John Garamendi

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin). (Mr. LANGEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel), the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to my friend from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I listened with considerable interest to the exposition just given by our colleague. I find myself in agreement with much of what was said, particularly the concerns, the unknowns, and the fact that this amendment is going to wind up in a CR, and we are going to be voting on the CR and the amendment, whether we like the amendment or not, or we shut down government. That causes me great concern. My real concern is beyond just this amendment, limited as it is. And I thank the chairman for making this as limited--it ends sometime in December, I think December 11; that is good. The fact that the reporting is there; that is good. The fact that we are knowingly going to find ourselves right smack in the middle of a civil war that has gone on for 3 years and the previous 3 we couldn't figure out which side we wanted to be on and who we wanted to work with, apparently we now know who we want to work with, or at least we will find out who we want to work with. A lot of unknowns here, a lot of concerns. The big concern is this, and that is that the administration presently does not intend to have the Congress of the United States carry out its constitutional responsibility to declare a war or not. They have figured out a way to avoid having the Congress deal with the most fundamental of issues. They claim that the 2001-2002 authorization to use force in Afghanistan and in Iraq is sufficient to carry on what may be an unending war in Iraq and, quite possibly, in Syria. The War Powers Act has been pushed aside. We don't need to worry about that, says the administration. We don't have to vote because they have these other two authorizations to use force still in effect. This is not right. This is a new war, a continuation of the problem that has existed in this area for more than 1400 years. So now it is in for a dime; we are going to be in for many, many dollars and many, many people. My plea to the Congress, my plea to all my colleagues is this is not the step. This is but one small, little movement towards a much larger. And will we have the courage to carry out our constitutional responsibility and take up the larger issue of what to do with airstrikes and beyond? For me, we ought to be voting on that larger issue. I believe the administration is dead wrong in saying they don't need to come back to Congress for a larger issue of an authorization to use force.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to my colleague from California (Mr. McNerney).

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price), my friend.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to my colleague from New York (Mr. Owens).

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Nolan).

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson).

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you, Mr. Peters, for your leadership in bringing to the attention of the entire Nation, and certainly to the 435 Members of this House, that there is a way to manage our forests and to deal with the fires that have plagued us so extensively over these many years. I think all of us have seen this before. It is Smokey the Bear. ``Only you can prevent forest fires.'' We need to add to it, ``But Congress can help.'' And Smokey turns to us and says: How can you help? Well, we can help by changing the way in which we budget for the fighting of fires. Instead of a rolling 10-year average and putting that money up every year and in 9 of the last 12 years blowing through that budget and then reaching back and taking the forest management funds that would allow us to reduce the risk of fires in our forests and in your public lands, instead of doing that, we would have a different system, as Mr. Peters just described. It is H.R. 3992. H.R. 3992 is a bipartisan bill, Democrats and Republicans. Democrat Mr. Schrader from Oregon and Republican Mr. Simpson from Idaho, the authors of the bill, say there is a better way of doing it. Set aside a special reserve, just like we do for tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods; a special reserve that could be tapped when we exceed the average and blow through that 10-year average with a megafire or a series of fires. We expect more than 38,000 fires this year in the United States. We are going to blow through that budget. Just this last month in August, the chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service sent a letter out to every part of the U.S. Forest Service saying: Hold on. No more contracts. Save the money. We are going to need to transfer some of your maintenance money. Your fire prevention money, the money that you are using to thin the forests to reduce the fuel load, the