Ed Case

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support House passage of H.R. 3479, the Brown Tree Snake Control and Eradication Act of 2004. Last November I was pleased to join with my colleagues from Guam, Congresswoman Madeleine Z. Bordallo, and Congressman Neil Abercrombie from Hawaii, in introducing this important legislation. This bill proposes a long-overdue comprehensive approach, through the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, to eradicate the brown tree snake in Guam and to prevent its introduction to jurisdictions in the Pacific, including my home state of Hawaii. There are other Federal agencies, particularly the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, that are crucial to our efforts, and I am fully supportive of resources and funding expended by or given to these agencies in combating the brown tree snake. I greatly appreciate the assistance of my colleagues on the House Resources and Agriculture Committees for their hard work on bringing this bill to the floor: House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo and Ranking Member Nick Rahall; House Resources Subcommittee on Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans Chairman Wayne Gilchrest and Ranking Member Frank Pallone; House Agriculture Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Ranking Member Charles Stenholm; and House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock and Horticulture Chairman Robin Hayes and Ranking Member Mike Ross. The devastating ecological, economic, and human health impacts of the brown tree snake have been long known among the affected jurisdictions in the Pacific and the federal, state, and territorial agencies charged with implementing brown tree snake preventative control and eradication programs. However, it is clear that unless we address this challenge with a long-term, coordinated, and comprehensive approach, Guam will continue to struggle with the adverse impacts of the brown tree snake, and we in Hawaii will increasingly risk the introduction of the snake into our fragile environment. A total of eight brown tree snakes have been found live or dead in Hawaii since the mid-1980s. All have been associated with the movement of civilian and military vehicles or cargo from Guam. Most recently, I joined my colleagues from the Hawaii Congressional delegation in expressing our concerns to and seeking funding assistance from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response to the proposed reduction in inspection and trapping services at and around Guam military and civilian ports by up to 50 percent this November. These operations, which are run by APHIS Wildlife Services, annually interdict 6,000-7,000 snakes. Since the DOD benefits significantly from such operations, and is expected to increase its own presence in activities and movements to and from Guam as much as three times in the next five years, it is imperative that all military operational expansion and construction planning on Guam should include brown tree snake control and interdiction design measures and protocols. DOD should consider such funding as part of its base operational and readiness plans. As background, the brown tree snake was accidentally introduced into Guam in the late 1940s and 1950s, likely via U.S. military cargo, from an area in the Pacific where the snakes are native. Unfortunately, because Guam had no natural predator but abundant prey, the brown tree snake population spread throughout the island. Because the brown tree snake's preferred prey is birds, it is directly responsible for the extinction of 9 of 134 native forest birds and 3 of 12 native lizards on Guam. Economically, the snakes have caused more than 1,600 power outages over a 20-year period in Guam, costing the island $4.5 million per year without considering their impact on transformers, and damages inside electrical substations. The disruptions affect all aspects of everyday life in homes and work, as well as for the government and the business community. In Hawaii, the brown tree snake represents one of the greatest terrestrial ecological threats due to its potential impact on our endangered bird species, which are found nowhere else on earth. As a result of Hawaii's geographical isolation and lush environment, there were more than 140 endemic bird species in the islands prior to human contact. Today, among the remaining 71 endemic forms, 30 are federally listed as endangered, and 15 of these are on the brink of extinction. Any negative impact on our native bird species in Hawaii will inevitably impact our native flora as well. Hawaii has the highest known number of endemic terrestrial plants of any major island group. Economically, a University of Hawaii study estimates that the introduction of the brown tree snakes to Hawaii will cause between $28 million and $450 million annually in electrical power outages. This does not include the potential devastation to our agriculture industry. In Guam, the brown tree snake has contributed to the decline in production of the island's agriculture industry, particularly the commercial poultry industry, because the snakes eat eggs and chicks. The snake has also impacted the growing of fruits and vegetables because insects that are no longer naturally controlled by birds and lizards inflict increased damage on crops. To address the brown tree snake problem, a Brown Tree Snake Control Committee was established subsequent to provisions in the Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act of 1990. A multi-agency Memorandum of Agreement on Brown Tree Snake Control was also signed in 1992 and renewed in 1999. However, it expired in March of this year. The Brown Tree Snake Control and Eradication Act will statutorily authorize a process to ensure the ongoing activities of federal agencies, enhance their effectiveness, provide the necessary resources from agencies actually conducting the work, and strengthen the coordination between federal and regional stakeholder in Hawaii and the Pacific in a more systemic fashion. Among the authorized activities is the expansion of science-based eradication and control programs in Guam; the expansion of interagency and intergovernmental rapid response teams in Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Hawaii; the expansion of efforts to protect and restore native wildlife in Guam or elsewhere damaged by the brown tree snake; continuation and expansion of sustained research funding from the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Wildlife Services, and National Wildlife Research Center, including the establishment of an APHIS, Wildlife Services, Operations Program State Office located in Hawaii; and the expansion of long-term research into chemical and biological control techniques that could lead to large-scale reduction of brown tree snake populations in Guam. H.R 3497 is a product of collaboration between my office, the offices of Congresswoman Bordallo and Congressman Abercrombie, and the key Federal, State, and territorial stakeholders in the region. While the brown tree snake is just one of the more serious of many invasive species threats to Hawaii, the mechanisms strengthened and established under H.R. 3479 can serve as an exemplary model for addressing other invasive species issues, not just in Hawaii, but in our whole country. The bill is supported by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, the Coordinating Group on Alien Species, and others. Such coordinated support in Hawaii is illustrative of the seriousness that we take this issue and the assistance the federal government can anticipate receiving after enactment of this bill. Hawaii's stakeholders will not be silent and passive partners in this effort. I am specially proud about the establishment of the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, which includes key State, county and Federal head officials in Hawaii, by legislation approved by the 2003 Hawaii State Legislature and Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle. I understand that Hawaii is now only one of seven states in the country to establish such a council in addressing invasive species prevention and response measures at the State level. Again, I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, it has been 1,215 days since the current administration assumed stewardship over our Federal budget. During that time, our national private debt has increased by 1.733 trillion. According to the Web site for the Bureau of the Public Debt at the U.S. Department of Treasury, yesterday our Nation's outstanding privately held debt alone was $4.343 trillion, an increase of 39 percent in just 3\1/2\ years. And foreign holdings of that debt now total $1.79 trillion, an increase of $780 billion since January, 2001, and now 41 percent of all privately held debt. Total Federal debt at the end of this current fiscal year in just 15 days, including obligations to Social Security and Medicare, is projected to be $7.372 trillion. It is time to stop the bleeding.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 771. As we remember our POW and MIAs, I want to share with my colleagues the text of a speech I recently delivered to a conference in Honolulu sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO). At this conference were representatives from our own country as well as five countries of Asia, including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Mr. Speaker, I urge swift passage of this important resolution and continued strong Congressional support for the DPMO. U.S. POW/MIA Accounting Efforts: Process and Operations, August 11, 2004 Thank you, Department of Defense Assistant Secretary Jennings, for your very kind introduction. Thank you also to Dr. Whitley, General Stackpole (who has contributed so much to Hawaii), and General Whitfield, or ``Q,'' the Commander of our Joint Personnel Operating Command, located just down the road. And please allow me to introduce my wife, Audrey, and my staff assistant, Jackie Conant, both of whose ancestral roots, like so many of Hawaii's people, lie with you in Asia. But most of all, Mingalar Par, Zdravstvuite, and Chao ong, or Aloha! Welcome to Hawaii, and Mahalo!, or thank you, to each of you for joining us at this vitally important conference this week, Your simple presence tells the people of my country everything about the commitment of your countries and peoples to assisting us all in finding, identifying and repatriating the sailors, soldiers, marines, airmen and civilians of our country currently unaccounted for throughout Asia. I am Ed Case and I am a Member of the Congress of the United States, I directly represent 650,000 Americans living in Hawaii's great Second District, which includes all eight of Hawaii's major islands, as well as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands all the way past Midway Island to Kure Atoll. Under our system of governance, we have three separate, independent and coequal branches of federal government: our executive branch, headed by our President; our legislative branch, made up of me and my colleagues in congress; and our judicial branch, headed by our Supreme Court. From beyond our shores, it often looks like a pretty messy system, as we argue and disagree in public over what we should do and not do, and as we contest elections for our presidency and for Congress. Many of our deepest disagreements and our elections have been and are about whether and under what circumstances we should have taken or we should take military action beyond our shores, as was the case with what we refer to as the Korean and Vietnam Wars and as is the case today in Iraq, and I recognize with you tonight as citizens of our world the terrible personal and national tragedies of those and other hostilities and pay homage to the fallen whoever they were. But if I can leave you with one and only one message tonight, it is this: in our country, we are one in our commitment to find and bring home our missing. I came of age during the time of Vietnam in a small community on my home Island of Hawaii. Robbie Peacock was a handsome and well-liked boy, also from that island, who graduated some years ahead of me, went off to college, enlisted as a pilot, and was sent to Asia. His plane disappeared on a mission and his remains have thus far not been found. His mother has passed away and his father grieves for him still. But, far worse, is that for almost 35 years they have had no finality, no resolution. I represent Ms. Michie Sasaki in Congress. Her brother, Private First Class Takeshi Sasaki, went missing in Korea on April 25, 1951. At the end of 1953, his status was amended to ``Missing in Action and Presumed Dead.'' Fifty years later, Ms Sasaki, along with her sisters, traveled to Washington DC to attend the 2004 Annual Korean War/Cold War Government Briefings sponsored by Secretary Jennings and our Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. Over 500 individuals representing 225 loss cases attended the briefings. There weren't just sister or brothers of those missing in attendance, but nieces and nephews, sons and daughters, and even some grandsons and granddaughters. Some 89,000 Americans are still unaccounted for on the world's battlefields since World War II, including 6,000 Korea and 2,000 Vietnam. 73 of Hawaii's own are missing in Korea and 12 in Vietnam. Here's the point: our missing touch each of us, personally, in our homes, our families and our memories. We have not forgotten them, we all seek resolution, and we are united in our efforts. We know that we are not alone. We know that in the cities and countrysides of your own countries you have countless friends and family members similarly unaccounted for. We know that you and yours also feel still not only your losses but the lack of resolution. We must help each other. The endeavors of people like Secretary Jennings, General Whitfield, the individuals at the Defense Prisoner of War/ Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) and Joint Personnel Accounting Command (JPAC), and the 600 Americans working fulltime worldwide to account for our missing is one of our most important missions. From your country, I salute you all. And I thank our foreign visitors for your efforts thus far. You can't imagine the effect even today up Americans like Michie Sasaki when they read a headline such as that of a few weeks ago, ``U.S. POW/MIA Official Breakthrough in Vietnam,'' reporting that joint operations will soon resume in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Congratulations to Secretary Jennings and the representatives of Vietnam for your mutual advancement of our mutual effort. So, as you all complete your vital work this week and return to your homes, please take with you these thoughts. First, for our country, our commitment to accounting for our missing rises above any internal disagreements; we all want to finish this mission, and all branches of our government are united behind and supportive of the efforts of DMPO and others in our focus on doing so. And second, we want to help you do the same, for our interests are mutual and exist notwithstanding the borders within which we live and the nature of our past, present or future relations. Perhaps in our joint efforts on this purely humanitarian cause lie the roots of true peace in our world. Mahalo, and aloha!

