Ed Markey

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. May I ask the Chair to recapitulate the exact time that the majority and minority still have remaining for this debate?

Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentleman very much. I yield myself my remaining time. Again, just for the record, Republicans can say this as much as they want, but I have to repeat: (1) When President Obama was sworn in, 57 percent of our oil was imported. Today, only 45 percent of our oil is imported-- congratulations, President Obama--no matter how many times the Republicans want to cover that over. (2) Seventy-five percent of all of the oil and gas reserves offshore have been made available by the Obama administration for drilling. (3) We in the United States are at an 18-year high in drilling. Now, the Republicans have a problem with this because the 18-year high in drilling, the reduction from 57 percent of imports down to 45 percent of imports and the fact that 75 percent of all areas off the shores of our country are open for drilling run totally contrary to everything that they believe--to everything that they want America to believe, it is better to be said--because if the American people actually believed the truth, which is that Obama has reduced our imported oil from 57 percent down to 45 percent, reduced our dependence upon imported oil and increased our drilling to the highest point in 18 years, then their whole narrative just goes right down the drain. They have to keep getting up as though Bush were the right guy, but he did nothing. All we're saying is, if you are so desperate to actually license all of this new drilling off of the beaches of our States, at least build in the safety precautions, which is what the Markey amendment calls for, which will prevent another mess like the BP Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, nothing in H.R. 2362 can't be accomplished by H.R. 205, the HEARTH Act, which passed the House unanimously in May and was just last week passed by the Senate without change. The President is expected to sign H.R. 205 into law any day now. Unlike H.R. 2362, the HEARTH Act authorizes all tribes to engage in leasing activities with any nation--foreign or domestic--for economic development purposes on tribal lands. It does not discriminate based on world geography, or benefit a select few tribes who qualify under strict requirements for a time-limited demonstration project. In light of H.R. 205, there is simply no need for H.R. 2362. It is redundant and unnecessary and should be rejected by the House on this basis alone. But there are serious reasons to oppose H.R. 2362. By acknowledging Turkey's ``unique interest'' in developing tribal economies and in building ``robust'' relationships between it and tribal communities, this legislation rewards a country with a terrible history of human rights and religious freedom violations, threats to U.S. commercial interests in Cyprus, and--most importantly--its refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million people. The manager's amendment to include WTO countries does not change the fact that Turkey is singled out for preferential treatment and will benefit through increased investment opportunities in Indian country. Congress should not be in the business of rewarding countries with appalling records on human rights to develop economic ties to Indian country on a preferential basis. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. MARKEY

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

Mr. MARKEY. This debate has taken on the characteristics of ancestor worship, and I understand it. I know it's hard for individuals to let go of the Cold War, to let go of an era where foreign policy was characterized by this bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The reality: We won. It's over. We didn't just win. It was basically a world where there's unipower now. It's us. The Chinese only have 40 to 50 nuclear missiles. The Russians have already dramatically reduced their weapons. The likelihood of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia is negative zero. And yet there are Members that don't want to see any reductions in our nuclear weapons force, notwithstanding the fact that those extra expenditures then would have to come out of other budgets, including the budget for the National Institutes of Health to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. And so we have this curious disconnect between the reality of the world that we live in today and the understandable but erroneous commitment that many Members on the other side have to a relic of a Cold War-era rivalry that no longer can withstand fiscal scrutiny. So let's just take this debate about whether or not the United States is vulnerable. Each one of our submarine-based nuclear weapons systems have 96 independently targetable warheads onboard. That is: each one of our sub commanders can destroy the 96 biggest cities in China; each one of our sub commanders can destroy the 96 biggest cities in Russia; each sub commander, with their first nuclear weapon, could destroy Tehran; each sub commander could destroy Pyongyang and still have 95 independently targetable nuclear weapons onboard that one submarine, much less every other submarine that we have out there. And so to have an amendment that says, after New START was agreed to between Russia and the United States, after the Air Force and the Navy signed off on New START, to have Members of the House proposing that notwithstanding that agreement that was reached that does enhance American national security by reducing the likelihood that there would be a conflict between the United States and Russia, as low as that likelihood is, that we have this micromanagement that comes in of our military. But it's more than that. Let's admit it. It's all about jobs. You're thinking about the defense bill as a jobs bill, and I understand that. But whenever we're talking about the defense bill, those jobs that are created should relate in some way to American national security. And what the Air Force and the Navy are saying is that they do not believe they need more nuclear weapons. In fact, they can agree to and have already accepted the reduction in nuclear weapons that is in the New START Treaty. And so I understand from a jobs perspective why you want to lock in jobs that may have been created a generation ago in the height of the Cold War, but we have to redeploy for the 21st century not only militarily, but also into what strengthens us domestically in terms of medical research and educational programs. So I can't really understand why we're even debating this issue. There is a treaty between our two countries. Our military has signed off. Our military says it actually enhances our security. And I agree with the gentleman from Washington State: This is an area where we should actually give some respect to the United States Senate that ratified the treaty, to each one of your Joint Chiefs that signed off on it, and not allow a jobs bill to trump our national security; and that if you can find programs that actually enhance our security and you want to spend the money on it, let's debate that. But this is an area that is already resolved. I urge a ``no'' vote on the Berg amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY

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

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, in this bill, not only do the Republicans claim there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to cut in the defense budget, they are actually increasing spending beyond what the Pentagon is asking for. The Republicans have put an additional $75 million for missile defense in this bill--75 million additional dollars that the generals have not asked for. So my amendment today is simple: It would reduce funding for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense program by $75 million to bring the 2013 funding level back to the administration's request. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense is Star Wars, and it's a system that hopes to one day shoot down an incoming nuclear warhead by launching our own missiles from Alaska and California. But here we have a situation where basically the Republicans are saying that they want to give the Pentagon $75 million more than what the military says it needs right now. And if we can't decide just to take what the Pentagon is asking and rubber stamp it and give it to them, and even that is not enough in a period of fiscal austerity, then how in the world are we going to be successful next year when $55 billion has to be cut? So, let's start here. St. Augustine's prayer, I think, is applicable here, where he said, O Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet. The Republicans are saying, O Lord, let us reduce the deficit, but not just yet. When it comes to defense spending, we want to give the Pentagon even more than they are asking for. Let's get all of our sinning done before next January. Let's really clear the deck on all the gold-plated planning that--I don't know if it's defense firms because it's not the Pentagon. The Pentagon is saying that the money that's in the bill as the President proposed it is sufficient in order to provide for the development of this missile defense technology. The bill already funds this program to the tune of $900 million, and the Pentagon is saying ``enough.'' So I know you're talking about canceling sequestration when it comes to defense spending, but this isn't a good sign. This isn't a good sign that we're ever going to be able to reconcile the tension that exists between the need not to cut NIH funding, the need not to cut National Cancer Institute funding, the need not to cut programs that deal with Grandma on Medicaid and nursing homes and all the way down the line. This just goes beyond anything that's even remotely reasonable. I urge an ``aye'' vote on the Markey amendment, and I hope that it is adopted by the full House. I yield back the balance of his time.

Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Dicks and I started 36 years ago at the height of the Cold War, with each country building more and more nuclear weapons, more and more defense systems in an ever escalating war of nerves that kept both countries and the whole world on edge. In this Republican fantasy land, gold-plated nuclear weapons systems budget, there are going to be programs that have long outlived their usefulness that are lavished with canyons filled with cash. In this fantasy land, the Cold War never ended. The Soviet menace lives on, making it necessary to maintain vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons and build new bombers to penetrate the Iron Curtain. In this fantasy land, there are mountains of money for intercontinental ballistic missiles towering over the landscape and providing shade and comfort to the legions of defense contractors making nuclear weapons we no longer need and we can no longer afford. In this fantasy land, the Republicans want to retroactively re-fight the Cold War that we won. This makes no sense. Mr. Chairman, it is time to get real. Sequestration is coming. The Republicans, in their budget, are ignoring the doomsday clock that has nearly reached midnight for millions of hardworking Americans. We must prepare for this reality. The bill the Republicans have brought to the floor today provides the Pentagon with a billion more dollars than this year's spending level, and $3 billion more than the Obama administration requested. Despite sequestration, despite budget pressures, despite the fragility of the economy, the Republicans still want to increase defense spending. Why? To pay for more radioactive relics of the past that no longer are needed in order to protect our country. But I have good news for my friends on the other side of the aisle: the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. The Soviet Union crumbled. It's okay to stop funding nuclear weapons to perpetuate a Cold War rivalry that has disappeared into the mists of history. We don't have to buy into this insanity. That is why I plan to offer several sane amendments to reduce Pentagon spending on unnecessary, outdated nuclear weapons programs. Here is the bottom line: beginning January 1 of next year, 5 months from now, $55 billion has to be cut out of the defense budget and $55 billion has to be cut out of civilian social programs. That is $55 billion and $55 billion apiece. The Republicans are increasing defense spending heading into that. Moreover, they're saying, Don't cut defense at all, cut the social programs. What does that mean? That means cutting the NIH, cutting CDC, cutting the National Cancer Institute. They're already going to be cut under sequestration. What the Republicans are proposing is to really create a true doomsday machine, and that doomsday machine is the lack of a cure for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for all of the other diseases which actually do pose a terrorist threat to families across the country when they get the call that once more that disease has come through their family because we--that is, the Republicans--have decided that they're going to continue to cut the research for the cure for disease and instead build more nuclear weapons to be aimed at targets that no longer exist. This is an important debate to have. It's a sequestration anticipation debate where we begin to be forced to get real. We have to have a debate about what the priorities in the 21st century are going to be, and not some Dr. Strangelove smiling from his grave, being so happy that we're still debating additional nuclear weapons.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentleman, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. MARKEY. Our current nuclear arsenal has significant overkill that is built into it. Our country continues to spend more and more taxpayer money on nuclear weapons even though the President and the Senate have already agreed to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons, and even though there is a growing bipartisan consensus that the United States has an excessive number of nuclear weapons and that the United States spends far more than it needs to for a nuclear deterrent and defense. That is why I rise today to offer my amendment: to reduce the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles from 450 to 300. I believe that this is the soundest approach to both our national security and our economic security needs. Each of our land-based nuclear missiles costs us--and this is an incredible number--$2.4 million every year to operate and to maintain. My amendment would save the taxpayers about $360 million next year and every year after that. It's not just arms control groups that support this departure from Cold War thinking. It also includes General James Cartwright, who until last year was the commander of the United States' nuclear forces. General Cartwright published a report in May that concluded that zero intercontinental ballistic missiles are necessary for our nuclear deterrent or defense. The former commander of U.S. nuclear forces doesn't think we need ICBMs at all. So reducing the number from 450 to 300 still leaves more than enough missiles for an effective nuclear deterrent. That's still more than enough missiles to annihilate any of our enemies over and over. It not only will turn our enemies into rubble, but it will make that rubble bounce and bounce and bounce again. That's how many nuclear weapons we would still have in reserve. That is a real savings, and that savings can be used for the NIH budget. The entire budget to find the cure for Alzheimer's--5 million Americans have it--is $450 million a year. If we would just cut out these ICBMs--and that leaves plenty left over--it would give us enough money to almost double the budget to find a cure for something that really is going to kill Americans, that really does terrify them in their homes. So I pray that the House will accept this amendment and send us in the correct direction in which we should be heading in terms of really protecting the American public.

Mr. MARKEY. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. MARKEY. I just want to note here that the gentleman from Washington State did pioneering work in the 1980s in identifying the vulnerability of the land-based ICBM fleet. That discussion continues even today out here on the House floor.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson).

