Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the other gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, could I inquire of the Chair as to the time available on each side?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Indiana (Ms. Carson).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case).

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this legislation, and want to thank all the members of the committee and also particularly the ranking member, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar), the chairman, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young), and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica), the subcommittee chairman, for the effort they and all our staff have put into this bill. This is a good piece of work. It is a potential foundation for the second 100 years of the aviation industry in this country, an industry that contributes well in excess of 10 percent to our gross domestic product on an annual basis. It will begin to anticipate and invest in meeting the needs of the future. There are a lot of folks that have seen the fall-off in air traffic, and they have forgotten the delays of 2 years ago and the capacity constraints of 2 years ago. But I have not and the members of the committee have not. It is going to require more investment, and there is significant investment in this bill over and above what was requested by the administration to begin to meet those capacity needs, in partnership with local communities and local airport authorities. It also does include some environmental streamlining provisions which will not do violence to the National Environmental Policy Act, but will help move some of the bureaucratic impediments and sequential referrals and things that have gone on that have delayed unnecessarily projects that ultimately were found to have merit and to meet the environmental constraints and laws of the United States. We need to move some of these projects ahead more quickly, and this, I believe, will help facilitate that. I am particularly happy with the air service section of the bill. I represent what has become an underserved community because of the dominance of one major carrier who has chosen, despite the profitability of that market, to divest itself of service and substitute a substandard so-called express service. There are many of us across the Midwest and the western United States and even in the East struggling with these sorts of issues. There are many communities that have no service whatsoever. So the improvements we are making in the essential air service authorization here are essential. The new pilot program that would allow other than the traditional essential air service program, which can sometimes be kind of lame, is to be undertaken by the Secretary. And, finally, the new section which I think is going to be the great benefit to airports like mine and other airports across the country that have seen a diminution in service is the Small Community Air Service Development program, which would, with language we have put in the bill, require and give preference to communities that are willing to partner with the government in terms of a contribution and also can demonstrate the potential sustainability of their plan. Not just a potential pilot program which essentially becomes another name for an EAS program, but something to encourage innovation, to attract in new carriers that could provide a permanent presence and a new competition and improvement in service to those communities. There are many of us that desire to facilitate that. Also, being a west coast Member, the issue of Washington National Airport and the sort of outmoded restrictions we see there is also accommodated to some extent in the bill. Flight attendants will get at least some small recognition for the vital service they provide the traveling public on a daily basis, where they are going to get a certificate when they have completed their training, which hopefully with the uncertainties in the industry, the bankruptcies and the layoffs, will give them some portability and viability perhaps to move to new jobs if they lose theirs or there are other problems. We begin to anticipate the huge looming retirement of air traffic controllers with this bill and to require or authorize the hiring of replacements who have quite a long training window, and we need to move ahead with that so we do not have a crisis. The cabin air-quality hearings which we had last week revealed that we are basically not monitoring cabin air quality; and where we do not monitor, we do not have a problem. But the few monitoring samples that have been done do show problems, and we are going to require studies that were called for by the National Academy of Sciences to be undertaken by the FAA. Finally, the air traffic control system, there is no more successful model in the world of an efficient, well-operating, privatized air traffic control system. Those that do exist have had to be dramatically subsidized, reinvested in by the governments that went down that route. And when I recently met with the Chair of the committee of jurisdiction from the Parliament, she said, Do not go there. Look at the mistakes we made in Great Britain. And I am pleased to see the provisions in the bill that relate to that. All in all, Flight 100 is a great foundation over the next 4 years for the next 100 years of flight in the United States.