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, every once in awhile I am deeply grateful for an action I am able to take that is both long overdue and truly needed. That is how I feel now as I introduce the Coral Reef Conservation and Protection Act of 2004. My childhood was spent among the rich diversity of the coral reef ecosystems of my native Island of Hawaii. It was a time of budding wonder at what nature had wrought, the living corals and other reef life existing in mutual dependency and sustainability. But just weeks ago, when I returned, as I often do, now with my children, to those same reefs, they're not what they were. Still beautiful, yes; still wondrous. But there is not the same diversity of coral nor the same luster; the fish and other marine life not as plentiful nor diverse; the presence of new, alien species is apparent. Of course, there are simply more of us in those marine environments than there were, and so our cumulative impact over my 50 years in those waters has become apparent, even at the level of recreational and subsistence use. But it's more, for these reefs have become a significant business, their coral exoskeletons, their living creators, and the shells and fish that live in and among them valuable collectors' items for the aquariums and curio shops of the world. And the purposeful and accidental introduction of marine invasives in isolated instances over the last decades have magnified into a critical mass of statewide presence and threat. In relevant terms, though, we in Hawaii are among the lucky ones, for at least we still have living, albeit threatened, coral reefs, with declining but at least remaining marine life. At least we have marginally protective state laws, and a culture of arguable sustainability. But in much of the rest of the marine world, especially throughout the temperate zones of the Pacific and beyond, the world of the coral reef is past endangered and into destroyed, wiped out by a wave of commercial overfishing, overcollecting, dynamiting, cyanide poisoning, and other forms of ecological pillage. In these worlds, laws do not exist to provide even minimum protections or, if they do, they are spurned. Some say that that's their business; what do we care if they wreck their marine ecosystems? First, of course, in today's interdependent world, our global environment is everyone's business. But beyond that, we can't turn our backs because we are the chief facilitator; ours is the largest market for the products of this stripping of the world's coral reefs. None of this is new: we have known all of this for decades. We have even set out to do something about it. In 1973, we became a party to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which sought to clamp down on endangered species trafficking. But although some of our world's coral reef life has been designated as covered under it, the enforcement mechanisms are frankly ineffective. More recently, in 1998 President Clinton issued the Coral Reef Protection Executive Order (#13098) establishing the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force. That entity was directed to strengthen our stewardship and conservation of our country's reef ecosystems, and to assess our role in the international coral reef products trade with the goal of taking actions to promote conservation and sustainable use of coral reefs worldwide. The Task Force conducted its evaluations, made its reports, and outlined what was needed. That was in large part comprehensive legislation to institute common protective standards for our nation's coral reefs, but, equally important, rules to discourage international coral reef abuse and encourage sustainable practices by allowing imports only of non-endangered products collected by sustainable practices and pursuant to integrated management plans. The Coral Reef Conservation and Protection Act of 2004 I gratefully introduce today embodies the principal directions of the Task Force and more. It establishes a comprehensive scheme for the domestic and international protection of our world's coral reef ecosystems. The regime's key ingredients are the disallowal of any domestic taking, transport in interstate commerce, or import of the endangered marine life of our coral reefs, unless that life is collected in non- destructive ways or subject to sustainable management plans or otherwise exempted from coverage by administrative actions. Mr. Speaker, we have to start somewhere; our world's coral reefs are crying out for our help. This bill is that start, and I urge its prompt deliberation and passage. Mahalo, and aloha!

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, the signing 150 years ago of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Peace and Amity, also known as the Treaty of Kanagawa, marked the beginning of a remarkable relationship between two great nations. It also represented a milestone in the history of each nation. For Japan, which was emerging from two-and-a-half centuries of self- imposed isolation, the treaty marked the moment that it began its ascent to the ranks of the world's great powers. For the United States, which began as a small colony on the North Atlantic seaboard with deep roots in Europe, the treaty represented its emergence as a Pacific nation. The Treaty of Kanagawa was signed in large part because the leadership of the United States recognized the importance of establishing a formal relationship with Japan, a nation that, in spite of its long period of isolation, was widely known to have a stable government as well as cultural and literary traditions that were highly evolved and refined. While we all acknowledge that the U.S.-Japan relationship has had periods of difficulty, particularly the tragedy of the Second World War, it has, on the whole, been close, sturdy, vital, and mutually beneficial. The relationship continues to flourish today because both nations share a belief in democratic institutions, the rule of law, and economic prosperity. Both nations also believe strongly in building a foundation for both regional and global cooperation throughout Asia and the world. We in Hawai`i have long had an especial relationship with Japan. Today, nearly 300,000 residents of our state (19 percent of our population) are descended from Japanese immigrants who first begin arriving in Hawai`i--then the Kingdom of Hawai`i--in 1868 to work as field laborers on our sugar plantations. Hawai`i's Japanese community has since played a central role in establishing modern Hawai`i's tradition of ethnic and social diversity. Over the course of this commemorative year, I am hopeful that all Americans and Japanese will reacquaint themselves with the depth and value of the relationship that was established between our two great nations 150 years ago.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Manzullo- Velazquez amendment. I came to this Congress and asked to serve on the Small Business Committee. Coming from a State that has 96 percent of its businesses as small businesses, 60 percent of its businesses as minority-owned businesses, I came here ready to roll up my sleeves believing that Washington, D.C. cared about small businesses. Let us put this amendment into perspective and ask ourselves is that true. As we look at the actions of this administration, and many times this Congress, Members have to say that small business has not been treated well. I have sat on the Committee on Small Business, as bipartisan a committee as there is in this Congress, where we are all trying to help small business, and I have watched as the discussion has turned to small businesses being squeezed out of the Federal procurement process. I have watched as we have had hearings on all of those measures to help small businesses, from reducing paperwork, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and instead we see this administration presiding over increases in paperwork. Regulatory relief, this administration presiding over huge increases in regulation, and the Small Business Administration coming in to us and trying to defend the actions of the Office of Management and Budget telling them to cut, and we see the pain in their eyes when they have to carry that policy down here. Now we find ourselves facing an amendment that should never have had to have been brought to the floor of this House to preserve a program which has been the flagship program of small business, and we are being put in a box where we have to elect between two different things that we both support. Of course we support it. But I have to ask, why do we not take a look at the billion dollar sole source contracts for huge businesses that are out there? This is a blip on the radar screen when we compare it to that. This is not about banks. Banks are consolidating. Big banks are getting bigger. Small banks are getting wiped out. Small banks serve small businesses; small businesses are not cared for by the big banks. They are being squeezed out. Take it to a rural community in my district, Na'alehu, a small mom and pop operation, trying to get just a little capital to get going; and if they are going to the big banks, they are not going to get that capital. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong, unqualified support of the bipartisan Manzullo/Velazquez amendment to save the Small Business Administration's section 7(a) small business loan program. Mr. Chairman, the Small Business Administration (SBA) was created 51 years ago by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to meet a critical nationwide capital shortage. SBA's top priority was to provide small companies with access to capital through its lending programs. The 7(a) loan program is the signature program within the SBA. Over the last decade, the SBA has approved more than 424,000 loans for over $90 billion, assisting countless small businesses across the country with their basic capital requirements. Tragically, funding of the 7(a) program is in grave danger of being eliminated. Should the administration prevail in its attempt to dismantle this proven program and Congress proceed on its current path, our Nation's small businesses would have to bear an additional $80 million in SBA expenses, and the fees per loan would increase by over $1,000. These loans are the only source of affordable, long-term financing for many of our Nation's small businesses, as 7(a) loans spur economic development in underserved areas, are used to purchase land or buildings or expand existing facilities or buy new equipment, machines, or even furniture, and provide long-term working capital including accounts payable--allowing small businesses to start and continue in business where otherwise if may not be possible. In my own state of Hawai`i, for example, the viability of small business is the linchpin to economic vitality. In 2002, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the SBA Office of Advocacy estimates that there were 28,800 small businesses in my state, representing 96.7 percent of all business in Hawai`i. Hawai`i is also home to one of the largest percentages of minority- owned businesses. Minority-owned businesses represented 57.8 percent of the state's businesses and they generated $14.8 billion in revenues in the most recent year for which this data is available. The SBA and its programs are critical to the sustainability of our economic base. In Hawai`i, FY03, the SBA made 269 loans worth nearly $29 million. Of that number, 132 of those loans, worth nearly $15 million--nearly half of all loans--were made to companies operating in the rural communities of the Second District that I represent. The situation is even more promising for my state in this fiscal year. Through May 31, 2004, the SBA had approved 260 loans, worth about $18.5 million to Hawai`i small businesses. Rural small business have received 61 of those loans--representing over $6 million. The 7(a) program is also crucial to small businesses because of recent consolidation of banks and other financial institutions throughout the country. My state is no exception. According to the Federal Reserve Board, there were 13 small-business-friendly banks in Hawai`i in 1998. In 2002, that number had shrunk to 7. Of those seven in 2002, four had assets between $1 billion and $10 billion. Because small business traditionally depend on local banks services and use commercial bank lenders, this recent consolidation has not had a positive effect upon lending to small businesses. During my time in Congress, as a member of the House Committee on Small Business as well as the Blue Dog and New Democrat Coalitions, I have argued for fiscal responsibility during our budget and appropriations process. The SBA's 7(a) program is a perfect example of a federal effort that is entirely consistent with this needed approach, for it both increases revenue-generating economic activity and pays for itself. By supporting, nurturing and growing small businesses, we are allowing these companies to increase in size, revenue, employment and purchasing power, ultimately benefiting the community where that company is located as well as the country as a whole. And these are repayable loans, not outright grants. Mr. Chairman, this is a crucial amendment for all concerned, not least the small businesses of my Second District of Hawai`i. According to a survey published by the National Federation of Independent Business in May of this year, the top three ``severe problems'' for small-business owners is cost of health insurance, liability insurance and workers' compensation. Let's not give these small businesses one more reason to fail in these trying times. Let's pass this important amendment. It is the right thing to do, and I implore my colleagues to support the Manzullo/Velazquez amendment and support the underlying bill.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of the amendments offered by my distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Blumenauer, relative to unexploded ordnance. I completely agree with the underlying assertion of his amendments that our country is failing its obligation to clean up unexploded ordnance (UXO) throughout our states and in fact, throughout the world. My own Hawai`i is a classic example. Our military has made extensive use of my state for military training and preparedness for at least a century, and we in Hawai`i accept that use as an obligation that we owe to our country. However, according to the Department of Defense's FY2002 Defense Environmental Restoration Program Annual Report to Congress, today there remain throughout Hawai`i over fifty Department of Defense- registered locations that have not been cleaned up, presenting ongoing public safety risks. These include 10 separate sites at Lualualei Naval Magazine on the Waianae Coast, one ten acre site at the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands on the island of Kaua`i, five sites at Marine Corps Base Hawai`i at Kaneohe Bay, four sites on the island of Lana`i, and many smaller locations throughout the state. I can only believe that there are a number of other states in the same situation. Let me take the specific example of the military's past use of a large portion of the Island of Hawai`i in and around the current residential communities of Waimea and Waikoloa. During and after World War II, the United States military, primarily the Navy and Marine Corps, utilized an area of approximately 123,000 acres on the western side of the Island of Hawai`i as an artillery range, military training cap, and general military grounds. This former Waikoloa Maneuver/Nansay Combat Range lies in and around the Coast resort area, and remains littered with related debris including UXO. This UXO has already resulted in civilian deaths and injuries and represents a continuing threat to residents and visitors and renders large portions of the area effectively unusable. In 1992, the United States Army Corps of Engineers determined that the site was eligible for the Defense Environmental Restoration Program for designation as a Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS). In 2002, the Corps completed an engineering evaluation/cost analysis which designated the entire site for potential ordnance health and safety risk and estimated total cleanup at an excess of $600,000,000. Of that amount, the Corps analysis estimated cleanup costs for the three highest areas of potential risk, in and immediately adjacent to existing and pending residential communities at $250,000,000. A comprehensive plan for utilization of such funds to those purposes requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC Report 107-151), completed, and submitted to the Secretary of the Army. Same amounts have been expended and other have been allocated in effectuation of that plan, but much less of the $250,000,000 estimate and far short then the estimated costs of total cleanup in excess of $600,000,000. On April 12, 2004, I met with official from the United States Army Corps of Engineers on the Big Island of Hawai`i. At that meeting, I was given an update on the Corps of Engineers' ongoing efforts to clear high priority sites within the Waikoloa Maneuver Area. A small project now underway has begun to clear UXO around Waikoloa Village and Waimea Town--two relatively populated areas on the Big Island. This cleanup project is located in an area that was once used as a military training cap and artillery range. Both on and off the record, I have heard many excuses about the reasons we cannot fund UXO: the war, the deficit, the President's tax cuts. But, these excuses and past Congressional and Executive mishandling of the UXO issue are no excuse for the country--for this Congress--to ignore a concept espoused by parents, coaches and camp counselors alike: Leave any place you visited cleaner than when you arrived. The Army Corps of Engineers is ready and willing to begin the process of cleanup; it is now up to all of us in Congress to appropriate the funds for this much-needed action. Mr. Chairman, our military needs places where they can train fully to protect our country, but when they've completed their mission it's only right that they clean up and assure that those of us that come after them can use the land safely. These amendments offered by the gentleman from Oregon are an essential first step towards cleaning up the many communities which are littered with UXO. I urge their adoption by the House.