Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank my friend. I think that will be a helpful addition to this debate. You know, when you have a suspension debate on a bill, particularly a bill that maybe has a majority but it can't get a suspension number, you check a box but you really don't move the agenda forward. I would hope that we could see some of these under rules. My final topic of the day, unless you raise another one, is I read in the Associated Press just yesterday that the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Chairman Obey, announced that the House will not consider a single appropriations bill this year. If that was true, this will be the first time in at least 22 years, maybe ever, that the House has failed to consider a single appropriation bill in any given session. The committee has passed five bills that are out of full committee ready to go to the floor: Homeland Security; Military Construction; Energy and Water; Commerce, Justice, Science; and Financial Services. And I guess I'm asking my friend to verify whether or not the chairman's view on this is the view of the majority, and if we would expect not to see any appropriations bills on the floor. And you can take this question in whatever order in July, in August, or as he said, this year. And I would yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I just suggest, the statement I read, and perhaps it was not accurate, but it seemed like an incredibly definitive statement on the part of the chairman; and since this is the work that the Congress has to do to fund the government, I would assume that the chairman will soon be conferring with the leader and the Speaker to determine if bills are coming to the floor or not.

Mr. BLUNT. If we don't deal with any bills this year, I guess our average is going to go down quickly. If we had 12 hours on Labor H last year and zero this year, I guess for this Congress we will say we spent an average of 6 hours debating the bills because one of them never got debated at all.

Mr. BLUNT. In that regard, on the 2005 energy bill that I voted for and the gentleman just said he voted for, I think we did head things in the right direction. Of course from the 6 years prior to 2007, energy gas prices increased by about 50 cents a gallon; and in the 17 months since then, they have better than doubled. Everybody can take the numbers and do lots of things with them. Nobody likes the doubled number. There is no doubt about that. In one of the early bills, I think it was H.R. 6, actually this Congress voted to repeal the incentives that we put in that bill that you and I voted for in 2005, the House voted to repeal those incentives which would have made it easier to promote the NPRA drilling area. I think maybe the position we would hopefully take in the future would be that we would want to continue to make those things easier to do rather than harder to do. I would also say in terms of the 68 million acres, I have heard that a lot and I am sure we will continue to hear it a lot. Number one, not all of that land has oil or gas on it. Two, even if it does, you don't drill on every acre to drain this important resource from it. We are all going to learn a lot more about the gas and oil business, even than we know today, and my guess is that we know a lot more than we did even 6 months ago. I do know in the last 6 years, as we frankly have accelerated exploration, that lawsuits to slow down exploration have gone up 718 percent in the last 6 years. So if we want to deal with things like lawsuits and trying to expedite the process, that's a very appropriate thing to do, and at that point it is even more appropriate to hold people to their strict lease standards that they have. The 22 million acres in Alaska, while that is some place we ought to look for both oil and gas, I don't know that we are going to be in an either/or environment, and particularly in this case where we want to look at what makes the most sense the quickest. I would also mention to the gentleman that we have a bill on the ANWR itself, it is H.R. 6107, that already adopts that principle that none of the petroleum coming out of there would go anywhere but to the United States. So many are already cosponsoring legislation that accepts that principle. It is a principle that if it's an easy way to open up new resources, I think it is something that we should be talking about and making sure that we get it just right. We do not want to assume that the oil companies can be micromanaged by Congress. We want to do what we can to make sure that we are producing American energy in the maximum way, and also understand that every oil lease does not result in oil. If it did, my good friend and I could open up Hoyer & Blunt and become oilmen if we could just get a lease. A lease doesn't mean there is anything there, but we ought to be sure that these leases are being vigorously pursued. We also should be sure that we are doing anything we reasonably can do to remove impediments, whether those impediments are lawsuits or the language that was in H.R. 6 that the House of Representatives passed. The Senate didn't pass it so the law didn't change, but the message to people out there looking for oil is that there is a new sheriff in town and the rules are different than they were under the old sheriff, and maybe we ought to get out of town. A lot of this hesitancy about exploring could result from debates right here on the floor. We want to do things in debate, and I take my friend's word that he wants to, too, that encourages exploration, not discourages exploration. I yield to my good friend.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the gentleman for that. And that is exactly right. That will be a bill to be debated, and leaders shouldn't be expected to know everything about every aspect of that, and particularly on a bill that will be debated. I would assume that this designation would create an additional obstacle, and there may be other obstacles already in place and I am sure that will be part of the debate. The gentleman's last comment about work for next week indicated that there may be other energy-related bills scheduled for the floor next week. Does the gentleman have a sense of what some of those options might be, and which ones may be more likely to be on the floor next week? I would yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I think one of our concerns about that on the energy topic, which I would hope to go to for a few minutes next, is there was a proposed liquid natural gas facility in that area that I think this designation will impact unless it is defined somehow out of that. And if the gentleman wants to respond to that, I would yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I will.

