The 6-year Highway Authorization

Floor Speech

Mr. DeFAZIO. I hope the gentleman who spoke before me in the well would be willing to accept one minor thing. I hear a lot from the Republicans about they want competition, they want the free market, but the problem is that insurance is exempt from antitrust law. Unlike any other industry or business, small or large, in America, except for professional baseball, they are exempt. They can and do get together and collude--collude to drive up the price of premiums, collude to stay out of one another's markets and not compete, collude not to exclude people with preexisting conditions, collude to do a whole host of anticompetitive things to stick it to the American people. So before I hear any more from that side of the aisle about supporting the private insurance industry, let's hear about having them play by the same rules as every other industry in America. But that's not why I came to the floor this afternoon.

I came to the floor because there seems to be a little disconnect downtown at the White House with the President's economic team, yet, once again. Big surprise.

The GDP, gross domestic product, is growing, so the economy is recovering. We're out of the recession. Whoops. Well, it's a so-called jobless recovery, and we're still going to lose about 250,000 jobs a month. But they're down there celebrating.

We need to take concrete steps--not to make a bad pun--here in the House of Representatives, in Congress, to put people back to work. And one of the things that we could do best would be to ignore the President and his advisers who want to delay a new transportation policy for America, one that will deliver projects more quickly and with less expense, getting people out of congestion, giving people more transit options, fixing some of our 160,000 bridges that are either structurally deficient--there was a little problem yesterday with the San Francisco Bay Bridge--or functionally obsolete, building made-in-America streetcars, made-in-America modern buses, like the fuel cell bus I saw yesterday. But guess what? It's going to take some investment and some money.

This White House, after cutting a deal with Republican Senators for $340 billion in tax cuts in the so-called stimulus, which isn't putting anybody back to work--ask your neighbor, ask your friend, ask anybody, What did you spend your $12 on last week, your tax cut? How did you invest it for the future of America?

We need something that is not consumer-driven. We need a recovery that is investment and jobs-driven in this country, and a 6-year highway authorization could get that job done. The difference between the Obama plan--do nothing, extend current law and current levels of expenditure for a crumbling Third World-like infrastructure in this country--and what we're proposing here in the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is 1 million jobs next year.

Now, apparently, the President's economic team thinks that they can tell those 1 million people who won't get jobs, Well, don't worry. The GDP's up, and we are losing less jobs than we were losing before. Or maybe they could get on board with us, help us write that 6-year bill, wake the Senate up from its nap, and put 1 million more Americans back to work next year rebuilding America's transportation infrastructure.

And, by the way, it meets another one of his goals. It will help him with his goals of reducing pollution, reducing carbon emissions because we'll get people out of sitting in traffic as we expand the system, deal with congestion and giving them more transit options.

I recommend that the President look for a new economic team and help us to do things that will benefit the real American people, not pointy-head economists and not Wall Street.

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