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support and as a cosponsor of H.R. 4417, which will extend for one year the deadline for countries to continue eligibility in our Visa Waiver Program by issuing passports which are both machine-readable and also include biometric identifiers. I do so with a clear focus on tourism, the primary industry in my state. According to the State of Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, in 2002, tourists spent more than $11 billion during their vacations in the state. A significant part of these expenditures come from international tourists. And while facilitated international travel is essential not only to recreational tourism, it is also key to international commerce, especially from Asia, and to the education in Hawaii of foreign nationals, a major and growing component of our economy. Each day, thousands of visitors arrive to Hawaii from foreign destinations, including those countries in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The tourism industry not only in my state, but every state in the Nation, faces grave consequences if this extension is not granted. According to the State Department, if the deadline is not extended, it expects to process an additional 5 million visas in 2005 alone. This will cripple our embassies and consulates worldwide, compound the existing program of visa issuance, and spell great hardship not only for the travel industry but also business and commerce in general throughout the United States. The Patriot Act justifiably legislated the machine-readable passport requirement for VWP travelers, and additionally gave the Secretary of State authority to postpone the effective date. However, the Secretary of State lacks further authority to extend the deadline on his own. The Secretary of State, working with the Secretary of Homeland Security, has granted a postponement only until October 26, 2004 of the date by which VWP travelers from 21 countries must present a machine-readable passport at a U.S. port of entry to be admitted to the United States without a visa. Another year is needed; only Congress can extend the deadline, and we must do so passing this legislation today. While most of the VWP countries are located in Western Europe, there are several countries in the Asia-Pacific Rim which will benefit from an extension of the October 26, 2004 deadline, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, and Japan. These are the countries of most concern to my home. Mr. Speaker, I share some additional thoughts from key officials within my State's tourism industry. The Director of the State of Hawaii Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism, Mr. Theodore E. Liu, recently wrote that his department is ``in total support of extending [the deadline of] the Visa Waiver Program countries to have machine readable passports.'' The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Hawaii Tourism Agency, Mr. Rex D. Johnson, wrote that the implementation of ``the program before countries are ready to comply would undoubtedly create mass confusion in international travel.'' To be clear, I support the overall requirement of machine-readable passports as well as the use of biometrics on travel documents, both American and international. And I call upon the executive branch to place biometrics upon a machine-readable American passport as quickly as possible, because biometrics can assist not only our country, but every country, to ensure that the person listed on the passport is the same person who presents the passport upon entering the country. As a biometric identifier is an electronic scan of a physical feature or features, including an eye, hand, fingerprint, or face, use of a biometric identifier allows an immigration inspector to know for certain that the person appearing before him or her is the same person to whom a passenger or visa was issued. But, Mr. Speaker, given the current situation, we must extend the deadline at least this one year. I therefore agree with the proposal of chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, the chairman and ranking member of the International Relational Committee, and others, and implore my colleagues to support this bipartisan bill.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce the proposed North Maui Coastal Preservation Act of 2004, a bill directing the National Park Service to assess the feasibility of designating certain coastal lands on the north shore of the Island of Maui between the towns of Pa`ia and Sprecklesville as a unit of the National Park Service. This area is fully worthy of designation as a National Seashore, National Historic Park, or National Recreation Area. Since assuming office as the representative for Hawai`i's Second Congressional District, I have heard loud and clear from the people of Maui, in person during countless times on the island and through petitions and postcards from some 2,000 constituents, about their deep concern for preserving this beautiful, historically significant and resources-rich coastline. Although the 128 acres identified in the bill are currently zoned as open space or parkland, they lie directly in the path of development in Maui's hot real estate market. The desire of the people of Maui is to have the natural, scenic, and cultural resources of this unique area preserved and protected from development, and ultimately designated as the Patsy Takemoto Mink North Shore Heritage Park. As many of my colleagues know, my predecessor in this body, the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink, was born and grew up in Hamakua Poko, a small village near Pa`ia on just this coastline. If the Park Service finds that the area merits inclusion in the National Park System, I will introduce legislation authorizing establishment of a park and directing that it be named after Congresswoman Mink. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contribution of the Maui Sierra Club and especially of Lance Holter, a dedicated community activist, for inspiring the introduction of this bill. I can tell by the hundreds of cards I continue to receive from Maui residents in support of establishing such a park that there are many more people who have dedicated enormous energy and time in the hopes of preserving our precious natural and cultural heritage for future generations. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill, and invite you to come to the Island of Maui to visit this special area. I know that if you do so, you will be convinced as I am of the vital importance of protecting these lands.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, our country is obviously going through times of great difficulty, but it is vital in such times that we pause to reflect on all that is good in our country, that we reflect upon the glue of our country, what holds us together. In that context, I am very pleased to join the gentleman from California, a most worthy and passionate advocate for our people, and my other colleagues on the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus on commemorating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I stand here as the proud Representative of my Second District of Hawaii, the most ethnically diverse district in the most ethnically diverse State of our country. In my Hawaii, out of a total population of 1.2 million, over half are comprised of Asian and Pacific Islanders. And so as we commemorate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I want to reflect on the history of Hawaii, not just because I am immensely proud of our history but also because I believe very strongly that we remain a beacon for where this country is going and what this country can be in the area of ethnic contributions and ethnic diversity. Of course among our country's original Pacific Islanders were and are the indigenous peoples of Hawaii, the native Hawaiians. They came from elsewhere in Polynesia in the early centuries A.D. and built one of the most amazing societies that this world has ever seen. The circumstances under which their kingdom gave way to the Republic of Hawaii remain controversial and far reaching, the subject even today of vital legislation to reaffirm the special relationship between our government and native Hawaiians everywhere. But what is unquestioned is that our indigenous peoples, like other Asians and Pacific Islanders, have seen a remarkable and deeply moving renaissance in their own culture and ethnic pride that has not even begun to approach its zenith. Modern Western contact in 1778 started Hawaii on the journey to ethnic and cultural diversity, a journey on which we are still embarked. As our economy turned to large-scale agriculture and we saw many foreign workers come in, we saw the Chinese come in beginning in 1852, Japanese in 1868, Portuguese in 1878, Puerto Ricans in 1901, Koreans in 1904, Filipinos in 1907. Today we continue in Hawaii to attract immigrants to our shores, including Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians from southeast Asia and other Pacific Islander groups including Tongans, Samoans, Fijians, Maori, Chamorros, Marshallese, Palauans and other Micronesians, Polynesians and Melanesians. Today Hawaii's Asian and Pacific Islander community counts all of these as valuable members of our society. My own congressional district is home to many, including the largest number of native Hawaiian and Filipino populations of any other district in the country. So it is no surprise that Hawaii leads our country in interracial marriages, including my own, where the undisputed head of my household's family originated in the great country of Japan a century ago. More than one- third of married couples and more than one-half of unmarried couples are interracial. More than 50 percent of the children born in Hawaii nowadays, including my own, are interracial. So you can see that in Hawaii, we live Asian Pacific American Month every month. We are proud of our API community, their contributions to our national and international life. For example, of the 33 Asian and Pacific American Members of Congress ever elected, seven have been from Hawaii, including Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, Senator Daniel Ken Inouye, Senator Hiram Leong Fong, Senator Spark Masayuki Matsunaga, Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink, Senator Daniel Kahikina Akaka and Congresswoman Patricia Fukuda Saiki. We have boasted a few firsts at the gubernatorial level. The first Governor of Japanese ancestry, George Ariyoshi. The first Governor of native Hawaiian ancestry, John Waihee. The first Governor of Filipino ancestry, Governor Ben Cayetano. We have seen today in the halls of Congress the incredible contributions of a patriot, Major General Antonio Taguba, a Leilehua High grad from Hawaii and a proud member of our Filipino community. And, of course, former General Eric Shinseki, 34th Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, of Kauai. Like everywhere else in our country we have tragically given thousands of the lives of our sons and daughters, including from the Asian and Pacific American community for the cause of freedom. The exploits of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team remain legendary, but more recently we have seen the tragedy, the tragedy of the loss in Iraq of Maui native Sergeant First Class Kelly Bolor and Big Island native Wesley Batalona. In sports we have seen Michelle Wie, a 14-year-old Hawaii high school freshman referred to as the Tiger Woods of women's golf. We have seen Benny Agbayani in baseball, Duke Kahanamoku and Rell Sunn in surfing, Ben Villaflor in boxing, Tommy Kono in weightlifting. Ellison Onizuka gave his life for the cause of science. Miss Universe Brooke Lee. Miss America Angela Baraquio. In music, Braddah Iz, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. In Hollywood Kelly Hu, Jason Scott Lee, Tia Carrera. In sumo, Takamiyama, Akebono, Musashimaru and Konishiki. In civil rights, Bruce Yamashita. And, of course, how could we end the night without mentioning Camille Velasco and more recently Jasmine Trias? If you want to show your support for Asian and Pacific Americans, tonight you know what number to call on what TV show right about now. Jasmine just finished singing. Mr. Speaker, this is just some of what our proud Asian and Pacific American community offers our country and world. We are deeply committed to sharing with our fellow Asian and Pacific American community nationwide a bright future. I have only the utmost thanks and respect for the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) again for his leadership and for my other colleagues, not just in the APA community caucus here but on all of the other ethnic minority caucuses. Together we are working for a much brighter, a much better, a much more vibrant and diverse and amazing culture and future that lies in front of us here in this country. I thank him and bid him a warm mahalo.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate the incredible students of Kahuku High School for their great achievement in winning fourth place at the national finals of the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution program held in Washington, D.C. from May 1-3, 2004. These outstanding students from my O'ahu's North Shore underwent months of intensive study and hard-won victories to win the right to represent Hawaii in the finals, where they competed against a class from every state in the country and demonstrated a remarkable understanding of the fundamental ideas and values of American constitutional government. This is the first time in Hawaii's eight-year history at this rigorous competition that one of our schools has competed in the final ten. This is truly a wonderful accomplishment that our whole state is deeply proud of! I commend Kahuku's great teacher, Sandra Cashman, for her unending commitment to her students and for producing generations of responsible citizens. Commendations are also in order to State Director of We the People Lyla Berg and District Coordinator Sharon Kaohi for their leadership in creating our leaders of tomorrow. However, ultimately this competition is by and about our kids. So I would like to send my heartiest congratulations to Samuel Braden, Chelsey Bunker, Stacia Colton, Brian Craycraft, Tusiata Esera, Lacey Golonka, Evelyn Griffin, Reis Harney, Celesta Hubner, Azura Iversen- Keahi, Jeremy James, Natalie Kamauoha, Jennifer Kamiya, Tiffany Lee, Brook McArthur, Donna Ramos, Alicia Reidy, Leilani Relator, Aaron Rillamos, Austin Spring, Ian Tapu, Alexandra Thompson, Rachel Telleson, Seini Unga, and Jordan Williams. You have all made Hawaii proud. Aloha and best of wishes in your future endeavors.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Duke Sevilla, Program Coordinator for Maui Economic Opportunity's YouthBank Program, who has been named the 2004 recipient of the Hawaii State Teachers Association Friend of Youth Award. The Friend of Youth Award is given annually to recognize an outstanding person or public/private agency which has contributed greatly to the youth of Hawaii. Duke was chosen from among numerous nominations statewide. Duke has been an outstanding volunteer on Maui for many years. You can frequently find him in the weight rooms at Baldwin High School and the Old Wailuku Gym showing the kids how weightlifting can be beneficial to them. Duke's commitment to our keiki knows no bounds, as he often visits homes to work with youth who are estranged from school. Duke's aloha isn't limited to the YouthBank program. He and his wife Jean have been foster parents for several years, with their home ending up being the ``last stop'' for youth after many foster homes. Congratulations, Duke, and mahalo nui loa for your true dedication to Maui's keiki. It is greatly appreciated by all!

