Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. When this premium support kicks in, no senior in America will have any choice about the matter. You will be subject to a provision that you will have to pay more money out of pocket when the HMOs take the healthy people into the private sector and leave the rest of our senior citizens in the more expensive Medicare pool. The group that said that last July was the AARP which said it will require beneficiaries to pay even more out of pocket. One hundred percent of Medicare recipients will be subject to this provision. You have no choice whatsoever. And everybody in this Chamber knows it. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We have tremendous respect for the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis). But what we are saying is the seniors of the greatest generation simply deserve better than this bill, and we ought to be capable of doing better, so that we do not have a bill that is too little and too late, we believe both.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we believe the alternative is a real Medicare prescription drug plan which we Democrats have offered and voted for. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Mrs. Jones).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time. I want to express my respect for the leadership of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) on organ donation issues, which is an important matter as well. We appreciate his leadership of trying to improve the access of organs in organ transplant procedures. So we agree on quite a number of issues. But I think we agree on a goal perhaps and not a direction in that he has indicated that he believes seniors do deserve better. And we believe seniors, in the bottom line of this debate, deserve better than this proposal for a couple of fundamental reasons. Reason number 1: this short-term, extremely modest potential benefit that may potentially help a few seniors includes the seeds of destruction potentially of the very foundation of their health care that this Nation has come to embrace since the early 1960s, and that is Medicare. In the premium support provision, which sounds like innocuous language that is in the bill, it is in the bill, and we all agree on that; it will be in bill. We do not know what page, because nobody has read this. It is going to be hundreds of pages and nobody will have read this probably until we are forced to vote on it less than 24 hours after the bill is passed; but nonetheless, that little innocuous provision carries the potential of the seeds of destruction of the guarantee of the Medicare program. The reason I say that is it will, ultimately, foist on every senior, whether they want it or not, if it is implemented, under this bill, to face a situation where they will have to pay more and have less coverage than those in the private plans. And since the private insurance companies are extremely adept at marketing, they can have all kinds of bells and whistles to lure the healthiest people into their population, leaving the sickest in Medicare, those most in need of security and peace of mind, leaving their premiums to skyrocket and Medicare to go into a death spiral, as the analysts have predicted. I am getting to a certain age; I am not as old as my dad and mom who I love dearly, but I think aging is tough enough. American seniors should not have to worry about the loss of the guarantee of Medicare. We should pass a Medicare prescription drug program that we have suggested on this side of the aisle, and work with my Republican colleagues to pass a true bipartisan bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I do. And I have come here based on some conversations I have had in the last couple of weeks with the father of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, the wife of a soldier who was killed in Iraq from the State of Washington. I met about a week and a half ago with a soldier with a shattered leg over in Walter Reed, actually two soldiers with shattered legs; and that is one of the great, unfortunately, hidden tragedies of this war the number of terrible injuries that have come out of it. That has been kind of hidden, and I think it is unfortunate that folks do not understand how terrible these young men are being injured. In part because of our tremendous medical care, we have saved people that never would have lived in previous wars, but they come away with some terrible injuries. But the reason I came here tonight is just to say that the U.S. Congress owes it to these men and women in uniform who are serving proudly tonight to not ignore them and not give up trying to help resolve this mess, and that silence is not an option for the U.S. Congress. We took a vote but that was only the start of our obligation to these people who are serving in Iraq tonight. And I just have two messages that I hope the administration would listen to to try to get out of this mess. One is to finally develop a meaningful plan, to develop a recognizable, credible Iraqi government so that the Iraqi people could have some credibility in the government, so that hopefully at some point we can bring our men and women home; and they are still on the wrong path failing in that fundamental obligation. Our mission is doomed there until this administration has a workable plan to develop a credible government in Iraq. They have failed in that fundamental mission, in a stumbling, bumbling mechanism. I will state, we stood in a meeting room about a hundred yards from here very shortly before the war started and said, Where is your plan for postwar Iraq? Where is your plan for establishing a credible government in Iraq so that we can bring our troops home? Do you know what their answer was? We are starting to think about that. And that is not too much of a paraphrase of what they told us. And now they still are making a fundamental mistake of thinking that we can establish a government by our order as to who will be the governing authority without the involvement of the international community. We still need to get international folks of other countries involved in there to help develop a credible government. And until we do that, we are not going to win the hearts and minds of the people no matter how many thousand-pound bombs we drop.