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I think this is a very worthy undertaking. As the gentleman points out, we have hollowed out so much of American manufacturing capability, but we have for years touted the fact that our leadership in aviation and aerospace, that this would be one of the areas where we would continue to dominate the world. To have the prospect of agencies of the Federal Government using taxpayer resources to outsource to foreign vendors in this very critical sector, a sector which in the case of at least one major manufacturer is beleaguered by unfair foreign competition, in fact, something we heard repeated on a trip of the Subcommittee on Aviation for the engine manufacturers and others, where subsidies and development grants that never have to be paid back and all sorts of things are made available to them that are not made available to American manufacturers. I think the audit at this time is extraordinarily worthy. I really thank him for bringing this issue before the Congress.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition but not to speak in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, this is an issue of sovereignty. The democratically elected governments of Europe have chosen, with tremendous support and urging by their own people, to urge more study and delay on the massive introduction of genetically modified organisms into their agricultural system. A large majority of Americans would like to see the same testing. We heard about testing, that this is regulated by the FDA. No, it is not. It is not regulated by the FDA. They said they have no jurisdiction, and it has been tested by the EPA. No, these things have not been tested by the EPA. It has been tested by the industry, who tells us, do not worry, it is safe. So the peer review tests we heard about and the government regulation that we heard about do not exist for the American people, and certainly not for the European people. So are we going to turn to this faceless, conflict-ridden bureaucracy, the WTO, and ask it to preempt the laws of the sovereign nations of Europe? Then how about next week, when someone asks it to preempt some of our consumer health and safety or labor or environmental laws? That will happen, we can bet on it. We heard a lot about Africa. Well, they will accept the food aid if the seed corn is ground up or the wheat is milled. They will take it. They are happy to take it. They just do not want the starving people there to take it out and plant it and begin to have it cross with their traditional crops. So that is not too tough of a thing to accomplish. There are huge problems in the distribution system, these massively corrupt dictatorships. People of Africa are not being starved because the Europeans have chosen to protect their people and their agriculture against unknown, untested science, unregulated. That is not a true fact. Let us have the debate about what this is about, which is new corporate interests that want to increase profits. Most of this is about increasing profits. Tell the people in India who have to buy patented seed year after year, or the people in Canada who have been prosecuted because they tried to replant the seed or it crossed into their crops and they have been prosecuted by Montana, that this is about making the world safe for people to not starve, and for the environment and all those things. No, it is, pure and simple, about profits for American industry.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, House Majority Whip Blunt said GOP Members find no urgency to act for a child tax credit, but there was an incredible urgency in this House a couple of weeks ago when we acted in the dark of the night to extend an average $93,500 tax break to every millionaire in America. Then the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Myrick) said, if we give people a tax break that do not pay taxes, it is welfare. Excuse me, someone who earns $27,000 a year pays $1,890 in FICA taxes. They pay taxes, regressive taxes; and guess what, every penny of those FICA taxes that is supposed to go into the Social Security surplus, the lockbox, that that side of the aisle used to support, that the President used to support, is being borrowed and being mailed in big checks to the wealthy. She may call that welfare; I call it Reverse Robin Hood.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, after the passage of the largest tax cut in history 2 years ago, the President began to talk about a little glitch in that, and a glitch that no one could have anticipated, not the Republican White House which wrote it, the Republican Senate which passed it, and the Republican House which passed it who deliberately wrote the glitch in, which was, gee, the estate tax would only expire for 1 year and then if you did not die during that 1 year, you would be subject to the full estate tax again. And a number of other taxes were phased back in. Well, it was not a glitch. They knew about it. They had to do it so they would not bust the bank and that was when they were predicting a surplus. But guess what now? Whoops, here we go again. There is a little glitch in the second largest tax cut in American history passed at the time of the largest deficit in American history 2 weeks ago in the dark of the night, personally written and negotiated by Vice President Cheney and the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate. How could they have known that they left out half of the American people? I mean, after all, it was Ari Fleischer who said, ``And, of course, for people in the 10 percent bracket, they benefit the most and that's the lowest income workers in America.'' He went on to say that it certainly does deliver tax relief to the people who pay income taxes. The President surrounds himself with waitresses. But unfortunately it is all a lie because those people are not going to get tax cuts under this bill. In fact, 51 percent of income-tax-paying Oregonians will get no cut under this bill and about 49 percent of income-tax-paying Americans will not get any cut under this bill. 7.6 million people who are in this 10 percent tax bracket that Mr. Fleischer referred to who were supposed to get a lot of benefits are going to get zero, zilch, nada under this bill. But every millionaire is guaranteed $93,500 or more under this bill. To even heap more irony on top of the injustice, the $93,500 for each millionaire will come from FICA taxes, payroll taxes paid by wage- earning Americans. Wage-earning Americans pay about 7 percent of the first dollar they earn and every dollar they earn up to about $88,000 on FICA tax. In fact, more than half of American workers pay more in FICA taxes to the Federal Government than they do income taxes. No relief for them. And, hey, guess what? We have really suckered you, because we are going to borrow every penny of the FICA taxes you have paid that you thought was going into a trust fund, in fact, a lockbox, passed seven times while the Republicans have been in charge of this House. Seven times we passed a lockbox for Social Security. Well, we cannot afford a lockbox anymore. It is busted open and robbed. Empty. That money is going to be used to finance the tax cut and replaced with IOUs. So the millionaire who gets a $93,500 benefit under this bill, they pay a FICA tax at the rate of .7 percent, one-tenth of the rate at which a wage-earning teacher or sales clerk pays that same tax, because they do not pay it on any income over $88,000 a year. So $912,000 of their income is exempt from FICA tax, and the poor person who works for minimum wage or for a decent wage is paying FICA tax of 7 percent on every penny earned. Finally, they made much hay on the fact that they were going to do so much with the child credit. Of course, it was temporary and going to expire in 2 years, but that is probably a glitch and they would have discovered that later. But there was another little glitch. Most Americans, in fact, all Americans who earn between $10,500 and $26,625 will not get the child care credit. That is an awful lot of people who have an awful lot of need. That includes 11.9 million children. So, all in all, what we have here is one of the biggest scams in history. Never before has this country in a time of huge deficit borrowing, and that is how this is being paid for, borrowed so much money from so many wage-earning Americans to give to so very few at the top under the premise that somehow those really rich people might invest or spend that money in a way to give those working people jobs so they can pay more FICA taxes that can be transferred to them in next year's tax cuts, which the President has already targeted toward those who earn over $1 million a year, to help them have more to contribute at election time in what is expected to be a record expensive Presidential election. The system is incredibly corrupt.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, Congress can recess for the Memorial Day break with a big bang. We are going to increase the debt ceiling by $984 billion, almost $1 trillion, and also later today the Congress will vote to borrow over $300 billion to reduce the taxes, principally of a wealthy few in this country, under the premise that under trickle- down economics, they will invest that money in such a way it will create jobs. Well, the last tax cut of $1.2 trillion cost the country 1.7 million jobs and caused us to borrow another $1 trillion, because we are now running deficits. We could make real investments and put people back to work, investments in roads, bridges, highways, mass transit, sewer, water systems, things that increase the productive capacity of the country and the wealth of the country. By the administration's own measures, if we diverted that money instead of borrowing it to give to wealthy people in the hope it might create the 1 million jobs the President hopes for, we could create 13 million jobs directly in construction, with a huge spillover in economic activity across the country. There is a very viable alternative: do not borrow money to give to a few people. Never have we borrowed so much to give to so few.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, next week the Nation will celebrate Memorial Day. A fitting celebration of Memorial Day in this House would be to crack down on the waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon so that we can better equip our troops and we can meet our obligations to our veterans. At the run-up to the last war, the Pentagon was scrambling to find chemical and biological suits. But it turned out that another part of the Pentagon had put them up for sale for surplus on the Internet, usable suits, and were selling them for pennies on the dollar at the same time that we did not have enough to go around in the field. But that is nothing new at the Pentagon. They have misplaced $1 trillion, T, trillion, not million, not billion, trillion dollars according to the GAO. They lost 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, 36 Javelin missile command launch units. They spent $20 billion trying to overhaul their accounting system, and then abandoned that effort. That did not help one soldier in the field, did not help one veteran, did not help the Nation. Waste, fraud, and abuse by contractors and bureaucrats is not patriotic. Let us clean up the Pentagon. Let us do something in the bill today to make certain this no longer occurs.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, one other point: the President also did not ask for enough money to fight the fires. It is not new. We had the same problem with Clinton, we had the same problem with Bush I, we had the same problem with Reagan. They never ask for enough money to fight the fires. So what do they do? They go back in. They used to borrow the money from the KB funds. KB funds do not exist anymore. What do they do now? They rob all the other accounts of the Forest Service. Do you know what the first one they rob is? The Fuel Reduction Program. So you are not going to put out any real money to do the work. We know that money is going to be stolen this year and used for fighting the fires, because there is not enough.

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

Mr. DeFAZIO. There is some room for agreement here. This is what we want to prevent. It is a fire in my congressional district last summer. The gentleman who just preceded me talked about bureaucrats. This bill is a bureaucrat's dream, because this bill gives all the discretion to appointed bureaucrats, and I know that that party would not be supporting this bill if there was a Democrat in the White House. They would not want to give Bruce Babbitt this authority. But they do want to give it to this administration. This bill was written at the White House and sent down. This is not the bill we negotiated last fall. If this was the bill that we had negotiated last fall, and I give the gentleman from Colorado and others credit for sitting down in tough negotiations where we took flack from both sides, from the environmentalists and from the industry, and came up with something that would have worked, would have gotten this done, would have turned this into a nonpartisan problem. If it was that, I would vote for it in a split second. But it was not, so I tried to offer some amendments to improve it. No, we cannot have any amendments because the House has to adjourn at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Why? I do not know. Someone has got a golf game. People have got to make fund-raising phone calls for the big event tomorrow night. I do not know. We do not have time for amendments. This is only the Congress after all in the House, no time for amendments. There has been a lot of talk about whether or not this would allow the harvesting of big old trees. The bottom line is we do not do this on the cheap. It is 100 years of mismanagement. The only good study was done in Oregon at Oregon State. Sixteen hundred and eighty-five dollars an acre is the estimate to do this work. And guess what? They do not get $1,685 an acre for a bunch of brush and dead poles, do they? No. If they are going to generate that much money to do the work that needs to be done, they are going to high-grade the damn forests the same way that they high-graded them early in the last century when we were really stupid. That is what is going to happen under this bill. It gives the discretion to protect or not protect old-growth to Mark Rey. I love Mark. Great guy. But I do not want to give him that discretion. I would like a definition of what has to be protected and what is not. No, he has that authority and people cannot hardly appeal his decisions because the White House wants to pretend it can be done on the cheap. The President's budget, his big request is $230 million for fuel reduction this year. At that rate, if we did all of the land that they want to put into this bill, it would take 174 years. So I do not think the President is exactly asking for the money needed. Where is the rest of the money going to come from? How are we going to do it more quickly than a 174 years? There is only one answer: The gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) said the truth, and the truth hurts. We have got to take high-value products out. What is a high-value product? It is a big old tree. And only one person stands between cutting that tree to fund this bill and the reality of that, and that is an appointed bureaucrat. This is really too serious to consider in this way, and it affects too many of us too much. I am really sad that it has come to this. I was willing to take the heat, and I did last fall. A couple of Democratic Senators took a lot of heat, attacked by national environmental groups for trying to do something that made sense in this area. The environmental groups, they succeeded. They stopped the bill last year, and now we are going to see something in the House much worse. There is a lesson in that. But there is also a lesson in overreaching. My colleagues know this bill cannot become law as it is. It is either a bargaining chip with the Senate. That is one thing I hear. It is a bargaining chip with the Senate to try to pull them back, or it is a political event so that they can blame a couple of prominent Democrat Western Senators who are up for election for stopping the bill over there and use it against them as an election year issue. I do not know which one it is. I do not know which one it is, but either are pathetic reasons to stick this bill through in this way without a single amendment being allowed.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, there are some grounds for agreement here. This chart shows what we want to prevent. Fires are not partisan. In fact, last fall we negotiated a bipartisan agreement, something that was not everything the timber industry wanted; and it certainly was not everything the environmentalists wanted. But that approach was abandoned several weeks ago. Now the White House is calling the shots here, and they are going to jam through a bill. There are a lot of reasons to oppose this bill. I mean, one is do we trust appointed bureaucrats with our precious natural resources? They created this problem through 100 years of mismanagement; and this is giving all the discretion in terms of appeals, protection of old growth. Even the courts have to give deference to the judgment of the appointed bureaucrats. I do not think the Republicans would support that for a Democratic administration. I would not support it for a Democratic or Republican administration. But there are another 5 billion reasons to oppose this bill. There is no money in it. The bill we wrote last fall admitted that this is an expensive