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, here we go again. Here we are to talk about a subject our majority colleagues and our administration do not want to talk about. They are hoping it will just go away. That subject is our national budget or, more directly, the conspicuous lack thereof. Madam Speaker, my constituents ask me all the time, what do I think is the most important challenge facing our country? What is the one thing that we have to work on more than anything else? I can reply to them, in all honesty and candor and directness, that it is the very solvency of their Federal Government. Why should that be? Why is it not the economy? Why is it not education? Why is it not our deteriorating relationship with the rest of the world? Why is it not Social Security? The reason is simple. Without a strong fiscal underpinning, we cannot do everything or anything else. We can have a great old talk, we can have a great old debate, but unless the fiscal solvency of our country is strong, we are not going anywhere. Put another way, unless we take care of today, our children will not be able to take care of tomorrow. We think we all know now, do we not, that we are in pretty bad shape? In fact, we are in real bad shape; and we are going downhill fast. The largest deficits we have ever seen, no end in sight, debt going up, interest rates going up, irresponsible budgeting, like going out only 5 years of a budget when we know that the big expenses come in the sixth year. And we all know that the budget passed by this House just a week ago by a mere three-vote margin is not going to solve that problem. In fact, it is going to worsen it. How did we get here? How did we ever allow ourselves to come to this place? Just 3, 4 years ago we were on the right track. We had spending under control. We had revenues coming in. We had budgets that were heading towards balance. We had debt ceilings that were low relative to GDP. How did we arrive here? Well, the first thing we did is pretty obvious. We consistently reduced revenues while increasing expenses. What do we expect when we do that over a period of years? Second, though, we did not have basic rules to live by. When we are talking about whether to increase this particular program or increase this particular tax or reduce this particular tax or reduce this particular program, we can talk about that program or that tax all we want, but it has got to fit into a big picture. And those are rules to live by; and if we live within those rules within that box, we end up with balanced budgets because we make decisions that are related to each other. And, third, the rules that we did have, we ignored. We talked at length about the first consequence. We have talked about that for many years now. I think it is finally sinking in. We cannot both slash revenues and increase expenses and expect everything to be okay; and yet that is what the budget we just passed and sent into a conference with the Senate does. Yesterday, we talked at length about the second part of it, rules that have worked in the past and that we no longer have, PAYGO. PAYGO, a very simple concept that we pay as we go. That as we reduce in one area, we have to increase in another area. We talked about consequences that when we reduce over here, there is a consequence that has to be addressed over here. That is what balance is. This is balance. Those rules set the boundaries for what we could do. PAYGO, that is what this House just rejected yesterday on a vote of 209 to 209. That is what the Senate has done. I support the Senate and praise the Senate for its actions to institute PAYGO, and I beg those conferees going in on behalf of the House to do the right thing. But today I want to address the third part of it, rules that exist today that are not followed. We have under our system a debt ceiling. It is designed as a check and balance. It is designed to make each one of us stand up and say that no matter how much debt we accumulate because of the decisions, no matter how reckless, no matter how irresponsible, for that matter, we have to vote separately to increase the total debt that we collectively carry through our U.S. Government. And that is what we are doing. We are carrying debt. When we run deficits year after year after year, the money does not just grow out of nowhere. It does not grow on trees. It is not found in a stash somewhere. We borrow it. We issue notes, bonds. We take it out of trust funds. We borrow it. And the total amount is supposed to be limited, and we have that on the books; but we are ignoring it. In 2001 when this administration started, there was a debt limit substantially lower than where it is. I want to say one thing in conclusion. A vote for the budget is a vote to increase the debt limit. We have voted to increase the debt limit. We have not taken a separate vote. So when people ask their Member of Congress, did he or she vote for the budget resolution, if the answer is yes, they voted for a substantial increase in the debt limit. Do not hide it. Let us be honest in our budgeting. Let us do this right.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in full and unqualified support of my colleague from California's motion, a motion that asks this House to do what the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, has already done, a motion that Democrat and Republican Presidents, Democrat and Republican colleagues of Congress have passed; that the conservative Concord Coalition as well as Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan supports; a motion that any business, family, or consumer can understand and has to live by and, frankly, a motion that most Republicans in this Chamber would probably love to vote for, if only they could. It is a motion that stands for this basic principle: when you balance a budget, it is not balanced unless and until you balance it all. Mr. Speaker, what is so hard about PAYGO? Why can my House colleagues on the other side of the aisle, in the party that professes budget discipline, not see what their own colleagues in the Senate see clearly? Is it a failure to understand, is it a failure to agree, or is it a denial of reality? I cannot believe it is a failure to understand. My own teenage son understands that when he balances his budget, he cannot leave out any part of it. He cannot leave out the spending. He cannot leave out any potential reductions in income. My neighbors and I understand that there is a difference between a budget that has a home mortgage payment in it and a budget that does not. If my wife comes to me tomorrow and says, I am going to be making less next year than I made this year, do I ignore it in my budget calculations? No. The States understand it. Every State understands PAYGO and practices it. Why? Because they have something that we do not have here: they have a balanced budget requirement. When they have a balanced budget requirement, they have to balance all of their budget. It cannot be a failure to understand. If it is, we are all in trouble. I would like to believe it is a failure to agree; but then I would like to have a conversation, substantively, about what we do not agree on. No, I think it is a conscious failure to accept reality or, perhaps worse, an attempt to spin, to deceive, to accomplish a result by means other than up front. Mr. Speaker, this is not about the substance of whether to reduce or increase taxes. This is not about the substance of whether to reduce or increase spending. This is about the consequences of actions. This is about the consequences of whether we reduce or increase taxes. This is about the consequences of reducing or increasing spending. My colleagues are telling me that there are no consequences of a $2 trillion aggregate tax cut. That is like saying there are no consequences of increasing our budget by $2 trillion. Of course there are consequences. Do we want to talk about it in a budget context? Okay, fine. Let us talk about the tax cut. Let us talk about the dynamic impact. Let us talk about jobs that may or may not be created, income coming in. But let us calculate it, factor it into a balanced budget. That is all this motion does. Let us live within our means and pay as we go.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Chairman, this is a message to a group of my colleagues that I cannot find: moderate, fiscally responsible Republicans, colleagues whose views on our national budget, on fiscal integrity, on responsibility to our children are really no different from my own or the formers of this substitute. I know you are here. I have talked to you in the halls, on the floor, out on the road. I know that well over half of the people that we represent in this country think as we do and they are not all Democrats. I know that of the five budget alternatives on the floor today for us to choose from, this one represents your own views going away. I know you are outraged at the fact that this budget that this chair has put forward only goes out 5 years. I know you would never adopt a one-way PAYGO in your home or business. I know you are sick at a budget that strips resources away from veterans, education, health care and piles it with those that do not want for anything in our country. So here is my message to you: vote for this substitute. Vote for it because you know it is far and away the most responsible, affordable, balanced, fair and sustainable budget that is on the floor. Do not make this a partisan issue. Do not make it that. I would vote for a comparable substitute coming out of you. Yet all you and I are given from your side today are two budgets, one principal one that is nothing more than a lie and the other one that may be a little bit more honest but demonstrates a fundamental hatred of our Federal Government that neither of us shares. So vote for this budget substitute not just because it is the right thing to do but because with your vote, you can change the course of our fiscal future.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, and colleagues, good evening, aloha and mabuhay! I rise tonight, on this occasion of national Filipino Veterans Action Day, to express my strong and affectionate support for our great Filipino-American community, as well as for our honored Filipino veterans, both here and in the Philippines, who are so well represented by the American Council on Filipino Veterans, and to highlight just some of the challenges these communities still face and the opportunities we have to address them. First let us remember that the relationship between the Philippines and our United States has never been stronger. Our modern-day bond began after the 1898 Spanish American War, continued through the commonwealth period into 1946, and strengthened when the independent Republic of the Philippines came into existence on July 4th of that year. For nearly 40 years, from 1907 to 1946, the Philippines in fact was represented in the U.S. Congress through nearly 15 different resident commissioners. Currently, we have a Filipino-American, Congressman Bobby Scott, representing the 3rd District of Virginia. And one year ago, I was proud to be a charter member of the Congressional Philippines Caucus, which today boasts over seventy members. Apart from the Philippines' continuing vital role in U.S. national security and economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region, our country also has a special relationship with the people of the Philippines. Many have migrated to the United States, in particular my home state of Hawaii, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of our first Filipino immigrants in 2006. In fact, there are now nearly 2.5 million Filipino-Americans, with significant populations in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Texas, and Florida. In Hawaii alone there are nearly 300,000 Filipino-Americans, including roughly 140,000 in my Second Congressional District, the largest number of any congressional district in our country. This community's contributions just in Hawaii are notable, in all facets of our society, from politics to business, from teaching to sports and movie stars, you name it. Former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano was the first Filipino-American governor ever elected in the United States; our state legislature today has 12 members: 6 senators and 6 representatives. Angela Baraquio became Miss America in 2001. We had Ben Agbayani in professional baseball and Tia Carrera in Hollywood. And let us not forget native daughters Jasmine Trias and Camile Velasco, two of just twelve of 2004's American Idol final contestants. But perhaps the most vital and painful contribution of Filipinos to our country was the service, and sacrifice, of our Filipino veterans, who fought alongside our troops in World War II. Their heroic efforts were indispensable to the liberation of the Philippines led by General MacArthur and thus to Allied success in that great conflagration, and earned them a place in legend at the same table as, for example, our Japanese-Americans' 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team. Therefore, the contribution of the American Coalition for Filipino Veterans to designate today as Filipino Veterans Action Day is invaluable to assuring that we never forget. There have been similar efforts in Hawaii from community leaders like Hawaii State Representative Jun Abinsay, Joe Gonzales and Artemio Caleda, former and new presidents, respectively, of the World War II Fil-Am Vets and Ladies Auxilliary Hawaii Chapter, and Domingo Los Banos, a Sergeant with the 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, who later worked collaboratively with many others in Hawaii and the mainland in molding that great documentary on the Filipino veterans: ``An Untold Triumph.'' Let me turn now from what has been to what needs to be. Specifically, there are two issues which I believe Congress must address for both Filipino veterans and our Filipino-American community at large. One is veterans' benefits and the other is immigration. veterans benefits We know that in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a promise to the members of the Philippine Army and the Philippine Scouts who had fought and would fight for the Allies in World War II. Because they had made and would make the same sacrifices as U.S. servicemembers, President Roosevelt promised that they would receive the same veteran's benefits as those received by American veterans. However, in the spring of 1946, just one year after the death of our 32nd President, the United States Congress went back on its promise. And that injustice stands uncorrected from that day to this, as these veterans pass increasingly from this earth along with their comrades- in-arms. Last year, we did make some measure of progress by enacting into law H.R. 2297, legislation increasing VA benefits for U.S. resident Filipino veterans and making New Philippine Scouts living in the U.S. eligible for burial in VA national cemeteries. The House also passed H.R. 2357, which would provide VA nursing home and