money that you are using to carry out logging practices, hold that. We are going to need to hold that because we anticipate once again blowing through that fire budget and having to reach back for the prevention budget. So Smokey is right. We can prevent forest fires if Congress acts on H.R. 3992. A discharge petition that Mr. Peters has brought to the floor is before us. It has 196 Members of Congress that have signed on. When we get to 218, that bill will automatically be brought to the floor for a vote. Democrats and Republicans already support it, so bring it to the floor for a vote. Let us put in place a sensible, commonsense way of appropriating money to fight fires and to manage our forests. Let's get ahead of next year's fire. Let's get to prevention not just by not throwing out cigarettes and leaving campfires unattended, but by making sure that our forests are healthy so that they are able to sustain small fires that burn slowly along the floor of the forest, which is the natural ecological way in which forests have for a millennium been able to deal with fire. We are in a different situation now. We have allowed the forests to grow and to be in a position where a fire becomes huge. It is no longer along the floor but gets up into the crown of the trees and destroys the forests. So we can get back to where we were by properly managing the forests, but we can't do it without money. The Forest Service needs to have that money. The Bureau of Land Management and the National Parks all need to have a different way of appropriating and budgeting. And that is what this bill does. By the way, it doesn't cost any more. It simply rearranges how that money is going to be spent. That reserve fund would only be available when you have the megafires and you blow through the 10-year rolling average of how much we spend on fighting fires. It is sensible. It makes a lot of sense. The administration wants it, and, therefore, I suppose my Republican colleagues are opposed to it simply because the administration has proposed a better way of dealing with this budgeting for fires. So our plea tonight is simple. Just for a few moments, like 12\1/2\ minutes thus far, it is to allow us to take up H.R. 3992 and help Smokey prevent forest fires. We only need a few more Members of this House to sign on. More than 50 members of the Republican Party are already coauthors, but none have yet signed the discharge petition. So let's do it. Let's get on with it. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I think we just heard a 1-hour audition for FOX News, but we did not hear a solution to what is a very real problem. We didn't hear a call for a vote, which we are going to have to take if we are to carry out our constitutional obligations, and that is going to be before us. I don't want to carry on the discussion about the very serious problem of ISIL or ISIS. We have heard a lot of that already. We will have to come to grips with that by October 6 or 7, when the 60-day clock on the War Powers Act runs out and our constitutional obligation takes place. There are many, many problems facing this Nation, and certainly, the international scene is one of them, but there is also a problem in our communities. I represent a large portion of California, the national forests on the Sierra side and the national forests on the coastal side of the Sacramento Valley. A lot of that is in the U.S. Forest Service, as well as in the Bureau of Land Management. Over the last several years, those two agencies have been struggling to put out the fires that have raged in the Western United States and, indeed, in the Southeast of the United States. The way in which we have set up the budgeting and the appropriation for fighting fires has created an ongoing cycle of increasing the likelihood of new fires. We need to change that. We need to get ahead of the century of fire repression and put in place policies and programs that will reduce the risks of fires. We need to manage our forests in such a way that the fire risk is reduced, the forests are thinned, trees appropriately harvested, the undergrowth reduced and eliminated, firebreaks put in place, and protect our communities by the proper management of the forest, reducing the fuel, reducing the load of fuel that these forests have. We have been unable to do that, principally because we have seen an enormous increase in the number of fires, and the Federal budget to fight these fires is a 10-year rolling average that has not been able to keep up with the increase each year in the megafires, California most recently facing the rim fire in the Yosemite area. That fire gobbled up not only the forest, but gobbled up the money that was set aside to prevent fires to manage the forest. Instead of having that fund available to do that kind of work, the money was transferred from those programs into the firefighting. Now, this is an ongoing problem. My colleague from California, Scott Peters, has addressed this problem with a motion to bring to the floor legislation that would set up a new mechanism for appropriating funds for fighting fires. I will let him discuss that and why he has this before us. Mr. Peters, if you would join us.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, it brings me sadness and honor to pay final tribute to Ross Erwin Hanna. Ross passed peacefully on Tuesday, June 10, 2014 after 91 years of life well lived. Ross was born in San Francisco, CA, on October 20, 1922 as the youngest of six children to Tom and Wanda Hanna. Ross grew up in the Alhambra Valley with his four brothers and sister. Ross spent his childhood roaming the hills around his home and enjoyed spending summers in the Sierras. Ross's love of the outdoors was a legacy from his grandfather, naturalist John Muir. Soon after graduating from Alhambra High School in Martinez, Pearl Harbor was bombed and Ross enlisted in the California Coast Guard where he served in numerous landings in the South Pacific. WWII sent him to the Pacific for four years, but built friendships that continued to grow for seven decades. After the war, he went to Stockton, CA to attend the College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific) where he graduated with a degree in business, and was a fraternity man at Alpha Kappa Phi Fraternity. Music was a major part of Ross's life and he led the Ross Hanna Orchestra during college. There Ross met a young Gladys Ann Stoeven who would later become his bride. Ross and Gladys married in San Mateo, CA in June of 1948. Over the next 66 years the two of them had much to celebrate. A year to the day after they were married, they welcomed their first son, Hal. They moved to Dixon soon after his birth and two years later welcomed son Michael. Four years after their two boys, they welcomed a sweet daughter, Lynne. Ross and Gladys enjoyed raising their children in Dixon. Ross imparted his love for nature to all of his children and grandchildren. Pack trips in the mountains, fishing in streams and lakes, hiking and enjoying nature are all a part of their memories. Ross left this life to join his parents Tom and Wanda Hanna, brothers Strent, John, Dick and Bob, his sister Jean and numerous family and friends who have gone before him. Ross is survived by his loving wife Gladys of 66 years; son Hal and wife Kathleen, son Michael Muir and daughter Lynne Hanna-Lincoln; grandchildren Tim Hanna and wife Jamie, Liz Fuller and husband James, Allison Theubet and husband Jerry and Mei-Lin Hanna. Ross lived to see eight great-grandchildren join his family; Kilian, Stephen, Natalie, Timmy, Gabby and Kolbe Theubet and Ross and Matthew Fuller. Ross will be missed by immeasurable friends and family members, but his love and music will play in their hearts forever.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my concern about the demise of the U.S. flag merchant marine and U.S. shipbuilding industry and to offer legislation to help revitalize these industries that are indispensable to the national security and economic interests of the United States. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, often recognized as the most important American strategist of the 19th Century, argued persuasively that our national greatness was inextricably associated with our control of the sea in order to secure both our commercial and security interests. That concept is as relevant today as it was in Mahan's time. Our economic strength and national security today remain tethered to our ability to control the safety and security of the global supply chain. What has changed, however, is our vigilance in maintaining our commercial U.S. maritime industry. That must change and fortunately I see a way forward. The U.S. shipbuilding industry and U.S. natural gas market are strategic industrial and natural resources essential to U.S. national security interests. In fact, the U.S. maritime industry has been interwoven into the fabric of our economy and national security since the founding of our Republic and the establishment of our Continental Navy in 1775. Several factors explain why it is in the U.S. national interest to utilize the emerging coastwise and export trades for liquefied natural gas (LNG) to revitalize the U.S. flag. First, this newly available and abundant energy source would provide reliable, long-term markets for U.S. commercial shipbuilding and new trades for U.S. flag vessel operators. Second, the imminent LNG export trade might also provide the impetus to attract new capital investment to expand the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base which has declined in capacity and international competitiveness over the past forty years. And third, the LNG export trade could be used productively to strengthen U.S. strategic interests and alliances with LNG trading partners, especially Japan, South Korea and India. For these reasons, today I am