Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. This is a photograph from 1956, before we had a national transportation policy in the United States of America; and if the Republicans are successful with their budget and with their vision, this will be the future for the United States of America. There are a substantial number of Republicans on that side who have drunk the Kool Aid of a guy named Grover Norquist, who says that he wants government so small, he can strangle it in the bathtub, and that we should devolve--devolve--this is interesting--not evolve--devolve transportation to the States. That's right. Our national transportation policy will be set by the 50 different States. Well, this is 1956, before we had a national transportation policy. This is the brand spanking new Kansas Turnpike. Isn't that beautiful. Well, look where it ends--in a farmer's field in Oklahoma because Oklahoma chose not to build its section, which they had promised to build. That's the way things used to be, and that's the way they want things to be again. We're now on the precipice of basically walking away from investing in our Nation's infrastructure. There are 150,000 bridges that need replacement or repair in the national system; 40 percent of the pavement needs total replacement, not just an overlay. We have a $70 billion backlog in our 19th- and 20th-century transportation systems in our major urban areas, in our transit. And that's not even talking about building an efficient 21st-century transportation system to deliver people and goods more efficiently. And what's their proposal? A 31 percent cut in an already inadequate budget or maybe no money at all. Actually, it's a bit odd. Mr. Ryan's budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would not be enough to fund the uncontrollable outlays, i.e., projects already under way by the States for which the Federal Government has contracted to reimburse at the end of the construction of these projects. His budget wouldn't even meet that number. And in terms of authorizing the bill, they decided for the first time in history to make this a partisan issue. Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican President, he came up with the idea of a national transportation network. Ronald Reagan put transit into the highway trust fund. They want to take out Ronald Reagan's step of putting transit in the highway trust fund as an interim step before they do away with the program altogether. That's pretty extraordinary stuff. Their vision is that we will go back to this state of affairs in America. We cannot afford that. Next week or the week after, the temporary highway funding expires. The Senate has passed a bipartisan bill by an overwhelming majority. The Republican leadership has threatened that their right-wing devolutionists will do away with Federal transportation by saying, We might make you vote on that Senate bill. That passes for a threat in the Republican Caucus. We might make you vote on a good bill that would continue the current system with some improvements for a couple of years--that's what passes for a threat--unless you vote for our crazy H.R. 7, which does away with transit funding and basically dismantles the program over a longer term, or the Ryan budget, which would immediately end the program next year. But they won't let us vote on that because they know that a bunch of Democrats--just like in the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans came together with an overwhelming majority and passed a transportation bill, they know that would happen here. So they got 80 or so ultraright-wingers who wouldn't vote for it. Big deal. I could match that with 150 Democrats, and we could have a bipartisan bill next week, putting millions of Americans back to work, rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure in this country. But instead, they want to devolve us back to the future. Smaller government. Smaller government. Yes, that's great, guys. A transportation policy for the United States of America, competing in a world economy, set by the 50 States without funding. What a great vision.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Repeal and replace, that's what the Republicans said they will do. Well, what's the replacement? Apparently, it's the Ryan voucher plan, which will stick it to seniors in the future--not too good of a replacement. But the other thing they're repealing that they don't want to talk about is they're repealing restrictions on age discrimination by the insurance industry. They would be repealing the restrictions on preexisting conditions to discriminate against people--redline them, essentially, by the insurance industry--and they would be repealing the provision of reviewing excessive rate increases which has been already successful in California this year. So the Republicans have come forward with this one part of the bill. They've already repealed all of ObamaCare, but now they're going to repeal it bit by bit because they don't want to do real things like deal with our transportation system and that. But there is one particularly objectionable part of this. They're going to pretend that they're taking away the antitrust protection of the insurance industry. Remember, this is an industry that can and does get together and collude to drive up our premiums. And after the Republicans do away with age discrimination, preexisting conditions, and rate increases, the industry is going to have a field day. So they're pretending that they're going to allow suits against the industry for antitrust violations. Unfortunately, not really. If someone wants to bring a suit, they can't do it as a class action. Well, more than 90 percent of antitrust suits are brought as class actions. Individuals do not have the resources to take on the insurance industry. So they're going to take something that in the last Congress was bipartisan--a bill I had to take away, really take away, the antitrust immunity in the insurance industry and give a benefit to all consumers in this country, passed this House by 406 19--and now they're going to fake out, they think, the American people by pretending they're taking on the insurance industry while they're filling their pockets with contributions from them. Good work, guys.