medical services to Commonwealth Army veterans and New Philippine Scouts residing in the U.S., assuming they-meet the same eligibility requirements as U.S. veterans. But this is clearly not enough. That is why I am a cosponsor of H.R. 677, the Filipino Veterans Equity Act, which will deem all members of the Philippine Scouts and Philippine Army as qualified to receive the full benefits denied them nearly six decades ago. As Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Anthony J. Principi wrote: ``The United States is indebted to Filipino veterans, whose heroism and self- sacrifice helped allies emerge victorious from World War II.'' As we all know, our Filipino World War II veterans are entering the sunset years of their lives. I implore my colleagues to get this bill out of committee and bring it to the floor for a vote this year. immigration Our country has benefited from the fruits of a century-plus influx of Filipinos as new and productive citizens, and we can and should continue this rich heritage. However, our overall immigration policy has fallen particularly harshly and unfairly on legitimate Filipino immigration of late. For example, in 1990, we provided a waiver from certain naturalization requirements for Filipino veterans, and many thereafter became proud citizens our country. But a huge gap was created when we did not also permit naturalization of the sons and daughters of these same veterans. These are real-life issues, for the stories of families who have waited years to be reunited are heartbreaking. For example, a veteran and his wife living in Hawaii filed immigration petitions for two of their six adult children; they have waited over ten years for a visa to be issued to either. Another veteran petitioned successfully for his wife's immigration visa, but has not been as successful with the applications for their five adult children. Again, this family has been holding on for ten years with the hope that they will one day live in the U.S. as a complete family. H.R. 3587, a bill I introduced in November of last year, would provide these sons and daughters with priority in their respective immigration categories. I urge its passage. Two other bills I have introduced also would correct deficiencies in our immigration system which impact Filipino-Americans disproportionately. H.R. 3306, The Compassionate Visitor Visa Act, would facilitate the temporary admission of nonimmigrant aliens in circumstances of family emergency of U.S. citizens or permanent residents. H.R. 4018, introduced yesterday, would ensure that family members who have petitioned to immigrate into the United States are not penalized as a result of an award of citizenship to a sponsoring parent or spouse. Both bills recognize the basic concept that our country can ensure our national security, while providing flexibility for immigrants from certain countries that have longstanding close relationships with our country. The Philippines is certainly very high on that list. In summary, Mr. Speaker, both Filipino veterans and our larger Filipino-American community have contributed immensely to our country, and I believe that the best is yet to come. On this Filipino Veterans Action Day, let us recognize that we do what is right for both the past and the future by acknowledging their contributions and committing ourselves to the unfinished business at hand. Mahalo!

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce a bill to ensure that family members who have petitioned to immigrate into the United States are not penalized as a result of an award of citizenship to a sponsoring parent or spouse. My office has been involved in many cases in which my constituents are caught in a contradictory situation. If a legal resident sponsor of immigration applicants becomes a U.S. citizen, the petition he or she filed as a legal permanent resident is essentially moved from the second preference category to the first preference category with accompanying alteration of the category priority date. While this is not a problem for most, as the wait list for the first preference category is generally shorter, it has become a problem for some, primarily our families from the Philippines. It is here that, unfortunately, the quota for unmarried sons or daughters of American citizens is longer than that for unmarried sons and daughters of legal permanent residents. As a result, the wait time for some petitions is in fact lengthened, even though their preference status is improved. My bill will end this unwitting penalty of citizenship and allow the approved petition, originally filed by a legal permanent resident, to keep that given priority date or place in line should a reclassification of a sponsor occur. This will ensure that a family member will not have to wait for a longer period just because his or her petitioner became a U.S. citizen. We should not continue to penalize both those who we welcome to the responsibility of citizenship and their families. I urge the bill's passage.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I stand today in grateful support of this resolution, which I am proud to have cosponsored. This resolution is about three things. First, re-acknowledgement of that region of our world in which the present and future of our Nation and so many others lie: the Pacific and Asia. Second, recognition of a proud people and culture whose future lies now not only in their home islands, but in our own country. Third, responsibility for our actions which, like the consequences of those actions, will extend down through the generations. On re-acknowledgement, as a product of the Pacific, I confess to a Pacific-centric view of our world. But can anyone doubt that our own future is inextricably tied to that of the Pacific? And as we look to the Pacific, we cannot overlook its island nations, whose strategic value and loyalty to democratic principles are unquestioned. Foremost among these nations is the Republic of the Marshall Islands, with a proud history and culture dating back thousands of years. We celebrate in this resolution the mutually beneficial relationship we have enjoyed for more than half a century. We also celebrate its people, who at home are striving to build a modern and sustainable island nation. And the emigration of many to new lands and new opportunities, especially in our country, are strengthening communities beyond their homeland. My own state has especially benefited, with a Marshallese community of some 5000 strong poised for a major breakthrough into the mainstream of political, economic and social participation in Hawaii's affairs. And, of course, we cannot forget that the Marshallese and their counterpart Pacific nations today have their sons and daughters serving with our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lying grievously wounded defending our joint freedoms in military hospitals. And lastly, this is a resolution of remembrance, of the dire consequences to a whole people and their aina, or land, of 66 nuclear tests, virtually all open air, from 1946 through 1958, including, 50 years ago, BRAVO, the world's first hydrogen bomb. Few of us, even today, can imagine the force and devastation released by just one such device, much less 66. I have my own recollection, as a boy of just six, sitting on my grandparents' porch on the Island of Kauai, on a dark night, watching the entire sky light up from a single explosion 2,300 miles away. But the Marshallese lived through it, and they are still living through it, and will live through it for generations to come. These stories are being told elsewhere, by Beverly Keever, in a February 25, 2004 article in the ``Honolulu Weekly,'' and by James Matayoshi, Mayor of Rongselap, in recent remarks on BRAVO day. I append these for the Record and commend them to your attention. But today, we simply remember what happened and recommit ourselves to remedy that which must be remedied. Mr. Speaker, there are lots of people to be thanked for this resolution. Chair Pombo and Ranking Member Rahall, for their commitment, Chair Hyde and Ranking Member Lantos for bringing this to the floor, and Chair Leach and Ranking Member Faleomavaega for their advocacy. But mostly, we thank the people of the Marshall Islands, for their friendship and support. We will not forget. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following articles for insertion into the Record in connection with H. Con. Res. 364. Suffering, Secrecy, Exile: Bravo 50 Years Later (By Beverly Deepe Keever) [From Honolulu Weekly, Feb. 25, 2004] Almira Ainri was 10 years old when she was catapulted into the atomic age. In June of 1946, as the U.S. Navy readied the first atomic bomb in peacetime--just the fourth in history--Ainri and about 100 other inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, were sent south by ship to Lae Atoll, where it was thought they would be safe from the effects of the explosion 100 miles away, at Bikini Atoll. Eight years later, in 1954, Ainri and other Rongelapese weren't as lucky. Fifty years ago this week, on Bikini Atoll, the U.S. detonated the Bravo shot, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb it dropped on Hiroshima. The most powerful bomb in U.S. nuclear history, Bravo had a radioactive cloud that plumed over 7,000 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. A hundred or so miles downwind, near-lethal fallout powdered at least 236 inhabitants of the Rongelap and Utrik atolls, contaminating their ancestral homelands. The Bravo-dusted islanders entered history as unique examples of the effects of radioactive fallout on humans. Ainri, who now lives in Honolulu, is one of 118 survivors of the Bravo shot. For her and other islanders, the bomb's detonation set off a chain reaction of events over the last half century. They became unwitting subjects in secret U.S. research on the effects of nuclear fallout and ultimately were forced to leave their idyllic homeland, which remains uninhabitable to this day due to radioactivity. Archeological finds on Bikini Atoll suggest that the first Micronesians likely arrived in the Marshall Islands between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago. Germany annexed the islands in 1885. Japan captured them in 1914. Allied forces captured and occupied them in World War II; the war's end left them in U.S. hands. The U.S. began nuclear testing there the next year. The Marshall Islands were declared a Trust Territory by the United Nations in 1947, with the U.S. as the administrator, an arrangement that did not end until 1991. The following treatment of the irradiated islanders raises doubts about the behavior of the U.S. government: U.S. officials failed to evacuate Ainri and other islanders before the Bravo shot and then delayed their removal for more than 50 hours after the fallout. On March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot, Project 4.1, ``Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons,'' established a secret U.S. medical program to monitor and evaluate islanders exposed to radiation, turning them into experimental human subjects without their consent. Ainri and other islanders were allowed to return to their irradiated homeland in 1957. It was later deemed unsafe for human habitation. Marshall Islanders were injected with or fed radioactive tracers without their consent, contrary to medical recommendations made by U.S. medical officers six weeks after the Bravo shot that the islanders should receive no more exposure to radioactivity in their lifetimes. The research projects arising from Bravo were begun just seven years after war crimes tribunals convicted German medical officers for their horrific experiments with concentration camp inmates during World War II. Those tribunals led to the Nuremberg Code, an international standard for experiments involving human subjects, which stipulated that the voluntary consent of the subject ``is absolutely essential.'' The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission established similar standards, requiring the consent of human subjects and the expectation that an experiment would benefit the subject, but they had little distribution or effect in the U.S. bureaucracy. Did U.S. bureaucratic bungling and operational obstacles cause the mistreatment of the islanders or, as so many islanders and others say, did U.S. officials make the islanders guinea pigs to study the effects of radioactivity? like needles over my whole body At about 6 a.m. on March 1, 1954, Almira Ainri was awakened by the brightness and noise of an inferno as hot as the core of the sun. Ainri was 18 then, married, and pregnant with her first child. The island shook, she recalled. The air was gray. Snowlike particles fell from the sky. A day later, U.S. soldiers with Geiger counters arrived and found people of Rongelap weak and vomiting. Fifty hours and more after Bravo's detonation, the 236 inhabitants on or near Rongelap and Utrik atolls were evacuated to the military clinic at Kwajalein Atoll. There, they were scrubbed every day with special soaps. The pressure of the water on Ainri's blistered skin felt ``like needles over my whole body,'' she said--``like I was burning.'' After the blast, Ainri gave birth to a son, Robert. His thyroid glands were so damaged that he became dwarfed. The glands were later removed, consigning him to a lifelong regimen of medication. Ainri got pregnant again and gave birth, she said, to ``a bunch of grapes, that had to be pulled out of me.'' Twice more Ainri got pregnant, she said, and gave birth to children who appeared normal but died several days later. Another son, Alex, survived, but again with damaged thyroid glands. Ainri herself has thyroid problems; two new growths recently appeared there. The suffering of Ainri and her family is hardly unique. Within a decade of the Bravo shot, more than 90 percent of the children who were under 12 years old at the time of the explosion developed thyroid tumors. Today, Marshall Islanders have one of the world's highest rates of abnormalities of the thyroid, which often result in cases of retardation, cretinism and stunted development. For these and other conditions that the U.S. government presumes were caused by its nuclear weapons testing, the U.S. pays compensation. Those with leukemia or cancer of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas or bone are awarded $125,000. Islanders with severe growth retardation due to thyroid damage get $100,000. By the end of 2002, a U.S. trust fund had paid about $79 million to 1,808 islanders, but because the trust fund could not cover all its obligations, 46 percent of affected islanders died before they were fully paid for their injuries. Rongelap Atoll comprises 61 islets with a combined land mass of about three square miles and a lagoon of 388 square miles. Because it is still too radioactive for humans, its former residents are scattered. In Honolulu, Ainri lives in a home where her pandanus floor mats mingle with a caller-I.D. phone and a television set. Under a 1996, $45-million agreement with the U.S., projects are underway to prepare for the return of Rongelapese to the five southernmost, least-contaminated islets of the atoll. A glisteningly white church has been refurbished, complete with striking lapis trim. An airstrip, desalinization plant, field station, power plant and docks have been constructed or installed. Phase 2 calls for the construction of 50 four- bedroom homes, a dispensary and a hospital, school building, residences for doctors and teachers, a library, a town hall and a municipal building. All that is missing is a date when the resettlement will occur. the three surprises Corporal Don Whitaker hardly could have imagined the worldwide surprise his letter home would create. Writing to his hometown newspaper, in Cincinnati, in March 1954, Whitaker told of seeing distraught Marshall Islanders arrive at a navy clinic on Kwajalein after the Bravo shot. It was one of three surprises that shocked the world, and members of President Eisenhower's administration. The first surprise was the magnitude of the Bravo bomb's blast. Its 15-megaton yield was more than twice what U.S. officials had expected. Set off from Bikini Atoll, it vaporized three of the atoll's 23 islets. The test was expected, however. Whitaker's letter was the next surprise. In it, he revealed the evacuation of islanders that U.S. officials had tried to keep secret. Published March 9, eight days after the blast, Whitaker's letter prompted the Atomic Energy Commission to issue a press release the next day, masking the magnitude of the Bravo shot and its radioactive effects with a bland announcement. But Bravo was hardly the ``routine atomic test'' the release described, and the phrase ``some radioactivity'' did not come close to describing the islanders' dosage, which was the equivalent of the amount received by Japanese citizens less than two miles from Ground Zero at Hiroshima, lawyer-historian Jonathan M. Weisgall writes. Twenty-eight years later, the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency would call the Bravo shot ``the worst single incident of fallout exposures in all the U.S. atmospheric testing program.'' The third surprise came just days after the AEC had assured the public that the irradiated islanders were fine. A Japanese tuna trawler, the No. 5 Fukuryu Maru (``Lucky Dragon''), was 112 miles east of Bikini Atoll at the time of the Bravo explosion, well outside the danger zone announced by U.S. officials. Yet Bravo's staggering detonation powdered the boat's 23 crew members with what is known in Japan as shi no hai--``ashes of death.'' When the Fukuryu Maru reached its home port of Yaizu, about 120 miles south of Tokyo, on March 14, the crew was suffering from a radiation sickness that stunned the world. The crewmen's sickness and the subsequent panic over radioactive tuna in the U.S. and Japanese fish markets led to an international furor. The Japanese government and people dubbed it ``a second Hiroshima'' and it nearly led to severing diplomatic relations. A U.S. government doctor dispatched to Japan blamed the Japanese press for exaggerating the condition of the fishermen, who, he predicted, would recover completely in about a month. Six months later, Aikichi Kuboyama, the 40-year-old radio operator of the Fukuryu Maru, died. He was ``probably the world's first hydrogen-bomb casualty,'' said The New York Times. It was this triple-play of surprises--Bravo's tremendous force, Whitaker's letter and the plight of the Fukuryu Maru-- that chinked the U.S. government's usual policy of secrecy. Instead, the word fallout entered the world's lexicon. For the first time, people in Japan and Russia, London and Bonn, New York and Milwaukee, were aware of a danger that could not be smelled, seen, felt or heard. the sun rising in the west The Bravo shot was the first U.S. hydrogen device that could be delivered by airplane. It was designed to catch up with the Soviets who, in August 1953, had exploded their first hydrogen bomb deliverable by aircraft. The Bravo shot was so dangerous that it could not be detonated in the continental United States. Nor could it be set off at Enewetak Atoll, where the U.S. conducted nuclear blast tests from 1948 to 1958, for fear it would wipe out the extensive U.S. equipment and installations there. So it was tested at Bikini Atoll. Even before the Bravo shot, experts knew that the radioactive dust of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions was invisibly and unknowingly powdering the continental United States and touching others worldwide. The U.S. government's failure to move the Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in advance of the Bravo shot is painfully ironic because Almira Ainri and other Rongelapese had been moved before the first peacetime atomic test, in 1946--and Bravo was 1,000 times more powerful. Yet the islanders were not moved in 1954 because of ``the high cost and logistic problems . . . in supporting such an operation,'' according to U.S. medical officers. Six hours before Bravo, U.S. officials knew that the winds had shifted, putting Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in the path of fallout, but they proceeded with the detonation anyway. That knowledge, coupled with the lag of several days after the detonation before islanders were evacuated, led to speculation that the U.S. deliberately used the islanders as guinea pigs. A month after the Bravo shot, Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss told reporters that allegations that the evacuation of the Marshall Islanders had been deliberately delayed were ``utterly false, irresponsible and gravely unjust to the men engaged in this patriotic service.'' He also said that he had just visited the islanders at the Kwajalein clinic and they ``appeared to me to be well and happy.'' Bravo was detonated at 6 a.m. Within four hours, the 28 U.S. weathermen on Rongerik Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, saw a mist from the blast. Seven hours later, the needle of their radiation-measuring instrument went off the scale. They were evacuated the next day. Clouds of snowlike particles moved over Alinginae, Rongelap, Utrik and Ailuk atolls. The clouds deposited radioactive fallout on the people below and irradiated them with doses of ``cloud shine,'' radiation produced by the blast itself, which Rongelapese described as being like ``the sun rising in the west.'' About two-thirds of the Rongelapese were nauseated for two days, according to a U.S. medical officer who examined them a week after Bravo. Roughly one in ten were vomiting and had diarrhea. Some had itching, burning skin that turned into black-pigmented areas and lesions, some of which became ulcerated and infected. Hair fell out. Blood counts fell. The Bravo-dusted islanders disappeared from the news for the next year, because of the AEC's clampdown on information. But if they were not making news, they were making medical history. guinea pigs Within days of the Bravo shot, irradiated islanders were unwittingly swept into a top-secret effort to research the effects of radioactive fallout on humans. ``Never before in history had an isolated human population been subjected to high but sub-lethal amounts of radioactivity without the physical and psychological complexities associated with nuclear explosion,'' said scientist Neal O. Hines. Islanders would not learn the true nature of the experiment for 40 years, until 1994, when President Clinton ordered thousands of documents declassified in the wake of a national scandal involving human radiation experiments. Four months before the Bravo shot, a then-secret U.S. document listed research Project 4.1 among 48 tests to be conducted during and after the explosion. ``(D)ue to possible adverse publicity reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purposes of this project and its background or its findings with any except those who have a specific `need to know,' '' the document said. The purpose of Project 4.1 was to study the effects of fallout radiation on human beings. Three days after Bravo, Project 4.1 began to unfold in Washington, D.C., where top medical officials decided that the victims of its hazardous debris would be appropriate research subjects. A week after the blast, 25 officials of the AEC's medical program arrived at Kwajalein Atoll. Six weeks after the blast, Project 4.1 workers recommended a lifelong study of the affected islanders. After thyroid nodules began to appear on Rongelapese and Utrik islanders in 1963, they were studied every year. They began to complain that they were being treated like guinea pigs rather than sick humans needing treatment. A doctor who evaluated them annually came close to agreeing when he wrote, 38 years after Bravo, ``In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the AEC, because it was a research organization, did not include support of basic health care of populations under study.'' return to rongelap In 1957, U.S. officials assured Rongelapese that their homeland was safe and returned them there. Upon their return, U.S. medical officers shifted the emphasis of their study to what researchers who studied the documents released in the 1990s described as ``the formation of an integrated long-term human environmental research program to document the bioaccumulation of fallout and the human effects of this exposure.'' In sum, U.S. officials knew they were placing the Rongelapese in a radioactive environment, even though the islanders had already sustained more than a lifetime's worth of radiation. A 1982 U.S. Department of Energy report indicated that some inhabited areas of Rongelap were as contaminated as the parts forbidden to humans. It was the first report prepared for the Rongelapese in their own language and it shocked them. ``All we needed to see was the center fold-out and our worst fears were confirmed!'' Marshall Islands Senator Jeton Anjain told the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1991. Rongelap, their principal island of residence since their 1957 return, had been assigned a level ``3'' of contamination, meaning it was unsafe for human habitation. In 1984, Rongelapese representatives asked the U.S. to evacuate them. The U.S. refused. The next year, the Rongelapese left anyway. ``It was by no means an easy decision, for our people knew that it might mean they and their children would never again know life on their ancestral homeland of the last 4,000 years,'' Anjain told the U.S. Senate committee. ``But the safety of our children and the unborn was more important.'' After living on radioactive Rongelap for 28 years, 70 islanders were moved by Greenpeace to Majetto Island, 100 miles away. Confirming their fears, a 1988 study authorized by the U.S. government and subsequent official testimony recommended that part of Rongelap Atoll be considered ``forbidden'' territory and that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food for the next 30 to 50 years. the only thing I could think of was nazi germany Residents of Rongelap and Enewetak atolls were also used in human radiation experiments involving radioactive tracers of tritiated water and chromium-51 injections, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Phillip Muller told the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1996. The U.S. Department of Energy withheld critical information about the adverse effects of U.S. weapons tests from the U.S. Congress and Marshallese officials, Muller said, and medical research without the consent of Marshallese subjects continued. Marshallese Senator Tony de Brum told the committee that U.S. doctors 50 years ago pulled healthy as well as unhealthy teeth of islanders without their consent, for use in cesium, strontium or plutonium studies. Even in the mid- 1990s, islanders were unsure whether they were being cared for or studied by U.S. medical personnel, de Brum said. In 1999, Muller's allegations of human radiation experiments were confirmed by the Department of Energy, the successor agency of the Atomic Energy Commission. Declassified documents showed that U.S. officials included the irradiated islanders under the umbrella of its extensive biological program. Its worst known cases included x-raying the male organs of Oregon and Washington state prisoners, feeding radioactive fallout materials to university students, giving small doses of radioactive iron to pregnant women and feeding Quaker Oats laced with radioactive traces of iron and calcium to supposedly mentally retarded boys in a Massachusetts state home. Upon first learning about these kinds of experiments in 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary said, ``The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.'' who will pay? Under the U.N. Trusteeship, the U.S. government was to prepare the people of the Marshall Islands for self- government. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Compact of Free Association after its ratification by the Marshall Islands government and Congress. Its provisions expired in 2001. New provisions for the compact were agreed upon earlier this year, but they are silent on U.S. funding that has since become inadequate to cover the spiraling claims of those harmed by U.S. nuclear weapons testing, including Bravo's fallout. There may be a ray of hope for the Marshallese, however. The compacts say that nuclear testing damages to persons or property discovered after the original 1986 agreement can be covered in a new request to the U.S. Congress with documentation that circumstances have changed. One changed circumstance is that the U.S. government did not disclose to the Marshallese government the yield of 44 of the 66 U.S. nuclear weapons tests detonated in its republic until 1993. The next year, a comprehensive list of 1,054 U.S. nuclear weapons tests worldwide and their yields was made public by the Department of Energy. It shows that the yield of 82 tests in the U.S.-administered Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston Atolls and Pacific waters from 1946 to 1962 was at least 128,704 kilotons. That's the equivalent of 8,580 Hiroshima-sized bombs, or 1.47 such bombs per day for 16 years. A second changed circumstance is that the personal-injury and property claims arising from nuclear weapons testing have exceeded the capacity of the $150 million trust fund established to pay them. The people of Enewetak and Bikini have been awarded just over $1 billion for property damages, radiological cleanup, loss of use and hardship and suffering, but as of the end of 2002, less than one percent of that money could be paid. And class-action damage claims for the people of Rongelap and Utrik are still pending. About 5,000 claims seeking a combined $5.75 billion for radiation-related damages arising from U.S. weapons testing in the Pacific have been pressed. The U.S. has paid $759 million. In 2000, invoking the ``changed circumstances'' provision of the compact, the Marshallese government asked the U.S. Congress for more funds and services to meet health costs and property damages. (Its petition can be viewed online at www.rmiembassyus.org_click ``nuclear'' and then ``petition.'') In November 2001, the Marshallese government's petition was resubmitted to a new U.S. Congress and President Bush. As of early this month, the U.S. has yet to take any action.