the Republicans want: a Federal Government that fails.

Now, there was a guy named Eisenhower. When he became President, he came in and said: You know something? This country needs roads. And he created the entire system. He was a Republican from Kansas, of all places, and he understood what the country needed to move forward.

People said in the last election what we need to do is elect Republicans. By God, if we get Republicans, we will get what we need in this country. Well, I don't know if they knew what they were voting for, but what they got is a Senate and House that can't come up with a highway bill. They have been here for 8 months. Everybody knows we need it. The sources of revenue are not mysteries.

Russell Long used to say about taxation: ``Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.''

We know there is nobody behind the tree. We are going to have to raise some taxes to do what is necessary.

Well, there are those guys that have that money overseas. Maybe we can get those guys who have got that overseas money and bring it back and fund this. I guess they are behind the tree. But they also live here, so they are not really behind the tree.

This argument is going to go on in December or whenever this thing ends. It doesn't really make any difference. We will come back here, and we will get out our toothpaste tube and we will squeeze a little bit more out of it just to see if we can brush our teeth one more time. That is what this is about. We have done it on issue after issue here, and somebody has to call the Republican Party on this.

The American people should understand, they are not serious about running government for the things that affect ordinary human beings. A transit system in a State is absolutely important. As cities get more crowded and more crowded and there is no parking, if you don't have a transit system that works, you can't have development. Everybody wants development.

Where the heck are you going to put the development? Out in the bushes? No. You are going to put it in the city where the people live. But if they can't move around and get to the jobs, you have got terrible problems. In every city and everybody's district, if you have got a city with over 50,000, you have got problems with traffic, and yet we can't get a transportation bill out of here that goes for more than 3 months. Now, that is pathetic.

I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source