John Garamendi

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. This morning in California, in Marysville, a young soldier will be laid to rest, one of many. The most important issue facing this Nation--the Afghanistan war--continues on. We have 10 minutes to debate our view of how that should end. Ranking Member Smith proposed in committee an amendment that would rationally bring down and end this war. He was refused the opportunity--the ranking member, refused the opportunity to even be heard in committee. And now we are faced with the language in the bill that extends this war indefinitely at a cost this year of $88 billion and at the same level interminably into the future. This deserves a robust debate. What is the role of America in Afghanistan? How long are we to continue there? Unfortunately, that debate is truncated and will be terminated by the majority in an unsuccessful way that extends the war. Why would we do that? Apparently for reasons that are not understood.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you so very much.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I was going to head out the door, but your Tesla story caught me as I was about to leave. The grid, we need to have a smart grid. This is one of the things that is in contention here. This is about energy research. Now, we need to understand, how can we make that grid smart enough and robust enough that we will be able to charge, on any given block, one, two, three, four, five, or six more homes at night? To do that, we need to have research and understanding, not only on how we produce the energy in an environmentally sound way that reduces the carbon emissions, but we also need to know how to distribute that power and when it's going to be needed. That's called the smart grid. Now, to do that requires research. It requires us to invest in research to understand how the grid works, how it can be improved, how we can create the efficiency in the grid, how that power can be distributed to where it is needed when it is needed. That takes money. The Federal Government has, over the last several years, provided that research money in the budget that we're debating here now. Well, we're not debating it. It actually passed. The blueprint for the current budget from this House reduces the energy research in the United States. So it may be some time, if our Republican colleagues have their way about the energy research, before those three people will be able to plug that thing in at the same time at night.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Is this the one that goes a gazillion miles an hour in 5 seconds?

Mr. GARAMENDI. --60 years was a net exporter of oil, a net exporter. We had achieved energy independence. We were exporting more than we were importing for the last quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year. I don't know if that's going to continue, but it flies right in the face of what the oil industry was telling us as the fake, false crisis of the spring occurred. My guess is it was speculation. My guess is it was greed on the part of the oil industry. My solution is to end the subsidies, bring that money back and use it on the green technologies and conservation. My solution is to enforce the Dodd-Frank laws and to make certain speculators are not robbing the American people day in and day out. Those are two things we can do. And as you said earlier, we will continue to produce energy in the United States, and we'll Make It In America. I thank you so very much. I do have another meeting. I'm going to have to run, but this is good. It's good to get the information out there. Thank you for bringing us together tonight.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I have a couple more things that I'll pick up along the way. Let me just share one of them, since we're on the gasoline issue. You and I go back to our district every weekend. A month ago, 2 months ago, the rage was the price of gasoline. I was doing town halls. I knew you were also, and so I was doing some research about where the gasoline is and what it's being used for and what the cost was. I came across a statistic from the Energy Information Institute that was absolutely surprising to me. The talk on the radio and on television and the talk radio and talk television was that we have this enormous shortage of gasoline, that the threat of a war in Iran was responsible for driving it up, and somehow problems in Nigeria or Venezuela--or wherever--were somehow shorting the market and that gasoline was in short supply. But the information, the statistics were exactly the opposite. There was a glut of gasoline in the United States, so much so--get this--so much so that the oil industry-- Chevron, Exxon, BP, all of the rest--were exporting 28 million gallons of gasoline a day. At the same time they were exporting, they were driving the price up towards $5 a gallon. And we go, wait a minute. What's this all about? You're telling me we have a shortage? If we have a shortage, why are you exporting 28 million gallons of gasoline a day? And from the information I've been able to obtain, it appears as though that export continues to this day--an export of 28 million gallons of gasoline a day out of the United States at the same time that the industry is saying, Oh, woe is us. We have a short supply. Well, if it's short supply, it's because they are creating it to the deficit and to the harm of the American traveling public who has to buy that gasoline. Now, one other thing--and check me on this; I was trying to recall all of the information this morning--that in the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of this year, the United States, for the first time in--help me here, 40 years?