Mr. BLUNT. I would

Mr. BLUNT. He's a capable man, and I'm sure he can figure out a way. So I would like to close by saying we would like to see at least the bills that are through the full committee on the floor and would hope that the energy bills that the gentleman is looking at can come to the floor with a rule that allows a substantial and full debate on this critical problem of both gas prices at the pump now and home heating and other things that are going to quickly become problems for Americans.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the gentleman for that information. On H.R. 415, the Taunton River bill, the Wild and Scenic Rivers bill, does the gentleman know, does the location change at all? Or was it the location that was on the bill that earlier was scheduled for this week?

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the gentleman for that. I am old enough now that I never argue with anyone who suggests I am a lot younger, even if I am not a lot younger. My children and grandchildren, too, I think, will live in a world much different than the world we are in right now; but it will take awhile to get there. And I absolutely agree we should be at an all-systems-forward effort to find the next technology, and while we are finding the next technology, to use the resources we have as an economic asset, not to see them as an environmental hazard. We need to get there. We need to have a debate that gets us there. We are going to have some figures that we are going to disagree about. It is hard with these sort of believed reserves to know what they are. I personally think I will have a lot of facts that suggest that 81 percent of the known reserves in oil and gas are not in those 68 million acres, but I am also for pursuing those 68 million acres vigorously. The oil shale in the West, we had a hearing last week that only members of my party attended because we wanted to talk about this whole issue of what this Congress could have done, and just the oil shale amounts in the West that I think are not calculated into your figure are hugely significant in how we use our resources in the future. We want to do that. We want to remove obstacles. On the $14 billion, and we have debated this before and I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I think everybody in this room understands that $14 billion so-called tax break for the so-called oil companies is their part of the domestic manufacturing tax incentive that every American business gets. Now if we want to take that away from companies that are successful, that's a different principle. Maybe we take it away from computer companies. Who do we take it away from? We want those jobs here. That is what that is about. I would like to have that debate one of these days about whether or not those manufacturing jobs need to be here. We think that they need to be here for every other industry in the country. Why is this the one industry where we say, they are going to manufacture here anyway, particularly based on everything we know about the worldwide oil challenge we face, why would we want to do anything that would encourage the oil product to be refined somewhere outside of this country? That is what that domestic manufacturing incentive is for. I think every time when we talk about this as a big tax break for the oil companies, it sounds like we have gone into the tax law and said if you are an oil company, you get something that nobody else gets. What we have done in the tax law is say if you are an oil company and you refine a product, if you manufacture a product, if you produce a product in this country, you get exactly what everybody else gets that makes that decision to make their computer in Texas instead of Romania. That's what that incentive is. Now, every time it is discussed on the floor, it is this big benefit that was just designed for the oil companies, and that is just not the fact. It is a domestic manufacturing benefit.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank my friend, but part of the unfortunate circumstance we find ourselves in is, as we have restricted access to some of our own supply, we in fact saw in the last decade that this industry that had been forced to be totally domestic, and we hoped it could be totally domestic again, was sending jobs out of the country because we were bringing in refined product for the first time. Because we were bringing in refined product for the first time, we were doing other things that the Congress should want to reverse. One other topic I have today, and I look forward to a good debate on these energy issues. I would hope these energy issues could come to the floor under a rule, by the way, and I would ask my friend if there is any plan to bring the energy bills that he would hope to bring to the floor in the next week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks with a rule that allows more than a 40-minute debate on a suspension bill. And I would yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I yield.

