Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3, Keystone XL Pipeline Act, And Providing for Consideration of H.R. 30, Save American Workers Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, House Resolution 19 provides for the
consideration of two important pieces of legislation to help the
American economy, both of which passed in the 113th Congress with
bipartisan support. H.R. 30, the Save American Workers Act, is designed
to address a critical flaw in the Affordable Care Act which is causing
workers to lose hours at their jobs and, thus, lose wages--those wages
that help put food on their tables, those wages that help feed their
families, pay their utility bills, heat their homes during the winter,
and cool their homes during the summer. H.R. 30 fixes this flaw by
changing the newly created labor rule in the Affordable Care Act which
defines full-time work at 30 hours a week and places that definition
back where the American public has believed it to be for the last 100
years, that is, at 40 hours.
The second bill contained in today's rule is H.R. 3, the Keystone XL
Pipeline Act, and that would put an end to what has been a 6-year
process for approving a pipeline that should have simply been common
sense for America's economy a long time ago.
The rule before us today provides for 1 hour of debate for each of
the bills. This allows the House to fully debate these crucial issues.
These bills are targeted pieces of legislation dealing with one single
provision in the Affordable Care Act and one single pipeline,
respectively. No one is trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act today.
For that, stay tuned. But I have no doubt that Members of the minority
will claim that this bill is an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care
Act. But, in fact, it simply makes changes to a definition and
interpretation by the Department of Labor in the bill. As always, the
minority is also afforded the customary motion to recommit on each of
the bills.
Madam Speaker, as a result of the Affordable Care Act's requirement
that businesses with 50 or more employees provide health insurance
coverage to those employees working 30 hours per week, employers across
the Nation--from schools to universities to municipalities to
restaurants--are being forced to cut workers' hours or face
unsustainable employment costs to their businesses and to their
organizations. As a result, we are seeing--and this is what Republicans
predicted prior to the controversial and contentious passage of the
Affordable Care Act--but what we are seeing is the bill has
fundamentally changed labor law in this country, creating a new,
standard 30-hour workweek. As a result, workers' hours are being cut,
and productivity in this country--a country that has always prided
itself on the work ethic of its citizens--will decrease over time. This
is what onerous government regulations do--suppress innovation and
hamper businesses.
Many Members of the Democratic Party have been outspoken in clamoring
for an extension to long-term unemployment benefits, which would extend
government assistance to all unemployed Americans well beyond a year's
worth of benefits. Yet there is something that can be done now, there
is something that can be done today, which will have an actual,
practical effect of putting more money in more people's pockets.
We have heard story after story from every State in the Union that
employers are dropping workers' hours from less than 39 hours a week to
perhaps less than 29 hours or fewer--potentially 10 work hours a week
that workers won't see in their paychecks, which could mean hundreds of
dollars that men and women won't have to feed their families and pay
their bills. Increasing workers' hours increases money that people have
to spend.
The Affordable Care Act fundamentally changed labor law in this
country, and the repercussions of this may not be felt for years to
come. This is a dangerous, slippery slope. What other labor laws will
be reinterpreted now to define ``full-time employment'' as 30 hours per
week? Do people intend to impose overtime rules on employers who employ
people for over 30 hours per week? This is yet another regulation which
would only result in businesses cutting more hours. What will the
National Labor Relations Board reinterpret, knowing that the very
fabric of labor law is now based on a 30-hour workweek instead of the 100-year standard of the 40-hour workweek?
Prior to the Affordable Care Act, employers were already
overwhelmingly providing health insurance to their employees working 40
hours per week. Making the change contained in Mr. Young's legislation
will cause the least amount of disruption to the labor market, and that
is an important thing.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Affordable Care
Act will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5
percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because
workers will choose to supply less labor. Because of this, the
Congressional Budget Office projects a decline in the number of workers
of about 2 million in 2017, rising to 2.5 million in 2024, as a result
of the Affordable Care Act. The latest Congressional Budget Office
figures show that the Affordable Care Act will increase spending by
almost $2 trillion, double the estimate from 5 years ago. And the Joint
Committee on Taxation says that taxpayers will be on the hook for over
another $1 trillion over the next decade. Americans earning as little
as $25,000 annually will pay more because of the law, even after
accounting for the $1 trillion in premium cost-sharing subsidies.
H.R. 3, the Keystone XL Pipeline Act, is an issue that Congress and
the American people have been supportive of for the past several years.
It has now been over 6 years since TransCanada first submitted its
application for a Presidential permit to cross the United States-
Canadian border with a pipeline bringing oil to refineries in Houston,
Texas. The President's own State Department, in a several thousand-page
document, stated that the pipeline would be cleaner and more
environmentally friendly. It is a way to transport oil than other
means, namely, with trucks, trains, and ships. This is common sense.
The issue has been debated here in the House I don't know how many
times over the past several years. Enough is enough. It is time to
approve this application and put men and women to work who will be
building this pipeline.
Madam Speaker, let us be clear about what is happening today. We are
not repealing the Affordable Care Act. We are not undermining the
Affordable Care Act. The bill does not take health insurance from a
single person in this country. It is a fix to a fatal flaw in the
legislation, a fix similar to the seven other fixes that have passed
both Houses of Congress and, in fact, been signed by the President. It
is similar to the 37 unilateral fixes that the President and his
Secretary of Health and Human Services have made on their own. This is
a fix to stop this legislation from resulting in people losing work. If
Democrats can't agree to fix a provision in the Affordable Care Act
that is preventing people from working, then it is simply empty
rhetoric to claim that they are interested in any fixes at all.