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, I took a look at that before we began this hour, and I go, Oh, my, do I have to wait until 2025 to buy that vehicle? No, not really. There are pure electric vehicles that are available today that get not 54 miles per gallon but like infinite, by using electricity only. You can buy those. Unfortunately for me, in my district where a Saturday run around the district is 600 miles, it doesn't make much sense yet, but it's coming. The battery technology is improving for automobiles. You can store that energy or take down that energy at night. This is part of the electric grid and the changes that are occurring in the electric grid all across this Nation. Given the low price of natural gas today--just over $2 per 1,000 Btus--we're seeing the electric utility industry shifting from coal to natural gas. As they do that shift, we get an enormous reduction in the carbon emissions--which is good for the environment and good for the climate change issue--and, simultaneously, we're able to then see a path to an electric vehicle, or at least a hybrid plug-in, hybrid electric vehicle. All very, very good. Biofuels will be part of that also. So it's very, very powerful that we continue to increase. And let's keep in mind that there had been no increase until the Obama administration came in. I think it was over 20 years that the standards had been in place, and then President Obama came in and said, Listen, we need to move to conservation. And the result is the incredible savings. I don't want to wait until 2025. Let's do something about it today.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I was there for that, and I was struck by the very same statistic. As you look at what happened then, $10 here, a doubling in price. Consider for a moment what it would mean to somebody that had purchased back here in March a million barrels of oil at $70 a barrel, and they come up to July, that million barrels of oil has doubled in value. So this is why speculation occurs. It occurs because somebody by playing the market, by speculating, is able to make a vast sum of money. There's the other side of that coin--somebody lost a vast sum of money coming down here. But the American public, however, was the single biggest loser in all of this because as that went up, the price at the pump also went up, and Americans paid more and more for the price of gasoline. It was about $5 a gallon when it came up here. And it didn't go down from $147 to $32; that proportion didn't happen. It did drop from near $5 down to $3.50, in that area. So the American public was stuck with an exceedingly high price which continues to this day, which leads to those extraordinary profits which you were showing just a few minutes ago. Now, I'm not saying the oil industry was involved in the speculation; but I will say this, the oil industry benefited from the speculation that left a very high price for oil into the future. This didn't last very long. This went back up to $70, and today it's over $100 a barrel. So we need to consider all of these things about what's going on in the oil market. The bottom line of this is we need to change. And this is, I think, where you want to go. You want to talk about conservation. You're the leader here, take us where you want and I'll follow.

Mr. GARAMENDI. The speculation issue, this morning we had a fellow from the Connecticut Petroleum Retailers Association come in and talk to us about speculation. You and I didn't have enough time to put this together, we talked about this beforehand, because we were both taken by the information he provided. It is really not new information, but it is very interestingly put on the issue of speculation. Forgive me, general public and forgive me, Ms. Speier, but I just decided to put this together on the back of this Make It in America chart because America was taken to the cleaners in 2008. This is what happened to the price of a barrel of oil in 2008. Now keep in mind in 2008 the wars were going on, but there was no real change in the wars. In March of 2008, a barrel of oil cost $70 a barrel in the United States, and I guess worldwide also. So March of 2008, it was $70 a barrel. Nothing happened, no big change. The Straits of Hormuz were not shut down; Venezuela and Nigeria and other countries continued to pump oil, as they had before. But between March of 2008 and July of 2008, what's that, 4 months, 5 months, the price went from $70 a barrel to $147 and gasoline was very close to $5 a gallon. So oil went from $70 to $147--doubled, doubled in price--in just a period of time from March, April, May, June until July of 2008. And then the speculators broke and the price plummeted between July to November to $32 a barrel. Now this has nothing to do with the production of oil around the world. It has nothing to do with major international crises of any kind. Obviously, we had a problem in the United States with our economy; but the consumption of gasoline remained about the same, but the price of a barrel of oil doubled and then in the same year, July to November, plummeted to $32 a barrel. If there is ever, ever a situation that says somebody is speculating in this market, it's this extraordinary change that occurred over a period of time from March to July to November. And there's no supply and demand, no international crisis that could even begin to explain this extraordinary shift in prices. It is, I think, beyond a doubt that all of this, this was the great gasoline crisis of 2008, was caused by speculation. Now, we need to do something about that. Here is an issue before the House of Representatives, and every day somewhere in the buildings here in Washington there are a group of Republicans that are doing their level best to eliminate the one law that we have been able to put in place to control speculation. This is the Dodd-Frank legislation. The Dodd-Frank legislation has very powerful tools to control speculation. And you can draw your own conclusions why our Republican friends would try to torpedo, to end, to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank legislation so that the speculators can continue this kind of activity. Now, keep in mind that this is not ending. If we go to 2010, 2011, the current period, my guess is that we would see something similar to this kind of speculation. So the Dodd-Frank legislation is the only tool we have available today to deal with speculations such as occurred in 2008 and is in all likelihood continuing today.