Gene Green

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, the amendments that we are considering now would exclude regulations on licensing, construction, and operations of nuclear reactors, and also on disposal of nuclear waste from the point of order procedure in this bill. We have actually two amendments that deal with two sections of the bill. The NRC is a national agency. Very seldom do States get involved in some of the regulation. However, Mr. Chairman, many States, not only my State of Texas but also New York, South Carolina, and a great many other States, have nuclear powerplants that are often either locally owned, State-owned, or in our case in Texas, are actually cooperatively owned by private business, ratepayer companies. Mr. Chairman, the issue at hand is whether we should have national regulation of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste disposal, or whether it should be exempted from the unfunded mandate issue. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a national agency; in fact, an independent agency. The problem where it comes in is that in south Texas and in other States we have cooperative nuclear power plants that are owned by investor-owned companies, but also by local municipalities. The issue that it brings up in this bill is what happens if we have, as in our case in south Texas, the managing partner who is an independent company, investor-owned utility, but the owners of it or partial owners of it are municipalities who provide electricity to their citizens in different parts of the State. How do we differentiate? The concern I have, and that is why this is an amendment to section 4 of the bill, would exempt out that. Very seldom do we have State regulation of nuclear facilities, although we have an example of a bill now that has been introduced by the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Fields], that I have cosponsored, that would provide for waste disposal in a cooperative effort. When I was in the Texas Legislature 3 years ago, we had to pass enabling legislation for that. The concern I have is that we are going to have nuclear reactors or nuclear waste that really should be a national issue. The Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania tragedy back years ago, did not know State lines, any more than Chernobyl knew international lines. We need to have a regulatory commission that is not subject to the whim or a point of order procedure here on the floor of the House. They should not be shielded from that, whether it be on the power or the waste disposal. Mr. Chairman, as the bill presently reads, a competitive advantage could be accrued to publicly owned utilities, often publicly owned facilities. That point of order procedure would block the mandates on States and localities, but not those local entities. How does it affect the part-owned, part-public owned and part-private owned, as I first mentioned? The point of order standards place a new hurdle to pass on the safety regulations for nuclear power. I am not anti-nuclear. I have been pro-nuclear. I think nuclear power plays a part in our energy policy, and it should, but it should not be to the whim of local governments or even States. It should be a national issue and not something that we deal with on 50 jurisdictions, or maybe hundreds of thousands of jurisdictions, based on our locality. Mr. Chairman, this bill had no public hearings on it. The only person we could hear from was the sponsor of the bill, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Portman], who is very knowledgeable on unfunded mandates, but we could not ask any questions on how it affected nuclear power or nuclear waste disposal, because we needed to have a hearing to discuss it so we can find out. We did not have that. That is why we have to run with not only this amendment but a number of amendments here on the floor. Mr. Chairman, we need to learn the impact of how this is happening. That is why we are having not only this amendment but other amendments, to develop a legislative history so somebody down the line can say ``This is what the intent of Congress on unfunded mandates was.'' I mentioned earlier today an editorial in the Houston Post, and again, for those who were not here earlier, it is not the Washington Post, it is an outside-the-beltway paper, that Republicans and many Democrats support the unfunded mandate bill, but we also realize it is not a panacea, and we need to realize what we are doing with this.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Let me just mention that there are some exceptions in the bill that we are amending on section 4, and, as the gentlewoman from Illinois [Mrs. Collins] mentioned, No. 5, it is necessary for national security, ratification or implementation of international treaty. This amendment may be under this bill right now. But since we did not have a public hearing, we could not ask those questions of the experts in the FAA. We were not able to find out, and so that is why we are having to take this time on the floor of the House tonight.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I offer amendments 73 and 153 and ask unanimous consent that they be considered en bloc.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. I thank the gentleman. Let me remind Members the earned income credit was a great bill and it passed in 1993. But that does not mean we should not also consider what we need to do with the minimum wage, and to separate out public employees, whether they work for cities, counties or States, to treat them separately from private individuals or private companies is wrong because they have to support families just like private employees have to.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate my colleague, the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger], bringing up the earned income tax credit. Last session of Congress not one Republican Member voted for that earned income tax credit. To take credit for it tonight, maybe it was their idea, but to put it into existence, the people on this side of the aisle did that. That is why minimum wage is so important. I appreciate my colleagues, the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], the chairman of the EEOC Committee, and my ranking member, introducing this amendment. The case for minimum wage, and we hear that we are not talking about issues tonight, we are talking about unfunded mandates, but we are talking about issues, because to deal with safe drinking water, to deal with nuclear regulatory issues, to deal with minimum wage, we are putting up the roadblocks tonight to deal with those issues. To say we are not doing it, Members are casting aspersions and making the American people not realize what has actually happened. That is why this amendment is so important. The case for minimum wage needs to be made tonight and hopefully, when we get a bill, here on the floor. We cannot raise a family on minimum wage, even with the earned income tax credit. Many people in my district are required to live on that. At $4.25 an hour as a single person they make $8,840. It is barely above the poverty line for individuals. That is $7,360. If they have one child, the poverty line is $9,840. That puts them below the poverty level, even at minimum wage. The purchasing power of the minimum wage measured in constant dollars is about the same as it was in the 1950's. Teenagers and young adults make up about half the minimum wage population. The gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger] was correct, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But the other half of hardworking adults, working Americans who need to have that increase, if we throw up another roadblock tonight for public employees not be paid a higher minimum wage, then that is doing a disservice to those people. I also served many years in the Texas Legislature, 20 years in the legislature, so I know about unfunded mandates. I also know that in a minimum wage issue, it is a national issue and should not be dealt with on the State level. Why should we be excluded from this bill? We have been discussing raising the threshold for passing the income tax. This Congress 2 weeks ago and maybe this week will make it a three-fifths requirement to require an income tax increase. Particularly in 1993 we raised taxes on the 2 percent of the wealthiest income earners. Yet we are going to make it even harder to pass a minimum wage on the people who are the lowest hardworking workers? Why should we put procedural hurdles to raise the income of working Americans when we are putting a procedural hurdle to where it is harder to raise the taxes on the richest? We are protecting the people at one end of the earning scale but we are making it harder to help those at the other end. It was a few year ago when I made minimum wage and I was glad Congress raised it then from $1.25 an hour. I remember where I come from. I hope that a lot of Members of Congress remember where we come from and recognize that we do not need to throw additional hurdles, particularly for public employees to make increase in minimum wage.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the chairman of my committee, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Clinger], expressing his concern about the reason there are a number of amendments, and I would not use the term misinformation as much as considering our committee had one weekend to look at this bill and never even had a public hearing during this session of Congress. So what we are doing during this floor debate is actually developing legislative intent. A lot of these amendments that we are talking about in the debate that you are going to hear and we heard last week and this week was to establish legislative intent on this bill, because we did not have the time in the committee. Now, I understand our chairman was told he had to move the bill. But that does not mean that we should short-circuit the legislative process, and so when we do that in our committees, and maybe we can learn for our other committees, that by doing that in our committee process, we are going to make it longer on the floor. Instead of just our committee members dealing with it, now we have 435 Members who want to have questions and answers to this bill. So we are establishing legislative intent. Let me talk a little bit about--just today in the Houston paper, and I was going to say the Post, but it was not the Washington Post, it was the Houston Post, so we will not get confused with inside the beltway or outside the beltway. They had an editorial about the unfunded mandate bill that says, ``No easy answers.'' This is daily newspaper. It talks about--again, it is not inside the beltway--it says, ``Unfunded mandates is a term that is overly used and often misunderstood