Andy Harris

Mr. HARRIS

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

Mr. HARRIS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Let me just briefly address this so that we can move on. We only cut $6 million out of the $8 million. There is actually budget language further on that protects a cooperative agreement between the U.S. and Israeli Governments, so it does not eliminate all the funding; it protects that program, and there will be another amendment offered later that will make that quite specific. I understand that there is some possibility of actually getting a benefit for partnering--and I thank the ranking member for offering assistance--but honestly, I'm not sure what we're going to learn from Kazakhstan by sending money over there to provide training on industrial efficiency. I thought that we were the powerhouse of the world in industry. I thought we were the leader of the world. It's fine when we have a lot of money, but the fact of the matter is we borrow 40 cents out of every dollar, and the largest program expenditure outside of the joint program with Israel is that expenditure in China. Now, I want everyone to understand there is still money available. It's in the Department of State budget. This doesn't eliminate these programs. This just removes the Department of Energy's contribution. I will remind the body why the Department of Energy was formed years and years ago. It was to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and it has failed to do so. It has existed for decades, failing to do the mission for which it was established. In my district, people in private industry tell me, if they had a division or a department that failed to do its job for decades, they wouldn't be cutting it back--they'd be eliminating it. So, again, I thank the chairman and I thank the ranking member, and I urge the body to support the amendment.

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

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Chairman, my amendment will reduce funding for the international programs of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by cutting $6 million out of their $8 million budget and transferring it to the spending reduction account to reduce our deficit. Now, first, Mr. Chairman, I want to commend the committee for doing excellent work in cutting the EERE budget by an overall total of 27 percent, but this program was cut less than that. It was cut by 20 percent. Mr. Chairman, as I go through the district, the number one area that I hear people say let's cut that to attack our deficit is foreign aid; and basically, this program is foreign aid. It takes scarce American jobs and sends them overseas. Now, Mr. Chairman, as you know, our unemployment rate here jumped to 9.2 percent last week. We created 18,000 jobs, and here in front of us we have a program, this international program, that creates jobs. It sure does. The problem is they're all in foreign countries. So it takes those scarce American jobs and sends them overseas. And I agree with the ranking member: Our actions today should have jobs as our focus, American jobs. That is why this amendment is essential. The United States Government now has a $1.5 trillion debt. We borrow 40 cents out of every dollar spent. We borrow money from China to finance our Federal spending and our national debt. And through this program, we spend that money in China to make Chinese manufacturers more energy efficient. Yes, that is hard to believe, but we do that. We take a million dollars and spend it in China to make their factories more efficient so they can compete with us so we can lose jobs, lose our revenues, and then borrow more money from China to do it all over again. We have got to end this vicious cycle, and we have to end it with this amendment. As chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee in the Science, Space and Technology Committee, we held hearings on this specific subject. Let me tell you about some of the programs this international program funds. It assists manufacturing facilities in China and India to reduce their energy use. Well, that's great, but why are we helping our economic competitors with hard-earned dollars that we borrow from them and then use to make their industries more efficient. It gets even better. Then we improve energy efficiency in the Chinese building sector. Great. Let's strengthen our economic opponents with money we actually borrowed from them. In fact, the DOE just announced a $25 million project over the next 5 years to support the U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center. Now, why isn't it a U.S. energy research and development center? Why are we spending hard-earned, hard-borrowed dollars overseas? Even more programs: One to promote energy efficiency in Indian software companies; unbelievable. Why aren't we promoting energy efficiencies in American software companies. Partnering with the Kazakhstan Government to provide