Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2898, Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3038, Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2015, Part II

Floor Speech

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Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

As we have heard, a year ago today, the House passed a temporary extension of 1 year. Chairman Ryan of the Ways and Means Committee, who was supposed to figure out how to pay for this, said we will use this year to put the transportation highway trust fund on a sustainable path so we can avoid stopgap legislation in the future.

Well, that didn't happen, but they were occupied with much more important things. For instance, they said that estates worth more than $10 million shouldn't pay a penny in taxes--none, zero. That cost $289 billion. If we had dedicated that to surface transportation, we could have basically doubled spending over 10 years.

So today, the Democrats are here to offer a real, 6-year, long-term increase in investment in America's failing infrastructure.

There are 140,000 bridges that need repair or replacement on the National Highway System. Forty percent of the pavement is at the point where you have to dig up the underlayment and rebuild the whole road.

We have an $84 billion backlog just bringing our existing transit systems up to a state of good repair. It is so bad that people are dying on Metro here in Washington, D.C., because of the decrepit condition of the system.

With the Buy America rules, we would create a phenomenal number of jobs. In fact, under our funding proposal in our bill, we would create an additional 300,000 jobs a year. And we need those jobs here in America, and they are good-paying jobs. They are not just construction jobs. They are engineering, they are technical, they are small business, and they are minority business enterprises. They are a whole host of things that would lift the whole economy--make us more energy efficient, make Americans save money getting out of congestion, not driving their cars through giant potholes and incurring costs--but the Republicans can't figure out how to get there.

Well, we are offering an alternative--a good, solid, 6-year bill. Yes, we haven't figure out the 6-year funding yet because you guys are totally opposed to user fees, despite Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower and the history of the Republican Party on user fees, and also former chairman of the committee, Bud Shuster, who joined with the Democrats in 1993, the last time when we raised the Federal gas tax to 18.3 cents a gallon.

We would fund 2 years of this bill by prohibiting corporate inversions; i.e., Benedict Arnold corporations that continue to have all of their operations in America but go overseas and buy some minor entity and claim that is their international headquarters, like a corner drug store somewhere in London for a pharmaceutical company. It is an outrageous practice. While they enjoy all the benefits of America and all the protections of our law and our military and all those costs, they don't want to pay, and they don't want to pay for transportation either.

So we are offering an alternative today. If we defeat the previous question, we would go into an open rule, something that never happens much around here, where both sides of the aisle, any Member of Congress, could offer an amendment to increase spending, decrease spending, target one or another part of the infrastructure that they feel needs more investment.

So I urge my colleagues to defeat this rule, move to an open rule, something we were promised when the Republicans took over, and fund a 6-year bill. We will give you 2 years of funding, and we can figure out the rest over the next 2 years.

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