Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, this motion to instruct would be to insist upon the House levels of funding for the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. There are a number of critical issues looming before us in the future of aviation. Some folks think today because the levels of travel are depressed that the concerns we had about modernization and airspace and a lot of other issues have gone away. They have not. We fully expect that with the new security measures we have put in place and they are continuing to put in place that people will be returning if the economy ever recovers, but that is another issue for another debate over tax cuts versus investment. But if the economy does and when the economy recovers, we will find that the levels of air passenger traffic will increase greatly in the not-too-distant future. We cannot take a break from the investments that we need to make. Our bill, Flight 100, would provide more than $59 billion over the next 4 years; and we think 4 years is essential, because the Senate only wants to reauthorize for 3 years, perhaps to come back and tinker or whatever reason, but we need the certainty of the 4 years and we need the higher levels of investment. It provides substantial increases in the airport improvement program, again back to the capacity issue and the concerns that were driving us just a couple of years ago here in the House in terms of the lack of capacity. Our bill would provide $14.8 billion for airport improvement projects over 4 years. That is $1.2 billion more than the FAA's request, and it would be $300 million more than the Senate has requested, projects that would not only enhance capacity but actually put people to work, a meaningful investment in construction projects. It would provide $12.3 billion for FAA facilities and equipment to maintain and modernize our air traffic control system. We have finally straightened out the problems in acquiring the new system and the technology. We need now to go ahead with the acquisition to put this equipment into place so that we can better utilize the airspace and we can better protect the safety of the traveling public. Again, the Senate has $267 million less than the House bill. We have a number of other areas where we believe that the House bill is superior, but these are the ones we wish to emphasize in our motion to instruct conferees. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman and the chairman, too, because I think they both recognize a critical need. I know there are difficult choices to be made, and I am very hopeful that we will come back from conference with the Senate with the additional teams funded, and I think that that would be a tremendous asset to the protection of the American people. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from Oregon.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment to close a gap that I see in the vital needs of the American people. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, as the father of the Civil Support Weapons of Mass Destruction Team, knows well that the National Guard is a unique repository of expertise with capabilities of response to weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, or radiological events, events that are far beyond the capabilities of most civilian units even in our major cities. They certainly exceed the capabilities that our States have to fund and train such teams at this point in time; yet we would all admit that a very real threat exists, and we are spending a tremendous amount of time around the world attempting to prevent such attacks on our country. But if the worst should happen, we are going to need these teams, and we are going to need more than we have. The Congress has authorized 55, but at this point, as I understand it, 27 are fully operational, and another 5 are in training, and yet there are 23 that have not yet received funding. My intention with this amendment was to push the Congress to make a difficult choice between a weapons system and these teams. We have to make difficult choices around here in the hopes that we can move forward.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. We have heard a lot about the new benefits and protections that will be afforded by this bill. Unfortunately, most of the benefits and protections will not go to seniors in need, they will go to the pharmaceutical and the insurance industry. This bill will do a good job of protecting the monopoly profits and price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps the gentleman from Kentucky has not read or at least he doesn't understand the bill. Section 1801 prohibits the Federal Government, Medicare, from negotiating lower prices from the pharmaceutical industry, a provision inserted at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to protect their profits. The VA negotiates very successfully, and that would lower the cost of drugs much more than the puny benefits in this bill at a cost of $400 billion. But, no, that is prohibited in this legislation. The bill does not allow the reimportation of U.S. manufactured drugs from Canada because that would provide a greater benefit than the puny benefits in this bill. Here are three drugs: Tamoxifen. If we could just reimport, if Americans could just buy the drug by mail from Canada, they would save 90 percent. But a couple with a $4,500 a year drug bill will get a 22 percent benefit under this legislation. For Vioxx, for arthritis, 52 percent if you could just buy it in Canada and bring it back into this country. Under this bill, a 22 percent reduction for seniors who pay $4,500 a year for drugs. And then Xalatan, for glaucoma, a little closer, 33 percent from Canada, 22 percent under this bill. So without any cost, without spending $400 billion and without spending a penny, but impinging on the profits of the pharmaceutical industry, we could provide much better benefits by negotiating or allowing reimportation. But it does not stop there. It also benefits the insurance industry. It is going to drive seniors from Medicare into private insurance, provide subsidies to private insurance to provide unspecified benefits at a cost to be determined in the future when those benefits might become available in the year 2006, and they can be withdrawn at any time by those industries. This is not the security our seniors deserve and it is outrageous that this should be offered without any amendments being allowed to this party.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, the Republican Medicare prescription drug bill will provide unprecedented benefits and protection. Unfortunately, the benefits and protection under this perverse legislation will all flow to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, not the seniors who need help paying their prescription drug bills. That is right. The biggest beneficiaries are the wildly profitable pharmaceutical industry and the anticompetitive insurance industry. You cannot provide a meaningful benefit unless you deal with the obscene price of prescription drugs. And this bill does nothing, not reasonable pricing, not reimportation, not negotiated lowering of prices, nothing, because that would hurt the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. The insurance industry, they will get a subsidy under this bill to offer some sort of benefit without any requirement what those benefits might be, without any limit on the premiums they might charge, without any requirement who they might provide coverage to or exclude, all beginning in 2006. We just heard about the great affordable plan we are going to offer today. This begins in the year 2006 and seniors who pay $4,500 a year for drugs will get $3,500 out of their pocket and a thousand from this bill. This is the pharmaceutical industry and insurance industry protection legislation.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. How can the Republicans spend $400 billion on a prescription drug benefit that will impose costs without benefits on many seniors and a totally inadequate benefit for those most in need? We start with the premise that, first and foremost, the plan is designed to protect and enhance the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry. Yes, seniors will be pushed into a confusing maze of PPO, HMO, discount card, private insurance plans, no limit on premiums, no limit on profits, and no required benefits. Very expensive. The pharmaceutical industry will prevent the reimportation of their manufactured U.S. drugs from Canada, and they are going to protect the obscene prices they get for their drugs. This plan will do a great job protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry but pitifully little for our Nation's seniors, those so much in need. But so it should be. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are the number one and number two campaign contributors to the Republican Party.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, how can you spend $400 billion and not provide a decent Medicare prescription drug benefit? Well, it is an excellent question, but the Republicans have come up with a formula. First, you underwrite the profits of the private insurance industry. Yes, there will be subsidies to the private insurance industry in this bill, trying to drive people out of Medicare; and you do that because they lost a bunch of money on crummy investments, and we have to help out their bottom line. Well, we can understand that; they are big campaign contributors. Secondly, how else? Well, overall, number one, do nothing about the extortion it costs to prescription drugs in the United States. Do not allow the imports or the reimportation of American-manufactured drugs. Do not allow the people on Medicare to be organized into a group to drive down the price of these prescription drugs. No. Because actually, the pharmaceutical industry are bigger campaign contributors to the Republicans than the insurance industry. So we are going to spend $400 billion to provide a benefit nobody understands that is going to be pretty parsimonious. We could do better. We could take on the pharmaceutical industry, and we can forget about giving a subsidy to the private insurance industry; and for $400 billion, we could provide a meaningful prescription drug benefit that seniors would enjoy and it would help with their health. But that is not where the majority is going in this House of Representatives.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, well, congratulations are in order for the Bush administration. They have set yet another record, something to be proud or at least something that their political campaign contributors can be proud of, which is the trade policy of the United States which is a disaster for working Americans and the industrial infrastructure of this country, but immensely profitable for many multinational corporations based in the United States who are generous campaign contributors. The trade deficit for the first 3 months of 2003 was a new record: $136.1 billion. If we keep that pace up, we will break last year's trade deficit of $435 billion, and reach a $550 billion trade deficit. That means we are losing $1.5 billion a day in U.S. wealth to overseas. $1 million per minute. Mr. Speaker, 53,000 manufacturing jobs alone were lost in May of this year, hollowing out the manufacturing base of the United States of America, formally the greatest industrial Nation on Earth. There have been 251,000 lost this year and 34 consecutive months of decline in the manufacturing workforce. These are all record accomplishments of the Bush administration. They told us if they weakened the dollar, this would all get better. Well, the dollar has plummeted, hurting the purchasing power of all Americans, yet the trade deficit is continuing to grow longer. How can that be? The economists scratch their heads. The theory says your currency goes down, your trade deficit goes. But if you do not manufacture things any more, if you do not export goods, which the United States does precious little of, then it does not matter what the value of the currency is because you are buying overseas. In fact, if your currency goes down, your trade deficit goes up, which is exactly what happened because you are buying all the manufactured goods overseas. Besides that, the Chinese have illegally under the WTO, which I am not a supporter of, but the U.S. is a signatory to, as is China, and the U.S. fought to get them in, has fixed their currency to the U.S. currency. So no matter how low our dollar goes, we are still going to run record trade deficits with the Chinese who now are the largest holders of U.S. debt overseas. We are not only enthralled to the Chinese for their manufacturing, they can basically threaten the United States if the United States ever decided to get tough with a lot of the bad things they do over there with the 300-plus billion dollars of our currency that they hold because of the growing trade deficit. This is a looming disaster for this country. If we look at the record deficit we are setting domestically, again another record for the Bush administration, over a $500 billion deficit this year and the trade deficit, the United States of America is going to have to borrow over $1 trillion this year to finance a failed trade policy and a failed domestic financial policy. Borrow over $1 trillion. A lot of that money is going to come from overseas. It does not come for free, let me tell you that. A good deal of that money is going to come from what was supposed to be the Social Security lock box which has been busted open and spent and is being spent on current consumption, particularly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. For instance, yesterday's vote to permanently repeal any estate tax on estates over $6 million, four-tenths of 1 percent of estates in the United States of America, supposedly small family farms, small businesses and small tree and wood lot folks with over $6 million in assets. I tell you what, $6 million is plenty of an exemption for small businesses. But, no, the Bush administration had to go whole hog and go for an exemption of all estates. That will cost another $60 billion a year, which we will borrow from Social Security, from working wage- earning Americans and send to the wealthy. They will, of course, replace the Social Security benefits for those folks. Ha. So what is the good we see in this? Unfortunately, very little. Record trade deficit, failing trade policy. What has the Bush administration proposed? Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts domestically to help the deficit and then on the international front, well, our trade policy is working so well with a $550 billion looming trade deficit this year, with the loss of 53,000 manufacturing jobs in May, 250,000 lost so far this year, they want to set a new record so they want more of the same. More so-called free trade agreements. They have got two that are already on the way up here to Capitol Hill that they expect will go through like that. The wheels are greased because these are important people and this is such a successful policy. It is working so well for whom? Not for American workers, not for our industrial infrastructure, but for a few wealthy benefactors who control those companies. Hopefully we can bring about and restore common sense here and recognize the fact that you cannot run huge and growing deficits forever. Even Alan Greenspan has recognized that. He says this policy is not sustainable.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration is about to open up our national forests to a new phase of road building. Now, in preparation for commenting on this, I had my staff check because the last time I had checked with the Forest Service, they had an 8 billion, not million, $8 billion backlog on maintenance on Federal forest roads. Hundreds of thousands of miles of road, crisscrossing the United States, the West, and yet they have an $8 billion backlog. Now, the Forest Service said yesterday said, no, no, no, the Congressman is wrong. It is not 8 billion. We just recalculated it. And I thought, well, this will be good news. It is $10.5 billion. The Forest Service has a $10.5 billion backlog on Forest Service roads. Of the 382,000 miles of roads, only 21 percent meet their maintenance standards; 50 percent are declared unsafe for driving; and 50,000 miles of roads are missing from the data. They are unclassified. They might be there. They might not. They might be passable; they might not. They have not had a chance to go out and look lately. Yet they are proposing under the Bush administration to begin a new phase of road building. Well, how is that? Well, we heard a couple of weeks ago they will uphold the Clinton Roadless Rule. And I had some folks in Oregon say to me, We cannot believe that the Bush administration will uphold the Clinton roadless rule. And I said, Well, there were an incredible number of comments on that rule, over 2.2 million, over 600 public meetings. It was hard fought, well constructed, well thought out, and it was very popular among most folks in the western United States. And yet, I said, it does seem unusual. Well, it turns out, no, they are not really going to uphold the roadless rule. They will immediately put in place exceptions for the Chugach and the Tongass Forests in Alaska, 300,000 acres. Except 300,000 acres of timber harvest with roads in the Tongass Forest will affect well over a million acres of land with fragmentation and eroding and other problems, perhaps even more. And, of course, there is the expense that comes with that. And then in the Lower 48 they will have a national policy, sort of, except they will develop an exception process where Governors can ask for exceptions on Federal lands for the roadless rule. What kind of national policy is this? At the same time they are staring in the face of an over $10 billion backlog, which they have no intention of dealing with because, of course, there is no money to deal with thinning or fire protection or even fighting forest fires, and particularly low on the totem pole is road construction. Every year the road maintenance unanimous money is stolen and used to fight fires, and they do not put the money back, and they never get around to it; and the backlog has grown by $2 billion since this President has been in office. The roads are unsafe. They are crumbling. They are causing all sorts of problems with erosion into pristine streams. They need culvert work. They will erode worse without the culvert work. And yet this administration wants to go on another road-building binge to fragment up the little bit of remaining roadless area in the United States. Just like Gale Norton recently said that all of the wilderness areas under study by the BLM would no longer be studied for wilderness value. The Forest Service, under the direction of this administration, wants to make certain they put in enough roads before this President leaves office, to fragment that up so those areas can never again be considered for roadless or wildness designation. This is wrong-headed policy at the wrong time. This administration should do what it said it was going to do, uphold the roadless rule in all of the States, and then it should begin to deal with the very real needs of the Forest Service, to deal with its maintenance backlog. Some of these roads need dramatic amounts of work in the short term. I have some in my district that have been promised for several years that roads, washed out in flood 5 years ago would be rebuilt; and yet the money, as I say, each summer has been taken away and spent on fighting forest fires because there is not enough money in the budget to fight forest fires because, of course, the administration has no money because they have given it away in tax cuts to all the rich people. So this is a pretty strange way to run a country and make a policy on Federal lands that are so precious to the heritage and to the environmental future of our Nation.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, it has been nearly 2 weeks since the embarrassing revelations that the $350 billion Republican tax cut left behind 6.5 million working families with incomes of $10,000 to $27,000 a year. Not a penny to them and their 12 million children. They were stiffed to make room for more millionaire tax cuts. Last week, the Senate rushed to fix this. The President has endorsed what the Senate did; and if the Republican leaders here in the House really cared about these families and their kids, they would take up, pass the Senate bill today, send it down to the President tonight, get him to sign it; and they could get refund checks next month along with other families. But, no, that is not what they are going to do. They are going to turn these families into second-class citizens. If this bill passes today, they can file for the money next year. A lot of working families with parents in combat will be excluded under this bill. They will be left out altogether, but it really does one thing that they really want to do. It assures this bill will not become law because they really do not care about those 6.5 million families and their 12 million kids. They are low-income people. They do not care.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I actually rise in strong support of the gentleman's amendment. I represent a State that has topography which is foreign to many of the bureaucrats inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, as do other Members from even more challenging terrain in Alaska and elsewhere, and it is hard for them to conceive that what looks on a map as a pretty straightforward route might happen to be a route that is not open in the wintertime or, even if it is open some of the time in the wintertime, it is often impassable; that even in the best of times it is over a mountain range, even though it is the shortest distance. So I think common sense certainly being applied as an antidote to bureaucratic intransigence in this case is very well merited, and I congratulate the gentleman on his amendment. It is something I had missed in my perusal of the bill, and many others I know would be concerned for this. We thank him for his vigilance and the amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar). (Mr. OBERSTAR asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition, although, I do not intend to speak in opposition.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, if I could, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim a portion of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I enthusiastically support the manager's amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, the Chair of the Subcommittee on Aviation has done good work with this. A number of Members have come forward since the bill was finalized in committee and raised concerns which have merit, as have other concerns been raised by outside groups, for instance, the flight attendants and others. So we have here a clarification on the training of the flight attendants, which we mandated earlier, the security legislation. We have here language that would require at least some minimal cooperation and coordination with the metropolitan planning organizations, making certain that they are informed of plans and future plans of airports that might have impact on communities greater than that which currently exist. To get some clarification, a number of concerns have been raised regarding passenger facility charges and the standards which are being applied by the FAA, and it certainly would be of great benefit to consolidate and publish those requirements so that meritorious projects across the United States can move forward to better enhance the utilization of our airports and their capacity. Then there was the 76-C regional jet provision for National Airport, again something raised later on; fairly technical, but actually quite practical and meritorious. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition, despite the fact I do not oppose the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I commend the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley) on his fierce advocacy on this issue and the fact that we are beginning to see some movement on the part of the Port Authority. It is astounding they have not undertaken such a study. I want to continue to work with the gentleman and the Chair and others to see that we begin to move ahead on this issue.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to the time remaining.