Howard Berman

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman's amendment encourages the administration to create a Comprehensive Interagency Strategy and Implementation Plan for Sudan. I have spoken with Mr. McCaul about his proposal and agree that developing a coherent approach to the situation in Sudan is critical. The United States must make every effort to address the ongoing and interrelated crises in Sudan. The U.S. should work towards a stable and lasting peace in a region that has seen so many tragedies in recent years. I have no objection to this amendment, and I look forward to working with Mr. McCaul on this provision as the bill moves through the process. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to claim time in opposition to this amendment, although I am not opposed to this amendment.

Mr. BERMAN. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. BERMAN. I thank the gentleman for yielding. While the gentleman may have broken the podium, his amendment does not break the task force; it improves it. The Secretary of Defense should be a member of that task force, and this amendment simply establishes that rather than leave it to the Secretary of State's discretion. That's fine with me. I support the amendment and urge its adoption. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. BERMAN. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for his amendment. I strongly support it. A number of immigrants to the United States from the former Soviet Union worked for decades in the Soviet-run industries, contributed to the state's social security system, and expected to receive their rightful pensions when they reached the requisite age. For a variety of reasons beyond their control, they haven't received their pensions. And some of these workers were forced to renounce their citizenship when they moved to the United States. As many of the former Soviet states refuse to pay pensions to those who are no longer citizens, these elderly individuals face a bureaucratic nightmare in seeking to reclaim their rights. This amendment expresses our sense of Congress that we should work with the former Soviet states to establish a workable system that enables the workers to claim pensions that are rightfully theirs. It is appropriate. It's right. And I support the amendment and urge its adoption.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his excellent amendment. I strongly support it because it basically works to encourage the development of the fundamental skills of the Foreign Service. It seeks to broaden the skill set of the Foreign Service by requiring this plan to increase career incentives provided to Foreign Service officers to serve in the bureaus and offices of the Department not primarily focused on regional issues, including the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Bureau of Oceans and International Environment, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. It asks the Secretary to consider requiring all Foreign Service officers to serve at least 2 years in a bureau office of the Department not primarily focused on regional issues. And it takes a look at the whole issue of changing the composition of the Selection and Promotion Board to increase the participation of those Foreign Service officers with extensive experience in the nonregional bureaus. Very important. There was a tendency in the past that gets entrenched that the way you get ahead in the Foreign Service is you work in the regional bureaus, you work in the political or the economic aspect of that. And the result is that critical issues involving functional programs and these other bureaus are neglected. We want the best and the brightest in all these different areas, and we should look to remove any internal biases that disincentivize that activity. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition even though I don't oppose the amendment.

Mr. BERMAN. I do.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume, up to 5 minutes. I rise in opposition to the amendment. I share a lot of the ranking member's concerns, fundamentally, about the countries named in her amendment and about the issue of proliferation. But there are sort of three different levels on which I think her amendment raises serious doubts and causes me to want to oppose it. The first is the assumption that withholding assessed contributions produces the actions we want. We've had test cases of this. Wouldn't it have been great if the money we withheld from the U.N. population planning account had stopped coercive abortions in China? Wouldn't it be great if the dues we are assessed to pay to the United Nations had resulted in the kinds of reforms that eliminated the questionable contact that the minority rightfully points to? There is a real challenge to this assumption that the withholding is what achieves the goal. We can wish it a lot, but it didn't always happen. Secondly, there are some specific categories of programs here that are involved and should be mentioned because, in some cases, they make some sense. The technical assistance provided by IAEA is constructive and supportive of a number of humanitarian needs, such as the eradication of the tsetse fly in numerous African countries, the fruit fly in Panama, improving cancer diagnosis and treatment in Tanzania, Niger, Mali, Zambia and the Central African Republic, improvements in agriculture in groundwater tracing. These are the kinds of programs that are involved. Once in a while there may be a project such as in Iran or Syria that may provide a small amount of useful experience in general nuclear science and radiology. But the most important part is to the extent that some of these programs are about enhancing safety. The U.S. is totally free on the board to vote against those projects at the Board of Governors, and does so. The U.S. already denies extra budgetary funding for technical cooperation projects for state sponsors of terrorism, which the countries the gentlelady mentioned are. However, the proposed amendment mandates the withholding, not of the voluntary contributions, not of the extra budgetary support, but of the U.S. regular dues to the IAEA. So what does it do? It hampers the Agency's primary function, which is the inspecting and safeguarding of nuclear material in foreign countries. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face. The IAEA's technical assistance program is funded entirely from voluntary contributions. The program that, understandably, concerns the gentlelady is not from the assessed contributions. It's from the voluntary contributions. The amendment is not focused on the voluntary contributions. It's focused on the assessed contributions. So what will we do? We'll end up cutting the funds that would otherwise be used by the IAEA to ensure that states are not diverting nuclear material from peaceful to military purposes--pretty serious concern--inspections that are in the direct national security interest of the United States. That's what we're cutting. So that's why I think the amendment, not by its intention, and not even by its focus on these programs, we could live without those programs, but its focus on cutting the assessed dues to the most important functions for the United States of the IAEA makes no sense, and I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. BERMAN. If the gentleman will continue to yield, my view is that that office cannot do through indirection, that is by going through some agency, anything that it is not allowed to do on its own. And it is not allowed to do the things that you are concerned about. And the purpose of the manager's amendment----

