Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Chairman, the people of the State of Washington deserve decisions about the Eagle Gap Wilderness area to be made based on science and public input, not the whims of President George Bush. Why do we rush to give this President, the President with the worst environmental record in American history, more discretion, more leeway, less science, less public input? That is a bit like giving Bonnie and Clyde a relaxation of the rules against bank robbery. There is no reason, given the record of this administration, to trust these administration policies with our national forests. But this bill will give a blank check to the whims of the political decisionmakers in the White House, not the foresters on the ground. This, in fact, strips, strips us of the requirement that we have a site-specific decision to go out and look at these properties. Now I will tell you how bad it is. I will tell you how George Bush's administration has not respected science. When Mr. Donato, a researcher at Oregon State University, reported his paper in a well-respected journal, Science Magazine, a peer-reviewed journal, do you know what happened? Do you know what his BLM did? They canceled his contract. That is how the Bush administration treats science. They cancel your contract if you come out with science, with an answer that is not apparently approved by Carl Rove and his political minions. Madam Chairman, we should not be on this floor giving George Bush more authority to make more bad decisions about the national forests. Reject this bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, here we go again. First, we had the clean skies bill, that got more pollution; then we had the deficit reduction bill, and we had more deficit; now we have the forest recovery bill, which assures that we will be using less science and less common sense by the American people to make decisions of where and how to do forest recovery plans. This has largely been a red-herring debate to date. This is not a question whether we are going to have forest recovery plans and places to replant and places to harvest deadwood. What it is a debate about is where we do these recovery plans and how we do these recovery plans. This bill, as currently structured, guarantees two things: We will at times do them in the wrong place and we will at times do them in the wrong way. It does that by a repeated continuation of the terrible habit this Congress has gotten into, which is to repeal our environmental protection laws. And that is why every single environmental group dedicated to the preservation of our forests is very strongly opposed to this bill. Now, how is it going to be the wrong place and the wrong way? First, it will assure these are sometimes done in the wrong way by gutting the insistence that we use science. Right now, existing rules require bureaucracies to use science when they make decisions; to not go by some cookie-cutter approach that some bureaucrat in Washington sets out and says you can do this, that, and the other all across the Rocky Mountains, without ever stepping foot in the area where they are going to do this harvesting and replanting. Existing law requires that. This law, through a quite clever shell game, guts that requirement that Americans will use science when these decisions are made. What it does is it essentially says that NEPA requirements, the National Environmental Protection Act requirements, to use science when we make these decisions where to cut, which trees to cut, and how to replant. And it does that on page 24, in a very clever way. It doesn't say we gut NEPA. It doesn't say we repeal the National Environmental Protection Act. What it says, and I quote, ``Satisfaction of NEPA requirements. The following activities are deemed to satisfy the requirements of section 102 of the National Environmental Policy Act.'' What they say is, what you do here just wipes away the requirements of NEPA because we deem it complied with. We care about our forests in Washington State. The Kettle roadless area in eastern Washington, the Eagle Cap roadless area in western Washington. We want to insist that our Federal agencies use science. This bill removes one of the fundamental pillars of making these decisions. It removes science. So it does something to make sure that we do something the wrong way. But it also does something in the wrong place, and I will get to that when my amendment comes to preserve the roadless areas of our forests.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, the continued violation of Americans' privacy by illegal spying cannot be tolerated. Today we found that this administration is building a database of millions of Americans' phone calls to know who we called and who called us. This is a privacy right that needs to be protected and respected, and we have now seen multiple violations of this principle where illegal spying has occurred. The U.S. Congress must hold hearings. It must stop illegal spying. I will be offering an amendment on the defense appropriations bill to assure that no taxpayer money can be used for illegal spying to violate the privacy rights of Americans. The excuse we may hear from the administration is that, no, these conversations may not be taped. But who Americans called is a privacy right and is protected by the law, and who calls us is a privacy right and it is protected by the law. It is protected by section 222 of the Communications Act, it is protected by the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution, and it is protected by the common sense of the American people that we ought to protect our privacy and democracy at the same time we are protecting our security. And both can be protected. The fact of the matter is that the FISA law builds in the ability of the Federal Government to in fact crack down on terrorism, something we all want to do. We want to have an aggressive program of electronic eavesdropping on al Qaeda and other terrorists, but we want to make sure that that is done within the law on the simple proposition that when the Federal Government does electronic eavesdropping, there is another set of eyes overseeing that program: our judges, our judicial system. What the law demands and Americans demand and the Constitution demands is that there is a review through the warrant process so that a warrant is obtained when this eavesdropping occurs. And if there is not time for that, under the FISA law, warrants can be obtained 72 hours thereafter retroactively. So what we are saying, and I think the broad swath of the millions of Americans who have to know tonight, is that somewhere in this country there is a database sitting with your records that belong to you that is subject to your privacy that has now been violated by the Federal Government, without any review whatsoever by a judge and without review whatsoever and oversight of the United States Congress. That is wrong, and it has simply got to stop. The U.S. Congress has an obligation. It is an obligation to stand up to an administration that refuses to abide by the law. This is a precious thing, democracy; and democracy is most precious when it is threatened. When we are currently involved in a war, it is most important to rise to the protection of our privacy. We have been involved in these fights for our privacy now for some period of time. We have fought to protect the private records of our cell phone records from being sold to telemarketers; we have fought to prevent our tax records being sold to other people who will market to us; and now we need to fight to make sure there is a review and a warrant given before, or at least after, our phone records are put into some master database with the privacy of millions of Americans violated. The reason we found out about this today is that the journalists have reported on this. Unfortunately, the administration has not been forthcoming to tell the U.S. Congress what they have been doing; and the U.S. Congress, the folks elected by people from 435 districts in 50 States, ought to have access to this information so that there can be oversight. There is not a review of this. In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Congress needs to stand up and be counted, stand up and be counted for the privacy rights of America, to stop the violation of privacy that we have in our phone records. Who we called and who called us is a private matter. It ought to be protected, and we are going to ensure that it is.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, this is the most pathetic rule since I have been here, and I am not the only one who believes this. Last weekend I was on a walk. I met an old friend of mine who told me his son, as we were speaking, was landing in Mosul, Iraq with the United States Army. And my friend and his wife were raising their grandson, a 2-year-old because this soldier is a single parent. And while he is over there fighting with courage, this House doesn't have the courage to debate Iraq. And every single amendment that was offered that would offer a strategic vision that questions George Bush's decisions in Iraq was denied. The Abercrombie amendment to say we should have some plan to leave by 2010, denied. The Cardin amendment to have some plan, denied. This House basically today has said it is only going to do one thing and that America should do only one thing, and that is trust the eminent judgment of President George Bush, who is apparently infallible, unquestionable, and nothing that this U.S. Congress should challenge. My friend begs to differ, whose son landed in Mosul. This House should challenge George Bush on Iraq. We should have a debate on it. We should not ignore it. While our soldiers have courage enough to fight, we ought to have courage enough to fight George Bush's misguided policies in Iraq.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. I certainly will. I will point out that Democrats do not claim to be the sole source of genius and wisdom in America. Republicans have great ideas too, and they did in the 9/11 Commission, chaired by ex-Senator Kean of New Jersey, a Republican. He was one of the co-chairs of the commission. A group of Republicans and a group of Democrats got together and did an evaluation on what this country really needs to do. And they have since then, they have made their recommendations, have issued this score card to evaluate the administration's performance to see whether those bipartisan recommendations have been implemented. And if it was your son or daughter's score card, the kid would not be going to any movies or watching any television, because it was full of Ds and Fs. The most amazing part that is important, I represent the area in Seattle, we have a huge port. And when I tell people that despite this bipartisan Republican and Democrat recommendation to do screening of all of our containers coming in, of radiological materials, either a dirty bomb, the makings of a dirty bomb, or worst case scenario, a fission bomb coming in through our containers, and we know the proliferation that has gone on in the last few years, when you report to people that despite that foreknowledge, the administration can only tell us a tiny little percentage of those are screened for radiological material, that is a sorry state of affairs. And there is no excuse for that failure. We have had a bipartisan consensus, at least on the commission, to get that job done. And the job simply has not been done. And the administration has had its eye off the ball of this major league threat. This is the big threat, by the way, at least in my estimation, and I think of the 9/11 Commission, of a dirty bomb or some day a fission product coming into this country. That is the real threat. By the way, it is probably 1,000 times more likely to be delivered in a container coming through Los Angeles or Seattle or Boston or Gulfport, than coming in from 10 miles up in space in an ICBM that none of these countries have, at least at the moment. That is where the real threat is. But, instead, the administration has been off spending billions of dollars on the Star Wars Project, and refuses to do more than 3 or 4 percent of the containers, which is a known threat, which is a known vector of radiological material; and they refuse to act. That is unconscionable. We Democrats intend to implement a bipartisan approach to this, which is what was in this 9/11 Commission. And people can look it up. It is on the Internet. You can look at the report card. You know, I thought, I was hopeful after that report card came out that the President would get his Cabinet together and hold that report card and say, what is going on here? This is absurd. I am President of the United States, the most powerful Nation in the world, and we are getting Fs on securing our ports, when we have got the technology to do this. I thought that he would do that. Instead, you know what he did? He walked around handing out Medals of Freedom to Paul Wolfowitz who got every decision you could possibly imagine wrong on Iraq. He told his homeland security people they are doing a great job, when 95 percent of the cargo is not screened coming into our ports. That is not a heck of a job. And he has failed to respond to that report from this again bipartisan commission in any way that I can fashion. That is one of the reasons Congress needs to act. There is a reason the framers set up a couple branches of government, so that when one branch was not doing the job, which right now is the executive, Congress can act.

Mr. INSLEE. I do, actually. There is only one person that the Bush administration has fired involving Iraq policy. There is one single person. And that person was General Shinseki, who was right about Iraq. He had the huge error in this administration of being truthful, forthright and accurate when he said we needed 400,000 to 500,000 troops to provide security in Iraq so it would not degrade into anarchy as it has done. And as a result of that, the President, in the way they do this with the military, effectively fired him. He is the only person who the Bush administration has removed from office in Iraq, not the people really responsible for the problem at Abu Ghraib, not the Secretary of Defense, not Paul Wolfowitz who came to us and told us the incredible falsehood that this whole operation was going to be paid for, because Iraq was going to pump more oil, and it would not cost a penny to the American taxpayers. And you know how many billions of dollars now the taxpayers have suffered. None of those people who have gotten almost every single thing wrong in Iraq that you can imagine. If you were going to design a train of errors, misjudgment, inefficiency, incompetence, acceptance of outright fraud in the contracting procedure, it would be hard to design a more inept train of abuses than this one, yet this President has sat there and done nothing. Now, I have to admit he has not said they have done a heck of a job. He has not used that language. But he has failed to hold anybody accountable. And one of the things that I am very pleased that you have been a leader on, is holding the administration accountable for this, is accountable for U.S. tax dollars. You know, there was a Democrat, Harry Truman, during World War II, who convened the Truman Commission in the U.S. Senate, and he insisted that during war time, even during war time, it is important to not allow the abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars. And he ferreted out some of the fraud and abuse in military contracting that was going on in World War II even when our whole Nation was in jeopardy, in an existentialistic sense was in jeopardy, but he still said we need to be careful with these dollars. We have had umpteen billions of dollars disappear into the sands of Iraq with nothing to show for it, no meaningful reconstruction, but tens of billions of dollars gone. We have seen multiple GAO reports, Inspector General reports. We have seen multiple contractors, many of whom have been very closely aligned with this administration; there is no secret about that. What we are saying as Democrats is real simple. The U.S. Congress needs to do its job to ferret out these abuses, find the people responsible, relieve them from duty, and hold these contractors responsible to the American taxpayers. That is not too much to ask. This Congress has been a lap dog. It has been a see-no-evil, hear-no- evil group, while one of the greatest abuses of the American taxpayer ever happened in the sands of Iraq, despite the tragic loss, which of course is a thousand times worse of our men and women in Iraq. So the Democratic Real Plan for Security is that it is the job of Congress to hold the administration accountable to the American people, and the American taxpayer, and we will do that job at the right moment. So I am glad that you have brought this issue up.

Mr. INSLEE. We have seen some pretty amazing rhetorical epiphanies here in this Chamber. For the last year Democrats on three separate occasions have attempted to pass a bill to make sure that the Federal Trade Commission has the explicit authority to investigate and punish price gouging by the oil and gas industry. We wanted to make it real clear that we wanted that investigation, and even when there is a lack of complicity, where there is price manipulation, that should be shut down. I think Americans are with us 100 percent on that. Three times we tried to pass that. The Republicans blocked us every single time. Now, last week I heard the Speaker of the House say, we demanded an investigation of price gouging in the oil and gas industry. Welcome, I guess; better late than never. But we will see if we really get that law passed here. It will be interesting. We heard the press conference. If we had the vote, we could have done that today. It will be interesting to see.

Mr. INSLEE. I just want to preface my comments about the strategies and tactics, about the people we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think any discussion needs to center on them, at the point of the spear, at our request. When I think about these issues, I think about the soldiers I met in Landshtul, Germany, just before Thanksgiving, where most of our badly wounded go after they leave Iraq. We have an amazing medical system, which I am happy about, taking care of our men and women. By the time they get to Germany, a lot of them are conscious, and so I had a chance to meet these folks. I met a couple of young men from Bremerton, Washington, just south of my district, both of whom had very severe injuries. Their legs were up and pins were sticking out and tubes coming every which way. One guy had both arms shattered, up and attached to pieces of metal. They were very seriously injured guys. I just wanted to say thank you to them and asked if there was any way we could help them. I asked both, What do you have in mind? And both of them said, in fact all of them I talked to, said one thing: I want to get back to my unit as soon as possible.

Mr. INSLEE. Whatever you think of the Iraq operation, whatever you think of the strategy, I think anybody who met these people would be incredibly proud and reach one bipartisan conclusion, that they deserve the best that America can provide. And you have to ask the question: Have they gotten the best that America could provide? And the answer is a resounding no, they have not. They have not gotten the personal body armor, they have not gotten the armored Humvees, they have not gotten basic equipment, on occasion, that we have talked about. The National Guard in particular has been shorted some important equipment. They simply have not gotten the best that America can provide. And when you ask the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, why we sent these people in, not in cardboard, but essentially thin-skinned Humvees with no protection, his answer was, and I am paraphrasing, well, we didn't know anybody was going to be shooting at us in the rear. We have the armor up in front. But, geez, the guys in the rear? Who could have imagined that an Iraqi would be unhappy that a Western occupation army of 150,000 people roaming through might be unhappy about that, and might be shooting at our people, and might be doing improvised explosive devices? That was beyond our comprehension. Just like it was beyond their comprehension that the levees could be topped during Katrina. Those two failures of obvious common sense I think have to go down in the top 10 of ineffective, incompetent, uncaring, rank mistakes, and that is too easy a word to use, in American history. Levees won't be topped and people won't be shooting at us back in the streets of Baghdad for the years we were going to be there. That was the working assumption of Donald Rumsfeld and the President of the United States when they sent our troops into harm's way. I can't think of a possible excuse for that bone-headed assumption. As a result, our people aren't coming home, a lot of them. And the anger I feel is matched by a lot of my constituents who feel this way, whether they are for or against the Iraq war. They deserve better than they are getting. And the Democrats are going to insist that when our people go into action they are going to be fully equipped, and we will not go in there with sort of a hallucination that it is going to be like the film clip of the Champs Elysees in 1944. They should have anticipated that. So I wanted to get that off my chest. But I want to say one thing about intelligence, if I can.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, I would agree with you. You have to ask, why has this happened? And I think it comes from an attitude of unbridled rose- colored glasses and feel-good politics. The administration wanted to have a war we could all just kind of feel good about, not have any personal sacrifice associated with it, not have any concern on our tax policy about that whatsoever. It was feel-good politics, and the attitude is that we try to all feel good over here, and the only people who would be suffering are the men and women in Iraq. That is a wholly irresponsible way to fight a war, and that is what has gone on. I wonder if I can address a little different issue of our Real Security plan, and that is what I like about the aggressiveness of the Democratic Real Security plan, because as you know, you have been a leader on this, we Democrats feel we need to be aggressive in disarming our enemy. The most effective effort is offensive. And we want to be offensive, not meaning disliked, but offensive in being aggressive and assertive to disarm our enemies. And I want to mention two ways, one short and one not so short. The short way we want to disarm our enemies, we want to make sure that they cannot get access to fissionable materials, which frankly are as loose and insecure tonight as we speak; it is roaming around places around middle Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, which is still secured with maybe a bicycle lock. I pay more attention to my Chinelli bicycle than some of these old failed States in the middle part of Europe to fissionable material. And we need to secure that. And as numerous reports have indicated, the executive branch of this government has failed to secure the number one threat to this country, which is that fissionable material. And we will get that job done. We will make the investment it takes to do that, because that has got to be an extremely high priority for this country. So one way you disarm your opponent is you take away their fissionable material that is laying around all over the world right now. And we will get that job done. But the second thing is even bigger. We need to disarm our enemy from their financial resources to attack us, and that means that we have got to be energy independent and stop sending our dollars to the Middle East. We have got to start sending them to Middle Western farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks, in this regard. Because of that $3-plus, one of my staffers paid $3.35 this morning, that $3.35 gallon, a good part of that goes to the CEO of Exxon, who just walked away with $400 million in a bonus package, and the rest, a lot, goes to the Middle East to arm our enemies. And we know that many of those regimes have been playing footsie with al Qaeda and various other groups. We know that our money we are spending is going to arm our enemies, and so we believe what we need in this country is an energy independence program that is not just rhetorical, but is real. And I was pleased to have the President give us some rhetoric during his State of the Union speech. He said, we have an addiction to oil. Well, welcome to the land of recognition, Mr. President. We have been waiting 6 years, but, nevertheless, it is good to hear the rhetoric. But the problem is we are not seeing the reality. The week he talked about breaking our addiction to oil, he fired 100 scientists at our renewable lab in Boulder, Colorado. When the press suggested that seemed somewhat inconsistent, those pink slips were pulled back, and those scientists were back on the job. But we think we need something as bold as John F. Kennedy about in the 1960s, we need an Apollo project, we are going to go the moon, we will invest in the capital and wisdom and technical brilliance in this country. We are going to take a big step forward, one big step for man, one giant leap for mankind. We need now a giant leap in energy policy in this country to depend on the technical prowess of this country, because Kennedy knew, and he stood right behind you right there. We are in an historic place here. He stood there March 9, 1961, and he said, we are going to go to the Moon. That was an amazing point. Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a little softball into orbit. We hadn't even invented Tang yet. A lot of people thought that was an absurdly ambitious goal, but he understood a central tenet of the American character is that when challenged, we respond, number one. Number two, we are the greatest tinkers since, you know, whoever in Space 2001 invented the bone as a weapon. We are the people that can invent our way out of this. We need to make the investments to do that. If you look at what the President has done in his budget, it is a pathetically insufficient commitment to this goal. We got so far two words from the President. We got energy independence. We got two words, but we have no funds to do the job from him, no bold strategic challenge, no commitment to science, no commitment in our academic institutions. You look at the money, he came out, and I was listening carefully to the State of the Union address. He had this bold rhetoric and he said, therefore, I am committing a few million dollars to this project. He has committed to this budget for biofuels less than we spend in Iraq in about 18 hours. That is what we have committed to this project. We have men over there fighting a war now for 3-plus years at about $80 billion a year, and he is committing less than 18 hours of what we are spending in Iraq to try to disarm our enemies. That is not a wise strategy. We need a significant energy plan to solve this problem. We have it in the new Apollo energy project, H.R. 2828, that I have introduced and others. That is a bold step, leap for mankind that we will get this job done. So I am happy that the Democrats have embraced real policies and not just rhetoric.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, I agree. And I want to, if I can, talk about intelligence for a moment because I think that in the nature of the warfare we are involved in with terrorism, intelligence, if not everything, is most of our ability to stop a terrorist attack. What I want to point out is that we have an enormous shortfall of HUMINT, or human intelligence. We have an enormous shortfall of human agents around the world. And Democrats have committed to ramping up that capability in this country because we recognize that in the new threat environment we have, the new threat is much more likely to come from an al Qaeda ring personally delivered by a taxi cab and bus than it is by an ICBM from some particular other place on the planet. You wonder why this administration is not ramping up the human intelligence around the globe. There are a couple of reasons. One, is they would rather put the money in the Star Wars projects by the tens of billions of dollars. That is number one. And number two, frankly, because this President worked so ineffectively with the rest of the world leading up to Iraq that we have had some difficulty in having as many alliances around the world as we need in this war on terrorism. We are certainly experiencing that in Iran right now, when we are trying to rally the world on a sanction policy against Iran, and we are not getting as much cooperation as we should. And, frankly, one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is not particularly pleased that the President refused to work with the rest of the world in Iraq. So what I would say about the Democratic approach to intelligence is there are two things we believe are the most effective in intelligence work, or at least two things we are vastly short in: electronic surveillance, very important, and we can talk more about that in a minute; but we have to boost the human intelligence, the number of effective agencies that have penetrated these cells around the world and can work with other governments in that regard. Two, we have to rally the world to a global alliance that is against us. And when we have a chief executive officer that tells the rest of the world to go fish on Iraq and global warming and on the land mine treaty, and you name it, it doesn't make you a very effective rallier of troops. And that is a problem.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, I appreciate your words, but in a sense it is easy in contrast to brand X. If you look at the energy bill that the Republican-controlled Congress that was promoted by this President, it is hardly a secret that this President had substantial history in the oil and gas industry, and it would not be surprising if that affected decisions, just like the secret meetings that the Vice President had when he designed the energy independence. In the secret meetings the President has always refused to tell us about, I doubt that they were hatching a plot to create biofuels and energy independence from the oil and gas industry. I suspect that was not a discussion, had we been a fly on the wall to listen to what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about a way to increase the profits of the oil and gas industries that led to $3 a gallon of gas and the largest profits of any corporation in the solar system history in this quarter in the oil and gas industry. Maybe that is what happened. Can't be sure. But in any event, the policy that this Republican-controlled Congress came out with that was promoted by the President of the United States, according to the Department of Energy, this is the Bush's own governmental agencies, will increase our imports of oil from the Middle East. I want to say that again because I think it is very, very important. The President, in his State of the Union Address, said, I want to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. That is the White House, the President of the United States. The Department of Energy, which works for him presumably, their analysis of his policies have concluded that the imports from imported oil from the United States will increase after full implementation by a significant amount. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I was shocked at how much they would increase when I looked at this report, under their policies. Why is that? First off, to me it takes a little chutzpah to talk about it up there and out there in the real world have a policy that will increase your imports. But why is it such a grand failure? Well, it is because they refused to do the things that we know that works. You know, we know it works. Brazil is now energy independent. Last week, actually, they achieved total domestic energy independence. The way they did it principally was to develop a biofuels industry. They didn't mess around. The President of Brazil didn't just give some nice speech and say, I believe we are going to break our addiction to oil. He actually did some policies. What they did is they made sure that consumers in Brazil when they bought a car would have a car that would burn either gasoline or ethanol. They freed Brazilian consumers to make sure that you get to decide what you burn, not the oil companies and not the automobile manufacturers. They insisted that every consumer when you buy a car, you get a flex-fuel vehicle that can burn either gas or ethanol. When they did that, that immediately created an enormous demand for an ethanol industry. Without subsidies for the Brazilian government, boom, 40 percent, 6 years later, 40 percent of all the transportation in Brazil is run on ethanol, which does not feed the Middle East and the sheiks, has