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, you have another chart there that showed the oil that is pumped and the price of gasoline. Congresswoman Speier, you used this before. And you asked me: If we take away the subsidies, will it increase the cost of gasoline? The answer is, categorically: No. First of all, it is an international market that sets the price of gasoline. I should add one little caveat to that. International market and speculation. And I'm going to come to the speculation in a little bit. Anyway, the international market sets the price of gasoline that these Big Five companies buy and the value of the oil that they extract. So the barrel of oil is set internationally. Now if it's set internationally and you take out the speculation, it remains fairly constant. Here's the production. And it has gone up, but it's been rather steady over this period of time. The subsidy is to encourage the production of oil. Well, they've had the subsidy and so the production has been rocking along here. The price of oil is set internationally. What explains this enormous variation in the price of fuel at the pump? Well, it's not production. That's from here. Is it the subsidies? The subsidies are a very, very small part. You're looking at a $137 billion total profit. The subsidy is $5 billion. So it's inconceivable that the subsidy has much to do with the bottom line, other than adding $5 billion, which would be, I guess, if you took the subsidy out, it would be $132 billion. Oh, my, let's whine about that. I don't think so. So the subsidy doesn't have much to do, if anything, with the price of gasoline. The price of gasoline, however, is set by those companies. And that leads directly to that bottom line there--this $137 billion. They choose to set that price. Now what are we going to do about it? Well, take the subsidies back and begin to move away from dependence on oil, whether that's imported oil or oil that is pumped out of the ground here in the United States, and move to these alternatives. Move to the alternatives, electricity and natural gas and the biofuels. All of those will further reduce the demand for oil which will bring down the cost of a barrel of oil within this country and around the world and, in so doing, allow us to have a lower gasoline price; and to do that, capture the subsidies. It's not going to increase the cost of a gallon of gasoline at all.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Congresswoman Speier, and thank you for bringing this very, very important issue to the attention of the American public this evening as we spend this hour talking about gas prices in the United States. I was really struck by the charts that you put up. Wow. But they tell us that the story is we don't pump oil in America. Not so. We do. We really do. And they tell us that we're going in the wrong direction. But if you take a look at those charts, we're actually producing more and more energy. Today, in the Resources Committee, on which I have the honor of sitting, we had a debate about this. And our Republican colleagues were saying that we're not producing as much. And so we show them the energy institute's statistics, and they say they're wrong. That's an independent agency and they collect the statistics, and in fact they're right. And your charts clearly pointed out that we are in fact making it in America. This is my favorite chart. This is what I'm often on the floor talking about: Manufacturing in America and making it in America. It's not often that we take this subject of making our energy in America, building an American energy machine, one that will supply the energy that our Nation needs to meet a growing economy and the needs of our society. So very, very much what we're talking about here is making it in America. There are so many different pieces to this. I'm going to just bring up two of those, and then we'll carry on our dialogue here. First of all, conservation. I think you're going to talk about this a little later--about automobile conservation, the gasoline in automobiles, which is very, very important, but there's so much other conservation that we must be doing in housing, in commercial buildings, in this building. This building is over 150 years old. We've got serious lack of energy conservation here within the Nation's Capitol. But if we carry on a major effort on conservation, we will reduce our expenses and simultaneously make the available energy--the energy that is currently available--much more widely available and at a lower cost because of the market forces. So conservation is absolutely critical not only in oil and gas but in all of the other energy that we consume in this Nation. Now the second thing, and then I'll circle back around quickly, is what I call substitution. We can substitute energy forms for oil, and in doing so, increase our domestic availability for oil--and that's diesel and gasoline. And in the substitution we also reduce our importation of oil. So substitution is really important. So what is substitution? Well, substitution is going electric. We can go to electric cars, go to hybrids, which are a combination of electric and gasoline. There are many different ways on the transportation sector. But oil is also used in the production of electricity. Natural gas is the big thing today, and it is a wonderful substitution for coal. And we'll come back to that. Finally, biofuels. The point I want to do here leads me to this little chart that I've used before, and it talks about where your tax money is going. Where is your tax money going? Well, I'll tell you that about $5 billion of your tax money every year goes to the oil industry. It goes to the oil industry to provide a subsidy that's now been in place for more than a century. And in doing so, it worked. That subsidy worked. It created one of the wealthiest--not one of--the wealthiest industry in the entire world. That's the oil industry. And, again, I know you're going to pick this up and carry it a little bit further. But just here, our subsidies, our tax dollars handed over $5 billion a year to the Big Five, who earn billions and billions of dollars of profit every quarter. Why do we continue to do that when we really starve the substitutions? You look at here, this is the biofuel area. This is the green technologies--wind, solar energy, biofuels. This is ethanol down here. You just compare this. The subsidies from $70 billion a year going to coal and oil, that's well beyond the Big Five. And over here on this side we're talking about some $12 billion. And down here, some $16 billion a year. So what's happened is that your tax money continues to subsidize oil and coal and just a little teeny, tiny bit on the substitutions, where the opportunity for real energy independence will exist. So we should keep this in mind as we look at how we use your tax dollars. Now there's a huge fight going on here in the Congress, appropriately so, about changing this substitution; that we ought to stop subsidizing the oil industry, put some of that money over here into the substitutes, that is the green technologies, and into paying off our deficit or taking care of our seniors and our sick. There's much, much more to be done on that. I would love to see your charts and we'll get into this in some, hopefully, elegant way.