Mr. BERMAN. I will yield more time to discuss this, if you want, but first I am going to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Ruppersberger), who has been waiting patiently. Then, if you want, we can come back to this. (Mr. RUPPERSBERGER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. BERMAN. I yield myself 2 minutes, Mr. Chairman. Let me just lay out this Office of Global Women's Issues. First of all, by law, by virtue of the Helms amendment and the Siljander amendment and the Leahy amendment, it cannot and, by practice, it does not and has no intention of serving as a vehicle for either abortion policy or coercive abortion. What does it do? It is dedicated to ensuring that women around the world can realize their potential by fully participating in the political, economic and cultural lives of their societies. Women around the globe, and the gentleman from New Jersey knows this, women are bought and sold like commodities and trafficked across international borders for sexual exploitation. Young children are married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers and have their education and childhood abruptly ended. Girls have their bodies mutilated in the name of culture or tradition, leading to complication in childbearing and lifelong pain and incontinence. Young women are slain by their own families for perceived and sometimes fictitious infractions, simply because they are viewed less as human beings and as symbols of human honor. Women who become infected with HIV, often because of the infidelity of their spouses, are shunned, lose their livelihoods or do not have access to the medicines that could prolong their lives and prevent transmission of the virus to their children. I say to the gentleman, these causes and these concerns that I have mentioned have always been at the forefront of the gentleman's own concerns, and to hold this entire bill and this office hostage to a desire to change abortion law I think is unfair. I scrupulously avoided and the committee Democrats scrupulously avoided any effort to change that law in the other direction, and I think it is wrong to try to hijack this bill to hold it hostage for those purposes. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BERMAN. They cannot. If the gentleman is yielding on his time to me, they cannot. You know, Abe Lincoln used to tell this story: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have? And the answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one. No matter how many times the specter is raised, this office cannot do and has no intention and no plans of doing anything to promote abortions, coerce abortions, fund abortions or lobby for an abortion policy. It is an office that is focused generally on the issues of women's political empowerment: should women have the right to vote, should they be able to run for office, are they treated as equal citizens under the law. It serves as a promoter of better education for women and girls and a series of causes that you are known for caring about. And it does not. It does not.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself as much time as I may consume. My amendment makes a number of changes. Many of these are minor or technical amendments. Others address issues raised by other committees that have a jurisdictional interest in the bill. However, there are a number of other changes in my bill that are more substantive. For example, the amendment takes care of requests by Members that are generally unobjectionable even though substantive. For example, the bill adds a provision that would allow the State Department's growing Civilian Response Corps to enhance its capability by drawing on locally employed staff who have significant expertise in unstable environments. It includes provisions to assist in the compensation for victims of terrorism from the 1998 Nairobi bombing, drawing from a bill that we passed last year on a bipartisan basis and supported by Mr. Jesse Jackson, Mr. Roy Blunt, and our ranking member, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The amendment also updates language currently in the bill, welcoming the end of Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam. These are provisions pushed particularly by the gentleman from New York (Mr. McMahon), a member of the committee. The United States, standing with the international community, eagerly looks forward to the government of Sri Lanka's putting forward a timely and credible proposal to engage its Tamil community and address the legitimate grievances of its Tamil citizens so that peace and reconciliation can be achieved and sustained. It also includes two requests by Republican members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, including an amendment by Mr. Wilson from South Carolina, who I agreed to work with during the markup at the committee. It also increases the amount of funds for the State Department Inspector General and the National Endowment For Democracy, as suggested by the minority in their views on the bill. This continues my efforts to include sensible Republican ideas into H.R. 2410, even though I recognize that very few Republicans appear to be prepared to support the legislation at this time. In addition, my amendment would also begin the process of modernizing our foreign assistance program by establishing a rigorous system to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of U.S. foreign assistance. One of the greatest weaknesses of the current U.S. foreign aid program is that it lacks a clear set of goals and objectives, and there's no systematic plan for measuring results. Under my amendment, the Secretary of State would coordinate the monitoring and evaluation activities of the various agencies carrying out foreign aid activities, and would report to the Congress on the findings and lessons learned from such evaluations. Finally, in recent days--and this is important--there has been significant concern expressed that a provision in the bill authorizing the Office of Global Women's Issues, an existing office at the State Department that focuses on issues like education for women and girls, political empowerment, and violence against women, somehow is a basis for promoting or lobbying for abortion. That is simply not true. The bill as reported out by the committee does not refer to abortion in any way, nor does the office work on abortion issues. That office is focused particularly on women in Iraq and in Afghanistan on the issues of education and political empowerment that I just mentioned. To reassure my colleagues, however, I have included in my amendment the following new subsection: ``Nothing in this section, and in particular the duties of the office described in subsection (c)''--that is the Office of Global Women's Issues--``shall be construed as affecting in any way existing statutory prohibitions against abortion or existing statutory prohibitions on the use of funds to engage in any activity or effort to alter the laws or policies in effect in any foreign country concerning the circumstances under which abortion is permitted, regulated, or prohibited.'' This language makes it very clear that existing prohibitions on lobbying for or using funds to promote abortion--including the Helms amendment, the Leahy amendment and the Siljander amendment--remain in effect and will continue to apply to the actions of the office. I believe this confirms that the bill does not undermine current law in any way and will reassure my colleagues on this issue. I think this manager's amendment is a good amendment. I urge all my colleagues to support it. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment made in order by the rule and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, could I ask if the gentlelady is finished. Our side has the right to close. Then since I'll be the only speaker and I have the right to close--

