Gerald Connolly

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commend Master Chief Petty Officer (Ret.) John Robert Brinkheide for his more than 20 years of honorable and courageous service to the United States Navy, his subsequent 17 years of service as a contractor supporting the Department of Defense, and his continued service to our community. We are fortunate to have among us veterans with MCPO Brinkheide's sense of duty and continued commitment to public service. MCPO Brinkheide enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1962 and completed electronics school the same year. From 1962 to 1964 he served aboard the USS Semmes, a ship he describes as truly unique, tied together by a crew committed to doing good. His service aboard the USS Semmes instilled in him his sense of professionalism and ethics that guided him throughout the entirety of his military and professional career. He attended advanced electronics school in 1965 upon leaving the USS Semmes and then served for three years in Vietnam aboard an in-river LST. After completing his tour in Vietnam, MCPO Brinkheide served aboard the USS America from 1969 to 1976 and was promoted to Master Chief Petty Officer. MCPO Brinkheide's last few years at sea were served aboard the USS Nashville as the Electronics Material Officer from 1976 to 1980. MCPO Brinkheide spent his last year with the Navy working on strategic communications for the Naval Electronic Systems Command performing oversight of electronic equipment acquisitions. After retiring from the Navy in 1981, he began a long career as a contractor supporting the Department of Defense, specializing in systems acquisitions. Since retiring from the Navy, Mr. Brinkheide has actively worked to better his community through the Knights of Columbus and served as the Grand Knight of the John Paul I Council of Dale City, Virginia, from 2006 to 2007. MCPO Brinkheide also worked tirelessly for 24 years to help organize and implement the Prince William County Tree Trimming Day of Remembrance, a ceremony held to honor those who died in alcohol- and drug-related vehicle crashes. Mr. Speaker, I ask that my colleagues rise to join me in recognizing and thanking John R. Brinkheide for his steadfast and selfless service to our country and our community.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to recognize the recipients of the 2012 Best of Braddock Awards. The awards are given annually to deserving individuals, organizations and companies in the Braddock Magisterial District of Fairfax County, Virginia, who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to the community. Residents of the 11th Congressional District enjoy an exceptional quality of life. Fairfax County schools are ranked as some of the best in the country, our communities are safe, and our employment rate is one of the highest in the nation. However, much of what defines a community cannot be found in statistics; it lies in the commitment and contributions of all who strive for the betterment of the community as a whole. It is my pleasure to recognize the following individuals for their service to our community, and to congratulate each of them on being named a Best of Braddock honoree: Citizen of the Year: Kathy Augustine, Braddock District and Fairfax County Communities. Young Person of the Year: Dawson Taylor, Frost Middle School. Most Outstanding Business Person: Patrick Gloyd, Burke Centre Conservancy. Most Can-Do State Public Employee: Katherine Stramel, Northern Virginia Community College. Most Can-Do Local Public Employee: Gaela Hime, Laurel Ridge Elementary School Crossing Guard. Club or Organization Making a Difference: Shepherd's Center of Fairfax-Burke. Neighborhood Enhancement or Beautification, Community Association: The Burke Centre Conservancy. Special Recognition Award: Marian Hardy (Annandale Christian Community for Action). Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating these outstanding residents and companies and also in thanking them for their service to our community. Their efforts and leadership have been a great benefit to our community and truly merit our highest praise.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate and honor Barry Hutchinson on his retirement from the Department of Defense after more than 40 years of dedicated and distinguished service to our country and to our men and women in uniform. Mr. Hutchinson began his career as a stock handler at the Andrews Air Force Base Commissary in Camp Springs, Maryland, in 1972. Throughout his years of service, he developed expertise in a wide variety of areas, including supply management, logistics, program management, and information operations. For the past 34 years, Mr. Hutchinson worked for the Defense Logistics Agency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he provided exemplary leadership serving the Information Operations Directorate and retires as the Staff Director for IT Business, Licensing, and Performance Management. Mr. Hutchinson certainly embodies the commitment and caliber of our federal employees. While he will be missed in the Defense Logistics Agency we will continue to benefit from the expertise and work ethic he has imparted in his coworkers. Throughout his distinguished career, Mr. Hutchinson relied upon the support of his family. He will enjoy his well-deserved retirement with his wife, Joanne, daughters Krista and Kerri, grandchildren, Ashley, Jonathon, and Hannah, and grand dog, Cutter. He will continue serving his community, relying on his degree in Theology while teaching Christianity 101 at his local church. I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Barry Hutchinson for 40 years of honorable and valuable service to our nation, thanking him for his many contributions and the sacrifices he and his family have made, and wishing them well in all of their future endeavors.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Speaker, sequestration--that's the bogeyman Republicans created last year when they refused, for the first time in American history, to allow a clean debt ceiling vote. So they formed a supercommittee which they doomed to failure when they refused to consider a balanced approach that included revenue and spending cuts. And now they decry the impending $1.2 trillion cuts they fashioned and voted for as a crisis for national defense. This gives chutzpah a bad name. If Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte want to resolve this crisis in their town hall meetings--that they helped create--join me in calling our House Republican leadership to cancel the 5-week August recess and solve this solvable problem.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, matter of personal privilege. Did this Member hear the chairman, the distinguished chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, characterize a Member as insincere?

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. I would ask the Chair to caution all Members about personal characterizations of Members on the floor of the House.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri, my friend, Mr. Clay.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I wish my friend's characterization of the bill were accurate; but, sadly, I think what this bill does is cripple the ability of the government to protect the American public across a broad swath of policy areas that certainly matter to the average American. I am now pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, this Member will reserve the right to object at the appropriate time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Is the gentleman yielding to me for an answer?

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Whether serving as a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee years ago or as chairman of the Board of Supervisors in Fairfax County or now, as a Member of Congress, a constant principle of my own public service career has been a deep suspicion of political legislation that employs arbitrary across-the-board mechanisms that make for good talking points but terrible policy. Such messaging bills make a mockery of the legislative process, and, unfortunately, H.R. 4078 is just such a bill. To understand the absurdity of this bill, consider the proposal to ban any new regulations based on the Nation's unemployment rate. Actually with the typo in the bill, it's the ``employment'' rate. But for starters, there is little or no evidence correlating regulation to private sector hiring. However, there is considerable evidence showing that blocking important health and safety regulations will have a negative effect on all seniors, children, veterans, consumers--not to mention the private sector itself. As written, the legislation prohibits any new regulatory actions until the ``employment'' rate falls to 6 percent, meaning unemployment would have to reach 94 percent before agencies could issue new regulations. The effect of that language, coming from a crowd that was just a few years ago talking about ``read the bill,'' means we would never update Medicare payment rates for doctors, bank lending protections for families, or food safety protections for consumers. No doubt, our Republican colleagues intended for this moratorium to apply until ``unemployment'' falls to 6 percent, which would still block regulation for the foreseeable future. What is absurd about their premise is that the Department of Labor, for example, would be able to update the exposure safety standards to adequately protect the health of workers exposed to beryllium, a toxic substance linked to lung cancer and other chronic and fatal diseases, based on a 0.1 percent swing in the unemployment rate. The same would be true for implementation of the Veterans' Benefits Act, bipartisan legislation that passed in the last Congress with no opposition. Under this bill, when the unemployment rate is 6 percent, the Department of Veterans Affairs would be able to take ``significant regulatory action,'' meaning implementation of the enhanced disability compensation benefits provisions for veterans experiencing difficulty using prostheses, for example, after the loss of limbs, or veterans in need of extensive care because of post-traumatic stress syndrome. However, if the unemployment rate is 0.1 percent higher, just 6.1 percent instead of 6 percent, H.R. 4078--the bill we're debating right now--would prohibit the Veterans Administration from improving care for those veterans. Think about that: in voting for this bill, Members are endorsing a world view that a 0.1 percent swing in unemployment ought to determine whether the Federal Government can issue rules that benefit veterans with catastrophic injuries, updating Medicare payments for doctors, assisting students with loan debt, or providing families peace of mind that the peanut butter in their pantry will not poison their children. Any law that results in such absurd outcomes is deeply flawed and misguided far beyond the typo. In fact, the bill, as written, would even prevent those rules that would save money from being implemented. Whether one advocates for smart regulation or passionately hates all regulations, surely we can all agree that the bizarre, capricious, and unjust outcomes that H.R. 4078--this bill--would lead to are the hallmarks of careless policy based on ideology, not on good public policy, not on good governance. Indeed, as former Republican Congressman Sherwood Boehlert of New York stated in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, I believe, on H.R. 4078, he said, it is ``difficult to exaggerate the sweep and destructiveness of the House bill.'' That was from a Republican former colleague in this body. I would remind my Republican colleagues that one of the first executive orders issued by President Obama requires agencies to ensure that their regulations are, indeed, cost-effective. Of course that doesn't fit their narrative. Neither does it fit the fact that the Obama administration has actually issued fewer final rule regulations than the Bush administration did in its first term. I urge my colleagues to join me in restoring sanity to the policymaking process in this House by opposing this extreme measure. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. I'm not asking for interpretation, Madam Chairman. I'm asking whether he in fact said it.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings), the distinguished ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Of course I know my friend from Arkansas knows his history. That was the whole battle of Federalist versus anti- Federalist. The Federalists won out. That's how the Constitution of the United States got adopted, a more powerful government to help the union of the States. Madam Chairman, I will close by simply noting the irony of opposing any kind of finite time limit. The very organization cited by my friend from Arkansas, NFIB, screams the loudest about uncertainty. Yet here we are, going to have expeditious consideration that could take weeks or months here in this body, and we're not going to put a finite time limit to give them the predictability and the certainty that they say they want. I think it's the minimum required in this legislation if we really mean to effectuate change. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. May I inquire of the Chair how much time is left on this side.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, my simple amendment would clarify the congressional procedure for acting on the President's written congressional waiver request as provided for in the bill. Based on their remarks today, it appears my friends on the other side of the aisle view the availability of congressional waivers as sufficient to ensure commonsense, popular safeguards such as rules benefiting veterans with catastrophic injuries, assisting students with loan debt, or providing families with peace of mind that the peanut butter their children eat will not poison them. So they are not blocked by this bill's arbitrary across-the-board moratorium action on significant rulemaking actions because there is a waiver provision. Yet for all of the emphasis on the importance of these congressional waivers, this bill, H.R. 4078, only provides vague, unclear guidance concerning how such actions would proceed on the President's waiver requests. H.R. 4078 only specifies that Congress shall give each submission by the President ``expeditious consideration'' and take ``appropriate legislative action'' without defining these terms in statute. Anyone who has watched this 112th Congress here in the House knows that they shouldn't put undue faith in terms like ``expeditious consideration.'' Republican claims to the contrary notwithstanding, as currently written, the congressional waiver provisions seem designed to spur effective talking points, not exactly an efficient process for considering Presidential submissions. My simple amendment ensures that if the President requests a necessary and urgent waiver, such as the flexibility for the Department of Labor to issue a rule protecting coal miners from black lung disease, expeditious consideration shall not take longer than 1 week. This simple amendment takes no position on the wisdom of the given waiver request. It simply requires the Congress, whether it decides to approve or disapprove a President's request, to do so within 7 days. As the numerous amendments filed by my colleagues demonstrate, the majority of the President's waiver requests will address noncontroversial, yet critically important, rules that protect our Nation's veterans, families, workers, environment, and economy. By supporting this perfecting amendment, Members will ensure that no American is endangered because of congressional inaction. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, some claim the solution to America's energy concerns is ``Drill, Baby, drill.'' Under President Obama, domestic oil and natural gas production increased every year, with the largest increase in the number of drilling rigs in American history. Domestic oil production last year was the highest in a decade, and natural gas production the highest ever in our history. Under President Obama, we've reduced foreign oil imports by 1 million barrels of oil per day. Foreign oil dependence was 60 percent of U.S. consumption in 2005 under Bush. It's dropped to 49 percent in 2010 under Obama, and is now on pace to fall to 36 percent, reversing trends since the Nixon Presidency. By 2020, U.S. oil production will be up 11 percent, rivaling the largest producer in the world, Saudi Arabia. Under this President, U.S. oil production and exploration are booming, while foreign oil imports are plummeting. The U.S. consumes 21 percent of the world's energy but contains 2 percent of proven oil reserves. That's why it's so imperative we follow President Obama's lead and pursue multiple sources of energy to meet our ever-expanding needs. So to those who say, ``Drill more,'' President Obama can respond, ``We have, Baby, we have.''

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2896, which would name the postal facility located at 269 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the late Judge Shirley A. Tolentino. This was a bill favored by our late colleague, Donald Payne of New Jersey, and it's an honor and privilege to carry that bill on the floor today. Shirley Tolentino was born in Jersey City, served in the judicial system, and lived a life of great accomplishments. She graduated with a degree in Latin with honors from the College of St. Elizabeth. Judge Tolentino taught Latin and English before starting law school. As a student at Seton Hall University School of Law, Judge Tolentino was the only African American female in the graduating class of 1971. She became a deputy attorney general in the State of New Jersey, where she remained until being appointed to the Jersey City Municipal Court in 1976, becoming the first female appointed to that position. Judge Tolentino received her master of laws degree in criminal justice from NYU Graduate School of Law in 1980 while continuing to serve in the municipal court. She later was elevated to the position of presiding judge of the municipal court of New Jersey, again as the first female to hold that position. With all those great accomplishments, she viewed her appointment and time served on the Coleman Commission, which would later be called the New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Minority Concerns, as her greatest accomplishment. During her time on the commission, she became chair of the subcommittee on juvenile justice. As a member of the Jersey City Hudson County Urban League, the Hudson County Girl Scouts Board, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and a host of other local organizations, she served in prominent roles and loved being part of her community and, obviously, served as a role model for future generations, especially among young women. Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of H.R. 2896 to honor the life of Judge Tolentino and to remember our distinguished late colleague, Donald Payne of New Jersey. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I join my colleagues in urging passage of H.R. 1369, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I certainly am pleased to join my colleagues, and especially my colleague from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren), in support of this bill. And I urge our colleagues to support H.R. 1369, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1021 Pennsylvania Avenue in Hartshorne, Oklahoma, as the Warren Lindley Post Office. I am now pleased to yield to my colleague from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren) for such time as he may consume.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am pleased to join in support of my colleague from New York in her urging us to pass H.R. 3593, to designate the facility of the U.S. Postal Service located at 787 State Route 17M in Monroe, New York, as the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency NCS Officer Gregg David Wenzel Memorial Post Office. As our colleague from New York indicated, this is a posthumous recognition of the ultimate sacrifice for his country that finally can be recognized, even though he served his country in a clandestine role. I urge all of my colleagues to support this legislation. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am pleased to join my colleague from New York (Ms. Buerkle) in supporting H.R. 5837, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 26 East Genesee Street in Baldwinsville, New York, as the Corporal Kyle Schneider Post Office Building. The dedication to his country, his sacrifice, his bravery are certainly worthy of this honor, and I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia

Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased to again join my friend and colleague from Texas in honoring this brave man. Serving as many tours of duty in Vietnam was a rare event in that era than the tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was particularly noteworthy. I'm pleased to urge my colleagues to join with Judge Poe and our other colleagues in support of H.R. 3477 in order to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 133 Hare Road in Crosby, Texas, as the Army First Sergeant David McNerney Post Office Building, and I urge its adoption. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.