Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. CARTWRIGHT. Madam Chair, tonight I urge the adoption of my amendment, which would allow the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to continue its congressionally mandated ongoing work to improve safety and accountability in the trucking and bus industry. I do so out of a concern that we need to exhibit common sense in what we do. We need to be fiscally prudent, we need to promote safe highways in our Nation, and we need to recognize the importance of promoting personal responsibility and accountability.

My amendment would strike a section of this bill that would halt the FMCSA's work toward issuing a rule that would make our highways safer for everyone by creating an incentive for motor carriers to make safety a greater priority. We have to allow the FMCSA to proceed with the development of a rule to increase insurance minimums for motor carriers, which have not been updated in, fully, 35 years in this Nation and, thus, have become outdated to the point of uselessness.

The first point I make is that it is simply common sense that we adjust for inflation. Not adjusting for inflation for 35 years is not prudent, and it makes no sense. It allows carriers to travel on our Nation's highways in a financially irresponsible manner, in a manner that would allow them not to be accountable for whatever harm they might cause.

Adjusting for inflation is common sense. It is also fiscally prudent, because what happens? Right now in this Nation, tractor-trailers are allowed to travel around with $750,000 of liability insurance. The FMCSA is studying that number to see what it should be updated to after 35 years. $750,000 is not enough money.

Just this morning in my district in northeastern Pennsylvania, there was a horrendous truck and bus accident in which three people were killed and a dozen others were seriously injured. When three people are killed, asking their families to share $750,000 is not fiscally responsible. Look who pays the difference.

If somebody is killed or if somebody is rendered, for example, a paraplegic, they are going to incur incredible amounts of medical bills; they are not going to be able to work. Who picks up the difference when that happens? It is the Social Security system, it is the Medicare system, it is John Q. Taxpayer that ends up paying the bill when the trucking company doesn't have enough insurance to pay the damages.

That is why it is fiscally prudent that we allow the FMCSA to continue its important work, and it is important work that was mandated by the MAP-21 bill that required the FMCSA to do this work.

It also promotes safe highways, because if we raise insurance minimums up to modern and responsible levels, that means insurance companies will have to engage in actual real underwriting. They will have to go out from the home office and visit the headquarters of trucking companies to make sure they are acting properly and safely and responsibly. If they do that, if you want to buy insurance at reasonable levels, you have to act safely.

Finally, Madam Chair, this is about personal responsibility. If you don't have enough insurance, you get away without being personally responsible when these horrendous crashes happen.

Madam Chair, I yield to Mr. Price for a colloquy.

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Mr. CARTWRIGHT. That is correct. For that very reason, I urge everyone to support my amendment to allow the FMCSA to finish its important work of examining and developing a rule that is critical to preventing devastating trucking accidents and keeping our highways safe and secure for everyone.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. CARTWRIGHT. Madam Chair, on the one point about 99.9 percent of crashes settling within existing insurance minimums, there we have the opponents of my amendment speaking really out of both sides of their mouth, because if they say it is so rare that a crash will cost more than the minimum insurance, then what that means is that the expense of insuring against that minimal risk has to be minimal itself, but these are the same people saying that it will be a crippling additional insurance premium. It doesn't make sense.

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