training on industrial efficiency. Now, I like those auto jobs in the United States. Maybe we should, in fact, train our own industry to be more efficient and not go to Kazakhstan and spend our money to do it. A renewable energy center and solar power project in Chile; energy efficiency centers in Peru and Costa Rica; windmills in Mexico. Yeah, we are taking this money and we are actually building windmills in Mexico. Renewable energy strategy development in the Caribbean, and windmills in the Dominican Republic. Ladies and gentlemen, I have gone throughout my district. They are begging for us to cut the deficit. The President said, he promised he would go line by line through that budget and find some items to cut. Ladies and gentlemen, this program is ripe for that cutting. We shouldn't be sending this money overseas. This doesn't eliminate the program; it cuts 75 percent of the funding. It goes a little further than the committee. We clearly have to allocate America's hard-earned resources to higher priorities. Again, I commend the committee for making a start in cutting here, but we've got to go further. When we're spending money on making Chinese factories more efficient to compete with us and when we're building windmills in Mexico with our money, we've gone too far. That's why the Citizens Against Government Waste has endorsed this amendment. It hardly gets more wasteful than taking hard-earned dollars, borrowing from overseas, sending it back over there, and creating jobs overseas when we have a 9.2 percent unemployment rate here. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, another week, and another week that our fiscal problems in this country are unsolved. We saw the jobs report-- 18,000 jobs created when we need 350,000 jobs created in order to get our unemployment rate back down to 5 percent. And who can blame our job creators when all the talk in Washington now appears to be about how we can raise taxes on those job creators? I don't care whether we call it expenditures in our tax code or revenues, what they are are taxes on our job creators, and our job creators have responded by not creating jobs. Mr. Speaker, what they want is they want to know that Washington understands how to solve this problem. They want to know that we know that we can cut our spending, we can cap our future spending. Mr. Speaker, it's time for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Forty-nine of the 50 States have it. We should have it here in Washington so that we never have to face again the question of how high to raise our debt ceiling and how far to put our children in debt.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, while marching in parades and town festivals all over my district during the 4th of July weekend, I spoke with concerned parents, job creators, seniors, and folks who have been out of work for a long time. The one message I heard loud and clear from all of them: Reduce government spending so that businesses can create jobs again. That's why I signed onto the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, which calls for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I know the idea that the government should have to actually balance its budget every year is strange to some here in Washington, especially to entrenched bureaucrats and the special interest groups that fill this city. Imagine if the Federal Government had to run a budget like we do in our homes. It's time for the Federal Government to live within its means, and it's time for us to reduce spending so that businesses will have the confidence to create jobs again. Cut, cap and balance. Let's make sure we put America back on the path to prosperity, not on the path to unemployment and bankruptcy.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Madam Speaker, I rise to report some distressing economic news from my district. To add to our country's rising unemployment, plummeting home values and a steep drop in retail sales last month, Allen Family Foods filed for bankruptcy last week. A well-known name in the poultry industry and a longstanding Delmarva family business, this closing could cost thousands of jobs. The reason for Allen's collapse: soaring grain prices, energy costs and overbearing government regulations, especially from the EPA. The chilling signal sent to potential job creators throughout America right now is that the bureaucrats in this administration are now the central planners of our economy--and they are not doing a very good job. We have tried to create jobs their way, and it hasn't worked. Overtaxing, overspending and overregulating cannot and will not create jobs. It is time to head in a new direction. It is time for a new economic policy. If we stop the spending spree in Washington, businesses will, once again, create jobs in America. It is up to us to restore confidence and certainty and to send a signal to the private sector that the United States is, once again, open for business.