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. GARAMENDI. To the ranking member and the chair of the committee, thank you for a long slog of hard work and for the production of a bill that has much good in it. Certainly, we have to provide for our military. We need a strong, agile, smart, and deadly national defense program. That's certainly in this bill. We also need to provide for our soldiers--for the men and women--and those who serve this country, and that's in this bill. The issue of those who have served and who have come home remains an issue that we'll probably take up in other legislation. Provisions in the bill also provide for the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance necessary for us to be smart, and the bill provides for us to be agile in air mobility. Those are good things. However, there are many parts of this bill that I find objectionable, which has led to my ``no'' vote on this legislation. Let me quickly list those: Certainly, we've already talked about, here on the floor, the issue of due process. It needs to be addressed, and I want to congratulate the ranking member of the committee for his work in developing a very good proposal that deals with the due process issue, which provides that every person in this country has full access to the civil liberties in the Constitution; The Afghanistan war is not taken care of in this bill. In fact, there are provisions in this bill that, in all likelihood, would increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan by some 20,000 and leave them there in perpetuity. We cannot do this. We've got to bring this war to an end very, very quickly, and the bill does not go in that direction. In fact, it goes in the opposite direction. We just heard a discussion about Iran, and I will simply second that portion of the bill as being out of place and incorrect; There are also things in this bill that are a vast waste of money: missile defense on the east coast, a missile system that doesn't work to protect us from a nonexistent threat. Why would you spend $100 million this year and up to $5 million to $7 million in the succeeding 2 years? We ought not do that; Some things are also to be found at home. The Lawrence Livermore Labs need to be protected.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for her very thoughtful and thorough discussion of this piece of legislation. It is about all women. We should never exclude any women from the protection of this law. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Why don't we work together here. But before we pass the baton to our colleagues here, I think we all need to recognize the extraordinary work that you have done over these many, many years on this issue, and understand now how it affected your family. And I dare say it affects every family in America. If it's one in four women are at some time in their life abused and threatened with violence, we're talking some 40 million women. It's an extraordinarily serious problem. And the legislation that you helped write back in 1994 needs to be reauthorized and strengthened, not weakened. I would like now to turn to Sheila Jackson Lee, our colleague from Texas, who is deeply interested in this and has spoken on this before. And then, with your permission, Representative Edwards, I'll let you conduct the rest of this meeting.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to take this 1 hour. We want to spend this hour discussing a piece of legislation that is extraordinarily important to every woman and every man who lives within the United States. It's the Violence Against Women Act, which is up for renewal, and we'll be discussing that. But before I go into that, we've just heard an hour of discussion on an extremely important matter, which is the issue of national defense. I do sit on the House Armed Services Committee, and I spent about 16 hours last week working to move that bill out of committee. Every single person on that committee and every single person in this House and in the Senate cares deeply about this Nation's security and providing the necessary support for the men and women who are currently in the military and those who have served in the past. There's no doubt about that. There is, however, a very important debate underway about how we provide those services, given the ability of this Nation to find the money to pay for it. You heard a most remarkable debate this last hour--or a discussion this last hour, not a debate--but a discussion that basically, on the one hand, said, we've got this terrible deficit problem, and we have to deal with it; and on the other hand, we have to spend more and more money on the military. Now recognizing that the war in Afghanistan is drawing down and hopefully will very soon be over, we are moving away from carrying on two major wars to a period in which we will not be having men and women overseas in these wars. That allows this Nation to draw down the military in an appropriate and very careful manner. Unfortunately, the bill that moved out of the House Armed Services Committee didn't do that. In fact, it moved away from the current law, which is one that was voted on by all of our Republican colleagues, which was the Budget Control Act that actually said the military had to be brought down. And the discussion you heard here about the President not having a plan, it simply isn't true. The President has put forth a balanced solution to the deficit within the confines of the Budget Control Act, a balance that has been rejected by the Republicans, a balance that calls for revenues, ending unnecessary tax breaks--for example, for the oil industry. Why should they receive $5 billion a year of our tax money on top of the tens of billions of dollars in profits that they are making in the sale of overpriced gasoline and diesel to the American public? So the President says, take