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, good evening and aloha. Tonight, I rise to address again the single most important issue facing our country, now, next year, and well into the next generation, and that is our crushing budget deficit and the fiscal corruption of our Nation's finances; and yes, I do not use that word ``corruption'' lightly because that is what is happening. I do so in solidarity with my fellow Blue Dog Members, people of sincerity who I respect and who have stood here for years and decades and argued for fiscal responsibility and with whom I today cointroduced the Assuring Fiscal Honesty and Accountability Act of 2004. That is the subject that I want to address briefly here tonight because I can assure my fellow citizens, beyond any semblance of doubt, that fiscal honesty and accountability have no place at today's seat of power here in Washington. Perhaps I am overly simplistic, but on any issue I like to ask: First, is there a problem? Second, what exactly is it? Third, what is the solution? Fourth, how do we accomplish it? The act that we introduced today addresses the fourth question: How do we accomplish it? And it starts with the fourth question because I do not know how anybody can doubt that we have a problem. We know we have one, and we know exactly what it is, the systematic pillaging of our Nation's fiscal and budgetary integrity and resources for short- term political gain. We know the general parameters of the solution, and today we have had a good interchange on that. We know we have to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, wherever it is. We know we have to balance revenues and spending, but the reality is that we have lost our way on just how to get there. We learned once in the eighties and the nineties that for us to have a realistic discussion and to make realistic decisions on the incredibly tough issues that go with the fiscal discipline territory, whether to raise or lower taxes and on whom, who and what to spend taxpayers hard-earned money on, and who not to spend it on, we had to set the rules of engagement and institute some basic checks and balances on natural political tendencies arising out of our reluctance, our abhorrence, of saying no. These rules were necessary, even though we had already placed limits on the amount of total national debt and required a separate vote to breach that national debt. Those votes had become, as they are today and as we proved again today in the Committee on the Budget, a superfluous pro forma exercise as we now break through the $7.5 trillion total debt barrier. These rules had fancy names like discretionary spending caps and pay-go or pay-as-you-go, but they all stood for the same basic concept, a concept we are all familiar with in our personal and business finances: Set the ground rules, the overall boundary of the finances as a responsible, achievable, sustainable level before making individual decisions, and then match those decisions to those rules. The caps were just that, overhaul caps or limits. We could move around under caps, but we could not breach the caps, and pay-go just said if we break the rules in one area, if we exceed in one area, we have to make it up somewhere else, a pay-as-you-go. It all has to balance one way or the other. And these rules worked up until 3 years ago. We had reversed a fiscal decline and were heading towards surpluses, but then what happened was something inexcusable, and it was on the watch of the current administration because that is when people around here in the majority and downtown decided they did not like those rules, because those rules got in the way of radically reducing revenues, while at the same time busting spending up to record highs. Yes, let us not talk about whose responsibility the spending increases were. The rest is history; record deficits as far as the eye can see, record total debt, material risk to our very fiscal foundations. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) again said tonight a saying that I am fond of: In order to get out of the hole, you have to stop digging. That is what this bill says: Let us stop digging right now by using techniques that worked in the past and let us start climbing. One would think the majority and the administration would be falling all over themselves to get out in front on this issue. After all, I hear tell they are the party of fiscal responsibility. What an incredible surprise here in Washington to discover that that is anywhere but the truth. So, lo and behold, they are not. They do not mind discretionary spending caps, as long as it is only the programs that they do not like. They do not mind putting caps on them. But, by the way, the programs that they want to raise, the programs that are busting our budget, no, we cannot afford discretionary spending caps. They do not mind pay-go, sounds good, as long as it does not apply to those programs, as long as it does not apply to evaluations of revenues and taxes. Well, any fool can see that when you set the rules, they have to apply to everyone. When you balance a budget, you cannot leave it with so many outs, so many holes, that it is dead on arrival. And that is what the absence of this discretionary spending caps and pay-go rules has done. So our bill says to everybody, hey, simply, you say you stand for fiscal responsibility, prove it. Set some rules that work and then live with them. I urge this bill's prompt passage. And to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, who have stood here today talking about fiscal responsibility, I invite their cosponsorship. I think we can form a good team to provide some realistic budget rules.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, good evening and aloha. I am very happy to stand on the floor of the House today and join my colleagues the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne), the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) and many others in introducing the Rural Veterans Access to Health Care Act of 2003. We are all very well aware of the commitment that we have made, at least in principle, although the practice has been lacking of recent years, but the principle that we will take care of veterans when they come home. The truth, however, is that as we try to honor that principle and the practice, the equality of access to health care throughout our country is inconsistent, and this is most particularly true in the rural areas of our country. In these areas, our veterans simply do not have the same level of access to the veterans' health care as they do in the urban areas. This is true in Hawaii's 2nd District, which is a rural area of our country, just as others are, but we have a little wrinkle in the 2nd Congressional District that creates a unique complication. The wrinkle is that my district is not contiguous. It is made up of islands. It is not possible for the veterans of my district to hop on the nearest road and get to the nearest clinic. It is not possible for the most part for my veterans to hop on the nearest ferry to get to the nearest clinic. Their access is by air. There are some VA medical clinics on many of the islands that I represent. Of the seven inhabited islands, four have VA clinics; three do not. The islands of Molokai, Lanai and Niihau do not, and these are the particular problems that this bill seeks to address. But it is not limited only to those islands. For the islands that do have VA clinics do not have the large specialized hospitals. There is only one of them on the island of Oahu. So for six out of the seven islands, the veterans that live on those islands have a particular difficulty in getting to treatment when they need it, and with airfares rising rapidly, with a round trip now well over $200 in some cases, we can see that the problem is quite evident. Let me give my colleagues just a real life example, one proud veteran who I have gotten to know over the last couple of years, a gentleman by the name of Patrick Esclito, of the island of Lanai. Pat asked for my office's help last year. He had rheumatoid arthritis and had also suffered a massive heart attack in 2002. His condition required him to drive from Lanai, one of the smallest, most isolated areas, to Oahu where he was able to be cared for. Every time he went there he had to pay almost $300 in airfare and his wife as well because they did not want him to travel alone. As my colleagues can understand, he needed assistance in getting the basic health care that was promised to him by our country, and we were successful, in part, by accommodating the possibility that he would be treated instead on the island of Maui, which still requires a boat ride at least, not quite as expensive, but he still has to get there, and I doubt that Pat's case is unique. It is certainly not unique in the remainder of the 2nd District of Hawaii. I surveyed all of the veterans in my district currently retaining or receiving benefits in the last couple of months and asked them what is on your mind the most. Every single one of them said health care, access to health care. That is what it is all about, and I am sure that this is the case in most of the rural and more isolated areas of our country. We are going to have a great debate this Congress, as we did last Congress, over the overall adequacy of our treatment of our veterans, over the overall adequacy, both this year and in the next 5 years at least, in terms of the budget, in terms of the projections on many aspects of veterans' care, primarily health care. And that debate is a debate that we should have. Because, again, it is one thing to express a principle and it is another thing to practice that principle. But as we go through this debate, I am happy to say that on the floor of the House tonight at least we have bipartisan agreement that one area that we have to focus on, and that we are focusing on in this bill, is our rural veterans, recognizing the unique problems that they have in access to basic health care. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join 52 of my colleagues in support of this vital bill, a bill that will help keep our Nation's promise to its veterans who live in our more isolated, rural areas. We are all well aware of the commitment we all, as a great country, have made to our veterans. However, the truth is that our ability to deliver on this commitment varies throughout the United States. Most particularly, in rural areas of the country, our veterans simply do not have reasonable access to veterans' clinics. The veterans of Hawaii's Second District have this very challenge, but with a unique complication. This is because my district is not contiguous, but composed of seven inhabited islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There are VA medical facilities on only four of those islands, and it is not possible for those veterans who live on the remaining islands of Molokai, Lanai, or Niihau to drive to a clinic. The same is true of those living on the remaining islands with clinics; they must travel to Honolulu for more advanced treatment. Currently, the VA will reimburse all veterans for travel to service- related injuries, but it will not reimburse travel for those veterans with less than 30 percent disability rating for nonservice-related injuries. This would be the case, for example, of a veteran who has a bad back, a service-related injury, who then has to have dental work. Let me give you a real-life example of one proud veteran, Patrick Esclito, who lives on the Island of Lanai. Pat requested my help last year; he was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and had also suffered a massive heart attack in 2002. His condition required him to travel to the Island of Oahu for treatment at a cost close to $300 per roundtrip. His wife traveled with him--another almost $300--because they were both concerned with his traveling alone. My office assisted him in receiving approval for treatment instead on the Island of Maui. However, he still must pay for travel by boat from Lanai to Maui because his ailments are not service-related. Pat's case is not unique. There are 120,000 veterans living in the State of Hawaii, and many live in areas with no easy or even adequate access to the VA health clinics to which they are entitled. Throughout my Second District, with the cost of air travel skyrocketing, it costs $200 or more for a round trip plane ticket between Hawaii's islands. This is why, when, last year, I surveyed all veterans in my district who are currently receiving VA benefits, and asked them what was and was not working, their number one issue by far was access to health care. I am sure that this is the case in most rural areas of our country. This bill will allow all veterans to receive adequate access to health care, regardless of where they live in this great country. Nonetheless, the President's 2005 Veterans' Affairs budget provides $29.8 billion for appropriated veterans programs, $257 million below the amount that the Congressional Budget Office estimates is needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2004 level. The picture is even worse after 2005. Taking into account inflation, but not caseload increases, the administration's figures reveal that over the next 5 years, the budget for appropriated programs for veterans is $13.5 billion below the amount needed to maintain programs and services at the 2004 level. Even the Secretary of Veterans' Affairs has admitted that the funding levels for 2006 through 2009 in the President's budget may not be realistic. I have no doubt that it will be the rural veterans who will be affected the most. Contrary to what some critics claim, H.R. 2379 will not harm the Veterans' Affairs (VA) healthcare system. Instead, this bill will enhance access to healthcare for veterans who have earned it, but are having to pay to travel to that care. Furthermore, by contracting locally for health care for enrolled veterans, the rural communities that provide these services will benefit economically. H.R. 2379 is a necessary bill to truly fulfill this country's obligation to all veterans. Mr. Speaker, as the President has repeatedly declared: ``We are currently a country at war.'' Hundreds upon thousands of this Nation's finest men and women are abroad in support of the Global War on Terrorism. Some 4,500 soldiers from the 25th Light Infantry Division from Schofield Barracks in Hawaii have deployed to Iraq; another 5,400 soldiers from the 25th will soon be deployed to Afghanistan. Reservists and Guard members from my State, many from my Second District, are also serving on Active Duty. What kind of message does our country's failure to provide access to healthcare for rural veterans send to the thousands of American men and women in uniform currently risking their lives overseas? Our veterans and our future veterans serving overseas deserve better. If we value all our veterans, we need to give them the respect they deserve by properly funding full and adequate access to healthcare for each and every one.