30-Something Working Group

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - March 02, 2006)

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I am always pleased to see you and Mr. Ryan and Ms. Wasserman Schultz lend your eloquence on these issues.

Let me make a couple of points. You touched on something enormously important about the President's commitment to more competitiveness in the economy and the strengthening of our workforce. You and I remember, we both came one Congress ago. We came here in January, 2003, and I remember the President's first State of the Union. He was standing not far from where we stand now. And the only line, frankly, I recall from that speech was a rather memorable one.

He said that this Congress should not put off what future Congresses would do and this generation should not put off for future generations what it could do for itself. That sounded good. It sounded like a bold President saying that we have real opportunities today if we are daring. Well, you look several budgets later. You have a verbal commitment to make the economy stronger. You have a pattern of cutting student loans and making them harder to get, and by the way, changing the eligibility outside the budget process in the dead of night in a way that it is not even debated by this Congress.

You have a promise of more effort to make the country competitive. You see reductions every year in workforce development programs. You see promises every year to strengthen our schools, and you see continued cuts in all of the educational programs in this country or so many of them, and the outright elimination of many of those programs. In fact, almost half of the title items in No Child Left Behind are gone with the wind now as we approach reauthorization.

And you see a promise by this President to make America stronger; but it appears, Mr. Meek, that making America stronger does not include making our workers stronger and creating more fair, stronger conditions for them.

As I said in the last hour, that is what this debate is about. It is not about cutting spending. You are not serious about cutting spending when you say, I am going to cut $45 billion and then cut taxes another $70 billion. The math works against you on that.

You are not serious about cutting spending when you have had the greatest level of discretionary spending increase in the last 10 years, in the last several budgets. You are not serious about those things. What we have is an administration and a Congress that, frankly, is not somewhat serious about cutting spending. They are very serious about changing the definition of what we owe each other as Americans.

They want to move us away from a world where we feel connected and obligated to each other across all kinds of lines, and they want to more or less move us to a place where you have got to take care of yourself.

These 13 million families on Medicaid who have got to dig deeper in their pocket now to go to the doctor, well, we have decided that it is such an important proposition that poor people pay more for health care that we rammed that into the budget reconciliation several weeks ago, or they rammed it in.

They think it is so important to spend less money on child support that they rammed that into the reconciliation package several months ago. It goes on and on. But the question is what exactly do we think we owe each other as Americans.

There are some people and some of them sit on the other side of the aisle who believe that we owe each other very little. There are some of us who believe that we can be no stronger than some of our people who are weak and who are hurting through no fault of their own.

There are a lot of kids in this country who will be pushed off Medicaid because of this reconciliation bill a few weeks ago. There are a lot of kids in this country who will not get the doctor visits they need because the Federal Government changed them the Medicare rules a few weeks ago. Those kids are blameless. They did not ask to be born into families under Medicaid or the distressed communities they live in.

So it is very much a matter of priorities and values and choices, but as I close out, I want to make one other point.

You talked about the importance of candor with the American people and the importance of leveling with the American people, not promising you are cutting and spending when you are actually causing the deficit to go up. You talked about the importance of not pretending that you are not taking people off programs, but in fact, you are moving them off programs.

I do not know if your office has been like mine in the last week. I have received so many phone calls from people wondering why their government cannot be more straight with them on what is going on with our ports right now. So many people have called our office and they are wondering exactly why we do not have a stronger shipping industry in the United States, why we have not built stronger port operators in this United States and why we have to keep delegating this stuff out. They hear all the procedural stuff about the 45-day review period, but really, what they wonder is why in the world are we doing a $6 billion deal with a country that helped launder money for the people who attacked our towers, a country that is a very strong and vociferous opponent of our strongest ally in the region, why are we doing business with a country that does not follow any of the rules that we said we want for good trading partners.

It is interesting. It is as if the administration's policy on this issue is completely unconnected to common sense and, frankly, completely unconnected from values because one value would be if you want to do business with the United States, well, maybe you need to do better in terms of your human rights policies; if you want to do business with the United States, maybe you need strong money laundering laws so people cannot pervert your system and finance terrorists; if you want to do business with the United States, maybe you need to be far stronger than this country has shown itself to be on the question of freedom around the world.

These are the values the President talks about every time he stands up there and does a State of the Union. He talks about exporting democracy. He talks about we are this great beacon of democratic freedom. He talks about countries all over the world that are not up to our standard. If that is the case, what signal are we sending?