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I am submitting a letter from Colin Taylor Mays, a 12-year-old school kid in Oregon. He is very worried about the future of his education. The drive by some to make deep cuts in our education system is jeopardizing his education and the future competitiveness of our Nation. While it is critical that we must not further burden our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt, we also must make investments in their future. With limited resources we must make smart investments that put people back to work by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure system. While we focus on creating jobs now we cannot forget about our youth and what future will lie ahead for them. We must invest in education to make sure that our children will be prepared for the workforce of tomorrow. It is possible to balance our budget and provide for the most critical needs of our Nation. We must look both at raising revenues and reducing spending in areas where appropriate. If we do not make these choices now we will continue to let our children suffer in an education system that is falling apart at the seams. I hope that my colleagues will heed this message and work with me on making the right choices for our youth by investing in their education and giving them the same if not greater opportunities than we had growing up. (By Colin Taylor Mays) I am age 12 and a boy scout of America. I'm writing this letter as a view not a complaint. I haven't been learning enough in school, because of all the budget cut days. It's hard to keep track of what I'm learning. We need to put more money towards schooling and education. I probably have only 12 full weeks of school and I have so many weeks that only have 4 or 3 days in them. Unlike very few children I want to learn and possibly get a very good job that I want. Please consider this letter.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I paid $4.01 a gallon at home in Oregon last weekend. There's a lot of people who've got long-term plans, drill now, drill here, drill everywhere, conservation, whatever. They say there's nothing we can do in the short-term. Well, there is. Seventy percent of the oil futures, the supply of oil, is owned by speculators on Wall Street and other places around the world--70 percent. The head of ExxonMobil testified that about $38 a barrel is due to speculation. That's the head of ExxonMobil. He says we're paying 38 bucks a barrel for speculators on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs says, well, it's only $22 to $28 a barrel. Let's take the lowest number, $22 a barrel. That would lower regular gas by 64 cents a gallon if we got rid of the speculators. I've proposed a tax of 1/100 of 1 cent per transaction that would drive most of these speculators out of the market and raise some revenues. It's time to get rid of the speculators, provide price relief to Americans, and then we can talk about a long-term plan for energy self- sufficiency.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Last December, the Speaker told us that the Republican signature jobs bill was going to be the surface transportation reauthorization. Yet, under pressure from the extreme right in his caucus 2 weeks ago, he said in the Republican caucus that this transportation bill is not a jobs bill. And they wrote for the first time since the founding of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Highway System a purely partisan transportation bill in the hope of jamming it through. Well, it's all fallen apart now. Yet there are 150,000 bridges falling apart in the Federal system. Forty percent of the pavement on the national system needs to be restored, and there's a $70 billion backlog for critical equipment in our transit systems. These could be jobs--Made in America jobs. But we need to work together. Transportation is not, never has been, and should not be a partisan issue. By trying to make it partisan, they've stalled and failed. It's time to go back to the drawing board and put together a bill that's good for America. We don't have to have partisan politics on every issue, and transportation investment should not be one of those.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, well, we're going to take up legislation which is targeted to fix the reimbursement for doctors, which is absolutely essential to Medicare. This threat should go away forever. We should make a permanent fix and not pretend that we can just keep dragging this on without jeopardizing seniors. Unemployment, we need to extend that for people who can't find work. They lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They can't find work; we need to help them out. But borrowing $100 billion from the Social Security trust fund under the premise that the consumer spending generated will bring about economic recovery and create jobs, that's the Larry Summers principle from the stimulus era. Look, that doesn't work. You want to create jobs, you want to borrow $100 billion, let's borrow $100 billion, finance the transportation bill that the Republicans pulled from the floor this week, and put a few million people to work rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure in this country with all made-in-America goods. That would be an effective way to get this country back on track, not Social Security tax cuts.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the entire Oregon congressional delegation, I'm pleased to introduce a fellow Oregon Duck, Italian American, and the newest member of our delegation, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, from the First Congressional District of Oregon. Suzanne is a former Oregon State legislator, an attorney who has worked on consumer and small business issues with a distinguished record of accomplishments and service for the people of Oregon. I know she'll be a strong and effective addition to our delegation in the House of Representatives. Suzanne, welcome, and we look forward to working with you. With that, I would yield to my colleague from Oregon.