Mr. INSLEE. If I may inquire, basically what we have is it sounds like the only international support the administration has had to try to help establish a new Iraqi government is a fellow from London, Mr. Chalabi, and that is not what we think we need when it comes to international support to try and establish a government. Because we know that ultimately to bring our men and women home, we are going to have to be in a position where there is a secure government that has some degree of trust to the Iraqi people. And the one thing we know is a decision, a unilateral decision by the United States to decide who that is is not working at the moment. We believe and have been arguing now since the beginning of hostilities that involving the international community to help establish a definition who is going to be at the table when the constitution is adopted, when the elections are set up, are going to help get the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people which ultimately we need to succeed in this mission. So we are here again tonight urging the administration to learn from past problems and indeed mistakes. One of those mistakes has been acting with such unilateralism, and unilateralism to date has resulted in folks allegedly running Iraq with no security and no credibility. So we will continue to beat that drum, and we hope at some point the administration will learn from these past errors. I want to mention another thing, too, that I hope that Congress does not lose sight of its responsibility to the men and women in Iraq tonight. Those men and women deserve to know why Americans did not get the straight scoop before this war started, and we just began just the baby step for Congress to start to get to the root of why Americans were told things that were not true before this war started. We owe this to the people in the field right now in Iraq, and we are going to call on the administration to stop stonewalling on that investigation. We have been trying to get multiple documents. We are not getting that, and it is interesting to me, when a true patriot, Joe Wilson, who was an ambassador, who was called a hero by the first President Bush for serving as the last counselor in Iraq, who stood up to Saddam Hussein and maybe saved hundreds of Americans before the first Persian Gulf War, when he helped blow the whistle and indicate there had been a mistake in the State of the Union address that came from that podium out to the American people, when he helped demonstrate that there had been a mistake made by the President as to what he said when he said that there was this uranium in Africa, what did the administration do? Instead of thanking Mr. Wilson for helping correct a mistake that the President had made on a pivotal issue and on which they had hung the hat to start this war, instead somebody in the administration, and we better darn well find out who blew the cover on Mr. Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, and that is the type of attitude to date this administration has in getting to the bottom of why we did not get the truth before this war started.

Mr. INSLEE. It appears that there could have been a felony committed; but even if there was not a felony committed, this administration, instead of thanking Mr. Wilson for correcting this grievous mistake that the President made in the State of the Union address, I do not recall he has ever thanked Mr. Wilson. Instead, they have hunkered down and they have refused to recognize that this war was started on the basis of false information given to the American people, and we need to know and the people serving in Iraq tonight deserve to know how and why that happened because it should not happen again. Now, if, in fact, it was a simple failure of intelligence by the CIA, and that the White House, all they did was convey to us the purest, most virginal intelligence given to them by the CIA, we need to know that; but if, in fact, that was not the case, if, in fact, it was the case that they took information and exaggerated it, stretched it, fudged it, told us things were certain when there was doubt, we need to know that, too; and this Congress has an obligation to get to the bottom of it. I hope that we have just started that process. With that, I need to bid adieu.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 7(c) of rule XXII, I hereby give notice of my intention to offer a motion to instruct on H.R. 1, the Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003. The form of the motion is as follows: Mr. Inslee of Washington moves that the managers on the part of the House at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses on the Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 1 be instructed as follows: (1) To reject the provisions of subtitle C of title II of the House bill. (2) To reject the provisions of section 231 of the Senate amendment. (3) Within the scope of conference, to increase payments by an amount equal to the amount of savings attributable to the rejection of the aforementioned provisions to-- (A) raise the average standardized amount for hospitals in rural and other urban areas to the level of the rate for those in larger urban areas; and (B) to raise the physicians' work geographic index for any locality in which such index is less than 1.0 to a work geographic index of 1.0. (4) To insist upon section 601 of the House bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to express my deep disappointment at the failure to deal with challenges for one-half of our patriotic team in the war against terrorism. We have done some good things in here for our folks in the Armed Services, but for our civilian employees, who are a crucial part of our defense team, we are removing protections for overtime pay and other matters, and that is just abominable. When I went out to greet with the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks) the Carl Vinson when she came back from the Afghanistan war, I talked to the folks about their incredibly successful safety record of thousands of sorties without a loss, and they told me it is in large part because of the incredibly adept maintenance done on that ship by our civilian employees. This bill is a jab and a mark of disrespect for those civilian employees, who are every bit as patriotic as our folks in the Armed Services today, and there is no reason for this to have happened. Now, this is just the first step in this effort. We are going to continue to work on this, that this effort of flexibility does not mean disrespect for our civilian employees. We are going to stay on it like a dog with a bone.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a special young man from my district, Mr. Rohan Singh. It is my pleasure to announce that Rohan has been named Junior Achievement's 2003 Student Entrepreneur of the Year. Last year, Rohan used just $60 to establish FuzzelFish.com, which sells software products over the internet. Today, Rohan has a thriving small business and I just want to take this opportunity to congratulate him and wish him luck with his business and his studies. I recently had the chance to meet Rohan in my Washington, DC office. Let me tell you, he is an intelligent and upstanding young man who, I'm sure, will have a very bright and productive future. I also rise today to say that I am encouraged to see that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well among teens in the United States. According to a recent poll by Junior Achievement and Harris Interactive, more teens believe that ``owning your own business'' provides greater job security than ``working for a company.'' This, Mr. Speaker, is good news for the future of this great nation. In closing, I want to say again how proud I am of Rohan Singh and believe that his story should be an example to all young people that everyone can and should play a part in the American Dream.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, we are looking forward to a healthy, open conference. We hope this conference will set a new high standard in openness and bipartisanship in the House. But there are a couple things I think we need to talk about that are challenging us in bringing this bill to completion, and that is, first, a recognition that we have a severe resource limitation that is the real limitation as to what real treatment we can do on our forests, and that no matter what we do in this bill, the amount that has been appropriated to date still will only treat about maybe 2 percent of the acreage of the hundreds of thousands of acres that need treatment in our national forests. That is an important point, because if we only have enough to do 2 percent of the acreage that really could potentially use thinning or other treatment in our forests, we have to really prioritize where we are going to do this work. One of the elements we hope to talk about in our conference is how to prioritize this work where it is going to be most effective. That is why many of us have been talking about prioritizing our work to be in the areas where it will have the greatest benefit to save human life and human property, and that is in the wild-line urban interface and the areas closest to our towns, suburbs, and homes. We will be talking in the conference about a way to focus our energies on those highest priority areas, because, if we do not, we risk really squandering some of it out in sort of the Timbuktu areas while we are losing homes in fires, as we have in California most recently. So that will be an element we hope to discuss in the conference. Second, we hope to have a product that can be embraced by all points of the ideological compass. One of the things we hope to be able to accomplish is a description of the thinning that will assure that we are really doing thinning, rather than disguised commercial harvest. We think we can accomplish that in some fashion of taking off-limits the old-growth timber that gets us into political battles, rather than really furthering the effort to carve out or to thin out some of the litter brush on the forest floor. Frankly, one of the problems we have of winning public trust for this program is the fear that this will be used as a guise to cut down 5- foot-in-diameter trees in some of our old-growth forests to finance this program. We hope we will come out with a final conference bill that will not be using old-growth timber to finance this program. There are a lot of ways, probably 1,000 different ways, to describe old-growth timber. We need to find some. We need to assure the American public we really do have a healthy forest initiative, not a clear-cut initiative, and not a ``let's get the old growth timber because that is where the most commercially valuable trees are.'' That should be doable. I look forward to working on a bipartisan basis to accomplish that.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, this is not a debate about whether or not to fulfill our moral obligation to continue to work in Iraq. It is a debate about how to do it. It does not matter how we got into Iraq. We are there now. Americans of all stripes, those who supported the war and those who oppose it, know in their hearts that we are united in our desire to support our proud troops in the field and to continue our work in Iraq. I will be joining the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) and others in an attempt to increase the pay of those men and women who are making such a sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow. But we owe these proud Americans in the field more than just that. We owe them a willingness to make some measure of sacrifice at home that is even the smallest fraction of the sacrifice they make overseas. The bill before us takes the irresponsible road and fails to truly call upon us at home to actually pay for the costs of this war. This bill proposes to avoid any sacrifice at home by stealing every single dollar it spends from the Social Security trust fund to wage this war. Every single dollar proposed to be spent will deplete the very funds that will be depleted by the forthcoming retirement of the baby boom generation. Every single dollar spent will be new debt foisted upon the shoulders of our children. Every single dollar that will be borrowed could hinder our economic recovery. Why is this? Why is this short-sighted way being taken? Well, it is the addiction to the credit cards and it is wrong. It is a multi- billion dollar moral wrong to our children who have this debt put on their shoulders. And there is a better way. We ought to ask for the smallest sacrifice at home to match that of our troops and reduce just a portion of the tax cut that people who earn over $300,000 will otherwise receive to pay for this war. Do you know anyone who thinks that is unfair? Now, I remember the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) urged us to fight. Well, we will do that, but we cannot just fight the war in Iraq. We have got to fight the war on the Federal deficit too. And this bill will only fight one of those wars. We ought to have the courage to fight both. If it is important enough for us to ask our troops to pay for this war with their lives, with their limbs, then it ought to be important enough for us to pay for this war without passing the cost on to our children, on to our soldiers' children. This bill guarantees defeat. It runs up the white flag in the face of the deficit. It cuts and runs from the war on the Federal deficit and we should fight both. Today there are men and women standing up for us in Iraq and we ought to stand up for them and say yes to supporting our troops and stand up for their children and say no to $87 billion in debt.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I appreciate that segue and why I came to the floor tonight to talk about the sad fact that we, and I am from the State of Washington, are hearing story after story after story about how our troops are not getting the tools they need to do the job and how their families are not receiving the benefits they need to keep the home fires burning while particularly these reservists and Guard men and women are in these extended duties, and that is what I wanted to focus on. Every Member of Congress I think has heard from mothers and fathers of troops. I met with a group of reservists, wives and mothers and fathers and husbands last weekend, and the story I heard about was of a mother who is a nurse who had to go out and herself buy medicine for the troops that her son, who is a medic in the Army, the Army simply was not providing. She had to actually ship over medicine disguised as brownies or food or something to her troops to get this kind of stuff to them. We heard story after story of that. In a grander scale, on a macro scale, as the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) indicated, we need to have a significant restructuring to provide the health care and benefits. We are going to have to improve or we are not going to have a reserve force. We are not going to have a meaningful National Guard force because the families that I have been talking to are going to be making some different career decisions if we do not start to cut the mustard. Now, as a result of that, I offered an amendment today in the Committee on Rules to significantly improve the health care situation for reservists so that they could buy into TRICARE or Uncle Sam would essentially continue their employer-paid programs for at least 6 months after their deployment. This would be a significant benefit to families in the reserve because they will say at least we are going to be able to continue our existing level of coverage for the whole family during these extended family deployments. It is not just a year anymore. It is 18 months for a lot of these folks because they changed the rules on what is an in-country deployment. This is a Democrat offering this amendment. We are going to hear a lot of people suggesting we are not supporting the troops because we are raising issues about this policy, but this amendment was not allowed for a vote on the floor here. I offered an amendment that would allow us to vote on this floor to give reservists better health care, and the Republican majority would not allow even a vote on this effort to improve reservists' health care, and I think that is a failure not only for the families which have a big dog in this hunt but in our military security force structure. We are going to have to do these kinds of things or we are just going to have people leaving the reserves and the National Guard in significant numbers. The second issue, I will be joining the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) who will be offering an amendment to take a little bit of money out of the Iraq reconstruction fund and put it where it belongs, which is a pay increase for these folks fighting this battle, and this is appropriate given the extraordinary nature of this extended deployment, and it should have been done in the first instance. I hope the majority party will join us in improving the lot of our soldiers on the line. The third issue, and I just want to mention this briefly before I yield, there is a huge irresponsibility in this plan that the President has presented. The irresponsibility is while these soldiers are risking all in Iraq, who are sacrificing their time, their limbs, their lives, the President of the United States has not asked folks to sacrifice a little bit to pay for this war and instead wants people on Social Security, essentially in the trust fund, to pay because every single last dollar of this money he is taking out of the Social Security trust fund to pay for this war, instead of asking for a small sacrifice to perhaps delay or defer the tax cuts for people earning over $300,000. Now, is that too much sacrifice to ask, people earning $300,000, when our kids and our husbands and our wives are serving in Iraq?