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the sponsor of the amendment for yielding. It's really an excellent amendment. If we want to encourage the international cooperation that's needed in this area, I'm telling you you've got to ensure that the entrepreneurs and the innovators know that their cutting-edge breakthroughs and innovations are protected. This isn't even as much about fair return for the inventors as it is ensuring that people will keep innovating and researching and advancing the technologies because they know that ultimately they will be compensated. So it's a symbiotic relationship. The more we ensure and protect intellectual property, the more we will be able to do in achieving our very important goals with respect to the development and deployment of new energy and environmental technologies. Last year, the United Nations reported that the global market for environmental technologies could double to $2.74 trillion by 2020 from the $1.37 trillion today because of growth in areas like energy-efficient technologies, sustainable transport systems, and water supply and efficiencies markets. This is a very important amendment. Again, I think it is essential to the development and deployment of these new technologies, and I urge its adoption.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Chair, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time in opposition, although I am not going to speak in opposition.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of the Fraud Enforcement & Recovery Act of 2009. I want to specifically address the language in this bill that will strengthen the provisions of our Nation's most effective fraud-fighting tool, the federal False Claims Act. With our Nation spending hundreds of billions of dollars to revitalize our faltering economy, now is the time to plug the loopholes that have been created in the False Claims Act over the last quarter century. Now is the time to update this law to ensure that it reaches the modern fraud schemes that are draining our public fisc with impunity. As one of the authors of both the 1986 False Claims Act Amendments and the relevant language in S. 386 which we consider today, I submit this statement to clarify the true intent of the False Claims Act and to send a clear message that all government funds should be protected from fraud.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I am honored to pay tribute to my friend, Robert D. Wexler, on the occasion of his thirty years of service to the American Jewish University (AJU), and particularly his service as president for the past seventeen years. During the first decade of his presidency at AJU, Dr. Wexler launched three major initiatives which promote education, understanding and peace: the Ziegler School for Rabbinic Studies, the Center for Israel Studies, and the Ziering Institute. Under his leadership, AJU started its Community Partners Initiative in which the university reaches out to the many ethnic and religious communities of Los Angeles. He has helped AJU's Whizin Center for Continuing Education become the largest Jewish adult education program in the United States with more than 15,000 participants each year. In addition to his work at the American Jewish University, Dr. Wexler has served in many community leadership roles. He chaired the Los Angeles Federation's Commission on Israelis and the Committee on Jewish Education. He has also published several articles, including contributions to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Etz Hayim commentary on the Torah, and a volume entitled Israel, the Diaspora and Jewish Identity. Born in Los Angeles, Dr. Wexler received his B.A. in Sociology from UCLA, and was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York where he also earned a Master of Arts degree in Hebrew Literature. While enrolled in rabbinical school, Dr. Wexler also earned his M.B.A. from Baruch College in New York City. Following his ordination, he spent a year on the faculty of Princeton University, teaching in the Department of Middle East Studies. Dr. Wexler later earned both a Master of Arts degree and a Ph.D. from UCLA in the Department of Near Eastern Languages. Dr. Wexler is included every year in Newsweek's list of America's 50 most influential rabbis, ranking number three in 2008. He has also been included on the Forward's list of the 50 most significant American Jewish leaders. Dr. Wexler is married to Dr. Hana Wexler, the Director of the Wadsworth Anaerobe Laboratory at the Veteran's Administration in West Los Angeles. They have four children: Daniella, Elisheva, Zev and Nili. Madam Speaker and distinguished colleagues, I ask you to join me in saluting Robert D. Wexler for his impressive career and dedication to the community and the American Jewish University, and to congratulate him on the occasion of his thirty years of service.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to yield 5 minutes to the chair, or co-chair, of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Caucus, an outspoken advocate for human rights internationally and domestically, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern).