Mr. BLUNT. We might ask Mr. Obey what his views might be about his bills that are already through the committee in regular order and why those five bills couldn't come to the House. You know, we have, in the years of our majority, always with an open rule, taken substantial time. It seemed to me 1 year we took five full days of hearing amendments on the Labor HHS bill and other bills, numerous bills at a time. The evaluation of last year, the House passed its bills, but at the end of the day, we had one vote on one big bill which may not have been nearly as healthy as having nine individual votes and then having to carry three bills over into the next year to get them done one at a time. But that's not really the question. The question is what about the bills that are out of the committee now and what would be a violation of any regular order problem to bring those to the House and take the time that we clearly have? We're passing a lot of legislation off the House floor, but not very much of it winds up on the President's desk. If we begin to determine the House schedule based on what the Senate is willing to do and a bill that can get to the President, not much of what we've done in the last several weeks really had much impact. But I would yield.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for recognizing me. I would point out to my good friend the conference chairman on the now majority side that we often passed pieces of legislation from this House that are already available to pass again today. Certainly there is no question that on the other side of this building, that legislation was often blocked. But we would like to see a comprehensive solution. My littlest boy and my grandchildren all love Band-aids. In fact, sometimes my little boy, Charlie, will fall and bump his head, and he feels better if we put a band-aid on his arm. I think that is kind of what we are doing here this week. We are bringing band-aids to the floor, rather than dealing with the real problem. We have got bills on the floor that say it is the people who run the service stations, and maybe there is price gouging; or it is the people who participate in the market; or it is the people who look for oil and gas. I would suggest it may very well be the people that don't bring the legislation to the floor that would do the things that my friend from Illinois just said he was for: Production. Those bills are there. We would like to see them discharged. We have got the No More Excuses Energy Act that the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Thornberry, has proposed, that would allow the kinds of production that the majority has just said they are for. We have got a refinery siting bill that Mr. Pitts from Pennsylvania has that would allow more refinery capacity. We have a repeal on a ban that won't let the government buy any of these alternative fuels that we are hearing are such a good idea. The very best way you can get a loan and go to the bank is if you had a government contract for coal-to-liquid jet fuel or oil shale or the tar sands. We have a Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Act that we will be trying to discharge in the future. We would like to see the real solutions come to the floor. And on-use-it-or-lose-it, absolutely you do lose it when the lease is up. Less than 10 percent of the available land is being used now.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam Speaker, I am grateful to the gentleman for yielding me the time and the hard work he and Mr. Sensenbrenner have done to bring this bill to this point. Certainly, this bill does a lot to restore the original intention of the Congress as to what the Congress had hoped at the time that the Americans with Disabilities Act would be. I am pleased to be a cosponsor of the bill that's on the floor today. I think it strikes the right balance between protection for individuals with disabilities and the obligations of the requirements of employers themselves. Ultimately, that partnership is the partnership that makes the most of people in the workplace and the skills they bring to the workplace. This ensures that people with disabilities, whom the Congress intended to cover by the original Americans with Disabilities Act long before I came to Congress, are now covered, as I understand it, by these changes, and that's important. It is better when there is a conflict between the courts and the Congress for the Congress to come back and say, ``No, that's not what we meant. This is what we meant, and this is what we hope to happen in the country.'' This prohibits consideration of mitigating circumstances in the determination of whether an individual has a disability. Of course, it continues to allow the normal eyeglasses and contacts and things like that as an exception in those circumstances. Most of all, Madam Speaker, this bill puts people to work. This bill creates opportunity. This bill creates a workplace where the skills people can bring to the workplace are maximized, not minimized, where what they add to the total product of America makes America a more productive country and for them establishes a totally different set of goals, a set of aspirations, a set of ways that they look at the world every day and brings their skills in new ways to the workplace. Madam Speaker, I am pleased to support this bill. I urge my colleagues to do the same and think that the approach we've taken here of the Congress itself going back and trying to clarify what the Congress meant is certainly better than letting the court determine perpetually what the Congress intended to do.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. So I'm certainly hoping that we deal with this important issue of physician reimbursement. I wish we could have done it with a bill that would have been developed sometime in the last 6 months, but we have some concern about that and, I think, appropriately so. We have a number of physicians on our side who understand this process much better than I do, and I think it's very important that we try to involve them in this process. We've actually got a number of proposals on our side, as you very well may have, too, none of which I've seen in any kind of legislative form. I'd yield.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend from Maryland, the majority leader, for information about next week's schedule.