away those unnecessary subsidies and bring those back into dealing with the necessary things that we must do in this Nation. He also said that men and women who earn over $1 million a year in adjusted gross income ought to be paying their fair share. There was discussion a moment ago about the budget reconciliation bill that passed this House. Understand that the budget reconciliation bill, as proposed by the Republicans, would increase the national deficit by $4 trillion. How does it do it? By giving an extraordinary new tax break to those at the very top. Those who earn more than $1 million a year would see their taxes reduced. So at $1 million a year in earnings, they would receive an additional tax reduction of $394,000. That's neither fair, that's neither balanced, and that clearly leads to an additional $4 trillion. Back to the defense. We need a wise Defense appropriations bill out of this House. Unfortunately, though, what did pass was not wise, and it actually increased the number of men and women in Afghanistan. These are our Armed Forces. Under that bill, there would be an increase of 20,000 new soldiers into Afghanistan. That's not where we want to go. Having said enough about that, I just thought we ought to put a little balance on the previous hour of discussion. So let us get on to what we really wanted to talk about tonight, which is, how do we protect women in America? In 1994, a previous Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, and that act provided a level of protection to every woman in America to be protected from domestic violence. I have with me tonight one of the key architects of that piece of legislation. She is now a Member of Congress. She is from the great State of Maryland. Her name is Donna Edwards. Back in the nineties, she was the founding director and the executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. The National Network to End Domestic Violence was an organization that Representative Edwards put together composed of State organizations that were dealing with domestic violence, many different kinds of organizations throughout the United States. Representative Edwards put that together. And she's here tonight to lead the discussion on how we can renew the Violence Against Women Act in a way that expands the protection to all women in the United States, all women. And central to this discussion will be that issue of all women within the United States. But before I turn it over to her, as the Republicans always want us to do, I would like to read a couple of clauses of the United States Constitution. The 14th Amendment, in the end of section 1, says: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. And section two of the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution, says, ``The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. ``Any person,'' a key subject for tonight's debate. Representative Edwards, you've been at this for many years. Please share with us the background, the history, and why this is such an important part of what we must do here.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. Madam Speaker, on May 9, 2012, the House of Representatives reaffirmed our strong relationship with the State of Israel and demonstrated our commitment to Israel's right to defend itself, by passing H.R. 4133 with 411 votes. Unfortunately, I was not present at the time of the vote, but I would like to voice my support for Israel and this bill. Israel is a valued ally and friend of the United States. It is in the national security of both countries to ensure that Israel has the robust defense needed to protect itself from many threats within the region. H.R. 4133 guarantees that the United States will aid Israel in this defense and this bipartisan vote shows that we will always stand firm on our commitments to this relationship. Again, I would like to apologize for missing this important vote, but I commend my colleagues for supporting this vital alliance.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank you for the courtesy of yielding. The fact of the matter is that 1.8 million people will not be able to get the supplemental food that they get from food stamps. They're going to be hungry. That's a fact. Now, the rest of the fact is the application process has been supported by the Federal Government and by the legislation so that the States can reach out to those people that are hungry and that are able to qualify for food stamps. That's gone in this bill. So the ability to reach out and to bring into those programs----

Mr. GARAMENDI. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GARAMENDI. I think I'll let this thing cool down a little bit. But the gentleman on the other side of this debate is quite wrong. There's no balance in this particular bill at all. There is no balance. The cuts are devastating. Meals on Wheels for seniors, Medicare programs, Medicaid programs for seniors. And if you take a look at the rest of the issues, school lunch programs, kids are going to go hungry. There's no balance. There is no tax proposal in this. There's no balance at all. But the reason I rise today is to add one more problem that's not being solved by this reconciliation. The National Flood Insurance bill was folded in to this reconciliation, and it has a gaping hole. The Corps of Engineers has gone through the Nation's levees and downgraded those levees, creating an enormous problem for agriculture throughout this Nation, and certainly in California, where many of the levees have been downgraded. It's now impossible for farmers and the agricultural community to obtain loans to continue to produce and to enhance their agricultural production. This amendment, which I had hoped could be put into the bill but was not allowed by the Rules Committee, would simply require an immediate study by the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to undertake a study on the impact of the downgrading of the levees and the resultant inability to get national flood insurance, and the impact that that has on the agricultural communities, keeping in mind that agriculture, in a flood zone, is one of the very best ways to reduce the risk. I would hope that the majority would consider, as this thing moves along, to fold into the National Flood Insurance Program an opportunity for the Farm Flood Program that I've introduced, which would allow farmers to obtain national flood insurance, and then the lending that the banks could make available so they can continue to build the necessary facilities for their agricultural production.