introducing, along with my good friend, the Chairman of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee, Congressman Duncan Hunter, legislation to provide a clear signal to the administration, maritime industry, energy industry, and our foreign trading partners that we in Congress intend to get serious about revitalizing our shipbuilding and maritime industries. The Growing American Shipping Act is straightforward legislation that would expand existing authority under section 306 of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2006 and under the Deepwater Port Act (33 U.S.C. 1503(i)) to ensure that the trade in LNG--both the import and the export of LNG--benefits the U.S. maritime industry. This legislation, if enacted, would enhance U.S. national security and port safety by encouraging the transport of LNG on U.S. flag vessels. It would help maintain the skilled labor pool and technological and industrial infrastructure of the U.S. shipbuilding industry necessary to build and repair both military and commercial vessels. Furthermore, this legislation would ensure that vessels carrying LNG to or from the U.S. are crewed by credentialed U.S. mariners to reduce safety and security risks. This legislation has received robust support from a host of maritime stakeholders, including the Maritime Trades Department (AFL-CIO), Seafarers International Union (AFL-CIO), Transportation Institute, Shipbuilders Council, Navy League of the United States, American Maritime Officers, Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association (MEBA), International Association of Masters, Mates and Pilots (MM&P), Maritime Institute for Research and Industrial Development (MIRAID), Marine Firemen's Union, Metal Trades Department (AFL-CIO), Sailors' Union of the Pacific, and American Maritime Congress. Again, this legislation builds on existing authority under the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2006 and the Deepwater Port Act which specifically authorized the Secretary of Transportation to develop a program to promote the use of U.S. flag vessels in the importation of LNG to the United States. This legislation simply would amend each statute to expand the scope of these authorities to apply also to the LNG export trade. This legislation is a measured and reasonable step forward to revitalize our U.S. maritime industries, to support our economic and national security, and to begin the process of reclaiming our mantle as a great maritime nation. I urge members to join Chairman Hunter and myself in this effort.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Tonko and Ms. Kaptur, thank you so very much for joining us tonight. America will make it when we Make It In America. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. There are so many pieces to this puzzle. At the top of our Make It In America is trade policy. Thank you for bringing that issue back onto the floor. It is something we constantly need to deal with. We have not talked this last year--actually, since Republicans took control of Congress, we have not talked about the manipulation of currency by China. I know when the Democrats controlled the House, we were putting forth legislation multiple times to address the currency manipulation issue, but there are many, many pieces to this trade policy that are relevant to us. As you were talking about the manufacturing, I put up one of my favorite photos, a Make It In America photo. You have seen my photo here, I am sure, of a locomotive. The American Recovery Act, a stimulus bill which really did work--trash it politically, but it actually worked--there was money for Amtrak to buy locomotives. In that particular section of the Recovery Act, Congress wrote--and you voted for it--I wasn't here at the time, I wish I was because I would love to take credit for this--wrote a little paragraph that said this money must be spent on locomotives that are 100 percent made in America--100 percent made in America--a couple hundred million dollars to build these locomotives. Companies looked at it. A German company said: that is a lot of money, we can build locomotives. Siemens, a large international industrial manufacturing company--located in Sacramento, building light rail cars--said: we can build American-made locomotives. They started a new manufacturing plant. They have over 600 workers there today. They are producing 100 percent American-made locomotives because of public policy. Your tax dollars are spent on American-made locomotives. That supply chain is all across this Nation--not made in Germany, made in America--the wheels, the trains, the tracks, the electronics, all of that, American-made. It is a matter of public policy. The Export-Import Bank, tax policy, how you are going to spend American taxpayer dollars--these are the things we wanted to do to jump-start the middle class--Make It In America. Mr. Tonko, we have got about 7 or 8 minutes left, so let's roll on.

Mr. GARAMENDI. One of the small businesses--of several of them, actually, after listening to the heads of these extraordinary laboratories said: yeah, but I am just a small company, I don't have any money to go and work with you guys on products that we want to develop. The fellow from the SBA, the Small Business Administration, raised his hand--you know, I kind of see him wanting to jump into the conversation--so I called on him and he said: we can help. I am going: You are from the government, and you can help? He said: we can help, we can help, we have a voucher program. I didn't know this existed in the Small Business Administration, but they have a voucher program that a small business that wants to connect to one of the national laboratories or one of the universities can get a voucher that is worth a certain amount of money, take it down to the laboratory, and begin to work with the laboratory on transferring technology to that business. Wow, I mean, do businesses know that such a thing exists? Are we promoting that? Are we supporting the Small Business Administration, so that they can help these small businesses in really what I think is a unique and wonderful way? I interrupted you. My apologizes, Mr. Tonko.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Tonko, it is always a great pleasure to be on the floor with you. You are so clear. Your vision and your purpose is so very, very clear. The Make It In America agenda has many pieces: trade policy, tax policy, energy, labor, education, research, and infrastructure. All of it is designed for one purpose, and that is to give American working families an opportunity. It has become part of our jump-start for the middle class. This is our policy. These are the things that we want to do as Democrats. We want to see the working families of America make it. We want it made in America, and we want American families to be making it, so the Make It In America is one part of this agenda. When women succeed, America succeeds. This is the fact that a majority of the workforce in America is now women. The reality is they make 70 cents on the dollar for every man that makes a dollar, so we need to address that. We need to make sure that they have the opportunities. Right now, there is an increasing concern about on-demand labor, which is mostly women. You can imagine the destruction to family life when a woman that is working at a retail store gets a phone call and has to immediately report to work for 3, 4, or 5 hours. This is craziness, but there is a whole series of family-friendly policies for women that are involved in this issue, including the minimum wage. Finally, the issue of education, which we have talked about. These are the jump-start the middle class policies that we are pushing forward. Make It In America is the agenda that you and I have talked about so many times here on the floor--little progress is being made--but I am telling you, if we had the majority in this House, these pieces of legislation that we have talked about today would be sitting over in the Senate and they would be on the President's desk very, very quickly--critical policies for the future of this Nation, critical policies for the working men and women and the families of America. We intend to do it. We intend to see this agenda, the agenda for the working men and women advance. Mr. Tonko, do you want to have another 30 seconds before we are told to wrap?

Mr. GARAMENDI. Madam Speaker, when talking on the floor, presenting legislation, it is always good to have a compass, so you can have some sense of where you are going and what it is all about. This is one I often bring to the floor when we talk about the issues of the day. This is from FDR--Franklin Delano Roosevelt--and he said the ``test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'' It is a compass, and it is a way of judging progress or a lack of progress, and we seem to have more of the latter than the former. We have much to do if we are going to add to those who have little. In America, the American middle class, the working men and women, the families who raise their children try to buy a home, a car, maybe take a vacation--they have been struggling for the last 20 years. It has been tough. They have not seen income growth. The statistics are stark and clear. The middle class of America has stagnated, and, in fact, it has shrunk, as more and more Americans have fallen into the lower income class. There is something we can do about it, and we, Democrats, intend to do just that. We want to jump-start the middle class. We want to put in place policies that will grow the opportunities for the working families of America, for those men and women that get up in the morning, feed their children, get them off to school while they are getting off to a job. There are things we can do. I want to talk about that tonight. Some of my colleagues will join us a little later. Let me put up the agenda for jump-starting the middle class, the Make It In America agenda, rebuilding the American manufacturing sector, which was the heart and--in many ways--the soul of the working middle class of America, where they could get a decent wage, where they know that a husband or a wife, by themselves, could provide sufficient income for the family to have a home, a car, and enjoy the benefits of this great Nation. So we will talk about the Make It In America agenda, and we will go at that in some length tonight because that is our basic subject matter. The other one is very simple. It is a reflection on the demographics, and it is a reflection on the working people of America, and it is