Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2822, Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016: Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2042, Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015; and Providing for Proceedings During the Period from June 26, 2015, Through July 6, 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 333 provides for a rule to consider important bills that deal with our environment: the first, H.R. 2822, the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2016; and the second, H.R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015. Each bill will be provided the standard 1 hour of debate, equally divided between the majority and the minority. Further, on each bill, the minority is granted the standard motion to recommit, a chance to amend the legislation one final time prior to its passage.

As with nearly all regular order appropriations bills that have come to the floor under the Republican leadership, the Interior-EPA bill will be considered under a modified open rule, allowing every Member of this body the opportunity to come to the floor and offer amendments to the bill that comply with the House budget rules.

H.R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection Act, is given a structured rule under the resolution before us today, with the Rules Committee making in order five of the eight amendments offered during consideration of the bill last evening. Of the amendments made in order, one is bipartisan, three were offered by Democrats, and one was offered by a Republican.

H.R. 2822, the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2016, provides funding for both the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. This bill provides funding for many of the national parks and recreational facilities throughout the United States. The bill includes over $30 billion in base funding, decreasing the top line level by $246 million below fiscal year 2015 and cutting $3 billion from the President's budget request.

This spending reduction is necessary to rein in an out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that is moving at breakneck speed to regulate every aspect of our economy. Following the failure of the House and Senate Democrats to get the disastrous Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation to President Obama's desk in 2009, Lisa Jackson and, now, Gina McCarthy, both administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, have moved forward with regulatory regimes under the guise of the Clean Air Act to go around Congress to regulate carbon after the American people explicitly rose up and said do not do this.

The Energy and Commerce Committee has held countless hearings and markups to address the out-of-control efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and has taken over the past few years to push President Obama's harmful environmental policies onto a populace that has rejected those same policies at the ballot box. From carbon dioxide to ozone to every stream, puddle, ditch, pond in America, the Environmental Protection Agency

will not rest until it has regulatory control over every aspect of every life in America.
The appropriations bill before us is an important step toward reining in such a power-hungry agency. The bill contains prohibitions on the Department of the Interior's attempts to regulate hydraulic fracturing, a process that President Obama's own Environmental Protection Agency recently stated has not resulted in any significant environmental or health harms. It includes a provision preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing new ozone standards until at least 85 percent of the country is able to meet current standards, which would seem to be a reasonable request. It prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations, regulations that the American people have never supported. And it prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency from moving forward with regulating every stream and pond in the country, an issue that the Supreme Court has rejected and that farmers and landowners all across America have risen up to oppose.

Even more than the funding levels in this bill, passing the House Interior Appropriations bill will keep the Environmental Protection Agency from doing further damage to the United States economy than has already been done by this administration. Mr. Speaker, I will just point out, we were greeted with the news that in the first quarter of this year, the economy actually contracted by 0.2 percent. That is not the direction that we need to go.

The second bill contained in today's rule is H.R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015, which does address the Environmental Protection Agency's job-killing carbon rules on existing power plants. The bill allows for judicial review of any final rule pertaining to greenhouse gas emissions before requiring compliance with such a rule and allows States to protect households and businesses from significant adverse effects on electricity ratepayers or reliability. This seems like a reasonable ask, that the EPA's own rule, which we know will be litigated anyway, not go into effect until the courts have had a final say on whether or not the Environmental Protection Agency actually followed the law.

The Environmental Protection Agency's proposed regulation on greenhouse gases, a regulation that the Democrats couldn't achieve through legislation, places different limits on different States, allowing the

Environmental Protection Agency to pick winners and losers in the carbon wars.

If a State does not comply with the strict guidelines that the Environmental Protection Agency sets out for its electricity market, then the EPA will force its own Federal plan on the State, driving up the cost to ratepayers exponentially.

The EPA's own estimates of this rule--just the rule, without any mention of the other disastrously expensive rules that it is currently proposing, such as the ozone regulations--suggest that the carbon rule for existing power plants will impose annual costs of $5.5 billion to $7.5 billion by 2020, and almost $9 billion by 2030. All of those costs will be passed on to every American who pays an electricity bill.

