Hank Johnson

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time, and I have no more speakers.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen).

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield as much time as she may consume to the gentlelady from California, the great Maxine Waters.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 908) to amend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to reauthorize the Missing Alzheimer's Disease Patient Alert Program.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, 50 years ago today, on February 10, 1959, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Bombay, India, to study the principles of nonviolence developed and used so skillfully by Mahatma Gandhi, which Dr. King himself employed to become this Nation's greatest civil rights leader. I commend my colleague, the gentleman from Georgia, Congressman John Lewis, for introducing this bipartisan resolution that calls upon all Americans to rededicate ourselves to Dr. King's belief that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time. I would also like to acknowledge the many members of the Judiciary Committee that join in this resolution and, in particular, the gentleman from Texas, our ranking member, Mr. Lamar Smith. During his month-long travel to India from February 10 to March 10, 1959, Dr. King gained a deeper appreciation for the power of nonviolent civil disobedience, a practice that Dr. King first discovered reading Henry David Thoreau's essay, ``On Civil Disobedience,'' while a student at Morehouse College. Just as Gandhi had used it successfully in resistance to oppressive British colonial rule in India, Dr. King adopted it as a cornerstone of the American Civil Rights Movement, holding firmly and faithfully to it even when the peaceful demonstrations were met by dogs and fire hoses, and worse. Nonviolence had already proven successful in the Montgomery bus boycott, and so it would be used later successfully in sit-ins used to protest segregated lunch counters, and in the freedom rides used to challenge segregated public transportation facilities. In Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, the eve of his assassination, Dr. King told us that ``it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it is nonviolence or nonexistence.'' This remains his challenge to us as we confront the evils of our own time, from the police brutality and hate crimes here at home, to the threats to freedom emanating from around the world. Can we always meet this challenge? Given our human frailties, that would be exceedingly difficult. But keeping that challenge in our hearts will help us always to look for the peaceful solution whenever possible, and to maintain our faith that we will sometimes be able to find it even in the most uncompromising situations. As Dr. King observed in February of 1967 against the backdrop of the Vietnam War: ``Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.'' That statement speaks to us as loudly today as it did to those who heard it more than 40 years ago. Standing on the shoulders of Gandhi, Dr. King called on us to promote equality and justice through steadfast nonviolence, and it is on the shoulders of Dr. King that we now stand to do our best to live up to his dream for us. I ask my colleagues to support this resolution. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I will yield as much time as he may consume to the sponsor of this resolution, the Honorable John Lewis of Georgia.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time as well.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I would yield 4 minutes to the honorable gentleman from the great State of Virginia, Mr. Bobby Scott, who is also the Chair of the Crime Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I will yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois, the honorable Danny Davis.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, we have no additional speakers at this time, and if the gentleman yields back the balance of his time, I will do the same.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I would yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr).