The last point I want to make is the President wanted to know what signal are we sending to our friends in the Arab world if we do not do this deal. The question is, what signal are we sending if we do it? Here is the signal. The signal is you can fall short of every value and standard that we have in this country, and we will pick you up on the back end and we can make a good enough deal with you.

Now, this is the administration that said it built a foreign policy based on our best moral values. Those moral values appear to be watered down to the way to do a deal, have we got a deal for you, and that is wrong. It has upset people all over this country. It does tie into this debate about the deficit because I think people are wondering who is it we are trying to help; why are we not standing up more for our people who need help and why are we not being more candid about what we are doing.

I really predict to you, as I close today, I think when we come back here after the elections in November, I think that our side of the House will be the side that has got more people. I think the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) will honor us by being the first female Speaker of the House. I am being stronger convinced that you will be the new chair of the subcommittee that you serve on so ably as ranking member, and Mr. Ryan and I will get to move up the dais, too, because I think the American people are getting this. They are getting that the side that says it is strong and says it is serious is neither as strong nor as serious as they have said.

People are really smart. They are smart in my district and yours and all over the country, and I think that what we will see is a change in the politics of this country, a change in the leadership of the House. I welcome it when we stand up here next year crafting the budget, and it will matter. The Democratic alternative we are putting together right now, it will really matter next year because we are going to be in the majority, and we will be crafting a budget and sending it to the President and saying, Mr. President, we dare you to veto a stronger commitment to education and health care and growing our economy; we dare you to veto a stronger commitment to strengthening working families. I would be happy to. He has not vetoed anything in 6 years.

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Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Madam Speaker, let me follow up on what my friend from Ohio just said.

This PAYGO rule you talk about, we call it PAYGO for various reasons. Really, it is the be-like-the-American-family rule. Every family I know, yours, mine, every other one, has to decide, if we are going to go out and buy some new things, we better make some more money or we better pull into our savings. All this rule says is if you are going to have new spending, you have got to pay for it. You can do it one of two ways, with spending cuts by making changes in the marginal rate or changes in revenue. That is the honesty stuff, that is the candor stuff.

The reality is, why would anybody not want to do that? If you are a fiscal conservative, why would you not want to go to a world that says let us just be no better or worse than the American family?

So this is an argument, once again, about whether we follow the same rules and the same principles that people follow all around the country.

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Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. I thank the gentleman for yielding. All of my colleague's points are so powerful that they inspire other thoughts and ideas that just want to tumble out of you. So let me go back a little bit to what you were saying, because you make a very important point.

I think there has been an interesting flip between where our party was at one point and where the Republicans are at this point. We are all fairly young guys. This is a little bit before our time, but we hit a zone as a party in the 1970s and 1980s where we would make decisions as a party and sometimes they would not be smart decisions. But we, frankly, couldn't and wouldn't defend them.

We would just say to the American people and some folks in our party would say to the American people, you know what, trust us. We have the facts, we are diligent, we know what is right, we have more information than you do, so you ought to just trust us. And, frankly, Mr. Meek, that didn't work terribly well as a strategy for our party and people started to lose confidence in us. And they started to think, well, we put you there, so you have to tell us more, you have to level with us more.

Now, what have we seen in the last several weeks, essentially, when everybody all over the country is saying, why can't we find a country that doesn't have a history of terrorist ties to help police our ports, pretty simple question? What do they say? They say, trust us. They say we have got the facts, we have got information you don't have, we know more than you do, let us do our jobs. Trust us.

And they have said it before. They say it with these budgets. They say, yes, there is a lot of stuff in here nobody understands, and they bring them to the floor and we get a few hours to look at it. But they say, trust us, we have the information, we have the facts and we know what is right for the American people.

And I am sure a lot of folks are probably thinking right now that they did that back in March 2003, and they said, no, you don't have all the intel, you don't have all the evidence, but we do. Trust us and we will get us in and out of this war real quick. And if you doubt that, well, trust us.

This "just trust us" politics took us from having, what was the number we had, it was 292, was the maximum we got to. We had 292 seats here at one point, but we lapsed into the "just trust us" politics and now we are down to 203.

Well, I think now they are the "just trust us" folks, and they have started to move down the scale in the numbers, and I think they are going to be moving from around 231 to about 208 or 209 or so in not too long.

The American people put us here. We get whatever little authority we derive from the Constitution and from them. So we do owe them candor, we do owe them explanations, we do owe them a sense of direction. It is not enough to say, just trust us, is it?

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