Mr. MARKEY. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. It is really quite fitting that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is taking up a bill today to weaken environmental regulations for the hard rock mining industry. Because just last night the Republican candidate for President held a lavish $25,000-a-plate fundraising dinner out in Montana. For those who don't know, the Daly mansion where that event was held was owned by a famous guy, Marcus Daly, was one of the three ``copper kings'' of Montana during the Gilded Age. He was infamous for his epic battles with other robber barons for control over the copper industry in Montana and around the country. In fact, the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to invalidate the Montana election law of 1912 overturned a law that was originally enacted to respond to the very excesses of mining barons like Marcus Daly. So here we are out here on the House floor embracing the Gilded Age. But here in the Republican House, we are not in a Gilded Age; we are in a Giveaway Age where every week the Republicans seek to hand even more giveaways to the oil, the gas, the timber, the coal, and the mining industries. The bill we are considering today is so broadly drafted where apparently sand, gravel, and crushed stone are considered rare and strategic that the majority actually appears to be trying to usher in a new stone age. Under this bill, the next time you go to the beach, you should put some sand in your pocket because the majority apparently believes that it is a rare element. That gravel in your driveway is protected because, under this bill, it is apparently strategic to America's national security. Rare Earth elements are indispensable to a wide range of military, electronic, and industrial applications, as well as a variety of clean energy technologies. But this bill isn't giving us just the futuristic technologies of the Jetsons. It's giving us the prehistoric technologies of the Flintstones. Volumes of reports have been written about rare Earth minerals and other critical and strategic minerals; and none of them define things like gravel, sand, and clay as critical or strategic minerals. What we could be doing and what we should be doing on this House floor is developing a policy to break China's grip on the rare Earth minerals that are important to our high-technology sector and to national defense. But we aren't doing that with this bill. No, what we are doing here is using strategic and critical minerals as a pretext for gutting environmental protections relating to virtually all mining operations. Now, because the majority has cast so many votes to benefit these industries that it gets hard to keep track, we have created this chart to help everyone keep track of which industry is benefiting each week in the GOP giveaway game show. Yesterday, my colleague from Utah seemed extremely interested in making sure this chart functioned properly in order to aid the body. So I brought it back today so we can give it a spin and make sure we all remember who is getting a special giveaway today. But for the Republican Congress, this isn't the game show ``Wheel of Fortune.'' This is the Wheel of Fortune 500 Companies where we can spin to see which large, multinational companies will get handouts. In ``Jeopardy,'' you state your answer in the form of a question. In the GOP House of Giveaways, answers are stated in the form of questionable policies. And the GOP's final answer in their running game of ``Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'' is always the same: it is the largest corporations in America at the expense of American taxpayers and the environment. In fact, the majority is bringing this bill chock- full of giveaways to the mining industry on the floor without addressing the 140-year-old loophole that allows mining companies to extract gold, silver, uranium, and other hard rock minerals from public lands without paying taxpayers any royalty payments. This rip-off is even worse when you see that every western State actually charges royalties of between 2 and 12 percent for companies to mine hard rock minerals on State lands; but on Federal lands, which might be right next door, the mining companies don't have to pay taxpayers a dime in royalties. The robber barons are long gone, but mining companies can still operate under a law put in place during their heyday. Yet the majority's answer is not only to do nothing to end this free mining on public lands. They are trying to hand even more giveaways to this industry in this bill. This is a bad bill, and it should be defeated. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. This bill is ostensibly a bill that is supposed to be discussing rare Earth. It's supposed to be discussing strategic minerals that we can use in our competition to produce high-tech products that we're competing with the Chinese and others in order to produce in our country. The kinds of strategic materials that we're talking about are scandium, cerium, europium, and terbium. These are not minerals that people ordinarily hear about. And from the high-tech manufacturing sector, we hear that they're central to their ability to be able to compete. What the underlying bill would do is to reduce or eliminate the proper review of mining operations on public lands for virtually all types of minerals; not just for those rare Earths that I just mentioned, but also for gold, silver, uranium, and things like sand and gravel that are clearly--I think we should all be able to agree upon the fact that sand and gravel are not strategic minerals for our country. They're plentiful. They're available. We don't need to be watering down environmental laws in our attempt to be able to have enough sand and gravel and clay in the United States of America. This amendment would not only allow for insufficient review for future mining operations, it would allow mining operations that are currently being reviewed to also escape proper scrutiny. Even worse, this amendment is drafted in such a way that it could potentially even apply to mining operations that already have been approved. Following environmental review, mines sometimes have to put in place mitigation measures to protect the public health and the environment. Under this amendment, there is the potential that those companies could seek to have those mitigation measures thrown out. In an effort to save potentially millions of dollars, I understand what the company is trying to do. That might be good for that company, but it's not good for the environment or for the American people who already have mitigation agreements in place to protect against the mining company endangering the health, the well-being, and the water table of the area where the mining is going on. It wouldn't just cover europium; it would cover, potentially, gravel, sand, and other elements that clearly don't need that kind of protection. This amendment would likely invite a hailstorm of litigation, which I would think that my colleagues on the other side would like to avoid. I would also like to think that my colleagues on the other side would rather have the Department of the Interior, the Forest Service, and other Federal agencies continue to move forward to approve new mines, not be bogged down relitigating mines that have already been approved. This amendment makes a bad bill even worse and would have a number of unintended consequences that could invite litigation and actually delay the approval of future mines. I urge defeat of the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey as much time as he may consume.

Mr. MARKEY. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. MARKEY. I yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt).

Mr. MARKEY. Madam Chair, how much time remains on either side?

Mr. MARKEY. I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt).

Mr. MARKEY. I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt).