Artur Davis

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, a number of us believe that there is no finer orator in the House than my friend from Indiana who runs the Republican Study Committee. I wish he were still here because I was struck by some words he used. He said that this was the toughest budget since Reagan. He said that we were in very tough times and this budget was laden with tough choices. Where my good friend and my very eloquent friend from Indiana was mistaken is who are we tough on. If this was truly the toughest budget in 20 years, if it had sacrifice all across the board, there would be support for it from the more conservative Members on this side of the aisle. If this were truly a budget that made tough choices and directed those choices at all of our people and not some of our people, there would be significant support for it from the conservative side of this aisle. There is a reason why there is not. Because it is not tough on everybody. The average person, Mr. Speaker, earning over $1 million a year, the people who will benefit so handsomely from the President's tax cuts, will get a tax cut this April 15 of $103,000. You could lower that number to $90,000, Mr. Speaker, and recoup every single Medicaid cut that is made. And I am sure my friends on the other side will say, well, yes, we need to cut Medicaid. Understand who goes on Medicaid. It is not the people who are sitting in this Chamber or our families. It is people who are crushed at the poverty line or near the poverty line. They are the ones whose wages have been frozen. This budget would make them, 13 million of them, pay more than they do today for the cost of Medicare. And it is projected it would put 60,000 of them off the Medicaid rolls all together. The one word we have not heard in this debate, and it ought to inform it, is not just the word ``tough'' but the word ``fair.''

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding to me. That cut was from $103,000 to $90,000.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. It is still a tax cut, and it would yield approximately $2.6 billion, enough to recoup the Medicaid cuts. And I make that point, Mr. Ford, simply because last night we heard the President tell us that we are all bound together in this long twilight struggle against terrorists around the world. And if we are all bound together to face terrorists around the world, it is very interesting that a day later we sever a lot of those bonds when it comes to whether we care about education or whether we care about health care. The President had it right last night. Either we are connected to each other or we are not. And that is where this budget is so wrong.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Conyers for yielding to me. Mr. Conyers, you mentioned that I was born in Montgomery. Coretta Scott King was born in Marion, which is in the heart of my Congressional District. I am honored to stand here today as the person who still represents some of her family in the State of Alabama. I only met her once as a younger Member of this institution and as someone who was not around to participate in the glorious days of the movement. I only met her once, at a Congressional Black Caucus in 2002. And I was a little bit in awe of her, Mr. Conyers, because when you grow up in the State of Alabama, Coretta Scott King is a heroine, and she has a very, very special place all over this country. There are two things I want to say about her today. When she was born in Marion in 1929, she could not have conceived, her parents could not have conceived, and as she grew into young womanhood, she could not have conceived that the person who represented her City of Marion would one day be an African American. That would not have crossed her mind. And when she formed her partnership with Martin Luther King, they had all kinds of dreams for this country. I wonder if they ever anticipated that they would accomplish the things that they did, the holiday, the King Center, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. They were big dreamers, but I do not know if they could even have seen those things. So that is the first aspect of Coretta Scott King that we are to acknowledge today, that she had an opportunity to see her South and her country transformed in ways that were inconceivable, and she lived to see it. She lived to tell about it. She lived to appreciate it and to breathe it. The second point that I want to make is, every time I saw her on television as a young man, every time I saw her, I was always struck by the power of her quiet dignity, and I mention that, Mr. Speaker, because we live in an age where sometimes our side thinks we have to outshout the other side, they think they have to outshout our side. What this wonderful women appreciated is that there is a power and a force to quiet, persuasive argument. And she kept updating the legacy. In the 1980s it meant arguing against apartheid, and then arguing against the ugly rise of southern conservatism. It meant in the 1990s arguing for fair welfare policies. In the early 21st century it meant arguing for more enlightened policy around the world. She kept updating the legacy, and as she kept updating the legacy she freshened it and she put her own touch on it. I conclude with just that observation. My colleague from Ohio was so right. My colleague from the District was so right. This woman was not a backstage figure, she was a co-anchor and a co-pillar of this movement. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney).

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Colorado for yielding. Let me first begin by congratulating my friend from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) for what he has done in the last several years, and I thank my friend from New Jersey for letting me walk just a short stem of this path with you. You asked me a couple of years ago to join you as the lead Democratic sponsor on this bill, but let the record very clearly reflect that way before that this was a cause of yours. It was something you believed in very strongly, and I thank you for your persistence, and I thank you for your courage on this issue. Let me just say a couple of things. First of all, I want to thank our colleagues in the Senate. As the gentleman from New Jersey just said, initially, there was a reluctance to move this bill in the Senate, not because of any doubts about the substance of the bill. This bill has been the classic example of uncontroversial legislation, but there were some in the Senate who believed that this bill should not be given a vote unless the stem cell bill was given a vote. I understood the force of their argument. I voted for the stem cell bill on this side. I understood the political analysis they were making, but every now and then, this Chamber gets to do something that shines beyond politics. Every now and then, this Chamber gets to find something that we can give the American people that does not admit to a liberal or conservative or Democrat or Republican level, and in the last 24 hours, that happened. So I thank Senator Harkin and I thank Senator Reid for deciding to take the politics out of this issue, on our side of the aisle, Democratic side. I thank them for letting this bill come to a vote, and this is a good Christmas present to give to many families around this country who have the tragedy of sickle cell anemia, who have the tragedy of diabetes in their family and who count on some look to science to improve it. The final point that I will make, I will pick up on what my friend, the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette), said. I happen to think that God gave us the power of genius for a reason. God gave us the power of genius to somehow close the gap between this imperfect world and what we could be. This is an example of that power of genius being used to save lives. I agree with her that stem cell research is an example of the power of genius. So I simply say in conclusion, this is what happens when we find a paradigm, a way of talking about issues that cuts us out of the crisscross of politics. This is good legislation. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for working with me on it and urge the Members of this House to pass it.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, let me thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis) for yielding. Let me thank my colleague from the State of Alabama (Mr. Rogers) for introducing this resolution and for his comments on the floor today. And let me thank the leadership for bringing the resolution to the floor in such a timely and expeditious fashion. We have just finished a month-long commemorative period around Rosa Parks. Mr. Speaker, we started with the events after her death and we, in effect, culminate, at least the Congress's part of this culmination today with this resolution. And between last week, the President signed a resolution that will allow Rosa Parks to take her rightful place in Statuary Hall. And as we end this commemorative period, I simply want to make a couple of observations about what it is that we honor. The first is that we honor a community today. The countless anonymous number of African Americans who lived in Montgomery in 1955 included my mother and grandmother, included numerous other people who made their statement to history, and it is a statement that has lasted and will last for all time by the very act of perseverance. My grandmother used to always tell the story that the hardest time of the boycott was in the summer, because in Montgomery it never gets very cold, but it can get very hot. And in the summer, a lot of black people in 1955 did not have a lot of money and they could not afford air conditioning in the car. They could not afford to fix the air conditioning, so the carpools could be very uncomfortable. Another thing that made the summer uncomfortable was that the boys were out of school, so the little boys who wanted to stand on the side of the road and jeer the boycotters and the blacks of that community, they had nothing else to do during June and July and August. So she always said the summer was the worst time. But what made that community so special is that it persevered, and that community chose dignity over comfort. The comfortable thing would have been to end the boycott after making a symbolic statement. The comfortable thing would have been to end the boycott because of the strain of carrying it forward. The dignified thing was to keep going and to keep asserting their rights. So we honor their community today. And we do one other thing that is worth noting. We recognize that this history is not simply a story of black people of one race triumphing in this country as a story of us triumphing together, because in 1955, a white person in Montgomery, Alabama was not free either because a white person in Montgomery, Alabama had to build a code of conduct around not what was in his or her heart, but around what was written in the city ordinance. A white person in the south was not free in 1955 because he or she was bound by the color code of prejudice and the legal code of segregation. Well, all of a sudden, after this assertion of dignity, white people became free too, to have a mindset, to have a sentiment that was not simply based on prejudice. So here we stand 50 years later with an appropriately uncontroversial resolution, with southern Democrats and southern Republicans standing together to offer it. But the final thing that I say today, Mr. Speaker, is as we end this commemorative period and we put the statute in the hall and we pass the resolutions and we close this year down, we close the 50th anniversary down, it is not enough to honor this legacy by passing resolutions. And as we move into the second half of the 109th Congress, may we honor it by being true to this spirit. May we honor it by being true to the notion that there are no marginalized people in this country. If we marginalize and leave behind people, we somehow sacrifice all of our dignity. May we honor Rosa Parks by remembering that all of us have a place. If we are to have a country that is true, there is an agenda and there is a space for every one of God's children. If we can honor that, then Rosa Parks will have left a legacy that will endure for the ages and one that will lift the spirits and the imaginations of all kind of people all over this globe.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) for yielding. I am honored as always to be here with my colleague from Florida and my colleague from Ohio to talk about what is an enormously important vote on the floor of the House this week. I thank the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) at the outset for exposing one of the great myths behind this vote. As you know, there is a requirement that when we introduce bills in the House that we label the legislation, that we give it a title that is supposed to be roughly descriptive of the purpose of the bill. So we are told, well, this is a deficit reduction act, and I thank the gentlewoman for laying bare that myth. When we finish with the tax cuts that are still being contemplated, dividend tax cuts, for example, in the next several weeks, and we do the simple math, our deficit will be worse than it is today. This is not a Deficit Reduction Act. Something very different is at stake. This is not about cutting spending, it is not about saving the government money; it is about a different set of values being in the saddle. All of us who are here have been in the Congress fairly recently. Mr. Ryan, Mr. Meek and I came here in 2003, and you joined us this year. We all came with this notion that we stood for a particular set of values about government. One of the values that we most deeply believe in is the idea of obligation, of strong people to weak people, of people who are in one place in society, being related and connected to people in a very different place in society. A lot of us ran on that, a lot of us talked about that. As strongly as we believe in our party, we hope that those just aren't partisan values. We hope that those are values that are shared all across this aisle, in the center, left and the right, the Democratic and the Republican side. But what is sad about this week is that a very different set of values are now in the saddle. You touched on some of them, but they are very much worth underscoring: 300,000 families in this country who are getting food stamps. If the majority has its way, those 300,000 people will lose their food stamps, not because they have committed fraud, not because their income status has changed in the last several years, not because they have been shown to not need food stamps but simply because a different set of values are in the saddle. You talked about, or you touched upon the question of child support. If the majority has its way, the Federal Government will walk away from a bipartisan commitment to help States go out and find deadbeat dads and enforce the laws that require people who have children to be responsible for them. We will see a party that styles itself as the party of family values walk away from that commitment. Again, it is not because of saving money, it is because a different set of values are in the saddle. You talked about Medicaid. For the first time, if the majority has its way, working-class and poor families will have to pay a premium and a copay for their children, who are very poor, to go to the doctor. When we came here, both parties believed that if you are very poor in this society, then your kids are entitled to health care, and, yes, that is a social obligation that we owe to people who are struggling. Now a different set of values are in the saddle, and we are told they have to make a copay. You touched on another basic matter. People who are legal immigrants, not illegal, not people who violate some immigration law to come here, but all those people who come here, played by the rules and have been naturalized as U.S. citizens, but have not yet shared in the bounty and prosperity of this country. Right now, most of them are allowed to receive food stamps. If the majority has its way, 20- to 30,000 of those people who are eligible will lose that eligibility, again, not to save money, but because a different set of values are in the saddle. To make a basic point about the food stamps provision in this reconciliation bill, $800,000, the 300,000 families will be shaved off the food stamp rolls, that adds up to about $844 million. $840 million in a $3.7 trillion discretionary budget is about one-sixteenth of 1 percent. That is worth almost nothing to the U.S. Treasury, but it is the margin of survival that means almost everything to these families. We could go on, issue after issue. The value of the money that will be saved will be offset by tax cuts or is altogether insignificant. But the impact of those cuts is devastating to people who are watching us right now.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I absolutely concur with that point. There are two points that we will have to make constantly over the next 48 hours. This is not just about altruism. I wish that we could convince our friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle just by saying it is wrong to single out the children of poor people for sacrifice. I wish we could convince them that this budget just has the wrong set of priorities on moral grounds. The reality is there is another equally compelling set of arguments we will have to appeal to, and it is the notion of our own economic self-interest. We already are a country where the gap between skilled and unskilled workers is a high one. We are already a country where the gap between children who are successful and children who are underperforming is a high one. We are already a country that builds all kinds of walls between our own people, and that is not good for our economy. It makes us less productive than we ought to be. It makes us less prosperous than we ought to be as a nation. But we can only close these gaps if we empower more of our people. That is very much what is at stake as we contemplate this vote in the next several days, two different visions.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, let me touch on the point the gentlewoman just made about faith. All of us were told different things and were given dictates by our faith. But one very universal view across all denominations that we know is this idea that you do not start sacrifices with the most vulnerable of our people. You do not ask the weakest of our people to be the first to give. You try to bring some moral foundation of equity to all that you do. Those are notions that ring across every denomination, and indeed nondenominations that still have ethical values in this world. What is striking about this budget reconciliation is that it is the first major government document that I have seen that says, let us ask the first people to sacrifice to be what Matthew would call ``the least of these.'' Let us ask the first people to sacrifice to be the weakest of our people. This is something that is fundamentally wrong and, again, it is at the heart of this debate. A lot of us in this Chamber would be open to a discussion about fiscal discipline. We would be open to a discussion about budget cuts. We would be open to a discussion about shared responsibility, but only if it ran across all lines. This is as powerful a point as I think we can make in the next several days. We are not asking our children to sacrifice. We are not asking the children of the people who go to our fund-raisers to sacrifice. We are asking the children of the people who cannot get in our fund-raisers because they cannot give $250 or $1,000 a head. We are asking the children of people who will never walk inside this Chamber or be able to spend a million dollars every 2 years to find a way to get here. We are asking the people who are doing the work in our country, the people who are waiting on the tables, the people who are driving the trucks, the people who are bearing a lot of the labor. We are saying to them, yes, your children may be on Medicaid, but we can save some money if we pare back our responsibility to them. Yes, your kid may need a student loan, but we can pare back some money. We can save some money if we cut and limit our responsibility to them. I think that this is wrong. The final point that I will make before I yield is this one. We have an obligation to talk about this debate in terms of right and wrong this week. This is not simply a matter of different political theories. It is not a matter of different economic theories. It is about a different value set. Some of us who have heard the word ``value'' used so freely in this Chamber, some of us who have heard the word ``value'' used so freely to label and to exclude and to stigmatize, well, this is about values. Even Abraham sacrificed his own children, not the children of others. So that is front and center for this vote. Mr. Speaker, I will certainly yield to the gentleman from Ohio to discuss something that is on our minds this week. How can we make this case to our colleagues, because I believe, as all of you believe that our colleagues that are in this Chamber are not hard-hearted, mean or evil people who just want to hurt folks? How do we find some way to make the case to them that what we are on the verge of doing violates every value that we have as Americans and violates every sense of connection that we have?

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to enter into the Congressional Record a special tribute to Mrs. Willie Jean Youngblood in honor of her 90th birthday. Mrs. Youngblood was born on November 7, 1915 in Bullock County, AL, and was the third of eight children of the late Cleveland and Julia Dennis. She later married Monroe Youngblood, a construction worker, of Bullock County. In search of better opportunities, the couple moved to Birmingham where they raised eight children. Mrs. Youngblood earned a living as a cook at the Thomasine Cafe and a service worker at the historic Tutwiler Hotel. Mrs. Youngblood was a nurturing mentor for young mothers in her community. The Youngblood home was also the gathering place for many young children in the community, including the current mayor of the city of Birmingham, the Honorable Bernard Kincaid. While Mrs. Youngblood may not have had an abundance of material wealth, she passed on a wealth of love and hope to her children and her community. May God bless Mrs. Youngblood and her family on her 90th birthday and for many years to come.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for letting me claim the time for my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), who I trust will join us tonight. Mr. Speaker, several of my colleagues have gathered to honor an individual who was one of the legendary Americans of the last century. She was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most significant people of that century. She was honored by President Clinton as a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she has been honored by numerous organizations all over this world and all over this country. Her name was Rosa Parks. She was, of course, an icon of the South, an icon of the country, and she was called home to her maker just last week. She will have two memorial services. One we understand will be in Detroit, Michigan next Wednesday, one in Montgomery, Alabama, this coming Sunday. Two communities, Montgomery and Detroit, will do their best to make a statement on behalf of this extraordinary woman; and I thank the House for giving us this hour to speak to her role tonight. I wanted to begin by hearkening, if I can, back to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. Montgomery, Alabama, happens to be the city where I was born in 1967, it happens to be the city where my mother was born, and my grandmother came to that city in 1931. I still remember them telling me what it was like to sit at the back of the bus. As those who know history remember, that was not simply a Montgomery phenomenon; it was a Southern phenomenon. The practice of making black Americans sit in a certain place in the bus, the practice of making them yield their seat was carried on in a number of Southern cities; but I remember hearing the stories about Montgomery. My mother and my grandmother never liked the stigma of segregation. They were not happy about it. But, like so many people their age and generation, they just took it as being part of the overlay over the land. They just took it as being part of the atmosphere of living in the South. And, like so many other people, they went on about their business, hoping for a better world, but not knowing when or if it would come. And then all of a sudden this extraordinary woman named Rosa Parks, who was in her mid-40s at that time, decided that she would rise up and say ``no'' to this system of segregation. One day in late 1954, she resisted the order, she resisted the command to get up and to yield her seat. The world has never turned back from that moment. All of a sudden, people like my mother and grandmother were freed. But the interesting thing is that white Americans and white Montgomerians were freed as well, because all of a sudden, from that day forward, or maybe, more accurately, from the day that the moment succeeded and won concessions from the white power structure in Montgomery, we reached a point where people were free to sit together. That might seem like a quaint thing to those of us in 2005, but the sitting together led to talking together, led to reasoning together, and led to people accommodating each other. It led to people one day getting to the point that they could understand and build one solid and one stable community. That was the legacy of Rosa Parks. As a number of my colleagues will point out tonight, we would do well if we understood exactly why segregation thrived for so long and what it was meant to do. It was never just meant to be a symbol. It was never just meant to be a code of laws; it was meant to be a stigma. It was meant to say to a certain group of people, you are not like the rest of us. You are not like us. You are different. You are worse than we are. It was meant to confer a badge of inferiority. And I think that the hope of segregationists, the hope of the supremacists was that these people who were being stigmatized might slowly but surely lose their confidence and slowly but surely buy into all the myths and all the hatred about them. That is why segregation thrived for so long. Well, when Rosa Parks stood up by sitting down, when Rosa Parks refused to move, it was a triumph of the human spirit. It was a triumph of all people who yearn for some measure of freedom and dignity in their lives. I hearken back to the last conversation, Mr. Speaker, the Special Order that happened before this. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle talked about the adventure in Iraq right now and talked about the dawning of freedom in that territory. I am reminded how recent is that experience in this country. As we go around the world speaking on behalf of freedom, I am reminded tonight of how fresh and how recent is that experience here. I think we ought to speak to another woman: Vivian Malone Jones. Vivian Malone Jones was another trailblazer like Rosa Parks. At the age of 20, she was the first African American to attend the University of Alabama and to stay there, and, at the age of 23, she was the first African American to graduate. It so happens the incredible irony of history that she died last week at the young age of 63. I remember going on campus at the University of Alabama just last week to speak at a memorial service for her and to see students, black and white, people from the power structure of Tuscaloosa, people from all over Tuscaloosa gathering together to honor her sacrifice. I am reminded, Mr. Speaker, of a cover of Newsweek Magazine in 1963. It showed Vivian Malone Jones, who was a very beautiful young woman, it showed her standing there on the campus, and beneath her image was the anonymous quote: ``We owe them and we owe ourselves a better country.'' Mr. Speaker, I would submit that the Vivian Malone Joneses and the Rosa Parkses, what made them such icons, what makes them icons to us now, is the fact that they challenged us. They made us believe that we owed them a better country, and they also made us believe that we owed ourselves a better country. One of the last points that I will make tonight is that there ought to be a challenge in this for us, because not only do we owe their successors a better country, we owe the people who are wounded in America, who are coming back from Iraq, a better country. We owe the people who are working every single day, striving to earn a living and falling just short of the water's edge, we owe them a better country. We owe the children who are sliding into poverty in this country a better country and a better vision. That is what we have to understand. This legacy of civil rights, this history of individuals rising above oppression and segregation is a long-running theme in human history. The story of people standing up against oppressive systems and asserting their dignity is a long-running theme in human history. It is a theme of courage, and it is a uniquely American theme. So as I prepare to yield to some of my colleagues tonight, I will simply make these two final points. I am very proud to be from Montgomery, Alabama, very proud to be a son of this modern South, because every day that we build bridges of reconciliation, we pay our own tribute to Rosa Parks. Every day that we find a way to exist across racial lines, every day that we find a way to transcend new boundaries, every day that we find a way to make better the lives of all the people who live in our community, we pay a silent tribute to Rosa Parks and to Vivian Malone Jones, and we ought to remember that. The final point that I will make is simply, once again, to talk about the power of individual choice. I heard one of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about the enormous courage of our soldiers in Iraq, and it is such a thing that inspires us, their courage. Well, there is a common theme between what they do and what Rosa Parks did. It is believing that there is a higher cause that can sustain you, just as our soldiers believe when they get up every morning and face the bunkers and the missiles and the grenades, they believe that there is a higher cause that can sustain them. So did Rosa Parks. When she sat on that bus, she believed that there was something beyond her mortal existence, and that moved her. The last thing I say today is that our country can be moved if we simply understand the power of individuals asserting their dignity, if we put enough of a foundation beneath them so that they can live their destinies. With that said, I am very happy to turn over the management of this Special Order to my colleague, John Conyers from Michigan, who employed Rosa Parks for a number of years, someone who was a friend of hers, and someone who has been an advocate for many years now, almost 40 years now, in this Chamber for so many progressive causes.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, one of the goals of this bill is to stimulate affordable housing activity on the part of the GSEs in certain categories and areas that traditionally have been underserved, and one of those happens to be the rural portions of America. There have been various goals that have been added that will require the GSEs to be more proactive in their lending in rural America. The concern that I have with the underlying bill is that the definition of ``rural'' that has been adopted is one that is, number one, very different from the definition that has historically been used by the Congress beginning with the Housing Act of 1949; and, second of all, I think it is one that is unduly restrictive. The new definition would define ``rural'' as being, among other things, nonmetro areas. As many of us in this Chamber know, ``metro area'' is very broadly defined in this country, and a number of areas that we would all think of as being rural, that we would all view as being within the ambit of this bill, would certainly fall inside metro areas and thus be excluded from the purview of this bill, and would be excluded from the definition of ``rural.'' So what our amendment, which I believe to be noncontroversial, would do would be to return to the traditional definition of ``rural'' that is contained in the Housing Act of 1949. That definition again is one that has long been accepted and long employed by this body. I should also note, Mr. Chairman, that we would retain some of the changes made in the substantive bill which would talk about micropolitan and tribal trust lands. Those would be included in the new definition, but we would return to the traditional definition that has been employed since 1949. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for his compliments.

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

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a tribute to Vivian Malone Jones. It is my generation's tragedy that so few of us knew the name of Vivian Malone Jones. It is a cruel twist of history that George Wallace's ``stand in the schoolhouse door'' is itself a vivid memory but that the protagonists of the event--the ones being stood against-- were off site and out of view. Vivian Malone Jones died too young last week at age 63. In prose, she was the first black American to earn a degree from the University of Alabama. In poetry, she was proof of the power of dignified commitment, and was a trailblazer to young black women my mother's age, whose own dreams seemed more attainable when they contemplated her boldness. Part of Jones' current anonymity was based on the choice she made to forge a conventional career as a government employee, rather than as a traveling icon of the civil rights era. She did not frequent the reenactments, the marches, or the annual seminars revisiting the sixties, and I never recall her weighing in on whether the war in Iraq was unjust or whether a Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed. But these choices of when and where to cast her influence were hers, and they were noble and worthy of respect. And the value Vivian Malone Jones put on respecting choices meant that I never heard her offer those facile denigrations of the caliber of this generation's African American leaders. My last memory of Jones is the Newsweek cover the week she registered at the University of Alabama. The cover featured the unattributed quote, ``We owe them--and we owe ourselves--a better country.'' It was so true, for Jones and her cohorts, and it is so true, for the children of poverty and depressed schools, for the working poor who are losing ground, and for the anonymous challengers to glass ceilings who are themselves broken for trying to climb to higher altitudes. Blessed are those whose courage moves us to make the ultimate commitments.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, because of my tremendous personal admiration and professional respect, I am particularly honored to rise today to introduce a resolution that gives tribute to Judge Myron Thompson's 25-year legacy of upholding the Constitution in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama--considered one of the most important courts of the American civil rights movement. Judge Thompson's tenure on the bench reflects years of honest, diligent, and fair jurisprudence. This resolution documents Judge Thompson's distinguished service to the federal judiciary, the people of Alabama, and to the United States. I am pleased to ask the House to express its gratitude to U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson. Judge Thompson was appointed to the Federal bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 after an already distinguished legal career. A product of Alabama's segregated public schools, he attended Yale University and proceeded directly to Yale Law School, after which, he returned to Alabama to work for the state Attorney General's Office. Judge Thompson went on to private practice, as the only African-American practitioner in Dothan, AL, his mother's hometown. He later became the founding director and Board Chair of the Legal Services Corporation of Alabama. Once appointed to the Court, Judge Thompson inherited some of the most significant cases in the Middle District. He addressed the needs of mentally-ill residents in the Wyatt case, upholding principles of humane treatment that have become part of the fabric of American law. He addressed the needs of workers, presiding over numerous employment discrimination cases involving, at times, the claims of hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. Judge Thompson's rulings in voting rights cases broadened the civic participation of Alabama's traditionally disenfranchised. In the Dillard case, Judge Thompson found the Alabama legislature culpable of racial discrimination in fashioning and authorizing at-large election schemes for local jurisdictions. As a result of Dillard, there have been African-American city council members, county commission members, and school board members elected in places where previously there had never been an African-American elected to public office. Judge Thompson upheld the Constitution's promise to insulate every citizen from inhumane conditions while in government custody by finding the conditions at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women unconstitutional and pervasively unsafe. These are just some of Judge Thompson's more significant cases. Judge Thompson's judicial career has thrust him to the forefront of many of the most pressing social and political controversies of the day. His compassion for the marginalized, love of learning, and knowledge of the law are reflected in his courage, insight, and sound judgment. We are fortunate to have Judge Thompson on the federal bench, and America has been a direct beneficiary of his extraordinary service. I ask the House to join me in endorsing this resolution of appreciation and commendation for the service of District Judge Myron Thompson.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a tribute to Mr. J. George Mitnick. Jasper, Alabama was not George Mitnick's first home--he was a Connecticut Yankee who migrated south--but Jasper was where George made his fortune and found his wife. Jasper is also a city that he shaped for over 5 decades: his footprints include the presidency of the local Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club; the Mitnick Wilderness Boot Camp for troubled teenagers; and of course, his role in founding Top Dollar, a retail chain of over 250 stores in 11 states. George Mitnick helped make modern Jasper, but what made George Mitnick, above all, was the days he spent as an army captain helping to liberate Nazis death camps. George was a committed Jew before he entered those camps, but the degradation that he saw there alerted him to an existential threat to his people, and to the capacity of humans to violate each other. Those camps never left George Mitnick's soul. They made him a vigilant defender of Israel's future and of American politicians who understood how essential Israel's future was to any vision of a just world. The death camps made him an activist--and I am honored that his activism led him to embrace my candidacy against a foe of Israel's aspirations. George was honored and humbled that his activism also made him AIPAC's ``Man of the Year'' in 2003. I think that those awful, wretched camps also made George understand his adopted home better. George lived in Alabama during the years when the racial cauldron was boiling, and Alabama's ill temper on race was one of the aspects of his new state that he most disdained. He was a quiet, but real, force for integration in Jasper. George also raised a daughter who raised a daughter who married a black man. His grandson- in-Iaw James, an African American, was one of George's pallbearers, and it is a measure of the Jasper that George help make that virtually no one stared at James' role. George's friends knew that tolerance was a Mitnick family value. On August 6, 2005, J. George Mitnick died at the age of 87. I thank George for his faith and his life and for the promises he kept. I hope that my tenure in Congress will honor the world and the state he wanted to build. May the God of Abraham bless George Mitnick and his surviving wife Willene.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Thank you for organizing this Special Order tonight. Because our time is limited, I want to make my remarks suitably brief. But I want to pick on something that has been a theme of what I have heard from a lot of my colleagues in the last several minutes. We have talked a lot, appropriately, about the question of national will in this country of ours, and I am reminded that several hours ago we passed a resolution on the floor honoring a woman named Rosa Parks who was a seamstress in the city I was born in, Montgomery, Alabama. When Rosa Parks made the decision to stand up by sitting down, by refusing to give up her seat on the bus, my grandmother was a 46-year- old woman who lived in Montgomery; my mother was a 12-year-old child. And they both vividly remember at times when they were escorted or asked to leave the front of the bus, to go to the back. And in that generation of Americans, there was a certain percentage of people who felt that, well, it is just the way it was. There was a certain percentage of people who felt that racial segregation, separating people based on color, was just in the fabric and the atmosphere of what we were as a country. And when the Rosa Parkses of the world asserted themselves, a lot of people dismissed their effort. A lot of people said that it is a quixotic venture. And here we are 50 years later with a whole lot of political power for this community, a whole lot of an ability to stand here and to talk about these kinds of questions. We are a long, long way from the Montgomery, Alabama that Rosa Parks and my mother and grandmother lived in. What has changed about that 50 years is our will changed as a country. Our sense of what we would and would not tolerate changed over a period of time, and that which seemed tolerable many years ago, all of a sudden came to be seen as intolerable. It is my sincerest hope, as a Member of this House, that when our time is long done, when the youngest of us here have left this body, that some group of Americans will look back and they will say that we managed to take these questions of poverty, impenetrable, cutting, wounding poverty, off the table, that we somehow managed to find a way to build enough of a net in this country that everyone who tries to build a family has a maximum opportunity to do it, that we managed to build enough of a net in this country that when anyone gets sick, that we find a way to give them a quality of care, that we found a way to build enough of a net in this country, so that if there is an ambition in our children, the ambition will always be rewarded. The hope that I have is that we will one day reach a point where these kinds of questions come off the table, just as the question of what side of the bus you can sit in came off the table. If we are going to get to that point, it will require a lot more than the reaction to Hurricane Katrina. It will require a lot more than the reaction to the Gulf that was exposed in New Orleans. It will require a sustained commitment to be serious about these questions. It will require a sustained commitment to talk about issues of day care for working mothers, issues of health care for indigents, issues of exclusion for all kinds of groups who have been marginalized in America. But I think those things are within our reach. The reason I think so is because I think that we have the capacity as a country to come back to a vocabulary and a dialogue of national greatness. We have the capacity as a country to talk about a vision that will make America great, that will not simply be based on the force of our arms, that will not simply be based on our intercontinental ballistic missiles, but will be based on the quality of the institutions that we build. I will end by mentioning someone that I know inspired many of my colleagues in this body, Robert F. Kennedy, the Senator from New York who died seeking to change the country by winning the presidency. He often ended his speeches by saying, ``Some men see things as they are and say why? I see things that never were and say why not?'' That has to be the constant challenge of all the Members of this institution who style themselves as progressives. The constant challenge has to be that we will see a range of visions, a range of opportunities and quality of life for our people that we have not previously seen and that we will have a national will to move toward that time. So I thank the gentlewoman for organizing this event. I thank my colleagues for speaking. In the final seconds I have here today, I will simply make the point that all of our citizens in this country ought to understand that we are impacted when some of our people do not share in the same circle of opportunity, but yet they are working and striving and pushing themselves every day to do it. That exclusion and that absence does not just wound African Americans, it does not just wound Latinos, it wounds everyone in this country that shares our national identity.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for yielding. I certainly thank all of my colleagues in this Chamber who have expressed solicitude to me. But, frankly, that solicitude is better spent on my colleagues from Mississippi and Louisiana. My State of Alabama was gratuitously spared virtually all of this damage. There are certainly people in my State who lost power, there are people in my State who were hurt. But God did not create all suffering on the same scale, and I know the difference between what has happened in my State and what has happened to my colleagues. I am very proud of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), I am very proud of the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) for all of the work that they do in this Congress, but particularly for their fortitude in the last week, because, Mr. Speaker, we have been able to sit at these things from a distance. We have been able to talk as compassionate people about these losses. The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) have the very hard work of going into their communities and talking to people who are in pain and saying, ``I will use my power to try to help you,'' and seeing the tears in response. So it is they who very much deserve our solicitude tonight, and I am proud to serve with them. Mr. Speaker, I want to make three points that I think are related. The first one is this: So many of the people who died, and we understand that the numbers of the dead will likely exceed 10,000, the largest single disaster in American history, so many of the ones who died had lives that do not put them on the front page of the newspaper. They had lives that were relatively anonymous. They were hard-working people, trying to make it through their lot in life, and all of a sudden they were cut down in blameless circumstances. The challenge of leadership though is to give an honor and a place to those who die in tragic circumstances. The challenge of real leadership is to lift the anonymity and to put an honor on the table. One of the things that I wish we would see in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, is for the President of the United States to do what he did the last time our country was seared, to come and gather the House and Senate together in this body, to address the Nation and the Congress, and to paint a vision of how we can do better next time and a vision of how we can rebuild these people. I would love to see the President go to the National Cathedral, a place he went 4 days after September 11, because when he went to the National Cathedral, he gave an honor to those victims and lifted them up to a certain place of honor. I would love to see that done for the people in your State of Mississippi and the people in the great State of Louisiana. We cannot let the anonymity that lingered over the lives of these people mask the honor of their death, because the honor of their death is this: They were innocent, hard-working Americans who lost their lives in part because of nature, but in part because of the errors of our government. And it is that second point that I want to turn to tonight. The country needs this President to admit that his government failed; the country needs this President to come here and say that the standard that was set by FEMA last week is one that was unacceptable for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana; and the country needs this President to name this as the disaster that it was. I cannot say it nearly as eloquently as our friend and colleague the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), but our country is embarrassed when we have power and do not use it intelligently and effectively. Our country is embarrassed when we have the means, the capacity and the ability to know what was happening last week, and still fail to adequately respond to it. I have heard some of my friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle say that they were pleased and satisfied and thankful for the job that happened last week, and I would simply differ with them in this one sense: Can we truly be pleased with the lack of response, the constant underestimation, the constant miscalculation? Because if we are pleased with that and we consider that to be good work, our standard is far too low. The final point that I want to make, I say to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), is one that perhaps should be more obvious to us. The fissures that already exist in our society become even more painful and more acute when there are stresses in our society. Last week, as so many people in this Chamber have said so well, the people who were left in the Superdome, the people not evacuated in time, so many are the people we often do not see. And we owe this next quote to Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA. Mr. Brown said that we learned that there were people that we did not even know existed. Mr. Brown did not mean to be profound when he said that, but he was unintentionally so, because we did learn and his administration did learn last week that there are people that they did not know existed, who live in the cracks and fissures in our society. And that ought to pain us. The last point that I want to make, and it is the point I would hang over this Chamber as we think over this next several weeks: We owe people in this country a better place than the margins of life. There are people who, because of their own faults and their own demerits, end up in a particular place. We understand that. We know that. The Bible tells us that. But we ought to be strong enough and bold enough as a country to not let people who are trying to live their lives fall into the margins because we do not care enough to build a net around them. The absence of a net in New Orleans, the absence of a net in Mississippi, the absence of a safety net in much of the South, was laid bare last week, and we ought to be moved by that. I will not cheapen this tragedy by saying there is a silver lining in it. Too many people died for that. But I will say that I hope that we draw some inspiration. I hope that as we go about fashioning a strategy for relief, that we fashion a strategy for relief that can lift up the weakest of these people and the least of them in an economic sense. But I hope as we move past Hurricane Katrina, and, frankly most of us in this Chamber will find a way to do that, it is the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) who will continue to you live with it, but for a lot of the people in this Chamber, we will be able to move past this. We will be on to the next crisis of the month or the next political cause of the month. But I hope as we move on, we carry this lesson with us, we carry this notion that if we are a just country, we cannot be a country where being left behind and being left out has the consequences that happened in the gentlemen's State of Mississippi and in Louisiana last week. If we are to be the country that we say we are, we have to do better by all of our people. The final point before I yield back my time, I turn once again to the President and his leadership. This President would not serve himself or our country well if this is turned into an attack on the mayor of New Orleans or the governor of Louisiana. This is not the time to make false comparisons and to wonder whether the governor and the mayor did not do this or did not do that, because there is something we ought to understand: The governor and the mayor lived in the midst of a crisis. The people who sat comfortably in this city last week were removed from that crisis. They were in a position and had the level head to do better, and they came up with the sea of incompetence that we saw. So how dare we look at the mayor and the governor sitting among their people in the midst of all of this and blame them, when people sat in this city far removed from the danger and could not do better? Mr. Speaker, again I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for his leadership, and I hope that his constituents, and know that his constituents, appreciate it. I thank the gentleman for his work as the ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, because it ought to be said, What is the measure of homeland security if we cannot find a way to secure our own people in the midst of danger?

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for his leadership on this issue. Let me begin with an image the President of the United States laid out before us. In his inaugural address very close to where we stand today, the President said that we have the capacity as a superpower on this planet to change the world, to reform it, to make it a better and more democratic place. I wish that with respect to this debate, I say to the gentleman from New York, that those same values and that same vision had been brought to the floor, because the reality is that, as one who believes an American power can make a difference, this agreement is a missed opportunity. Instead of taking these nations that struggle so much day in and day out, instead of challenging them to move to a better place, we gave up and we accepted the status quo. And one of the cruelest and strangest arguments, I say to the gentleman from New York, that I have heard tonight is that somehow we are not standing by these countries if we defeat this agreement. What a bizarre, upside-down world we would have, Mr. Speaker, if we think that we are standing by these countries when we are not standing by the millions of children between the ages of 5 and 14 who got up to go to work this morning, will get up to go to work again tomorrow morning. What a strange and bizarre world if we think we are standing by these countries when we cannot stand by the dignity of their women. And what a strange and bizarre world if we think we stand by these countries when we do not stand by their voiceless and by the people who work and who are shot down in fire because they speak up for their political rights. For the Republicans and the conservatives who support this agreement, if you believe in what your President said, if you believe that the superpower has the capacity to help remake this world, then let it begin in Central America, and let it begin by pushing these nations to do better. The final statement I will make is that this is a values statement. We hear the word ``values'' in this Chamber a lot. Well, the strongest value is what we take of our conscience and how we extend it to other people. A value is whether or not we push others to do better, and we fall short on the value scale tonight.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his thoughtfulness and for his leadership on this issue over the better part of a decade now. And I thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for his bipartisanship and his thoughtful approach. I would say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), one of the things that strikes me about this debate is when I tell many people in the business community, I tell some of our editorial writers that I am firmly opposed to this agreement, there is a regular refrain that they have. They say to me, Mr. Davis, why are you against globalization? And they say, why are you against trade? And it strikes me that that is such an enormously false way to frame this argument. To say that someone is against globalization if they oppose this treaty is a real misstatement of what we are debating and what we will be voting on 1 week from now, and I want to talk about that for a moment. There are some of us in this Chamber who have voted for every trade agreement that we have seen since we have been here. I voted for agreements with Australia, with Morocco, with Chile, with Singapore. I am someone who firmly believes in this modern economy that we cannot disengage ourselves from the rest of the world; and I, by no means, subscribe to the label of being anti-trade or being anti-globalization. But I think that there is another way. There is a possibility if we are thoughtful enough and serious enough about this economy and our obligations to build a trade policy that actually prods countries around this world to change. There is a possibility of building a trade policy that elevates conditions around the world. And I would submit that there are two kinds of trade policies. There is one set of policies that challenges the rest of the world to rise to a higher standard, and there is another set of trade policies that takes the world as it is and does not seek to move, does not seek to bend it, does not seek to change it. And I and so many of us believe in the first kind. I believe in a set of principles that say that we can use our trade as we occasionally use our economic might, as we occasionally use our political might to improve conditions. The reality is that if this agreement is somehow passed next week, despite the great opposition to it, it will open up a new low-wage market, and it will say to five countries in Central American and to the Dominican Republic that your low-wage conditions, your failure to protect your workers, your failure to protect your women from discrimination laws, your failure to prevent children from working, is acceptable in the community of nations, it is acceptable