zero emissions of global warming gases, because it is circular, it has no net increase of global warming gases. Brazil achieved that not because they are smarter than we are, not because they have better natural resources than we do. We have got the Midwest, we have got Microsoft, we have got Intel, we have got Google. You know, they have got some smart people, too. But what they had was leadership that had actual policies rather than just rhetoric. That is what we need. The second thing I just want to point out, we have had experience in achieving this in the United States. It was during the late 1970s. We improved the efficiency of our cars by over 60 percent in 5 years. We were on a path of doubling the efficiency of our cars while increasing safety, I might add, while increasing safety for 5 years in this country. Then those policies were stopped under a Republican President. The fact of the matter is that had we continued on that path, if we had simply continued to improve the efficiency of our cars, as we did for those 5-year periods, today you and I would not be having this discussion because we would have been free of Middle Eastern oil today. That is the opportunity cost that we experience when we got off this bandwagon at doing smart things in energy. I just point this out; you know, we have a history of success in this. We just need the policies to get it done.

Mr. INSLEE. I don't think it was Yogi Berra.

Mr. INSLEE

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

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, if you liked the administration and the Republican Congress' response to Hurricane Katrina, you are going to love the response to this gas crisis. Because while folks said they could not anticipate that the levees would be topped, when you do what the administration has done, you should have been anticipating $3 plus, $3.25, and $3.35 gasoline at the pump. When you go into secret energy meetings, as the Vice President did, to devise an energy strategy and come out with a giveaway to the energy industry; when you have a President who refuses to act when Enron was stealing billions of dollars from the economy, telling the oil industry you can go ahead and do the same thing because I will not act; when three times Democrats stood proudly to have a bill to allow the FTC to investigate this price gouging and the Republicans voted in lockstep against it, you could anticipate the levees would be topped, and you could anticipate that the oil companies would run rampant with the price of gasoline. Now, how has this President responded? He wants to do this thing with a slow one-half of one-third of 1 percent increase in production to do something about it. If your house is on fire, the President would bring you a thimbleful of water, and that is the only assistance we are getting. We need real action, not these baby steps.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Thank you. And I have a simple message. We Democrats want to strike a preemptive blow against our enemies in the Middle East. And the single, most effective preemptive blow we have is to starve them from resources with which to attack us. We know where the money came from to finance the attack on September 11. It came from our addiction to oil that must stop. And we now have a President who said he wants to break our addiction to oil, and we welcome his language about this. But we cannot run our cars on rhetoric. We cannot run a national energy independence program on rhetoric. We need real policies. And we are offering them. We have offered to the country the New Apollo Energy Act, H.R. 2828. That is H.R. 2828. If folks want to look at it, they are welcome to see the most comprehensive plan that will really deliver a situation where we send less money to Middle Eastern sheiks and more money to middle- American farmers. That is a policy that we will embrace, and we will be more secure than we are today. I thank you for letting me have my few words today.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to echo my friend Mr. Kingston's remarks and urge Members to take a look at his and Mr. Engel's bill for another reason besides national security, that is, it has the additional benefit of dealing with the climate change that the globe is now experiencing. This is kind of a two-fer, the bill that Mr. Kingston just described. One, it can free us from our addiction to Middle Eastern oil or help in that direction; and, two, it can deal with a problem that you can read about in Time magazine. The cover story in Time magazine is about global warming. It says: be afraid, be very afraid. I hate to think it is from fear. I like to think it is from hope. We ought to have the hope that we can free ourselves from our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, and we can stop global warming if we do some of the commonsense things that Mr. Kingston and Mr. Engel have proposed. For those who have been paying attention to the science in the last month, we have learned that the Greenland glaciers are accelerating at a factor of two. The Arctic has lost 36 cubic miles of ice. Polar bears are drowning due to a lack of ice. It is time for some action. Take a look at this bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. If the gentleman will continue to yield. ``Identical'' in this context does not mean that every word has to be exactly the same, does it?

