National Guard and Reservists Debt Relief Act of 2008

Floor Speech

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Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 4044, the National Guard and Reservists Debt Relief Act of 2008. I am happy that the House is considering today this bipartisan legislation.

As the gentleman from Michigan, the chairman of the committee mentioned, several years ago we passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. The purpose was to ensure that bankruptcy procedures were still allowed for those who needed them, and yet the abuses that we had seen in the years leading up to the bill would be reduced if not eliminated. It received bipartisan support.

Today's bill deals with a part of that scene that needs to be addressed and addressed immediately. Republicans strongly support the mission and appreciate the sacrifice of our dedicated reservists and guardsmen. As many people know, we rely far more on our National Guard and Reservists in the conflict that we have ongoing in the Middle East today than we have in previous conflicts. That was a conscious decision by the Congress of the United States over the last couple of decades.

As a result, many, many more dedicated reservists and guardsmen are assuming responsibility in areas of conflict. We agree that reservists and guardsmen who are plunged into bankruptcy by the demands of their service should be given a helping hand under the bankruptcy code.

In committee, Republicans labored long and hard to achieve a workable compromise that would help these serving men and women. The major issue for committee Republicans was simple--that the bill respond to bankruptcies attributable to a reservist's or guardsman's service.

This bill does not perfectly meet that concern. However, it is part of the art of compromise and it meets it sufficiently for committee Republicans to support passage.

It does this first by requiring an important study by the GAO. The study will examine the degree to which bankruptcies benefiting from the bill are indeed attributable to service, as we hope they will be.

The study thus will help us to be sure of whether reservists and guardsmen are using the relief granted by the bill when it is their service that leads to bankruptcy. And the study must be completed promptly within 2 years of enactment.

Secondly, the bill includes a 3-year sunset. When we are asked to reauthorize the bill, we will have the GAO study and report. And we will know for sure how the bill is working, and if it needs to be modified, how it should be modified. It is not my expectation that it would be abused, but if it is, we would be able to address that at the time the reauthorization is considered.

With these requirements added, I am pleased to support passage of the bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Once again I would just repeat this is a bipartisan bill brought to this floor with strong bipartisan support. Hopefully we will get a unanimous vote in favor of it. This is something that recognizes the unique situation our reservists and guardsmen and women are placed in when they leave the jobs that they have, go back to the theater of war, serve us well and run into difficulties as a result of that service from a financial standpoint.

We all agree that they should receive relief. I would hope that we can get people on the other side of the aisle to also agree that they ought to get relief from these extraordinary, out-of-character, unprecedented high gas prices that we have. What a shock it must be for our reservists and guardsmen to leave this country and do service for this country in a foreign land and then return and find out that in the period of time they have been gone, all of a sudden gas prices have risen $1.50, $1.70, before they were even able to return.

So hopefully as we grant relief in this small particular area of bankruptcy law, we might also think about the relief not only for reservists and guardsmen but all Americans from the extraordinary costs that they are now being called upon to pay in the area of energy.

It is not just at the gas tank, it is rippling through the economy because transportation costs are built into the cost of just about everything that we have, and our friends on the other side of the aisle say, well, we will bring a lawsuit, maybe that will do something. Wind, solar, I support those, but I have yet to find a wind-powered car in my district, or a solar-powered car in my district.

And creeping up on us, although we are now involved in the middle of summer, the beginning of summer, but it feels like the middle of summer with the heat that is out there, creeping up on us is the extraordinary increase that we are seeing in the cost of natural gas. Natural gas supplies a good bit of the heating for the winter that we will find come November and December.

I have been informed that in California electricity is produced at least 60 percent by natural gas. We don't have to wait for our heating fuel. We can worry about the concerns that we have with air-conditioning supplied by electricity.

So all I'm saying, Madam Speaker, is that as we work on worthy legislation like this, there is other worthy legislation out there. And all we ask is what the American people ask: Give us a vote. Give us a chance to prove that the reserves that are available in the United States, American reserves, American oil, American natural gas, be utilized for Americans. If our enemy was doing this to us, we would be in a fighting mood, but unfortunately through our Congress, we're doing it to ourselves.

So at some point in time, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we might be able to prevail on the other side to understand that supply makes a difference and help us bring those costs down as a result of increasing the product that is available to Americans from American sources.

Once again, Madam Speaker, I support H.R. 4044, the National Guard and Reservists Debt Relief Act of 2008.

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Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Madam Speaker, of course I cannot address the gentleman directly under the rules. So through the Chair, I would just say that yes, shale oil and tar sands are important. We happen to be the Saudi Arabia of those certain resources of God, placed here for us to use, and yet for one reason or another, we're almost afraid to use the world ``drill.'' So I appreciate the chairman using the word ``drill'' three different times. That doesn't mean going to the dentist. That means drill for oil, drill for natural gas. That will be something which will help the American people.

So I would just say that I don't need my leadership to tell me about it. All I need to do is go home and see the prices of gasoline. All I need to do is listen to people. Seventy-some percent of the American people now, by the latest Fox poll, say they want more drilling, they want more production in America. The only group that doesn't have a 70-some percent support of it is this group, the House of Representatives. Either we're behind the times or we're ahead of the times. And I suspect we're behind the times.

And all I'm doing is asking my good friend, the chairman from Michigan, to understand that the people of Michigan suffer as much as the people of California when we fail to understand that we have resources that we could use. We ought to use American technology to develop American energy rather than having it developed all around the world.

Oh, and by the way, oil spills. They come from tankers. They come from tankers, not from offshore rigs. We ought to understand the more we're dependent upon foreign oil, the more tankers that supply the oceans and a greater possibility of a problem which would cause difficulty on our beaches and those beautiful waves that my friend from California enjoys surfing on in California.

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