when we talk about misinformation.'' And it is part of the Contract with America or on America or for America or whatever. But State and local officials across the country complain about Washington being too quick to tell them what to do, whether it is clean air, fair labor standards, family leave. But is it fair, and let us go back and use their analogy, again from the Houston Post. It says, An analogy of a teenager in his car. Clearly, it is wrong for his parents to force him to use his money to pay for gas to run errands. But what if they simply order him to repair his transmission so it does not leak in the driveway? Instead of saying, ``We want you to clean up your driveway, son or daughter, and that is what we are talking about.'' That is a mandate that parents give to their child, they are not telling him to use his money to pay for gas to go run errands, they are just saying, ``Well, if you want to keep that car in the driveway, we want the transmission not to leak on it, at least.'' So we are unfunding that mandate for you to clean up your transmission. It is easy to talk about unfunded mandates, and I agree that the bill needs to be passed, but I also think we would be doing a disservice to our constituents and to the people of this country if we do not recognize what we are doing by taking as much time as we need, if not in committee then on this floor for the whole world to see, about the unfunded mandate issue. We are 1 country, but we are 50 States. What we come together on as a country is important to us. It may be called an unfunded mandate, it may be a national issue instead of a local issue. But I still think it deserves the time on this floor of this body to consider it judiciously. I think that is what we are doing. amendments offered by mr. skaggs

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, the people who breathe that do not know whether it comes from a municipal waste incinerator or a commercial weight incinerator. And so if we are going to, by this bill, create disparity in the regulations, that is the concern that we need to recognize.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Skaggs amendment. Let me say, my colleague from Illinois who was here earlier and talked about his frustration with the trip reduction, I was in that meeting with him last week with the EPA because we were concerned about emissions tests in Texas, the system that the State of Texas had set up. But one of the problems he may recognize though is that that was a state plan that was established. And it was a state plan that put so much weight on emissions, so much weight on industry, and also the trip reduction, although EPA did come in and give him some flexibility on trip reduction just like I think they are doing with us on our emissions testing in Texas. But it was a state plan. In 1990, the Clean Air Act was passed here with bipartisan support and signed by a Republican President, and I am sure it had a vote somewhere on it on the floor that said, this gives the flexibility of the States. It may be a mandate on the States to reduce your pollution, but it is giving the States the ability to make that decision on their own. Pollution knows no boundaries. We are just fortunate in the State of Texas that if we pollute in Houston it is all within our boundaries most of the time. We do not have that in other parts of the country, whether it be the Midwest or the Northeast or California to the mountain States. So that is why I think it is important that we prioritize and say we are against unfunded mandates. We recognize that it is wrong. But there are also things that bring us together as a country. Pollution does not know state lines or county lines or city lines. And that is why oftentimes in Congress we have to address it, and the Clean Air Act is one of those examples. But they can be fine tuned by our States to recognize whether it is emissions or by the trip reduction, and my colleague from Illinois has had so much trouble with it. They have responded in there and they are working on it here in Washington.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. And I understand that, and, reclaiming my time, we will, we very well may do that some future time, if we find some new technology. It may cost a million dollars to provide new technology to discover some new type of weapon that somebody may try and smuggle in our airport. We must fund it from here, but also those local communities benefit from having that airport there, so they should also participate in. That is what we are doing now. I just want to say we all are supporting, and I support, the bill. I just want to make sure that we recognize that some future Congress may say, ``Oh, no, that's an unfunded mandate,'' and the standard of living that we have become accustomed to in these great States will go down because some future Congress may say, ``Well, we have to take an unfunded mandate vote,'' and I am so against unfunded mandates, but we cannot increase the national debt because of that. We are just going to have to take our gamble, and may be some terrorism from wherever else in the world may be able to slip through. We need to recognize that today when we are debating this bill because it will have an impact on the gentleman's and my constituents.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. I yield to the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham].