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I'm very honored to yield 1 minute to the Speaker of the House. For those of us who were in this Chamber at the time of the Tiananmen Square movement 20 years ago, we all remember that there was no one more passionate or eloquent on the aspirations of those students and more outraged by the dashing of those aspirations, whether the people at the square or of the Chinese people generally or the thousands of Chinese students who were studying in the United States at that time and watching that happen, than Leader Pelosi. I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the Speaker of the House.

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First of all, I would like to thank my good friend, Representative Sandy Levin of Michigan, for his leadership as the chief sponsor of this resolution and as the co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. First and foremost, I would like to express my sympathy to the families of those killed, tortured and imprisoned as a result of their participation in the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and in other parts of China 20 years ago this week. The world must not forget the horrendous events which occurred that fateful day when the Chinese Army was ordered to clear the square, using lethal force against its own citizens. Hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed or injured. The Chinese Government detained thousands of Chinese citizens in connection with the protests. Many of them still languish today in Chinese prisons. Even after 20 years, the precise number of dead, wounded, and detained remains unclear. Chinese authorities still censor information that does not conform to its official version of events surrounding the Tiananmen massacre. The government also limits or bans information about the crackdown from appearing in Chinese textbooks. How can China claim its place as a major global power if the government refuses to address the Tiananmen protests in an honest and candid way? How can China develop into a modern society if its own citizens are prevented from knowing their own history? This resolution calls on the Chinese Government to initiate a full investigation into the crackdown, to review the cases of those still imprisoned for participating in the protests and to end its harassment and discrimination against those who were involved. Finally, this resolution recognizes those Chinese citizens who have suffered for their efforts to keep the struggle for democracy alive during the last two decades. I urge my colleagues to support this resolution. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. BERMAN. I am pleased to yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.