women. It is women. What we say is that when women succeed, America succeeds. There is a set of policies that we need to put in place all across this country that will guarantee that the women of America that are out there working day in and day out have an equal opportunity. Right now, they don't. They make about 70 cents on every dollar that a man makes. There is an inequality that exists in America's workplace, and our agenda is to end that inequality, to make sure that whether you are a man or a woman, you are going to be paid an equal amount for the same amount of work, the same experience, the same productivity. So when women succeed, America succeeds. There are several other policies here that are family-friendly policies, and we will talk about that another day. If the middle class is to succeed, if we are going to jump-start the opportunities for the middle class, a key element is education. So that is the third plank--the third leg upon which we rest our policies. How can we jump-start the middle class? Education--there are very many things that we can do in education. One just passed the House of Representatives on a bipartisan vote after almost two decades of struggle. We are revamping the job training programs in America, so that the preparation that people need to get a decent job are streamlined, effective, and efficient, and that is part of it, the job training programs, but it is more than that. American students now have to--in almost every case--borrow an extraordinary amount of money in order to get a higher education, whether it is community college or the 4-year colleges and beyond. That extraordinary debt burden is enhanced by extraordinarily high interest rates, so what we want to do is to bring down those interest rates, and there are three or four different pieces of legislation that our Democratic team has put forth, all of them to accomplish the same goal, bringing down the interest rates. We would like to see it go down to the same interest rates that banks pay for the money that they borrow from the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve--wouldn't that be nice--because it is almost zero, but we don't think we can get that far. We know it can bring that interest rate down from 6, 7, 8 percent down to the 3 percent, maybe the 4 percent range--literally cutting in half the cost of that money. So there are a series of policies on education. Let me turn to the one that we want to focus on tonight, which is the Make It In America agenda. There are many pieces to this. One of them was put forward by our team, and there are about seven different elements to this program. This is our logo, Make It In America, so that Americans can make it. Trade policy, taxes, energy policy, labor, education--which we just talked about--research, and infrastructure, these are the elements of a solid program to have the middle class have an opportunity, to jump- start the working men and women so that they can, once again, make it in America--by rebuilding the manufacturing sector, by having decent trade policies, where we don't give it away and see the American corporations simply run off to China or Bangladesh or wherever to get the lowest possible wage, trade policies that are fair to America. Our tax policy is critically important. If anybody was reading the newspapers, The Wall Street Journal or other business newspapers last week, the word now is ``inversion.'' Well, what is inversion? It is simply a runaway American corporation, running away to the lowest possible tax haven in the world and making themselves domiciled in that country, leaving America behind, where they got their start, where they built their enterprise and simply running away, leaving those who cannot run to pay the burden of operating this great country's security, our defense, and all of the other things we need to do. So tax policy fits into it. Energy policy, labor--we will go through some of these tonight. We won't get to all of them. I want to deal very quickly with this last one, which is the infrastructure. We passed a bill last week, and it was a stopgap. It was a kick the can down the road bill to keep our national highway system funded. It was really a pretty lousy bill. It would extend for some 10 months an inadequate amount of funding for the transportation systems of this Nation, and it was funded by a cockamamie scheme of somehow smoothing pensions, which basically meant that American corporations didn't have to pay as much into their pension system, so that they could pay more in taxes. It is not going to happen. If you wonder why Detroit, why San Jose, why other cities and companies across this Nation have troubles with their pension systems, it is because of this kind of foolish legislation. What are you to do? Let the highway program stop? No. We passed the bill, and we will see where it winds up. What we really need is what the President has proposed--a robust, comprehensive make it and build it in America program. It is called the GROW AMERICA Act, to grow America, to build the infrastructure, and there are several pieces to this piece of legislation--all of them deserve the immediate attention of the 435 of us in the House of Representatives and the 100 Senators--proposed by the President and, therefore, dead on arrival here. If it had been proposed by--I don't know--any other leader in the world, it probably would have passed by now, but the Republicans will not allow President Obama's proposals to move forward. Here it is, the highway system. Now, this is just in 2015. The highway system would get even more money than it has today, some $60 billion total, $7.6 billion to fix the current highway system, and this is in addition to the money that the States and locals are putting in-- public transit, an increase in public transit, the buses, the light rail trains, and the like, inner city rail, Amtrak, boosting that--I am going to come back to Amtrak in a few moments. International trade--back to what I talked about a few moments ago in the Make It In America agenda--international trade, the ports, revamping the ports, a freight policy--really, for the very first time, we would have an opportunity to have, in the United States, a freight policy. How do you get the containers off the ship in Long Beach, put them on a railcar, travel across the United States to some terminal, and then, once again, put them on a truck to go to wherever they are going? A policy, a comprehensive policy about how we move freight is critically important to the United States. International commerce and fair trade is important because it does allow for the boosting and the growth of the American economy. Now, free trade is something different, and that basically means give it away to some other country, which we should not do. This GROW AMERICA Act is one of the principal elements in jump- starting the middle class. Why? Because these are middle class jobs. These are construction jobs on the highways, on the transit system, in the railroads, and certainly in the ports and the freight system-- middle class jobs. How do we grow the economy? Build the infrastructure, increase the jobs for the working men and women and the families of America, and we grow the economy. By the way, we also grow the tax revenues because people are working. They are not tax takers, they are taxpayers. So this is a proposal that the President has put forward. There has not been one hearing in the House of Representatives on this proposal that is now over 4 months old. Why? Why? Why is it that we have not given the President of the United States at least the consideration and the courtesy of having a hearing on his proposal? We should do so because it happens to be a very, very good proposal. Let's take a couple of these elements for a moment. This bridge collapsed. Now, this isn't a bridge from Donetsk in Ukraine that was bombed during that war there. This is a bridge in Washington, a bridge north of Seattle on Interstate 5, the highway system between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, right down the coast, the west coast of California. This bridge collapsed just a couple of years ago. And this is not unusual. We have had bridges collapsing all across the United States. This is part of the GROW AMERICA agenda. It is part of the agenda that we have in mind for the middle class, jump-starting the middle class, because when this bridge is built of American-produced steel in the Buy America laws that are presently on the books--which, by the way, the President says we ought to make even more robust so that your tax dollars are spent on American-made steel, American-made concrete, and the other elements that go into building these infrastructure projects, in other words, spreading the opportunity that comes from the transportation system and the growing and the building of the transportation system into all the other elements in the economy. It can be done. The GROW AMERICA Act is specifically designed to deal with the deficiency in America's roads, and particularly in the bridges. Oh, the economic loss as a result of this highway system being shut down? Unfathomable. Didn't have to happen. And if we pass the GROW AMERICA Act, it is not likely to happen. I want to pick up that little piece about what happens when you spend your tax money on American-made systems. Now, we talk a lot about green energy, as we should. We talk about energy conservation, as we should. We talk about wind turbines, and we talk about alternate energy systems such as solar, as we should. But where are those manufacturers? Where are the wind turbines manufactured? Where are the solar systems manufactured? Oh, China. By the way, we have a trade suit against China for dumping solar panels in the United States and decimating the American manufacturing system. This piece of legislation, 1524, I like it. I am the author of it. H.R. 1524, Make It In America, create clean energy manufacturing jobs-- simple. Your tax dollars must be spent on American-made solar, wind, and green energy systems. Now, if some developer out there wants to build a solar energy plant and use your tax dollars as a subsidy to pay for that plant, then if this becomes law, he must buy American-made solar panels. Now, if he wants to use his own money, he can buy whatever he wants. But I believe your tax dollars ought to be spent on American-made equipment, which is part of the Make It In America agenda. There are many other pieces to this puzzle, and in the Democratic Caucus, we have introduced well over 50 pieces of legislation to advance the program of Make It In America so that the American middle class has a chance to grow and a chance to prosper. We can do that. Any number of those bills--or, in fact, all of them--would advance the middle class, literally jump-starting the middle class and giving American families an opportunity to enjoy the benefits of this incredible society and this incredible country we call America. Joining me tonight is a woman from Ohio who has spent many years dealing with manufacturing and talking about the things we need to do to build and to grow the manufacturing sector of America. I think you come from the heart of that. Marcy Kaptur, welcome. Please share with us your thoughts.