Important Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding, and, yes, we have a lot of military installations in the Hampton Roads area, and we are very concerned about the present situation in the Middle East.

We want to talk about what is going on in the Committee on Education and Labor, and I just want to share a few things that we have been doing over the last year.

Comments have been made of what Congress is or is not doing. Well, we have been protecting the income of hardworking Americans by the House passing the Raise the Wage Act, which will gradually increase the Federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2025, giving 33 million workers a raise and lifting over a million people out of poverty.

We haven't had an increase in the minimum wage for over a decade. The last minimum wage was over 10 years ago, and inflation has eroded the value of that minimum wage so much to the point where one study concluded that a full-time, 40-hours-a-week, minimum-wage worker cannot afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in any county in the United States.

We are not talking about San Francisco or Manhattan. Not a single county in the United States can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. So we voted in the House to increase the minimum wage.

The Paycheck Fairness Act addresses pay inequity by holding companies accountable for gender-based wage disparities and protecting a worker's right to challenge systemic pay discrimination. We passed that bill.

The Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act, or Butch Lewis Act, will prevent the imminent collapse of our multiemployer pension system, saving over 1 million hardworking Americans their pension, while protecting those benefits and the taxpayer's dollars.

We also passed the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act to prevent violence and the injuries that occur because of that.

In addition, the committee has reported the PRO Act, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which will enable workers to negotiate for better wages and better working conditions.

We also passed the legislation to help in the area of children's access to quality education and a safe learning environment.

We passed in the committee the Rebuild America's Schools Act which will invest $100 billion to repair our public schools' crumbling digital and physical infrastructure and will create 1.9 million jobs.

We passed two important civil rights bills in the area of education: the Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act and Strength in Diversity Act, which will empower students, parents, and communities to challenge discriminatory education policies and increase school diversity.

The committee passed the College Affordability Act, which will comprehensively overhaul our higher education system so that students will be able to achieve a college degree without incurring crushing debt.

We also passed legislation to protect children from school shootings.

In the area of healthcare, the House has passed legislation to protect consumers from junk health plans by trying to overturn the Trump administration's short-term, limited duration insurance rule, as well as passing the Lower Drug Costs Now Act which will reduce out-of- pocket costs for customers, lower prescription drug prices, and increase transparency.

We passed legislation that will protect children from child abuse, the Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.

We protected seniors by passing legislation, the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act.

All of those bills have passed the House. None have been taken up by the Senate, and so we need to make sure that the hard work of our committee is rewarded by the passage of those bills in the Senate.

But as I have said, our committee has been busy. All of the committees have been busy doing the people's work. We are doing the people's agenda, and I thank the gentleman for the opportunity to do a little bragging about what we have done.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for the opportunity to mention these bills for the people. The people will be much better off if we can get a little cooperation down the hall and improve education, improve healthcare, and improve working conditions.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, we are continuing to work.

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