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. INSLEE. The gentleman just provoked a thought. You think about who is really paying for this in financial terms. The soldiers are paying for it with their lives. But in financial terms, it is our young who are going to be saddled with this debt, billions of dollars of debt, and it is our older folks, including veterans, who are not going to get their health care because this President wanted to send this money to Iraq and did not pay for it. So we are hurting the two most sort of vulnerable groups in our neighborhoods, in our communities, because this plan is not a responsible plan that fulfills our mission in Iraq and our responsibilities to our future kids and our current elders. For that reason, we ought to be asking serious questions.

Mr. INSLEE. If the gentleman will yield, I would like to just address how large this blank check is. I mean, it is a large figure. It sounds big. But in reference, it is, for instance, compared to the Marshall Plan, it is 10 times per capita benefit going to the Iraqi folks than went to the German folks. Ten times per capita. This is an enormous sum of money. Speaking as one who has supported foreign aid, even though it is sometimes controversial, there are many circumstances where we ought to support foreign aid. But this is 50 times larger per capita foreign aid to the country of Iraq than the next largest developing nation. Fifty times per capita. This is an extraordinary amount of money for one country. Frankly, this is not the only country that presents us problems. Yemen is a potential terrorist site. The Sudan is a potential terrorist site. Somalia is a potential terrorist site. Afghanistan, we are doing lip service to and frankly it is too little in my opinion for Afghanistan given what is going on there with the Taliban perhaps restructuring. Indonesia, throughout that part of the world. We have lots of places where we need to keep stable governments.

Mr. INSLEE. The way it is is that those of us who are raising questions about this proposal, I will not call it a plan because it does not rise to the dignity of a plan. It is not a Marshall Plan. It is not even a partial plan. We do not have a schedule, we do not have a schematic, we do not have a plan. It is the beginning of a proposal of an idea maybe, but that is why we are here asking these questions. But what those of us who are asking these questions, the one thing we do know is this. The amount the administration has proposed for military expenditures is actually inadequate for the job at hand. We are the ones who are saying that what has been proposed is not enough to fulfill this responsibility. It is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of Reservists, it is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of National Guards, it does not provide some of the basics to the service personnel. It is billions of dollars short on what it is going to take to rebuild the tracked vehicles that get essentially destroyed in the sands of the Mideast. There are billions of dollars we are going to have to spend that are not in that figure that should be ultimately. There is not a method of paying for the interest on the debt they want to rack up to do this. In a whole host of ways, we are the ones who are saying we actually need to beef up the amount needed for the military expenditure in this mission. So we will not hear or suffer those who would attack our willingness to invest in the military part of this operation.

Mr. INSLEE. Well, Madam Speaker, what has happened is that many misstatements have been laid bare to the American people, and that is why the American people are demanding Congress ask the questions we are constitutionally obligated to ask about this program. And we will not be dissuaded by those who will simply try to demagogue this issue by saying that we are not supporting the troops. We are the ones who want to improve the troops' pay grades; we are the ones who want to make sure that, in fact, this gets paid. I want to make one point also. This debate tomorrow is not going to be about whether or not we continue to fulfill a responsibility in Iraq, because there is bipartisan consensus that we have some responsibility in Iraq; and anybody who says otherwise, well, that is just a red herring. But what we are saying is, let us not repeat the errors that a Democratic President made in the 1960s of deciding to try to fight a war on the cheap and saying we can have both guns and butter and create these enormous deficits. Now, it is the same as what happened in the 1960s here. This is going to create enormous deficits. There is a little difference, though. At least in the 1960s it was our butter. Now it is going to be the Iraqis' butter that Americans are going into debt to pay. Now, maybe some of that has to happen by the vicissitudes of fate we find ourselves in, but we should not repeat the mistake of the 1960s that ended up with a horrendous deficit going through the roof in the 1970s.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), who has been doing stalwart work for 11 years on this matter.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore includes 64 miles of shoreline along the northeastern edge of Lake Michigan. I want to commend the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) for their great work bringing before us H.R. 408, working on this preservation, to acquire 100 acres for eventual addition to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. I look forward to the passage of this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.