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Thank you, Congressman. That whole process of trying to get bipartisan support here in the House I guess was probably doomed to failure from the outset because there was no good-faith being exercised by my friends on the other side. It was just politics as usual. Let's play ``gotcha'' politics, and let's use our control over the media to get our message out and to undercut public support for the change that Americans voted for in November. And I think that the fact that no Republican bucked their leadership to vote in favor of this plan despite the fact that President Obama made significant concessions to my friends on the other side of the aisle, they kept moving the goalposts. If you do this, then they want something down here.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Yes. Thank you. So we've got a group of folks who were right here as you say, Congressman Ellison, they were right here in this very Chamber, and they had the leadership up until 2006; and they aided and abetted this country's decline and all of the things that contributed to it. And so but now they want to dictate the solutions to getting us out of this morass. And it just doesn't make sense. I hope the American people are paying great attention because my friends on the other side of the aisle, the only thing that they propose is more tax cuts for the wealthiest 10 percent, and that's certainly not going to work. We've got to take care of our basic safety net. We've got people in this country who've lost their jobs, they've lost their homes. They are on the street--families, no place to live, no food. And so we've got to fix those things while we also pay attention to the future needs of this country preparing us for the global economy and the long-term future. And with that, Congressman. I'm going to yield back.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. I'm doing great. Mr. Ellison, you have been a shining light and a great example of a courageous congressman who doesn't run with the crowd and do what's popular but you do what's right, and I'm happy to join you tonight. You know, I am deeply concerned--and have always been deeply concerned--about the fact that there's been a transfer of wealth in this country, a shift of the money from the middle class to the upper 10 percent of earners here in this country. In fact, since 2001, the figures show that worker productivity went up, while at the same time, 96 percent of the income growth went to the wealthiest 10 percent of this country. And so that's a clear indication that something is wrong with the policies that we have been following over the last 8 years. And despite the wealth that has been transferred into the hands of a small minority of Americans, we still see that the pursuit of greed has brought us to the point where we're closer to a depression than we have been since the Great Depression. And so I'm happy to be a progressive. The other side of that is conservative. Let's leave everything the way we want to leave it, and let's do business as usual. We cannot do that. So I'm happy to be a member of the Progressive Caucus espousing, along with yourself, new ideas; and it's a new time. It's time for change.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Okay. Before I answer that, Congressman, I do want to talk about--you mentioned something very interesting and that is the lack of regulation in the financial markets. Oil futures contracts were taken out of the regulatory process by the laws of a senator who would become the Republican nominee for president's financial adviser. And now we have that candidate, that unsuccessful candidate for President, proposing his own economic plan, is what he said he was going to do. And it took me back to as a young man, my dad decided that he wanted to get under the sink and do something with the plumbing. And he's like a college-educated guy. Never took any plumbing classes or anything. But anyway, we came out of that situation with puddles and puddles of water in the kitchen. So, you know, my mother called in the plumber. She did not entrust fixing what had been messed up to the guy who messed it up. And so that's where we are right now with our economic plans in this country, our--we call it the stimulus package.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Congressman, it's nice to have you with us, and I admire you so much, both in your foreign affairs philosophy as well as your domestic philosophy. I appreciate the fight that you have put up over many years. You know, as I see it, health care is also an economic issue, and it's an issue of education as well, because if you have got children who are not healthy, when they go to school, they can't give their best. And so, as they grow up, they can't compete with other students from other countries who have had a healthy preventive health-type of experience. It's an economic issue because we have got to compete in a global economy now. American workers--and it's so important that our workers, our middle-class workers, that they are able to access health care, remain healthy, wealthy, and wise, if you will. And so it's an economic issue. It's like removing termites from your house. If you know you have got termites, you know that they are going to at some point eat up the whole frame. And so to prevent that from happening is very important. Health care is one of those important areas that has been neglected for so long for working-class people. And so I am glad that we have a President that is going to be assertive in terms of changing this system that does not work for anybody but the insurance companies as far as I can see. And so this American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan includes, of course, some outlay for health care. If you could comment, if I might ask.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. We have cut down on so many medical errors. I know that you being a doctor, you could probably relate to this. The penmanship of the average doctor is quite, some say, arrogant. You can't understand what is written. So electronic medical records would be a clear communications device that would cut down on medical mistakes, pharmaceutical errors, and the like. That is an investment in the future of this country, and also it sets up our entrepreneurs, Congressman Ellison. It sets us up to lead the way as future developing nations see the need to bring that kind of technical expertise to their own health care systems. And so it puts us in a great position in the future, as does the recovery package with respect to energy. Congressman Ellison.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. A tremendous analogy. And so we have seen what happened in the House of Representatives. The Senate is supposed to be a more thoughtful and deliberative body. But isn't that the place where all of the earmarks come from? And it is politics up there, too, even though the Senators are elected for 6 years as opposed to the 2 years that Representatives are elected for. And we simply cannot afford to cede our constitutional obligations to the Senate with respect to this reinvestment plan.

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. If the gentleman will yield for just one second. Let me start by saying this. The new deal and the investment that was made in this country after the great depression caused this country to prosper; and the money, there were jobs for middle class, and people accumulated wealth. They were able to buy their homes, buy their cars, send their kids to college. But back then there was a whole set of conditions in existence that are not in existence now. But things like infrastructure, health care, which have gone neglected for so long, these are the new areas that we can create jobs. We are talking about 3 million to 4 million jobs will be saved or created by this American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and we have got to think out of the box in terms of what these long-term measures that are included in the stimulus package will produce in the long term. And if I could get you to just comment on that.