I will encourage my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the rule and
``yes'' on the underlying legislation, and I reserve the balance of my
time.
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Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
It has been an interesting afternoon, and we have heard a lot of
discussion. The first week of a new Congress is a little bit different
from other times. None of our committees have been constituted. Yet, in
this Congress--in this historic Congress--we have been left an enormous
amount of work by the previous Congress, not because the House wouldn't
do its work. Republicans and Democrats showed up and passed bills and
sent them over to the Senate, and there they languished. Well over 300
bills are stacked up on the former majority leader's desk. I stress the
word ``former'' in that statement, and I believe that is why he is the
former majority leader.
Now it is a new day and a new Congress. No, the committees have not
yet been constituted, but there is an enormous amount of work--there is
an enormous body of work--that has already been accomplished by the
House of Representatives that now needs to move forward on behalf of
the American people, on behalf of our economy, on behalf of our jobs,
on behalf of heating our homes. Look, I am old enough to remember when
the Democrats assumed power in 2007, in the 110th Congress. It was kind
of an unusual time for me because I had been in the majority
previously, and I didn't know what it was like to be in the minority,
but let me just take everyone back for a moment.
The rules package that the Democrats passed in the 110th Congress--
their first year of the majority--provided for the consideration of
five measures. I never quite understood that because the Democrats ran
on ``six for '06.'' Nevertheless, five measures were included in their
rules package. They went directly to the floor with these bills, with
no committee consideration, not even the consideration of a hearing in
the House Rules Committee, which they controlled at the time. So it is
a little disingenuous to say, ``Oh, we are rushing things. Oh, we have
not had adequate consideration.'' You heard the gentleman from Illinois
(Mr. Shimkus) describe the number of hearings and markups that have
been done on just the Keystone pipeline.
In the time I have been sitting here I have heard discussions that
there is nothing in the Affordable Care Act that actually cuts a
worker's hours, but a plain reading of the legislation--of section
1513, page 158, paragraph four, for those who are keeping score at
home--reads:
A full-time employee, section A, in general: The term
``full-time employee'' means, with respect to any month, an
employee who is employed at least 30 hours of service per
week.
That seems pretty straightforward.
What has happened as a result of that very plain language even before
the Department of Labor issued its rules, which were even more
restrictive, is employers made the decision of: Do you know what? We
are not going to employ anyone over 29 hours because we don't want to
run the risk of invoking this employer mandate.
Now, it is true enough that the administration did delay the mandate.
Yes, we are criticized for passing things that are restrictive on the
Affordable Care Act. The administration has done so so many times--30,
35--I don't even remember how many. One of the things they delayed was
the employer mandate. In fact, later on, in this very section, section
1513, it states:
On the effective date of the employer mandate, the
amendments made by this section shall apply to months
beginning after December 31, 2013.
That is in the past.
It is important to bring this up. It is not part of our discussion
today on the rules, but it is for employers--for small businesses--in
this country to recognize, with the delay of the employer mandate--
actually, it started last week, January 1 of 2015--no taxes for
calendar year 2015 will be paid until next year. So the fines under the
Affordable Care Act will, in fact, not start until next year, but the
reporting requirements started 7 days ago. Big companies understand
this. Big companies get this. Big companies have got lots of lawyers on
retainer who are working on this every day. It is the small employers
with 50 employees back home in our districts who need to understand
that they have to be keeping these records today so that they will be
able to go back and verify the statements on their tax bills next year.
Mr. Shimkus said it very well. On the Keystone pipeline, there have
been 15 hearings in the House and Senate, four markups, 10 votes--10
votes on the Keystone pipeline. Tell me we haven't studied this
situation.
We heard discussion from the other side that this was a phantom
pipeline, that no one is even interested in building it anymore, and
that the price of gas is so low that no one would be interested in
building the Keystone pipeline. In fact, the president and CEO of
TransCanada, in a statement yesterday, said that Keystone XL is a
project that was needed when oil prices were less than $40 a barrel.
That was in 2008 that it was less than $40 a barrel. It is a project
that was needed when oil prices were less than $40 a barrel. It was
needed when prices were over $100 a barrel, and it is certainly needed
when prices are $50 a barrel, as they are today.
He went on to say that the review process for the Keystone XL has
been anything but a well-established process. For decades, the normal
process to review and make a decision on an infrastructure project like
Keystone would take 2 years. He went on to say that we are well over
the 6-year mark in reviewing the final phase of Keystone with,
seemingly, no end in sight. The bar continues to move again and again.
What business can function like that, Mr. Speaker?
TransCanada has patiently and diligently worked since 2008 to comply
with every twist and turn in this unparalleled process. We have done
this to ensure that the Keystone XL is built and operated safely. The
State Department has concluded this to be the case time and time again,
and it can be done.
Mr. Speaker, I would just submit that that does not sound like a CEO
who is not willing to invest his money. We are not even talking about
government money here. We are talking about private money. This private
investment, indeed, is going forward. I would just submit again, from
Cushing, Oklahoma, to Port Arthur, Texas, the pipeline is actually in
the ground and exists today--far from a phantom pipeline.
Mr. Speaker, today's rule provides for the consideration of important
bills pertaining to health care and energy--the two very centers of
excellence within the Energy and Commerce Committee.
I applaud Mr. Young and Mr. Cramer for their thoughtful pieces of
legislation. I applaud them for working across the aisle to offer bills
that both Republicans and Democrats have publicly supported. Over two-
dozen Democrats voted for the 40-hour workweek the last time it came to
the floor. I urge my colleagues to support both the rule and the
underlying bills.
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