in the economic community of nations. And I remember, as the gentleman from Ohio does, when President Bush gave his second inaugural just a few months ago. Most of that inaugural was devoted to the proposition that, as a superpower, we have an ability to change the character of this world. Much of that inaugural was dedicated to the idea that, as a superpower, we have the ability to challenge this world and the most repressive countries in this world to move in a better direction. Here we stand, just 7 months later; and that challenge is not being posed to the House, not by the administration. That challenge is not being posed to us. And all of a sudden the same President who told us 7 months ago that we have in our power to move this world toward reform, apparently does not believe that we can do so when it comes to the dollars and cents that people earn every day, apparently does not think that we can do so when it comes to the quality of community the people live in every day around the world. There is a very cruel argument that I have heard in the last several days I want to mention to you. I have heard it said that if you do not support CAFTA that somehow you are not standing by the countries of Central America. I have heard it said that if you do not support CAFTA that you are somehow abandoning these poor miserable nations and that you are somehow leaving them to just be cut adrift. What I do not understand is how we can say that we are standing by the CAFTA countries when we are not standing by millions of children, 14 million in the whole region who are between 5 and 14 who got up and went to work this morning and who are being put in bed tonight and will go back to work tomorrow morning. I do not understand how we can say that we are somehow standing by Central America when we cannot stand by the rights of women in these countries. I do not understand how we can say that we are standing by Central America when we cannot stand for the rights of the voiceless and those who work and want to express their political beliefs or their desire for better conditions in the workplace and can be fired because of those opinions. I do not see how we can say that we are standing by Central America when we are leaving it unchallenged to change itself. That is what this debate is about. This is about, to use a word that is used on both sides of this aisle very freely, this is a debate about values because I define values as what we demand from others, what we demand from ourselves and the vision that we offer to others. This agreement offers such a narrow vision. It offers such a limited notion of what our economy can be. It tells us that we can roll back our trade deficit on the backs of unskilled workers around the world. It tells us that we can somehow improve certain industries and the profits of certain industries by diverting them to low-wage economies. And it somehow says that we can trade off the fortunes of our people and the fortunes of other people interchangeably without any higher standard to lift them both. Another point that I want to address, so many of the editorials that I have seen on this issue have a certain bloodless quality to them because they say if you believe in globalization, yes, you have to accept that there are winners and losers, and there will be more winners than losers, and the losers simply have to get over it. They simply have to adjust. Well, like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones), I represent some of the towns in west Alabama that are full of some of the people who will lose, families who today are working in textile companies, apparel companies, hosiery companies, who may not be able to work there if this agreement puts a set of forces in place. And I do not think of those people as being losers. I think of them as being families who are struggling to build a future for their families. I think of them as being people who want their kids to be able to come back and work in west Alabama. I think of them as being people who desperately want a better life for themselves and their children and their grandchildren. And I think that we should keep this in mind as I begin to close today. How do we promote and defend a vision to the American people that concedes that so many of us will be losers? How do we promote and defend a vision and a set of values that accepts that so many of our people will be left to fall behind under the trends of this agreement we set in place, and that so many people in Central America will be left in their substandard condition? There is no wonder why this agreement is struggling to pass Congress. There is no wonder why, if almost any of us went back to our States, we would find either a mystery or we would find out right confusion around CAFTA. The reason the case has not been made is because the American people are tired of being denominated and delineated into winners and losers. They are tired of being told that you may lose, but you have to get over it. And that is the final point at stake here today. Can we build a trade vision which offers a better way for so many workers in our country? Because it is not enough to simply say that, well, there are these abstract benefits that are off in the distance. We have to be able to talk to people in the gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. Brown) district and my district and the gentleman from Idaho's (Mr. Otter) district and the gentleman from North Carolina's (Mr. Jones) district and the gentleman from Virginia's (Mr. Goode) district. We have to be able to talk to them and say here is why your Congress is doing this. And right now we could not justify it. Right now we could not say to them that these agreements will create a higher standard of living in America or abroad. Right now we could not say that these conditions will meet the American test of reforming the world for the better. We simply cannot make the case. The administration cannot make the case. So in closing I simply call on my colleagues tonight, 1 week from now, or 1 week and 1 day from now when we, in all likelihood, vote on this agreement, to vote on their principles, to vote for trade that has values lying beneath it, to vote for a vision of how we can reform the economies of the world, and not to accept this limited vision. And I am reminded so often of something that William Jefferson Clinton who was elected the same year that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) was to Congress. He often said that he was so tired of what was cold blooded being passed off as courageous in politics. I fear that our indifference to the fortunes of the people who live in these countries, our failure to prod their governments toward reform looks a lot like that cold bloodedness that President Clinton was talking about. And it is so wrong for the editorial boards, so wrong for so many lobbyists in this city to say that that cold bloodedness is really courage. It is not courageous, and it will not be courageous to take your voter card and to stand on the floor in the well of this House next week and to vote for an agreement that is so empty and so vacant of values. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his good work. I thank our Republican colleagues who are here tonight for joining us in that bipartisan cause and thank them and hope the American people recognize that this is a critical vote, because it is a statement of what kind of community we are and how we exist in the international community of nations.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I did not want this debate to end without expressing my support for what the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) is doing today. The reality is that, while this economy has improved in the last several years, while housing starts are on the rise, while the number of Americans with the chance at the dream of homeownership is rapidly expanding, there are a lot of breaks and gaps in this economy, and this program, Section 8, exists to remedy those breaks and those gaps. The score of the amendment of the amount of money that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) proposes to add to this budget is roughly 1.6 percent of this bill. This is a fractional investment in the scheme of things, but it is a significant investment for numerous families who will benefit from Section 8. So I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) for his outstanding work in raising this issue and being persistent and bringing it before this body.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. I yield to the gentleman from New York.