Mr. HARRIS

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

Mr. HARRIS. I thank my colleague from Ohio for introducing this amendment and, once again, for this dialogue on an important issue. I will remind my colleague that, although he brings up the fact that this has been decided in the Chamber twice already in other similar circumstances, it's not really the same because, last Friday, of course, we found out that our unemployment rate is rising in the country. It's now 9.1 percent again. We only created 54,000 jobs, not the 200,000 jobs we'd hoped we would create and certainly much fewer than the 150,000 jobs we need to create in order to get back to full employment. That's how many we need to create every month. What this amendment means, very simply, is that we are going to have to spend 10 to 20 percent more on every single project that ends up in a project labor agreement--and more projects will. If more projects wouldn't, then the advocates wouldn't care about whether we put this provision in. It clearly will result in project labor agreements, so let's review what a project labor agreement does. First and foremost, it increases the cost 10 to 20 percent on every project. Now, Mr. Chairman, if you or I or people in my congressional district were going to contract to build something around their homes, they wouldn't put a provision in normally that says that we're only going to hire union contractors. They will go out. They will get the bids. They will go out. They will seek to find out what the reputations of the bidders are, and then they will make the decision based purely on price and quality and value whether or not to make that deal, not whether someone is a member of a union or hires union laborers; but that's what a project labor agreement does. So let's talk about jobs a little bit. What is our important role here in Congress? Our role in Congress is to try to get our unemployment rate up. Well, if we save 10 to 20 percent on every job, we certainly can do more construction jobs. I just met over lunch with one of the people in my district who is an electrical contractor and he's not unionized, and he asked me to come down here and he said, please, go to the floor today and ask so that those 80 percent, or 7 percent, of us who are contractors who are not unionized can get a piece of that pie so that we don't have to fire our employees. Mr. Chairman, it's simple. If we can save 10 to 20 percent on every project, we can hire 10 to 20 percent more people to do more projects. And again, the sad fact is our unemployment rate is 9.1 percent. It's going up, not down. The number of new jobs created last month, 54,000, going down, not up. We've got to reverse that, and we've got to do it by being efficient and being smart with our dollars, and one way is to not require project labor agreements. Finally, let me address the issue of local citizens. I want these contracts to go into the First Congressional District of Maryland; but, Mr. Chairman, I don't have a lot of union contractors in my district. There are a lot of districts that don't have a lot of union contractors. So if we want local contractors to be employed, if we want local citizens to get jobs, our local unemployment rates to go down, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest we defeat this amendment, which will frequently require that in order to qualify for a contract you have to hire out of district. You may have to go to another State. That's not good for anyone, certainly not good for the folks in the First Congressional District of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, again, I want to thank my colleague from Ohio for bringing this issue up, but we do need to revisit this issue because we don't live in the same world we lived in one week ago. We live in a world where the talk of the double-dip recession is sincere and it's serious and our unemployment rate going up, not down; the number of jobs going down, not up. The last thing we should do is to take those hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to use them, and I will say to waste them, in some circumstances, on project labor agreements. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, with Americans feeling pain at the gas pump, I am so glad that the House remains focused on lowering the cost of energy and creating an environment for positive job growth. American energy production has been handcuffed by a moratorium that the President has placed on new oil, natural gas, and coal production right here in the United States. Mr. Speaker, there is simply no reason that a country with the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world should be suffering through another energy crisis, a crisis that has already cost America thousands of jobs, forced manufacturers to relocate overseas, and made a gallon of gas unaffordable. The folks that get hurt the most are our seniors on fixed incomes, small businesses, and the poor. This administration apparently thinks the best way to help these folks is to raise their energy taxes and then lend Brazil billions of dollars to drill for oil, while our workers and our factories stand idle. What we need is a dose of common sense when it comes to our domestic energy policy. We have to use our own oil, natural gas, and coal to create jobs and stop the pain at the pump.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, as if businesses weren't struggling enough with the worst recession since the Great Depression, some Washington bureaucrat decided it was a good idea to distract the real job creators of our country from doing what they do best--create jobs. To the gentleman from New York, that's what this debate is about, whether that hypothetical family actually has a job. But whether they should be distracted from creating jobs by requiring them to fill out mountains of 1099 paperwork. Obviously, the individual who came up with this brilliant idea has never had to meet a payroll or deal with the day-to-day operations of a small business.

Mr. HARRIS. Small business owners all over my district have told me that the 1099 provision would hurt their business. Trish Date, who co- owns Rittenhouse Fuel Services with her husband and Perry Hall, said it would be ``an administrative nightmare that would cost me thousands of dollars to implement.'' Last year, she used over 250 individual vendors that will now require 1099 forms to be printed, copied, mailed, completed, and sent to the venders and the IRS. Her small family-owned business simply does not have the resources or capacity to handle this onerous regulation. Another business owner, Karen Oertel, whose family owns and operates the Harris Crab House on the eastern shore, said this 1099 mandate would be ``overwhelmingly burdensome on my family business.'' Mr. Speaker, the 1099 provision is simply a job-destroying regulation that wastes precious time, labor, and money. If we want to create jobs tomorrow, I urge my colleagues to join me in repealing this awful provision now by supporting H.R. 4.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. I thank the gentleman from California for giving me this opportunity. ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' Mr. Speaker, perhaps those were Ronald Reagan's most famous words, words which meant a great deal to millions of people. But his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that June afternoon touched me and my family personally. As many of you may know, my immigrant parents were victims of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. My Hungarian father served 2 years in a Siberian gulag for his anticommunist views, and my Ukrainian mother fled just before the Red Army seized control of her native country. They, like Ronald Reagan, understood that communism, especially the Soviet brand of communism, meant a life of restriction, oppression, and in many cases violence or cold-blooded murder. While some derided President Reagan when he took on the USSR to win the Cold War, it was a point of inspiration for the Harris family. His courage and unwavering belief that freedom must always conquer evil has forever immortalized him to those who witnessed and lived through one of the most despicable and deadly regimes in the history of mankind. Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the Harris family, I want to thank President Reagan. May his legacy always remain a beacon for those around the world who seek the asylum of freedom and liberty.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Madam Speaker, as a physician delivering care in labor and delivery for 26 years, I know that the last thing we need is a new government bureaucrat looking over our shoulders when I am in that delivery room administering an anesthetic to a mother for an emergency cesarean section to save her baby's life. But that's exactly what ObamaCare will do if we don't repeal it. Instead of the last Congress making sure that the baby born that day has a real chance at the American Dream by creating jobs and solving America's long-term fiscal crisis, they added over $2 trillion to our children's and grandchildren's debt with that job-destroying ObamaCare bill. That's why we should repeal it today.

Mr. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Section 2: ``The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.''