John Garamendi

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Let me pick up on that, Mr. Tonko. You are quite correct, it is not just an attempt. There have been 33 votes on this floor by the Republican majority to either terminate completely or to eviscerate in part the Affordable Health Care Act. Now, what would be eviscerated? First of all, the Ryan Republican budget would terminate Medicare as we know it and give to every American who is not yet 55 years of age a coupon that basically says this coupon is worth 70 percent of the cost of insurance. Go get your insurance when you become 65 from a private insurance company. No longer would Medicare be available to all of those people who will eventually be 65. And for those people who are 55 to 65, it makes it impossible for Medicare to go forward on a financial basis because it takes away the younger people. I heard something on the floor which I just said--wait a minute--some statistic that was tossed out here just a few moments ago that more people die on Medicare than die on regular insurance. Yes, Medicare is for the elderly. Medicare is for the elderly. Yes, they do get medical care but eventually they get old; and I will, too, be on Medicare, and I will die on Medicare. And I am so grateful to have Medicare available to me when I become 65 because I know that I have a solid insurance program. I know that I'll be covered, and I know that my younger brother and sister will be covered when they become 65. They will have quality care. And guess what, they will die on Medicare. Yup, that happens. You're on Medicare for the rest of your life. It may be for a year. It may be for 30 years. But for whatever, you've got a guaranteed benefit that is available to you. And what do you lose if the Ryan Republican budget and the effort to repeal Medicare is lost? Well, let's see. Nearly 13 million Americans will benefit from $1.1 billion in rebates from their private insurance companies that are presently overcharging them. Hmm. And 86 million Americans, including 54 million Americans on private policies and 32 million Americans that are on Medicare, will lose their free preventive services. Now, you want to reduce the cost of health care, then you've got to make sure that people stay healthy as long as possible. And how do you do that? Blood pressure. You want to deal with blood pressure, okay, it is very cheap, if you get your medicine. But you have to find out about it, so you need that free checkup. Diabetes, stroke, all of those things can be delayed and often prevented if you know it's coming. So what are we talking, 32 million seniors will no longer have a free checkup, preventive services. In August, just a week from now, women will begin receiving free coverage for comprehensive women's preventive services--pap smears, breast cancer checkups. You want to repeal that? That's what the Republicans have voted 33 times to do--repeal the free checkups for women in America. 105 million Americans will have a lifetime limit once again. Today, they do not have a limit. So if you're 30 years old, you have a private insurance policy and you get cancer, you'll hit that lifetime limit immediately. Not under the ObamaCares program. In that program, there are no lifetime limits, and you will continue to receive the medical benefits.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, thank you for the privilege. And thank you, to my colleagues in the Republican Doctors Caucus, for a most interesting but factually incorrect 45 minutes of debate here. We really were going to spend this evening talking about jobs and about the American Jobs Act and one of the great ``woulda, coulda, shoulda's'' of our time. But we're going to hold that for just a few moments, though, because there are a few things that really need to be discussed from the last half-hour. First of all, most of the discussion was about Medicaid. That's a national program in which the Federal Government pays about 50 percent--it varies State to State, but roughly 50 percent of the cost of providing medical services to the poor, women, and children in the States. Now the debate was most interesting in that the argument was that there would be a lack of access and simultaneously an argument that there were no cost controls. Yet if you were listening to our esteemed colleagues, you would have heard them say, The doctors are not paid enough. I think if they're not paid enough, and the doctors want to get paid more in order to provide services, then the costs are going to go up. So the cost control argument here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you want to keep the costs down, you need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the system. Certainly certain services within the Medicaid and Medi-Cal, as we call it in California, are not paid sufficiently. Some other services are paid more than enough. So you need to balance that up over time. And all of these programs are run by the States. It's really the State that decides what the reimbursement rate is going to be. The Federal Government then matches the State's contribution. So the argument really didn't make a whole lot of sense. And even more so, in the Ryan Republican budget, which has passed this House twice now, there is a significant reduction in the educational services for doctors so that the money that we, all Americans, spend to educate doctors--particularly in that part of the program, both the basic education and then in the residency programs--the Ryan Republican budget significantly reduces the amount of money available for residency programs for family care practices, for the very basic programs that we all want to access. For family care, for basic care, that money is reduced. You go, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. If you are down here on the floor arguing that there is an insufficient number of doctors and they are not paid enough, then don't argue at the same time that it is too expensive and there are not enough cost controls; and please don't argue that there are not enough doctors because, in fact, the Affordable Care Act expanded the number of residencies for very basic care, for the family practice programs. I'm not quite sure I understand what they are arguing. In addition to that, access across this Nation for millions and millions of people is provided in clinics. These are the community clinics that a large population attend for their basic services, and most of those are the Medi-Cal or Medicaid population and the very poor that are not yet enrolled in what will be the expanded ObamaCares--the ObamaCares program. So what do the Republicans offer us? The Ryan Republican budget would cut by more than a third the support for the clinics, closing thousands of clinics across the Nation and in my State where people get access. So please do not come down here on the floor and argue for an hour or half an hour that access is being delayed when on the one hand you are cutting the money for access. That's what the Ryan Republican budget does. It cuts the money for access by reducing the residencies and reducing access to clinics by cutting by more than a third the money that is there to build up the clinics, the community clinics where people get care. I'm going to take a deep breath here because I don't want to get wound up too tight about this issue, and I want to ask my colleague from New York, Mr. Paul Tonko, to talk about the Medicare aspects of this.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Mulvaney).

Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Reclaiming my time, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank the gentleman. My apologies to Mr. Jones who was about to stand up and speak on this issue. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your sincerity and your extraordinary work on the issue--a very, very difficult issue. I share with you the obvious compassion that you have for our troops--those who are there and those who have been wounded. However, if I might pose a question: The Commander in Chief, who presumably had the advice of the generals on the ground and in the Pentagon, has stated clearly that at the beginning of the next fiscal year, which would be October 1 of this year, there would be 68,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan and that there would be a steady drawdown, or a steady pace, so that at the end of the fiscal year there would be some 40,000 troops, which would be September 30, 2013. Now, a steady drawdown would assume that you would take 28,000 troops, and you would remove them on a steady basis so that, over the course of that year, you would have half the troops in the country and the other half would be gone. That being the case, you don't need to budget for all 68,000 being there the entire year. In fact, you budget for something between 40,000 and 68,000. However, the appropriation that we have before us actually assumes that all 68,000 are going to be there until October 1 of 2013. That's not what the President has said. That's apparently not what the generals are planning and what the planning and execution is. So what this amendment simply does is to recognize what it is that the generals intend to do as commanded by the Commander in Chief. Now, we may disagree with that, but the advice just given to me by the chairman is that we ought to pay attention to the generals, who are apparently saying a steady drawdown. There is $12.5 billion at stake here, and what we are trying to do is to capture that. Now, at least there would be concern that something would go awry and that the drawdown wouldn't occur. The appropriation actually places a $3.2 billion cushion for unexpected contingencies. So what are we doing here? Do we care about the deficit or not? My amendment simply speaks to: let's be wise with the taxpayers' money. Let's not appropriate money that should not or is not apparently going to be necessary, and if there is a contingency, there is a $3 billion cushion built into this budget and into this appropriation already.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is offered by Mr. Jones and myself. The current Overseas Contingency Operation budget is based on the assumption that we will have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan throughout the entire fiscal year 2013. However, this is not the plan that our Commander in Chief has put forth, nor is it the plan that many of us who would like to see the war come to a quick end would support. As President Obama has repeatedly stated, we are winding down this war. After withdrawing the surge troops by the end of this summer, that will bring us to 68,000 troops at the beginning of the 2013 fiscal year. We will continue to bring our troops home from Afghanistan, and I quote the President, ``at a steady pace.'' This amendment captures the billions of dollars that we will save by pursuing this steady drawdown of troops, as opposed to maintaining troop levels at 68,000 throughout the entire fiscal year 2013, and then presumably, on October 1, bring 28,000 troops home. This amendment would cut $12.67 billion from the Overseas Contingency Fund. Let me be clear about what this amendment does not do. It does not cut funding for troops on the ground in Afghanistan. I believe, as do all of my colleagues who have advocated for an accelerated end to this war, that our troops in harm's way should have all the resources they need to safely execute their mission. And I am committed to ensuring that our troops on the ground have the best equipment and the compensation that they deserve. This amendment does cut the OCO funds that are unneeded and would not be used if we pursue the President's steady drawdown plan. In these fiscal times, stringent as they are, we should not be paying for things that we're not going to buy and that we don't need, and we certainly don't need to further pad the OCO budget. The committee has already approved an extra $3.25 billion cushion on the OCO fund that was not even part of the President's request. We have already spent half a trillion dollars of taxpayer dollars on the war in Afghanistan, and the Department of Defense can't even account for many of those funds, lost due to contractor fraud or Afghan corruption. When we take into account the long-term costs of this war, such as servicing our debt and caring for the wounded warriors, the costs are even more staggering. Many of us support a quicker timeline of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan than the President has proposed. After a decade of war, we recognize that our core national security objectives have been met in Afghanistan and that there is no U.S. military solution to the remaining challenges in the Afghanistan nation. We began our military operations in Afghanistan to eliminate those international terrorist organizations that threaten the United States. Thanks to the remarkable bravery and competency of our men and women in uniform, al Qaeda has been virtually eliminated from Afghanistan; terrorist training camps have been demolished; and Osama bin Laden is dead. Thousands have given their lives to accomplish this, and tens of thousands have suffered life-altering wounds. It is now time for our troops to come home. It is also time for this House not to waste further money. This amendment is not about ending the war. It is about reducing the deficit by $12.67 billion. We can do that by capturing the billions of dollars saved by the President's proposed troop drawdown and by redirecting those funds towards reducing the deficit and by bolstering our fiscal security here at home. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, reclaiming my time, and thank you, sir, for the information. The point here is that in the early development of all of these fuels, whether they are coal-based or other kinds of biofuels, there is a higher cost in the early stages that presumably and hopefully and, in fact, must be reduced if the Navy is to procure those fuels for the normal utilization of their fleet, or whatever the fuel might be used for. Therefore, in listening to your discussion, which I do support, I think it's important to understand that in the early development there is going to be a higher cost which could not and should not carry forward for the normal use of those fuels. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Reclaiming my time, sir, in listening to your discussion about the coal-based fuels, clearly those are in the development stage; they're not yet in place. I would assume that in the development stage, the U.S. military would be purchasing those for the purposes of testing as well as providing an early market, a development market, for those fuels. Therefore, I would assume that that same logic would apply to other kinds of biofuels, would it not? I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I have a question to the author of the amendment and to those who are supporting it on the other side. In listening to your discussion, you seem to be in a posture of the military--Navy in this case, and I suppose other branches--having access to alternate fuels. You spoke specifically of coal-based fuels. Are you speaking of all kinds of alternative fuels and that the military should pursue those fuels so that they might be available to pursue them in their development phase as well as when they are fully developed?

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Madam Chair, after more than a decade of war, it is time to accelerate our drawdown of troops in Afghanistan and bring this war to a close. We've sent our brave servicemen and -women to Afghanistan to eliminate the international terrorists who would do us harm. They have successfully executed this mission with phenomenal dedication and capacity: they have driven al Qaeda from Afghanistan, destroyed their training facilities, killed or captured most of their top leaders. Under President Obama's decisive leadership and thanks to the courage and competency of our special forces, the 9/11 mastermind--Osama bin Laden--has met his just end. The President has outlined a plan for winding down this war, and I support drawing down our military presence in Afghanistan even more quickly than the President has suggested. We should welcome our troops back as heroes and ensure they receive the support and care that is due when they return. Our military servicemembers and their families have borne and continue to bear far more than their share of the burden of this war. I am a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and I represent the 10th District of California, which is home to Travis Air Force Base-- the largest Air Mobility Command unit in the Air Force. Nearby in Marysville, California, is Beale Air Force Base, which is the leader in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Together, 16,000 servicemembers across the active duty National Guard and Reserves, as well as over 75,000 veterans, live in my district and in the surrounding area. These are the people who are disproportionately bearing the cost of this war. As their Representative, I owe it to them to make sure that we do not ask of them any more than is absolutely necessary in order to ensure America's national security. But the majority here in this House is determined to prevent even a serious debate about ending the war in Afghanistan. They have inserted language into the National Defense Authorization Act that would actually slow down the withdrawal of U.S. forces and keep nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until at least 2015. When the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee tried to offer an amendment to replace this provision, the majority said it was out of order. When a bipartisan group of Members of Congress joined together on an amendment replacing this provision, the majority blocked that amendment. This is the longest war in America's history, claiming thousands of lives and costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and the majority simply doesn't want to talk about it. We must talk about this war. We must take time to think deeply about the sacrifices of those who are serving and who have served. To date, 1,875 of our military servicemembers have been killed in Afghanistan, leaving thousands more to endure the unimaginable grief of the loss of a loved one. 15,322 of our troops have been wounded seriously, suffering life-altering injuries. Not included in that number are those with psychological wounds--invisible but no less devastating. We have spent a half a trillion taxpayer dollars on the war in Afghanistan, and this legislation would allocate $88 billion more to be spent in this year alone. There are some who would continue this war indefinitely. They oppose the fixed timeline for ending combat operations and for bringing our troops home. They oppose any concrete plans for transitioning full responsibility for Afghanistan's security as quickly as possible. Even worse, they would have American troops continuing to fight against a domestic insurgency in Afghanistan, and they think it's America's job to defeat those armed factions that threaten the Karzai Government, which is, perhaps, the most corrupt government in this world. In fact, they have inserted language into this bill that says the U.S. objective in Afghanistan is to defend the Karzai Government against the Taliban. They also have an interest in American troops defeating the Haqqani Network and any other faction that is taking on the Karzai Government, involving us in a multisided civil war. It was never the American mission in Afghanistan, nor should it be. As President Obama clearly said last week, ``Our goal is to destroy Al Qaeda.'' We began a military operation in Afghanistan with a very clear reason. It's time for us to end this war and bring our troops home. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, Mr. Tonko, thank you for joining us this evening. I thank our two gentlemen from the armed services who were here earlier. And, yes, our best days do lie ahead. It's about public policies, it's about the entrepreneurial spirit, and it's about America's desire to be the best. We're going to make it in America. We're going to make it in America because we will, once again, make things in America. We will rebuild the American middle class. It's about policy, it's about the spirit of America. It can be done and it will be done, and we're here to see that it does get done. Mr. Tonko, thank you for this evening. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. GARAMENDI. You talk about reward and about tax policy, as was I. And let me give you another one, and I know that you and I are working on this together: tax policy. Right now we provide, we Americans provide a tax credit, a tax reduction, for those who put up solar programs or wind turbines. The thing is, that's our tax money. The question is, where is it being spent? Is it being spent on American- made equipment, or is it being spent on foreign made equipment? All too often, those tax subsidies are used to purchase foreign equipment. This piece of legislation which I'm working on together with Mr. Tonko, H.R. 613, basically says that if you're using our tax money, for example, the Highway Trust Fund tax money, for buses, trains, or building roads, then you must spend that money on American-made equipment. Similarly, with solar and wind, if you're going to get a tax credit, if you're going to use American taxpayers' money to build something, then it's going to be made in America. We're going to return the American manufacturing by using our tax money on American-made goods and services. Mr. Tonko, we're nearing the end of our time. Why don't you take a run at wrapping? I get the last 30 seconds. You take the next 90 seconds.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Let me pick up one of the issues the President has been talking about recently, and we actually worked on this more than a year and a half, almost 2 years ago, and that was the tax policy. At the outset, I talked about policies, tax policies being one of them. American tax policies until December of 2010 actually allowed and gave to American corporations a tax reduction, a tax break when they offshore jobs. Send a job oversees and reduce your taxes. Hello? How could that be? I don't know where it came from, but that was the law of the land until the Democrats, then in control of Congress, pushed through a piece of legislation that ended $12 billion a year of tax breaks for corporations that offshored, sent jobs oversees. I will just note parenthetically that not one Republican voted to end that extraordinarily damaging tax proposal that rewarded companies with lower taxes when they offshored jobs. Not one Republican voted to repeal that law. However, the Democrats stood together, the President signed that, and it is now the law. There is still about another 4, 5, maybe $6 billion of tax breaks that companies get when they offshore jobs. We've been working to eliminate those, and the President talks about it very often. He also talks about something that we should do, and that is to reward the onshoring of jobs. When companies bring the jobs back home, they should receive a tax break. When you want to send jobs offshore, you should receive a penalty and certainly ought not receive a tax reduction. Now, that's good public policy. It hasn't happened. We don't control the House of Representatives, and all tax bills have to start in the House of Representatives. So we keep pleading with our Republican colleagues, please, please, give American corporations a tax break when they onshore jobs, and end the remaining tax breaks for offshoring jobs.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I want to just pick this up. I do want to come back to our manufacturing policies before we wrap up here. But before we do, just to pull together the American Jobs Act that the President proposed back in September, A, folks, it did not increase the deficit. The program was paid for, paid for by changes in the tax policy of the United States, policies that the President continues to talk about today that we eliminate the tax benefits that go unnecessarily to the oil company, the oil industry. Some $5 billion to $15 billion a year of subsidy is going to the wealthiest industry in the world. Pull those back. And the extraordinarily low taxes that have been available to the super rich, the top 1 percent, restore those to the Clinton era tax and other tax proposals that he had made so that the proposal was fully paid for--not decreasing the deficit but rather putting people back to work and creating the jobs that are necessary to move the economy and to get the American middle class back into the game so that they can prosper and so that we can rebuild those American manufacturing jobs, the 9 million jobs in manufacturing that were lost between 1990 and 2010. Keep in mind that over the last 29 months, there has been private sector job growth every one of those 29 months. And so when people say, no, no, it's not good; say, it's not good enough, but at least it is happening. Men and women are going back to work in the private sector. The public sector continues to lose jobs and continues to shed jobs. But on the private sector job side, in part because of the policies we've been talking about here and the inherent strength of the American entrepreneurial and business spirit, people are coming back, not as strong as we want, but if the American Jobs Act were in place in its fullness, we would be moving towards a more balanced budget, reducing the deficit, and putting people back to work. We're not there yet, but we've not given up on this. And one of the major pieces in this is what we call Make it in America, because manufacturing matters. I know in your district you've been talking a lot about this Mohawk Valley and about this great history. I'm not going to let you continue on without saying, hey, I'm from California. And we know entrepreneurship, and we know about the next generation of jobs and the next innovation. But New York still is there, and we'll vie with you for the best in the Nation.

Mr. GARAMENDI. This was the Governor from New York, not from Arkansas.