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, good evening and aloha. Today, I stand here as a proud member of the 37 Member-strong moderate, independent Democrat Blue Dog Coalition. These Members come from all parts of our country and they are dedicated to these three basic propositions: first, the budgetary and fiscal integrity of our country is of paramount importance; second, our country's finances are royally messed up; third, there is a way out of this cesspool if we are honest about why we are here and what we all must do together to fix it. I have served here for 15 months now, and when I go home I am asked two questions. Number one, what is our biggest challenge in our country? Number two, what is the biggest surprise in my mind from having served here? My answer to both is the same: the financial condition of our country now and well into the next generation. Why is it our biggest challenge? I think it is pretty straightforward and obvious when we think about it because our very ability to provide what we want to provide for ourselves and our children is reliant on a strong fiscal foundation. Otherwise, it is just talk. Need to protect ourselves here at home and overseas. Where is the money? Need to improve education and health care. Take care of the poor and needy, need to provide the infrastructure, need to honor our commitments to Medicare and Social Security. Yes, where is the money? It is not there right now. We know that. Let us face up to it. Spending exceeds revenues as far as the eye can see. That is the definition of a deficit, when spending exceeds revenues, and total debt accumulative borrowings to match those deficits has now climbed well through $7 trillion, $7 trillion. What is my biggest surprise? My biggest surprise is that all of this is happening on the fiscal watch and under the revenue and spending policies of a Republican administration. Do not jump all over that comment and assume that it is simply a partisan shot. I just spent the better part of a decade in my own home State of Hawaii working as an independent, moderate Democrat with Republicans to right the fiscal ship of my own State. The last thing I expected when I got up to Congress here was to arrive here and see the fiscal irresponsibility, on a massive scale, brought on by the national counterparts of those same people that I had worked with successfully in Hawaii. My surprise does not arise just as a matter of policy disagreements because, after all, we can handle policy disagreements. We can identify choices. We can debate them. We can let the political process yield the result. That is not my surprise. My surprise is the manner in which we are dealing with this. It is much worse: denial, concealment, misrepresentation. Let me give my colleagues a couple of examples. First of all, this administration clearly overestimated job and growth recovery from its version of tax cuts. Second, it did not even include huge chunks of spending, spending we know we have to make, in the 2005 budget. What does that say when we do not even include the cost of the intervention in Iraq, do not even put it into the budget? What are my colleagues scared of? Are my colleagues afraid of the debate that will come from it? Clearly underestimating expenses like Medicare, projecting the Medicare bill at $500 billion and turning around mere weeks later and saying, whoops, we made a mistake, $630 billion after all. Finally, the one that bothers me the most, this is inexcusable. Bringing to this floor a budget that is only out 5 years into the future. The norm in Washington is 10 years, and I can make a good case to my colleagues that 10 years is not enough. Fifteen, 20, 25 years to account fully for Medicare, Social Security beyond that, and yet we are only going to talk about 5 years. That is like projecting a family's budget for an adjustable rate mortgage with a balloon at the end, but ending before the balloon is due. That is like projecting a family's budget for education, but stopping in the senior year of high school before their kids go to college. Why do you do that? Because you will not want to face the fact of what happens after that year has happened, and that is exactly what we have. Do not take my word for it. Here is David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, on the Nation's growing fiscal imbalance: current fiscal policy is unsustainable; the status quo is not an option; faster economic growth can help but it cannot solve the problem. Finally, the one I particularly agree with: the sooner we get started the better. There are solutions, and what are they? Because talk is cheap. Here is the deal. They are there, they are tough, and they get tougher. We have to face up to those decisions right now, and we have to get to them right now. I urge my colleagues to be honest with the American people and address the fiscal problems of our country.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H. Res. 412, which honors the men and women of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on the occasion of its 30th Anniversary and recognizes the sacrifices of those who have given their lives in the line of duty. In Hawaii, we are fortunate that such a cohesive law enforcement community exists, with the strong working relationship between the DEA, the United States Attorney's Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our four county police departments, and the 14 Federal, State, and local agencies which support the Hawaii High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. All work together to pursue and dismantle domestic and international criminal organizations that produce, transport, and distribute illegal substances. Under the leadership of Briane M. Grey, Assistant Special Agent-in- Charge of the Honolulu District Office, the office advocates the same multi-pronged approach that I firmly believe is the solution to our drug abuse problem: combining strong enforcement, with education, prevention, and treatment efforts. For example, through its partnerships with the Counties of Kauai and Hawaii, the DEA's Demand Reduction Program educates many of our young people on the dangers of drugs. In my home State, the unfortunate drug of choice today is crystal methamphetamine, also known as ice. High purity ice, ranging from 96 percent to 99 percent, is all too readily available, and commonly abused throughout our State. In Hawaii, ice users have been linked to violent crimes including child abuse, hostage situations, and homicides. The DEA has been a strong and valuable force in our fight against the scourge of ice. In August 2003, the Honolulu DEA's Operation Jetway Task Force was notified of three parcels suspected of carrying ice. Pursuant to a search warrant, approximately 15.9 pounds of ice, worth more than $1 million were seized from two of the parcels, and approximately $65,000 in cash was seized from the third parcel. Later that same month, the task force seized approximately 674 grams of ice from the inside jacket pocket of an individual traveling from Los Angeles to Honolulu. I would like to extend a very special mahalo (thank you) to the 15 Special Agents, 17 Task Force Officers, 2 Intelligence Analysts, 2 Diversion Investigators, and 2 Administrative Staff in our DEA Honolulu District Office. The district extends DEA's presence with personnel assigned to offices on the islands of Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii, as well as offices in Guam and Saipan. I know that the Honolulu District Office will continue to initiate drug investigations targeting the highest level traffickers, and for that we are all very grateful. Again, congratulations to the DEA on its 30th anniversary.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I also rise in very strong support of this resolution, and commend my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda), for introducing it. I rise as the representative of one of the two districts in our country that contains the largest number of Japanese Americans in our entire country. Some 20 percent of my constituents descended from the people that were directly impacted by the events of the Second World War and themselves impacted, the other district being the First Congressional District of Hawaii. But in 1941 as the war broke out, 38 percent of Hawaii was composed of Americans of Japanese ancestry; 38 percent of people from Japan whose origins were in Japan, who had lived and worked successfully in Hawaii for almost a century at that point. By the end of the war, about 1,500 of them had been interned, an unconscionable figure, but nothing like what happened proportionately to the population of Japanese Americans on the mainland. And there were some heroes to be recognized even today. So as we remember today what our country did to those citizens of our country and those of German and Italian descent, we also have to remember there were heroes then, people not from those racial groups, who stood up and were counted. Robert Shivers, the former Director of the FBI's Honolulu office, who arrived in 1939 and took it upon himself to understand Japanese Americans in Hawaii, he had the power to say who would and would not be interned, and he recognized that most, if not all, of the Japanese American citizens of Honolulu and Hawaii were not to be interned. He was a hero. He remains a hero to my constituency today. Dr. Charles Hemenway, former President of the U.H. Board of Regents, who took the time as well to work with Agent Shivers to get beyond the hysteria of the war and into the facts, who did have to be interned as a legitimate risk, but who was simply not a risk to their country; Colonel Kendall Fielder, former head of G-2 intelligence operations for the Army in the Pacific, decisions that he made on behalf of our military, for which he took an incredible amount of heat at the time from his national superiors, were vindicated after the war. These were people that stood up and counted at the time, and as we remember what we did, we need to remember who helped them at that time. We also need to remember simply that our institutions are what prevent this from happening again. Mr. Speaker, I commend this resolution, and support it fully.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce legislation to ensure that out-of-state Federal contractors doing business in the various States fully comply with local State laws. For years, my home State of Hawaii has struggled to force out-of- state Federal contractors to pay local taxes. This issue became so serious in the mid-1990s that the State of Hawaii sued out-of-state Federal contractors for failing to pay State taxes, penalties, and interest ranging from $191,000 to $324,000. Noncompliance with State laws has become such an acute problem that the Hawaii Department of Taxation has joined with other State departments and members of the Hawai `i congressional delegation to devise ways to make Federal contractors comply with State tax laws. The bill I introduce today will solve this problem by requiring the Federal government to withhold from any Federal contractor doing business in any State the amount necessary to pay the State tax liability due under its contract, with the amount withheld paid directly to the State where the work is performed. The bill would also direct the Federal government to require a contractor to be licensed in the State in which a construction contract is to be performed. Besides assuring prompt and full payment of State taxes, these requirements will also help ensure that out-of-state contractors follow the same set of rules and compete on equal footing for Federal contracts with local contractors. Ignoring State laws gives out-of- state contractors an unfair and illegal advantage over local contractors, who routinely face much stricter scrutiny to comply with their local laws and much stricter penalties for failing to do so. This bill is modeled after legislation introduced by my predecessor, the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink, who understood that out-of-state contractors must fulfill their legal responsibilities wherever they conduct their business. By reintroducing an expanded and refined version of her earlier bill, I will continue her fight to help State governments police unethical contractors. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. CASE

Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to what I believe to have been the unwarranted omission of language from the Omnibus Appropriations Conference Report, originally included in the Senate version of the Agriculture Appropriations bill, that would have designated funds to assist electric ratepayers on the Island of Kaua`i, Hawai`i. The Rural Community Advancement Program in Division A of the Omnibus Conference Report contained a directive to the Secretary of Agriculture to provide grant assistance to the not-for-profit, consumer-owned Kaua`i Island Utility Cooperative under the ``Rural Utilities Service, High Energy Costs Grants Account''. The Senate language was designed to provide a small amount of vitally needed assistance to families and small businesses on this economically challenged island. The poverty rate on Kaua`i runs at about twenty (20) percent. While unemployment has slightly declined to a somewhat low of 5.3 percent, the jobs available are overwhelmingly very low-paying jobs. With a current electric rate of nearly 27 cents per kilowatt hour, many among the ``working poor'' face a daily decision whether to turn on a few lights, or put food on the table for their family. Twenty-seven cents per KWh is the highest cost for electricity anywhere in the United States except for two or three very small, remote villages in Alaska. A very large portion of families on Kaua`i must actually rely on the Food Bank to adequately feed their families. The Senate provision would simply have designated, from within funds otherwise appropriated for the High Energy Costs Grants Account, an amount to offset the expenses incurred recently when island residents took over the utility system as a means to help gradually lower the punishing electric costs being charged by an off-island investor-owned company. The Senate provision for the cooperative on Kaua`i was just one of several items dropped from the final conference agreement. I understand that the conference committee took a position against hard earmarked projects, relying instead on the Secretary to hopefully recognize the needs and make these allocations within the existing programs at the Department of Agriculture. Mr. Speaker, this language would have guaranteed an enormous impact on the Kaua`i community, and I am very concerned that it was not included in the measure before us today. I can only hope that the Secretary does in fact heed the intent of this language, and I will continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol to assure my constituents this badly-needed relief.