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, Representative Collins of Illinois is talking about her amendment mainly on airport safety and talking about airline safety. Let me bring up another point. Just like my colleague from California, though he has a little bit further to go, but I go home every weekend to be in my district in Texas, which is just halfway to California. But I also feel a lot safer when I have to go through that airport security and those scan devices, simply because it makes me safer in the Houston airports. That was not put there because the city of Houston, our airport authority, did that out of the goodness of their heart. They did that because there were Federal mandates to do that. Also, they utilized enterprise funds, local funds that are made up of money that we pay as passengers to provide that airport security. We have some of the best, secure airports in the world because a lot of us have been to a lot of other places and we know we are really concerned about walking through some of those machines and we do not know if they work or not. But we know in our airports they do because they have to. Again, if we could compete, whether it be Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, or somewhere else, we might have different standards for each of them if we do not have some kind of recognition nationwide of airport security needs, not just from terrorism, or pilot training or private pilot training. That is a mandate. It is in some ways funded because I am sure FAA provides some funding for it. But some of it is unfunded because it is also made up of local tax dollars and local money paid for out of airline tickets that pays for that. So it is unfunded from the Federal Government. We may vote for that next week, if there is some new technology that comes out, but what is going to happen if we pass this without recognizing that the next Congress may say we are in a bad budget, we are in a $4 trillion debt. But I am willing to pay for funded mandates, sure I will, but I am not sure that there are going to be 218 Members of Congress who will do it. So we will see the standards in our airports possibly go down because of the threat of terrorism. Also, we do not have to go very far to know some countries only pay lip service to it whereas in the United States we put teeth into it. It is paid for most of the time by local funds because they also benefit by having a major airport in their community.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. (Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from New York [Mr. Towns] for allowing me to address the House. Mr. Chairman, as a 20-year member of the Texas Legislature, both in the House and Senate, I know about unfunded mandates, and I also oppose them, but I also know that the State mandates on the counties and cities and the counties and the cities mandate on their citizens without providing their funds to those citizens, even our schools mandate on their citizens without providing it, and my children went to public school, and they were mandated to buy a workbook even through we pay property taxes and State taxes, but they could not come to school if they did not pay for that workbook or the folder. So there are mandates from the Federal Government, from the State government, and from the local government, and this concept needs to go forward if it is going to pass here, too. I support the concept of restricting unfunded mandates, but I am also concerned in hearing my other colleague from Texas talk about respect for this institution. How can we have respect for this institution when this bill did not have a public hearing during this session of Congress? I think we need to learn the full impact it will have on air pollution, nuclear wastes, and so I expect we will have a lot of amendments to try and clarify it. I hope we have clean water in New York when I come to visit the gentleman because that way I would like to drink it, but I would also like to make sure we do not become a Divided States and continue to be a United States.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, Americans want a more open and honest government. Last week I voted with the majority to open our Congress to ensure public hearings. But also last week the Committee on the Budget rejected on a party line vote a requirement requiring Congress to tell how the balanced budget amendment would be implemented. We should require this House to specify those cuts to reach that balanced budget. The Congressional Budget Office has said it would cost $1.2 trillion in cuts by the year 2002 to reach that balanced budget. In the name of honesty, openness, and constructive planning, we must set that course to achieve the goal. The people need to know how and what and when these cuts will be made. We talk about a Contract With America. Let us not forget our contract with our senior citizens in 1935 for Social Security, our seniors for health care in 1965, and our veterans that provide them benefits for their sacrifices for their country. The people of these United States will remember that our contract is renewed next year unless we tell them how we are going to fulfill the contract we agreed to.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker and Members, we are talking about term limits today, and the majority party, like the gentleman from West Virginia, who yielded to me, I have no problem with the majority party limiting the terms of their chairmen, but I think this goes to the heart of the issue: that we have an arbitrary term limit on any office. Are we going to limit a chairman or chairwoman simply to three terms simply because they are doing their job correctly? This is an issue that this House will deal with whether we are talking about Members, chairmen of committees, Members of Congress, or anything else. But I would hope, as a Democrat, as the minority, we might be able to go even further and, in some cases, even limit the terms of the majority party chairmen to one term at this time.

Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, we will soon be voting to change the way the House operates in several ways, but it is not enough. Later, we will also be considering a bill to bring the Congress into compliance with many private sector laws that apply to the rest of the country. Last Congress, Mr. Speaker, many of my Republican colleagues pointed to the closed rules as an example of the tyranny of the majority. It is, therefore, disappointing that the Congressional Accountability Act, the first bill to be considered by this Congress, will be offered under a closed rule. Open rules allow the minority the opportunity to amend legislation and to allow all points of view to be heard. I was led to believe that the House will be operating under a more open system. Today, Mr. Speaker, it is not open. Despite my disagreement with the rule on the bill, I intend to support the Congressional Accountability Act. This bill is no stranger to those of us who are Democrats because we offered it last year, and it passed last year before this 100-day blitzkrieg that we are going through. I believe extending employee protections is an important and meaningful step for Congress, and I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will extend that to all workers in the future.