proposition. Undoing 100 years of mismanagement is very expensive. There is no money in this bill, and they are going to finance this bill potentially by cutting the very resource that should be protected, what we wanted to restore. We just heard about low-intensity fires. We want to go back to low- intensity fires, big old trees, widely spaced in Eastern Oregon and down through the intermountain States. But we give all of the discretion on the harvest to the Secretary of Agriculture and his or her appointees, and we say there is no money and that we are going to finance this by putting contractors out there and having them remove things and paying for the projects that way. If you do that, guess what they are going to take first? They are going to take out the big old trees. They might not bother with the brush and poles and dead stuff, which is what we need to be targeting. This is not the bill we should be voting on today, and not a single Democratic amendment was allowed. What the heck kind of a process is this? Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I had hoped today that we would have a fair and balanced rule. Traditionally, when the Committee on Resources, formerly the Committee on Natural Resources, formerly the Committee on the Interior during my time here in Congress, has brought important bills to the floor, they have been under open rules with each and every Member being allowed to offer amendments. I had two amendments that would have improved this bill which might have given it a better chance of actually becoming law instead of just scoring big political points. Unfortunately, neither of those amendments are to be allowed because the House is in a hurry. A hurry for what? So we can get out for golf games this afternoon? We are going to be done between 4 and 5 o'clock this afternoon so Members can make phone calls for the big Republican fundraiser tomorrow night? I do not know. But for some reason the United States House of Representatives cannot work after 4 o'clock in the afternoon and allow Members whose districts are most affected by this legislation an opportunity to offer amendments. That is absolutely outrageous, unconscionable, and of course violates everything the Republicans promised in the ``Contract on America'' when they took over the House. But I am sure there is a good reason why they shut us down and they will not allow the amendments. Maybe because they are afraid some of those amendments might win, might improve the bill, might go against the wishes of the White House who is running this process. We had a good, collaborative, bipartisan process going last fall. We reached agreement on a bill. It would have actually had a very good chance of becoming law. Instead, suddenly this bill springs up on a Friday afternoon to be considered in full committee the next Wednesday without one single public hearing, without even consideration in the subcommittee, and it was being driven by the White House. The Republicans would never vote for this bill if we had a Democratic administration, even this exact bill. It gives total discretion to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Assistant Secretary who runs the Forest Service and the Secretary of the Interior over what and where they will apply this bill. They do not have to prioritize. They do not have to go and protect communities first. They do not have to protect old growth. No. In fact, this bill will rely upon harvesting old growth, which can be done without appeal by the Secretary under this bill. Sometimes only in thousand acre segments, sometimes in smaller segments, timber harvesting. There is no money in this bill. This is a very expensive process. One hundred years of mismanagement of the national forests cannot be fixed on the cheap. There is no money in this bill. There was money in the bipartisan substitute last fall, but the White House will not allow them to ask for money because they want to pretend this can be done for nothing. It cannot be done for nothing. They will just give the contracts to people, and they will go out there and clear the stuff out and just take what they get. But, guess what, the brush, the underbrush and the little dead poles and the small trees, they are not worth much. So what are they going to have to do to carry out this bill? They are going to harvest the old growth, the large fire-resistant trees that are what we should be leaving according to all the scientists while we clear out the understory and the underbrush. But that will be harvested or not harvested at the discretion of Mark Ray and other bureaucrats in the administration. Appointed bureaucrats will have the discretion, total discretion without appeal, virtually without being able to go to court because their decisions have to get deference in the courts. We could have done something real. We could have done something bipartisan. We could have done something that would become law. We could have done something that would begin to address the 100 years of mismanagement of our forests and deal with the real threats to my community. There are going to be a lot of people talking today who do not have a darn thing at risk. I have got people and communities at risk. The largest fire in the country burned a good deal of my district last year, and we are still threatened. I feel very strongly about this, and I am offended that I cannot offer a single amendment, get one vote on one substitute, and the House is going to rush out of here at 4 or 5 o'clock for people's golf games or fundraising phone calls. That is outrageous.