Mr. GARAMENDI

Mr. GARAMENDI. For more than 20 years, there's the question of what to do with the San Joaquin River, a river that was essentially dried out and a river in which the indigenous species--salmon and other fish--were simply nonexistent. That fight went on and on and on. And after 20 years of fighting and litigation, a settlement was reached--a settlement that called for the restoration of stream flows in the San Joaquin River so that the salmon and other species in that river could be returned. This amendment simply overturns that. It was a Federal court order that approved the settlement--a settlement between the water users of the CVPIA and also the environmental groups. To do this amendment is simply going to once again reignite a major water war that is totally unnecessary. Certainly, it is going to be difficult to restore the river, but it can be done and it is going to take time and it is going to take money--and we should do it. This is one of the two largest rivers in the State of California. It's a river that had in the past, before the reservoirs were built and before the river was dried up, an extraordinary run of salmon. It will never be able to return to what it once was, but it can return to a viable river. To take action at this hour of the night on an amendment that is going to only be heard between half a dozen of us here on the floor seems to me to be quite wrong. We ought to oppose this amendment. We ought not allow it to be in the bill, and we ought to allow things to go forward. I would remind those who are supporting this that this is going to be a major blowup in the U.S. Senate. I know we don't much care about that, but, nonetheless, Senator Feinstein has authored legislation to implement this particular settlement. This unravels all of that. We ought not be moving forward, and I therefore oppose the amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, day after day, or at least week after week, my colleagues and I are here on the floor talking about jobs. It is about jobs and jobs and jobs again. Our agenda, which we call ``Make It in America,'' is an agenda that would rebuild the American manufacturing sector, a sector that has lost about 40 percent of its jobs in the last 20, 25 years from just under 20 million to just over 11 million Americans who are working in manufacturing today. One of the innovative ways of improving manufacturing has been developed. It's called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It's actually modeled after another Federal-State program that's been in existence for more than 100 years. Anyone that's in agriculture would recognize the Agricultural Extension Program. This is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a program that has actually added another feature to the old and still very successful Agricultural Extension Program, and that is a public-private partnership. In this program, the Federal Government, through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, runs a program in which funding is provided for local, private, or nonprofit organizations to become extension program managers. In California, this has been a very, very successful program. Some $447 million in new retained sales have occurred, $128.8 million in new investments, and some 3,769 jobs have been created. Some examples exist throughout California. In southern California, a manufacturer, a small company that makes high-tech parts for the aircraft industry, has been able to improve their manufacturing techniques and have been able to stay in business, and they now have been very successful in bringing down contracts with the aircraft industry. In the Bay Area, another program--actually run out of San Ramon, near my district--has been very successful. This program, called MANEX, has been very successful working with companies in the area. Morgan Hill Precision, to be precise, is a company that, again, is a machine shop. That company has used the MEP program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, to good success. Now how do we pay for this? Some $437,000. We take a little bit from some 20 different parts of the Department of Commerce. The result is it's working. We would like to keep it working at its full level, at last year's level. The bill before us actually reduces it by 50 percent. So we're adding $437,000 back by taking small amounts from some 20 different programs. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. GARAMENDI

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