Mr. BLUNT. My belief is that is largely not going to be dependent on the issue that solves the problem for physicians but on how that problem is solved. Of course, if two-thirds of the Members are not prepared to do it that way, that will not have gained any time. It will actually have lost time. We'll continue to talk, if you want to, on that. I notice there is also a bill on energy that is potentially to be considered, and I wonder if that bill would be considered under a rule, and I would hope that it would be. I'd yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank my friend for that information. I'm looking here at what we're going to be talking about. I will have some questions about that. Before I get to that, I would like to congratulate my friend on the great work he did on the legislation we passed both yesterday and today. Particularly the legislation today took a tremendous amount of effort on the majority leader's part to get that legislation to the floor. I'm hopeful that the Senate, before we leave for the Fourth of July, will pass this and get it to the President's desk. I'm convinced that the country will be significantly safer because of the tools we've given the intelligence community. But I'm also convinced that we have done a lot to structure this process in a way that not only protects individual rights, but also requires the government to be more forthcoming with its rules and regulations. And both the leader and his staff did a great job on this. And I know personally because we've worked together on it, and spent days, hours and weeks trying to get to a bill that would come to the floor that would have a significant vote from the majority side. And virtually every Republican at the end of the day was able to be there, as we have been on these bills generally. But I am grateful to you, and I will just point out that while we almost got a majority of the majority voting for this, there wasn't a majority of the majority. And that makes it harder for a leader. And that can be easily overlooked. But this is something where you had to work hard to do what you thought was the right thing for the country. And I'm grateful to you for it.

Mr. BLUNT. Well, I thank the gentleman, and I certainly share his comments on our two principal staffers who have spent so much time on this. But one of the things in this process that I was deeply appreciative of, and that you mentioned in your remarks today, was how great the entire staff was in coming together on very technical issues where every single word mattered. The staff on both sides of the aisle were in those rooms you and I were in--and many times we were not in the room--when they were working out the last technicalities of which word was the best word. With all of those involved, it made a big difference here as they do so often, but this is one of those moments where exactly what is done makes a big difference in both how we secure our country and in how we secure our liberties. I'm grateful to the staff for that. On the Medicare bill that would come to the floor under suspension, as I believe I understood your announcement on Medicare physician rates, when would that bill be available? Will it be available?

Mr. BLUNT. We've known that we were going to face this deadline for about 8 months now or for at least 6 months now. As to the process there of going through suspension, I would just tell my friend that I think, on a suspension bill, if this has Medicaid cuts that hurt rural communities or that hurt minority seniors, as we believe some of the cuts in the CHAMP bill did, I would be prepared for this bill to fail on suspension. It might pass with a rule. I wouldn't know about that, but I would give some prediction here that a suspension bill that does those things as pay-fors to appropriately see that physicians are reimbursed but then to have a big debate on the House floor as to whether or not seniors--minority seniors and rural seniors--are disproportionately impacted would, in my opinion, lead to at least a veto-sustaining number on our side. I'd yield.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the gentleman for that. Energy will continue to be an important focus of our discussion of what we think should be on the floor. We look forward to seeing an energy bill on the floor with a rule, and I would encourage the majority to bring every energy bill that we're trying to discharge right now to the floor as soon as possible.

Mr. BLUNT. Well, to make the point, I'm not sure in my statement there that I mentioned a veto-sustaining majority. I'll just point out, if we had that veto-sustaining number, rather, it would also mean that the bill wouldn't pass and that it would fail on suspension.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Hoekstra for yielding me this initial time that would have the otherwise gone to you. I thank you, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. Reyes and Mr. Smith, for bringing this important piece of legislation to the floor and for working so hard to see that it came to the floor. I would also like to say that I again appreciated the opportunity to work with my good friend Mr. Hoyer, as he spent so many hours and so much time on this. From his staff, Mariah Sixkiller; from my staff, Brian Diffel; Mr. Boehner's staff, Jen Stewart worked hard on this; Chris Donesa from Mr. Hoekstra's staff was indispensable in his work, as was Caroline Lynch from Mr. Smith's staff. And I got to know frankly and work with Jeremy Bash from Mr. Reyes' staff and Lou DeBaca from Mr. Conyers' staff, and appreciated the real positive contributions they bring to this process every day. I would also like to suggest that two staffers of my colleague from Missouri, Mr. Bond, Louis Tucker, and Jack Livingston, spent lots of time and lots of productive work on this. Madam Speaker, this represents a compromise, as Mr. Reyes just said, as Mr. Smith just said, that was forged with lots of hard work by lots of people. It accomplishes the goals of the intelligence community. There is no individualized court order for targeting foreign terrorists in foreign countries. There are protections here for communications providers that may have assisted the government. But, as Mr. Reyes just said, those protections will be determined by a court, not by this legislation. We modernized the law to adapt to changes in technology since the 1978 FISA statute. The bill would accomplish all this while adding new protections and strengthening the individual liberties and privacy protections of Americans. We also worked closely with the majority to reinforce the FISA Court's role in procedural certifications and reviews of administration policies, and we created some new obligations for the Attorney General to establish guidelines. Madam Speaker, like yesterday's vote, this bill is an example of what we can do when we work together. I thank all those who worked so hard to get it to the floor today. I urge my colleagues to vote for it.