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentlewoman from Oregon, the Honorable Suzanne Bonamici, be permitted to take the oath of office today. Her certificate of election has not arrived, but there is no contest and no question has been raised with regard to her election.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Ronald Reagan signed legislation that funded transit out of the highway trust fund. The new Republican majority is going to end transit's eligibility for highway trust fund dollars--but they've created an alternative transportation account that will be paid for out of the general fund. The only problem is that paying for transit at current levels under an alternative scenario would blow another $40 billion hole in the budget. But they have a plan. They're going to require Federal employees to pay 6 percent of their salaries into a trust fund. That's about $40 billion over 5 years. But they're not taxing Federal employees to pay for transit--don't worry about that--because that money can't be spent on transit. It will make it look like they're not spending more money. In reality, they will borrow $40 billion to pay for transit instead of paying for it with your fees out of the highway trust fund, but they're going to pretend that they didn't add more money to the deficit. At the same time, they're going to make Federal employees put 6 percent of their salaries into a trust fund for this illusory offset. Good work, guys.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I was named conferee. I have been on the aviation committee for 26 years. There was no legislative conference. The most contentious provision of the bill was a deal that was struck between Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, and Speaker Boehner; and it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal. Now, this bill is absolutely critical to the safety and security of the aviation system of the United States of America. It's critical for its modernization. It's critical for its competitiveness. These things are extraordinarily important to our country. Aviation constitutes, in aggregate, about 10 or 11 percent of our gross domestic product. It is not a sector that we can continue to ignore and underfund in terms of providing it with the tools it needs to be more fuel efficient and safer for the traveling public and more efficient for business transport and goods. But those things should not be held hostage to the incredible anti- labor bias of the majority here in the House. The bill that passed our committee would have established a rule for the formation of a union that said anybody who was eligible to vote, who didn't vote, counts as a ``no.'' I went and reviewed the elections of every Member of Congress and, guess what, if we had that rule, if every person who was a potentially eligible voter would be counted as a ``no'' vote in your election, not one Member of Congress, even those who get 80 percent, would have been elected because you had more people who didn't vote than you got votes, not one Member of Congress; but that would be fair for the working people of America according to the Republicans here in the House. That was an incredibly egregious provision, outrageous. So then we move to the Senate. Well, we go through this little thing last summer where we actually shut down the FAA. Now, I know you don't care about 4,000 Federal employees, that's fine. But you also put out of work 78,000 people who were working in the private sector on the modernization and updates of our aviation system at our airports--all over wanting and hating unions. Now, I don't get it. I don't get why you hate unions and working people. I really don't understand that. So here we come to the final product, and the final product will make it much easier for someone in the anti-labor airline out there, perhaps, to deunionize in, say, a merger or even in an election because their furloughed employees would count in an election. You don't know who they are, where they are. They get to vote. And you have to have an election to have an election, and you have to win the election to have an election. This is not a fair provision. We need the changes in this bill, but we do not need to attack the working people of the United States of America.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. PIPA, Protect Intellectual Property Act; SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act. Now, who could be against bills like that, to prevent the theft of intellectual property or online piracy, to prevent online piracy. Clever names, great. Content, not so much. Now, the worst, organized, government-sanctioned theft of intellectual property in the world goes on day in and day out in Communist China. And this government has done precious little to rein that in. We run a huge trade deficit with China. We're buying their goods. They are dependent upon our purchasing of their goods. And yet we allow them to get away with that. This bill does nothing to deal with the organized theft in Communist China, which is the greatest problem that confronts us in the theft of intellectual property. Now, concealed behind these really benign names and embedded in the text is something that's kind of like what we call malware. Now, we all know what malware can do to our computers. We've seen it; the black screen of death. Well, this is a little bigger than malware that gets on your computer, steals your data, or crashes your computer. It could crash the entire Internet and the productivity of the Internet. Now, eventually this legislation could threaten the existence of an entire domain because of one blog entry, one user link. A whole domain could be taken down. Wow. That's pretty incredible. Imagine how some of these user-content sites are going to have to try and police things. Well, they can always err on the side of censorship because there are broad provisions in this bill to allow you in good faith to censor something because you thought maybe it was a problem. So they could start censoring rather dramatically. The legislation also includes very broad language for so-called anti-circumvention, that is any site that provides information that could--could, maybe, possibly--help users get around censorship would be a target. Well, that's kind of an interesting contradiction for the government of the United States because actually we promote through the State Department software that helps democratic activists in Communist China, which I already mentioned, and in Iran and other vicious dictatorships around the world to get around their government's online censorship. We're now going to enshrine principles that would allow this sort of censorship, sort of mimicking some of the actions of the Iranian and the Communist Chinese, I guess, in regards to the Internet here. Of course, we're going to allow private companies to impose this censorship instead of the government imposing this censorship; but they would have government enforcement behind their actions, the private right of actions that would be allowed in this bill. This is pretty extraordinary legislation, very poorly drafted. If you didn't care about the Internet, if it didn't exist and you wanted to put in the toughest possible protections theoretically for piracy and intellectual property, maybe you'd write something like this. But there's a better way to go than to kill the Internet at the same time as you're trying to get at these few bad actors that are out there, let alone the state bad actors, like China. I'd love to see a bill drafted to take on the Chinese on their multi- billion-dollar annual theft of intellectual property from the United States. Everybody says we can't take on China; no, they're too big. So instead, we'll go after small, creative people who could tread across this line unknowingly who are participating in a much larger site. They have their blog as part of that site or they have their post as part of that site. The whole site could be taken down. This legislation, I'm pleased to say, that it seems like the White House has woken up to the dangers here; the fact that we are essentially creating the PATRIOT Act national security letter provisions for private companies to censor the Internet. We cannot let that happen. We must stop this legislation. We also need to take on meaningfully piracy and the theft of intellectual property.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Congress excels at doing nothing; but sometimes doing nothing or empty political posturing, as we've just seen from the Republican majority, ignores our Nation's critical needs. By leaving town without extending unemployment insurance, the 2.3 million long-term unemployed Americans who want to work and can't find work in this economy is especially cruel on the eve of the Christmas season. And for 48 million seniors and disabled, the new year will dawn with a 28-percent decrease in physicians' reimbursement. Many will find that they can't get in to see a doctor. It will be slammed in their face. So with these actions, or rather these inactions by the Republican majority, they truly embody the spirit of the season: the Grinch.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, we've all heard of too big to fail when the Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and President Bush bailed out a bunch of miscreants on Wall Street for their gambling and mistakes and putting taxpayers at risk, some principle that does not belong in the policy of this country. But now we have another one: Too big to be counted. Too big to be counted. This year, the Pentagon will spend $670 billion, about $2 million a day, and it doesn't know where its money is. In fact, it often doesn't even know if it has spent money. Here are a few examples: In March 2000, the Pentagon inspector general found that of the $7.6 trillion--``t,'' trillion dollars--in accounting entries, about one- third of them--$2.3 trillion, or $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, was completely untraceable, completely untraceable. $2.3 trillion, don't know where it went. Don't know if they bought something, if it was delivered. Who knows. Then, in 2003, they found--and this is something I've talked about all through my years in Congress, the so-called inventory system at the Pentagon, which is absolutely absurd. The Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 missile command launch units. And while military leaders back in 2003 were scrambling around trying to find chemical and biological suits for our troops because of the risks in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was selling suits at surplus on the Internet for 2 cents on the dollar. No suits for the troops. They're very expensive. Over here, we're selling them for 2 cents on the dollar to the general public. What is this all about? Another year, they spent $100 million for refundable airline tickets that they didn't use. Hey, what's $100 million at the Pentagon? Chump change. They didn't ask for the refunds. They just stuck them in a drawer. That is $100 million that didn't go to serve our national defense, supply our troops, or be saved and defray our deficit. In fiscal year '10, half of the Pentagon's $366 billion in contract awards were not competed. Half. Now, these are pretty shocking numbers. And actually, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) and I on the floor here last spring got a little amendment in the Department of Defense bill to require that they conform to a 1994 law. In 1994, Congress said the Pentagon should be audited by 1997. Unfortunately, every year, the appropriators have said, Oh, no, no, no. That's too much to ask of the Pentagon. Well, we got a little amendment in the bill here. We kind of snuck it by the DOD hawks over there who are protecting the incompetence over there, and they would have been audited. The Senate did the same thing. But to the rescue, the conference committee, behind closed doors. I was one of very few on the floor here who voted against closing the doors of the conference because they don't close the doors of the conference committee over there to talk about classified things that could risk our national security. They do it to cut deals like this. So yesterday, they decided the Pentagon will not be audited. It can't be audited. In fact, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway), one of our colleagues, said it would be insulting to require that we audit the Pentagon in a mandatory way by 2014. I mean, that's only 2 years from now. That's only a couple more trillion dollars from now. Boy, we wouldn't want to know where that money is going. We wouldn't want to know whether they are surplusing out stuff our troops need while they're paying for a contractor who didn't have to compete to buy the same stuff, and they say there is a shortage and we don't have enough. We wouldn't want to know these things. So we closed the conference and cut these stinking deals. So here it is, once again, too big to be counted. This does not serve our men and women in uniform well. It does not serve the national defense needs of the United States of America, and it sure as heck doesn't serve the interests of the American taxpayers. The Pentagon must be audited like every other agency of Federal Government, and we should also throw in the Federal Reserve.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chair, today, my Republican colleagues missed an opportunity to pass targeted, nonpartisan legislation to protect farmers and small businesses from unnecessary federal regulation. There is widespread and bipartisan agreement that ``farm dust,'' dust produced during activities on farms and ranches, should not be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clean Air Act. The EPA doesn't want to regulate it. And Members of Congress do not want the EPA to regulate it, myself included. But instead of writing legislation to codify a simple ban on regulating farm dust--legislation that would have won my support and the support of most of my Democratic colleagues--the Majority wrote a bill creating major loopholes in the Clean Air Act that would have significant consequences for public health and the environment. H.R. 1633 imposes a blanket, one-year moratorium on any regulation updating the national ambient air quality standards applicable to all coarse particulate matter, which includes: fly ash, diesel soot, asbestos, arsenic, lead, mercury, and heavy metals. None of these harmful toxins are defined as farm dust. Yet, this far- reaching bill would prohibit EPA from protecting American families from these harmful toxins for at least a year. H.R. 1633 would also exempt major industrial activities, including open-pit mining and aluminum smelters, from EPA's review. Again, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, nickel, and mercury--all particulates emitted from mines and industrial activities--would be exempt from federal oversight, even though they have nothing to do with ``farm dust.'' The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not regulate farm dust. The EPA has no plans to start regulating farm dust. And, if the EPA ever proposed regulations for farm dust, I would vociferously oppose them and sponsor legislation to prevent their implementation. But that's not the bill before the House today. The bill before the House today is a distraction from the most pressing issue facing our country and economy: jobs, jobs, and jobs. Mr. Chair, I support a ban on regulating farm dust. That's common sense. But I do not support creating Clean Air Act loopholes for big industry under the guise of helping small farmers and businesses. I am voting no on H.R. 1633.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Later today, something stunning is going to happen that will catch many Americans by surprise. The so-called Postmaster General is going to announce details that will lead to the end of the United States Postal Service and universal postal delivery in this country. This is an incredible blow to our economy. You're talking about closing processing centers. Let me just be specific. In my area, they're talking about closing the Eugene/Springfield processing center. It means if I mail a letter from Springfield to Eugene, 6, 7 miles away, it will be carried by truck to Portland, Oregon, and then sorted there and then trucked back down sometime that week. They're saying they will no longer guarantee 1-day or 2-day delivery on first-class mail. They're going to move to a guarantee of sometime. If you mail it on Wednesday it will be a minimum of three days till-- oops, wait--we don't have Saturday delivery anymore under this plan. So, actually, you mail a letter on Wednesday or a bill on Wednesday, it won't get there until the next Monday. They will drive more people to use the services that have cut into their revenues. But some people don't have that option, and some things are essential to commerce in this country. There are many, many businesses that will be affected by these delays, and in addition to the delays of prescription drugs or Netflix, mailing DVDs, or, you know, people buying things on eBay, Amazon.com--these things will flood over to UPS and to FedEx and further undermine their revenues. This guy, this so-called Postmaster General, should be fired because of a lack of any imagination or initiative in proposing the death knell for the great United States Postal Service. With 100,000 people laid off, oh, that's just what we need in America today. Let's lay off 100,000 people. Great idea. And then he's going to close local post offices. Let's talk about little Tiller, Oregon, in my district, 16 miles on a winding road subject to heavy rain, subject to black ice and snow in the wintertime to the next town, a generally elderly population and generally not very affluent. These sorts of closures, which will save minuscule amounts of money for the post office, are going to be death knell blows to small rural communities across America. Now, weekly periodicals: Get today's news next week, sometime. Yep, that's right, 7 to 9 days for your weekly periodicals. That's going to do a great thing for the remaining periodical industry. That's really, really special and, again, driving people to look for alternatives that will further undermine their revenues. I don't think there could be a more shortsighted proposal. Now, there's plenty of blame to go around because this Congress has failed to act. The Postal Service overpaid $7 billion into a Federal retirement account, but the Republicans are refusing to give the money back to the post office. They'd rather lay off 100,000 people. They think somehow the private sector will take this over. Tell me, who in the private sector is going to deliver a letter for 45 cents to a small rural community 40 miles from the nearest or 100 miles from the nearest sorting facility? That's not going to happen. These people will be deprived of any meaningful service. There are other critical reforms that could be undertaken short of dismantling, killing the United States Postal Service. If these proposals go forward and if this Congress continues to fail to act, and this guy gets to continue to put in place his dyspeptic vision of a future for the Postal Service--and the White House continues to be totally silent, absent from this debate, as they are so many--we will no longer have a United States Postal Service in this country. That would be an incredible blow to our economy, to our future, and to the prestige of the United States of America. I guess we'll become the first developed nation on Earth without a postal service, just like we're the only developed industrial nation on Earth without universal health care. We're the best.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I agree, let's do something meaningful to put America back to work. Let's put millions to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. The Speaker promised us we'd do that this month, the Republicans would bring a surface transportation bill to the House, and they said no, can't figure out how to pay for it. It's more important to continue tax cuts for the rich. Now, with millions unemployed, can't find jobs, the Republicans want to jerk their lifeline. They want to kill off extended unemployment benefits. To do what? Preserve tax cuts for the rich, the job creators. Ah, they're doing a heck of a job creating jobs, aren't they? This is the discredited theory of trickle-down economics. America's unemployed are being trickled on, and it stinks.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman, and I particularly want to thank Mr. Goodlatte for his extraordinary leadership on this issue. We both supported a virtually identical amendment in 1995. Now, when I first came to Congress, I did not support a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I said things similar to my good friend and colleague Mr. Neal from Massachusetts: It's a gimmick. We don't need it. People will come together. We can make these decisions. It didn't take me long in observing the Congress to realize that there's an infinite capacity in this Congress to kick the can down the road. And the problem is that can's getting pretty darn heavy to kick down the road, and it's going to land on the next generation with full force--$15 trillion of debt. For the first time since World War II, this year our deficit exceeds the gross domestic product. Now, we're going to have to force people to make tough decisions. That's a conclusion I came to when I changed and I supported the amendment back in the mid-nineties. Now, just think about it. It passed the House, failed by one vote in the Senate. And had that become the law of the land, today we would be paying down the last of the debt. We might still be in this hole economically that we're in, but we would actually then perhaps have the capacity and the will to go out and borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars to rebuild the Nation's crumbling infrastructure. We could afford it. But in this environment with this amount of debt, that's a very tough sell around here. This is an honest balanced budget amendment. It does not prejudice the debate between taxes--and there are many on that side who object to any new taxes or revenue--and spending cuts--and there are many on my side who object to many spending cuts. It does not discriminate. It's fair. It's evenhanded. There were many on the Republican side who preferred one that would have tied the hands of Congress, said, No, you need a 66 percent vote to have taxes; no, you have to be limited to 18 percent of GDP. But, no, they brought forward something that is fair, and it would be something that would force Members of Congress and future Members of Congress to make the tough decisions that we have to make. A lot of talk about Social Security. I'm an expert on Social Security. Social Security is the largest creditor of the United States of America, $2.66 trillion. We have to have the capability to redeem that debt to pay future Social Security benefits in the not-distant future when we have to draw on what's called a trust fund. It's not a trust fund. It's government bonds. It's debt. And if we keep adding to the pile of debt, will we have the capability to repay those Social Security bonds? And there's a long-term problem with Social Security. I have a bill to fix that. Lift the cap on wages. I didn't notice that--many on my side have been down here carrying on about the attack on Social Security in this bill; they're not on my bill. Because that's a tough thing to say, we're going to make people over 250 pay the same amount of tax as people who earn less than 250. That's a solution long term. But short term we've got to worry about being able to redeem those bonds and pay promised benefits of Social Security. And then a lot of talk about the debt limit. Well, when we're in balance, you're going to have to have a 60 percent vote to deficit spend, and you would need a 60 percent vote for an increase on the debt limit. I would say that they could be done at exactly the same time. It requires the same number of votes. Is someone going to vote today to say we're in balance, to vote in deficit to deal with the economic situation today, perhaps to fund infrastructure investments, and then vote later on today against raising the debt limit by that same amount? That would just vitiate their earlier vote. So I don't think that that's a real threat. If you vote ``no,'' you're assuming that we have an infinite capacity to borrow money to pass on to future generations and still meet our obligations to the American people. I don't believe that. We need limits. We need to be forced to make tough decisions, and this would force future Congresses to make those tough decisions.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Eight days until the so-called supercommittee is to report. They're limping toward failure; although perhaps now they've found the way Washington always loves to do things--let's kick the can down the road. Let's pretend we did it. Let's say we'll adopt some future tax measures in the next 12 months that will get us to their rather modest goal of $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction over 10 years. I tell you what, the do-nothing option is starting to look a lot better. Now, that's something that Congress is really good at doing-- nothing. So what happens if we do nothing? Well, first you get the sequestration. There's much gnashing of teeth about that. But Congress will have discretion within accounts, within the Defense Department and elsewhere to find those cuts, which would be relatively modest over a 10-year period. But then the better thing with the do-nothing option is if Congress really, really can do nothing and continues to do nothing for the rest of this session, then all the Bush tax cuts go away and that means $4 trillion of additional revenues with a little bit of shared sacrifice. It hits the people at the top mostly, takes them back to the Clinton-era rates of taxes. That's without closing tax loops and going through all that. Just let the Bush tax cuts expire; that would take care of 40 percent of the deficit problem over the next 10 years. Add in the sequestration from the failure of the committee another 1.2, plus the 1.3 we passed last summer, suddenly we're up to 67-70 percent of the projected deficit. That's pretty much what we need to do around here. And you can do it in an honest way, which is with revenues and spending reductions. That's how we balanced the budget in the 1990s. You can't do it all with just stopping cuts. Stop pretending that that'll work. It won't work. Now, there'll be much gnashing of teeth, particularly on Wall Street, about oh, Congress can't get things done, and we're worried. And the crooks are the unindicted co-conspirators at the ratings agencies. The same people who rated designed-to-fail mortgage collateralized debt obligations as AAA-plus investments are now concerned about the government of the United States and how it conducts itself in its honesty and dealing with these difficult problems. Well, you know, maybe they should take a look at the do-nothing option, too. If they're really concerned about debt reduction, the do-nothing option is the best. And then finally this week, Congress will have a chance to vote on a balanced budget amendment, the same one that passed in 1995. Let's think of what the world would look like today if the one that passed the House in 1995 had become the law of the land. We wouldn't have had 10 years of Bush tax cuts at a cost of $5 trillion of new debt and no jobs. We wouldn't have had the wars fought on the credit card. We would have had to vote every year because we didn't declare war, and under this balanced budget amendment if you don't declare war and you have an overseas emergency, you have to vote every year on the spending. Maybe we wouldn't have spent those many hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. And, finally, the prescription drug benefit designed to subsidize the pharmaceutical industry with borrowed money and that gives seniors a donut hole, we wouldn't have had that either. Now, I have liberal friends over here who say: Oh, we can't have a balanced budget amendment. That would be horrible. Well, just think, if those things hadn't happened and we didn't have $14 trillion of debt today, wouldn't we be in a place to make the investments we need to put America back to work and not burdening our kids with a mountain of debt? Think about it. A balanced budget amendment works both ways. This one's honest. It doesn't say supermajority for taxes. It doesn't say supermajority for cuts. It says you figure it out. You were elected, you figure it out. And do it in a way that both builds a country with a sustainable economy and gives us a financial future that isn't a huge burden to our kids.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I asked to have the reading suspended because I want to expedite things. I listened to the debate over the previous motion to reconsider. I'd just like to address a couple of points in advance. This will not delay the bill. In fact, if we adopt this motion by voice vote, we can move directly on to passage of the legislation, which I believe enjoys broad bipartisan support. Now, I know we all have tremendous pride of authorship in legislation we write or we move to the floor, and that's to be understood, but sometimes bills are not quite perfect. And I would look at this amendment, which narrows the scope of the bill, that is, it says basically that we're opening up a new way for small business and other undertakings to offer a share of stock in their business to the public in order to raise capital and grow and employ folks. That's great, and I think everybody here supports that. However, I think that we should adopt one minor restriction to that, one that would narrow the scope of the bill, and it's quite simple. It just says that these new rules apply to everyone, except for persons who have been convicted of fraud in connection with a financial transaction, including predatory lending to a veteran. Now, it seems to me that there should be unanimous support for that. We want to open up this new vehicle for small businesses and others to gain investors, but we certainly don't want to open it up to people convicted of fraud in connection with a financial transaction or predatory lending to a veteran. In fact, I'd just sort of poll the House here and ask: Does anybody think that we should allow those who were convicted of fraud or predatory lending be allowed to engage in this? If so, raise your hand. Okay. I don't see anyone raising their hand, so I would hope that we can move along very quickly to this amendment and adopt it by voice vote. It is narrowing the scope, it's a commonsense amendment, and it just addresses the potential for abuse for those who have a proven record of fraud due to conviction. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I am in its current form.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership on this issue over almost a couple of decades. It's been a long struggle. I hope the time is here. I was one of 73 Democrats in 1995 to support a balanced budget amendment which was basically silent on the issue of whether we would get there with additional revenues and reforms that would raise revenues, or with spending cuts, or a combination of both. Ultimately, in the nineties, by a combination of revenue increases and reforms and spending cuts, we did reach a balance in the year 2000, and actually paid down debt. And had we passed that amendment in 1995, we wouldn't be looking at a $14-plus trillion mountain of debt today. As the gentleman before me spoke, that's not the legacy that I want to leave to our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, given the magnitude of that debt. We have a responsibility to act, and anyone who is observing Washington these days can see that it's hard, it's really hard for Congress to come together and decide on issues that are extraordinarily important to our Nation. We really need a little bit of forced discipline, I would say; and that's the way I look at a balanced budget amendment, that H.J. Res. 2 would force us over a relatively short period of time to make very difficult decisions on, yes, the potential for revenue increases or spending cuts with virtually everything on the table to get to a mandatory balance of the budget within a short period of time. Then to begin to pay down the debt, which will take, if we aren't running surpluses and we merely balance the budget into the future, including our payments of interest and principal on the debt, it will be some 30 years before our country could be debt free. But that would at least be a point in time in which we knew that our grandkids and others to follow would not be inheriting that debt. So I'm very hopeful that when we have a vote some time, I understand, perhaps in the next month, that we have an opportunity to bring up what I believe is the version of the balanced budget amendment, most likely to be able to engender a majority as it did in 1995, and that would be H.J. Res. 2. With that, I thank the gentleman for the time, and I look forward to continuing to work with his leadership on this issue.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Chair, in December 2008 an impoundment holding disposed ash waste generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority broke open, creating a massive spill in Kingston, TN. The spill covered the surrounding land and Clinch River with one billion gallons of coal fly ash, displaced residents, and resulted in $1.2 billion in cleanup costs. The accident underscored the need for rules to ensure structural stability and safety of coal ash impoundments. In response, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first- ever regulations to ensure the safe disposal and management of coal ash from coal-fired power plants under the nation's primary law for regulating solid waste, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, RCRA. In June 2010, the EPA presented two regulatory options: regulating coal ash as hazardous waste under Subtitle C or regulating coal ash as a non-hazardous waste under Subtitle D. The EPA has not established a deadline for the final rule. I have serious concerns that designating fly ash as a hazardous material, the result of regulating coal ash under Subtitle C, could have major impacts on the recycling and reuse of fly ash to manufacture wallboard, roofing materials and bricks, and especially concrete. In 2008 alone, the concrete industry used 15.8 million tons of fly ash in the manufacturing of ready mixed concrete making it the most widely used supplemental cementing material. When combined with cement, fly ash improves the durability, strength, constructability, and economy of concrete. It also has huge environmental benefits. Using coal ash--and industrial byproduct--in concrete results in longer lasting structures and reduction in the amount of waste materials sent to landfills, raw materials extracted, energy required for production, and air emissions, including carbon dioxide. A ``hazardous'' designation of fly ash could put these benefits in jeopardy. It could make fly ash storage and transportation more expensive, and create a legal environment that would deter cement manufacturers from recycling fly ash in cement production. The result would not only be devastating for the cement manufacturing industry and American jobs, it could also divert millions of tons of coal fly ash from beneficial uses to surface impoundments like the one that broke open in Kingston, Tennessee. For these reasons, my preference is for EPA to regulate fly ash under Subtitle D of the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act. This would ensure we have strong regulations for surface impoundments of coal ash needed to protect public health and the environment without inhibiting the recycling and reuse of coal fly ash. It is also for these reasons that I am supporting H.R. 2273. The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act is not a perfect bill. In fact, this bill could have been much simpler and likely noncontroversial if my Republican colleagues had just legislated Subtitle D of RCRA. It is my hope that the U.S. Senate will take this more targeted approach. Nonetheless, H.R. 2273 does clarify that coal fly ash should not be regulated as a hazardous waste and establishes minimum state disposal requirements. In my state, this would mean the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality would develop appropriate rules for the handling of coal fly ash for the only coal plant in the state--PGE's Boardman Power Plant--and for the many Ready Mix Producers throughout Oregon that use coal fly ash as a necessary ingredient in the manufacturing of concrete. I support strong regulations for the disposal and storage of coal ash. But, these regulations can and should be completed without jeopardizing the recycling and reuse of fly ash. By voting for H.R. 2273, I am voting in favor of moving forward with regulation and providing the EPA with needed direction.