Of course, as we have seen in previous rules, the Environmental Protection Agency consistently underestimates the cost of its rules to hide the ball from the American people about the true damage that is actually being proposed by the Agency. Outside estimates put the cost of this one regulation at upwards of well over $360 billion to almost $500 billion between 2017 and 2031. That level of harm to the United States economy is insane after seeing such a slow recovery under the current President, but it is exactly what Administrator Gina McCarthy is proposing.

State Governors, regulators, and other stakeholders have submitted thousands of comments on this rule, explaining how difficult it will be to implement and prevent rates from increasing, but those pleas appear to have hit a dead end. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with these rules, and this bill before us presents one of the great opportunities to slow them down before irreversible damage is done to the economy.

Mr. Speaker, the House is moving forward with important legislation today to make the government more accountable. I look forward to both bills having a full debate on the House floor after the passage of today's rule.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

It was 6 years ago this week. I don't know if many people remember the activities on the House floor 6 years ago this week, but in June of 2009, right before we left for the July 4 recess, the then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, brought forward to this floor a bill.

The bill was called Waxman-Markey. It was the cap-and-trade bill. The bill had come through our Committee on Energy and Commerce. I thought it was a dead duck when it left there, but that bill was pushed

through to the floor at the end of June 2009.

Madam Speaker, I don't know that I need to remind you that, in 2009, right after the 2008 election, the Republicans were deeply in the minority. People talked about the fact that the Republicans were so far in the minority that 40 years in the wilderness actually sounded like the best case scenario for House Republicans; but something happened, and it began in that last week of June 2009.

Now, a lot of people will credit the change in the House majority to the President's healthcare law--and, indeed, it was ill-advised; and, indeed, it did upset a lot of people very quickly--but prior to that, even before we began having the big debates on the Affordable Care Act--the big debates on what became ObamaCare--the then-Speaker of the House brought to the floor of this House Waxman-Markey.

When people started to look at it, Waxman-Markey, we started to get phone calls. People said: ``I can't sell my house unless the Department of Energy certifies it as reaching certain levels of energy efficiency. How am I supposed to be able to do that? That is not a free society. That is not a free country when I am prohibited from selling the one possession that I had used to accumulate dollars in my estate over my entire life, and I can't sell it without permission from the Department of Energy.''

People were legitimately asking questions about what this cap-and-trade bill will do.

Madam Speaker, I have got to tell you that there are times in this body when there is one of those moments when the incandescent lightbulb goes off. One of those was last night. We were sitting in the Rules Committee, and we were hearing testimony from two Members from Kentucky, one in the majority and one in the minority.

The one in the majority is bringing the bill that we have before us, H.R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection Act. Mr. Whitfield of Kentucky was explaining what the bill would do and the protections the bill would provide. The other Member from Kentucky, a member of the minority, said, because of the failure of the legislative process, the President was required to act, and this is part of the President's Climate Action Plan.

What the H? A failure of the legislative process?

Madam Speaker, I would submit that the legislative process functioned as intended when Speaker Pelosi brought Waxman-Markey to the floor of this House and this House passed that bill. We went back to our districts that weekend, and I will tell you what we caught.

We caught unmitigated holy ``you know what'' because people were so incensed at the freedoms that Waxman-Markey and the cap-and-trade program would take away from them.

When the gentleman last night said it was a failure of the legislative process and that the President had to act, it was exactly the performance of the legislative process that delivered us from a very bad proposition.

What happened after that? Because the country was in such a convulsion about what the House had done, the visceral and immediate reaction of the people of the United States was: ``Hold the phone; we don't want what they are doing.''

The Senate, which was fully invested in passing a cap-and-trade bill--you had Senators who thought cap-and-trade was the be-all and end-all, and that was the reason they were in the United States Senate--didn't bring it up. It never came up for a vote.

Here was a situation in which the Democrats had--I don't remember what--a 55-seat majority on us here in the House of Representatives and a 60-vote--filibuster-proof--majority over in the Senate, and they couldn't get this done. They couldn't get this done because the people said: ``No. No. Don't do this to me.''

The legislative process worked. The Senate said, ``I haven't got the courage to do this right before the 2010 election,'' and the proposition died at the end of the session that concluded on December 31, 2010. I would just submit that that is a good thing.