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be certain that I understand the requirement in the bill that State food safety laws be identical to the ten sections of Federal law that are listed in section 2(a)(6) of the bill. Am I correct that each of these ten sections provides a basis for determining whether food is adulterated?

Mr. INSLEE. If a State's basic adulteration law is identical to the Federal adulteration law, can a State apply that law as it determines to be proper?

Mr. INSLEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for those clarifications.

Mr. INSLEE. I thank the gentleman for this explanation, and I have a further inquiry. I understand that if a State law is identical to the Federal, that State regulators can apply State law to particular circumstances where FDA has not. Suppose a State enacts a law that applies to State's basic adulteration requirement to a particular substance or circumstance. So the law would say, for example, that the State has determined that any food that contains more than X amount of Y poisonous or deleterious substance adulterates the food within the meaning of that State's food adulteration law, would that be permissible?

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you mentioning this little small business that has had a little success, it is called Microsoft, in my district that has been one area that has recognized the power of innovation. There are many others in my district. I will just tell you, I want to mention a couple of my favorite constituents, about why they believe this Democratic Innovation Agenda makes sense, that we should seize the creative powers of Americans and put it in harness. One of my favorite constituents, my mother, I talked to her today, and she was brimming with laughter. We had a great talk, and it was great to hear her laughing because she went through a tough patch with some health problems about 6 months ago, and it was a tough time for her. Since then, she has got on a medical technology that was developed in Seattle by some brilliant doctors doing research in basic and applied research; and because of their work now done over a decade ago, my mother was laughing today and probably is alive today. The reason that she was laughing today is that someone had the wherewithal and the foresight to make an investment in basic research medical technology involving the blood system over 10 years ago. We have rolled out this idea to increase and accelerate research in medical technology because we belief there are a lot of people that can use this; but unfortunately, the budget the President has submitted to Congress today, we had Mr. Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services today, he let us know that they are proposing to cut blood research by $20 million. At this time of the most rapid time of potential scientific growth, when we have mapped the human genome, when we could be looking at the dawn of medical technology, that we could make penicillin look like a small investment, they want to cut medical research.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I will just mention my other constituent who is a friend of mine. I will just call him Bill. He is a 55-year-old guy, great guy, plays basketball. He had prostate cancer. He is being treated now with new technology developed, again, in Seattle, bragging about the hometown team a little bit here, about three or 4 years ago. We hope things are going to go well. We have rolled out saying we should accelerate our budget for research into cancer because we are on the cusp of some major breakthroughs, principally because of our genetic development to map predisposition and risk factors to this regard. But what does the President's budget want to do? They want to cut $40 million out of the cancer budget for research this year, $40 million. They want to cancel 634 grant programs now existing for research in some of these emerging fields.