Mr. GARAMENDI. So the President also talked about building the foundation for tomorrow's economic growth. This is the infrastructure of the Nation--a big word, but one that I think most Americans understand as being the roads, the bridges, the railroads, the sanitation systems, the water systems, the research, the schools. We delayed--I guess all of us, in some respect, but really the Republicans in this House controlled this--the transportation bill. We delayed the implementation of the reauthorization of the transportation bill until the middle of the construction season. Just 2 weeks ago, we actually passed a 2-year transportation authorization program--very, very important and very beneficial. But what if that had happened last September? We lost half of a construction season and States and localities were unable to plan and put in place the projects that they needed to put in place because of the dilly-dallying and the delay that went on here. We'll take some of the blame on our side, but we don't control the legislation. It's controlled by our Republicans here. Ultimately, they were unable to even put a bill out. The Senate did put a bill out; and I thank Senator Boxer from California, the lead author on that, and the minority leader, and in her committee the two of them came together with a bipartisan bill. It finally got done. We're thankful for it. But the President wanted to go beyond that. He wanted to establish an infrastructure bank, one where we could literally invest some public money, some private money, and go about building projects that have a cash flow, like a toll road or a sanitation plant or a water system where people pay a fee and there's a cash flow so that we can really build the infrastructure of this Nation. But it didn't happen.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, you just talked about history here. Actually, your Governor, DeWitt Clinton, really did lead a major infrastructure project. Now, California was the Gold Rush. It's very interesting to go back through the old writings; and the folks from the East, New York and around, traveled up the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes to Chicago and then from there on. And they also left--and these are my relatives--the port of New York, which was built as part of the infrastructure, to travel to the Panama and then across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the coast of California. So my own relatives took advantage of those two infrastructure projects that you talked about. However, your Governor was building off some of the work of the Founding Fathers. There's a lot of talk around here that there's no role for government in the economy. Well, George Washington disagreed. And his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, disagreed. And they had a debate with Jefferson, who thought that we ought to be an agrarian State; and George Washington and Hamilton thought there was a role for industrial and for manufacturing. And so George Washington in his very first days as President told Alexander Hamilton to put together an industrial policy for America. And there were about, I think, nine points or maybe 12 points in that industrial policy. One of them was: build the infrastructure. It specifically said canals and harbors. So this goes back to the very beginning of our country. What the President wanted to do and what we Democrats want to do is to build the infrastructure, the foundation upon which the economy grows. And we can do it. We can pay for it because every dollar we invest in the infrastructure immediately turns around and develops $1.75 of growth in the economy. So it's not money down a rat hole. It is money that builds the foundation and then expands the economy immediately. It is the very best way to put people back to work immediately, together with education.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Exactly. Now the American Jobs Act had many, many pieces to it; and this is one of the great what-ifs, you know, one of the woulda, coulda, shouldas. What if back in September this House had actually taken up the elements of the American Jobs Act. There was, I think, almost 250,000 teaching jobs that were in this piece of legislation. There was also almost the same number of police and firemen and public safety officers in the legislation. It didn't happen and so I know that in my daughter and son-in-law's own school district there have been layoffs because of the economic and financial circumstances of the State of California, and the class size went from 22-23 to 33-34, an extraordinary burden on the kids. When you're in the second or third grade, you never get a chance to go back and repeat. That's a lost year, and that will carry through perhaps all the rest of your life, that you missed that opportunity to really advance your education. Just on the educational side, you go, whoa, what if we had another 280,000 teachers in the classroom across America today? How would that advance the well-being of our children? I think it's very clear they'd be far better off, far better off. But it didn't happen.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, this is the only thing that's actually been done. When the President last September proposed the American Jobs Act, the second thing that he talked about was the veterans jobs bill, and it kind of languished around here for a couple of months. It was early September when the President spoke. Then came this special day every year called Veterans Day, and all 435 of us, we would go home, and we would go to the veterans parades and, lo and behold, we came back and we found compromise, and we found bipartisanship and the veterans jobs bill actually became law shortly thereafter.