Here we have before us a bill today to provide, in some measure, some of the protections about things that people were worried about 6 years ago, but it is precisely because we were where we were 6 years ago that we are now considering a bill that will hold back some of the rulemaking authority from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Madam Speaker, under today's rule, we are providing for the consideration of two important bills, bills that prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from doing irreversible damage to our economy through dozens of ill-advised regulations that Administrator McCarthy is looking to push on the American people before President Obama leaves the White House in January 2017.

The bills are thoughtful responses to one of the most egregious agencies in the administration, and I look forward to a full debate for that reason.

The material previously referred to by Mr. Polis is as follows:

An Amendment to H. Res. 333 Offered by Mr. Polis of Colorado

At the end of the resolution, add the following new sections:

Sec. 6. Immediately upon adoption of this resolution the Speaker shall, pursuant to clause 2(b) of rule XVIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for consideration of the bill (H.R. 1031) to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and for other purposes. General debate shall be confined to the bill and shall not exceed one hour equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Financial Services. After general debate the bill shall be considered for amendment under the five-minute rule. All points of order against provisions in the bill are waived. At the conclusion of consideration of the bill for amendment the Committee shall rise and report the bill to the House with such amendments as may have been adopted. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill and amendments thereto to final passage without intervening motion except one motion to recommit with or without instructions. If the Committee of the Whole rises and reports that it has come to no resolution on the bill, then on the next legislative day the House shall, immediately after the third daily order of business under clause 1 of rule XIV, resolve into the Committee of the Whole for further consideration of the bill.

Sec. 7. Clause 1(c) of rule XIX shall not apply to the consideration of H.R. 1031.

--
The Vote on the Previous Question: What It Really Means

This vote, the vote on whether to order the previous question on a special rule, is not merely a procedural vote. A vote against ordering the previous question is a vote against the Republican majority agenda and a vote to allow the Democratic minority to offer an alternative plan. It is a vote about what the House should be debating.

Mr. Clarence Cannon's Precedents of the House of Representatives (VI, 308-311), describes the vote on the previous question on the rule as ``a motion to direct or control the consideration of the subject before the House being made by the Member in charge.'' To defeat the previous question is to give the opposition a chance to decide the subject before the House. Cannon cites the Speaker's ruling of January 13, 1920, to the effect that ``the refusal of the House to sustain the demand for the previous question passes the control of the resolution to the opposition'' in order to offer an amendment. On March 15, 1909, a member of the majority party offered a rule resolution. The House defeated the previous question and a member of the opposition rose to a parliamentary inquiry, asking who was entitled to recognition. Speaker Joseph G. Cannon (R-Illinois) said: ``The previous question having been refused, the gentleman from New York, Mr. Fitzgerald, who had asked the gentleman to yield to him for an amendment, is entitled to the first recognition.''

The Republican majority may say ``the vote on the previous question is simply a

vote on whether to proceed to an immediate vote on adopting the resolution ..... [and] has no substantive legislative or policy implications whatsoever.'' But that is not what they have always said. Listen to the Republican Leadership Manual on the Legislative Process in the United States House of Representatives, (6th edition, page 135). Here's how the Republicans describe the previous question vote in their own manual: ``Although it is generally not possible to amend the rule because the majority Member controlling the time will not yield for the purpose of offering an amendment, the same result may be achieved by voting down the previous question on the rule. ..... When the motion for the previous question is defeated, control of the time passes to the Member who led the opposition to ordering the previous question. That Member, because he then controls the time, may offer an amendment to the rule, or yield for the purpose of amendment.''

In Deschler's Procedure in the U.S. House of Representatives, the subchapter titled ``Amending Special Rules'' states: ``a refusal to order the previous question on such a rule [a special rule reported from the Committee on Rules] opens the resolution to amendment and further debate.'' (Chapter 21, section 21.2) Section 21.3 continues: ``Upon rejection of the motion for the previous question on a resolution reported from the Committee on Rules, control shifts to the Member leading the opposition to the previous question, who may offer a proper amendment or motion and who controls the time for debate thereon.''

Clearly, the vote on the previous question on a rule does have substantive policy implications. It is one of the only available tools for those who oppose the Republican majority's agenda and allows those with alternative views the opportunity to offer an alternative plan.

Source