Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to use the time of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, having watched that last bill, I continually am surprised in this House that I think I have seen everything, and then I see another one like this one tonight. But on the television today we saw an even more amazing thing. We saw the architect of the Iraq war and all the problems that still remain, the killings, the massacring of civilians, the instability of the government, the inability for them to pick their leadership, their inability to give security to the people of Iraq, we see that every day on the television. It is all the creation of a man named Paul Wolfowitz and his friend, Mr. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of War. The two of them together have put together this disaster that we now face. Now, one would think that, given the failure of the planning and all of what went on in the Iraq war, you would be about to see the end of Mr. Wolfowitz one way or another. But history has some really interesting things in it. Some of you may remember the Vietnam War. There was an architect for the Vietnam War. His name was Robert McNamara. Robert McNamara led us into the swamp; 58,000 people died. Tons and tons of folks died on the Vietnamese side. We wasted money. We put ourselves deeply in debt. And when it was over, Lyndon Johnson made him the head of the World Bank. Who would think that today the President of the United States would reward a man who has created the mess in Iraq with the job of being the head of the World Bank? Now, what does the World Bank do? At the end of the Second World War we set up four institutions. We set up the World Bank, the United Nations. We set up the International Monetary Fund. They were all to stabilize what was going on economically and tie us together in trade. And we take a man who is an avowed American imperialist, who believes in establishing hegemony across the whole world on the base of military power. That is really what the neocons believe. And the President says, you know, this is just the kind of guy we need at the head of the World Bank. What does the World Bank do? Well, if a country wants to build a dam or they want to do some road improvement projects or they want to do some AIDS prevention or some AIDS treatment, they come to the World Bank and ask for loans. Imagine the world coming to the feet of Paul Wolfowitz and trying to get him to understand about rebuilding. This is a man who has flattened Afghanistan and flattened Iraq, has come in here and asked for $80 billion again and again and again, even today, 80 more billion dollars, and they still do not have the water running and the sewage moving, and they do not have electricity, and they do not have the basic requirements of a civil society in Iraq. And he comes in here, now to be the head of the World Bank. We are going to give him billions of dollars to hand out to the world to rebuild the very mess that he created. What in the world is the President thinking? I suppose he thinks, well, maybe, you know, Paul created all those problems over there, bombed everything and led our neocon ideas, that if we could just get enough power, we just bomb enough, you could have a city like Fallujah in Iraq. It is a city of about 400,000 people. It is flat. Just like we did in the Second World War to Dresden, and we did with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He flattened that city. Well, that was to save it, you know, because they were so resistant in that city to American democracy that the only solution Paul Wolfowitz and his confreres in the department of war could think of was to bomb it flat. And now he is the World Bank president, and he will be letting the loans to put Fallujah back on its feet. Man, I have seen everything.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, we know the right questions to ask: about Iraq, the budget, waste, fraud and abuse by contractors including Halliburton. After seeing scenes from an Iraqi prison, we know what we don't know. What are we going to do about all this? We know the right questions to ask, but we also know these questions will not be answered--unless we reach back into recent history and reinstitute an independent, bi-partisan internal watchdog. In the 1940s, the Truman Committee saved the government and the American people $15 billion dollars. They asked the right questions and were empowered to get the answers. The American people got what they paid for and someone made sure of it. There was truth in government. There was trust in government. We don't have that kind of faith, confidence, or oversight anymore. Instead of scrutiny, there is subterfuge. Already, America has spent $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet two years after the start of the war, many troops and their transports still do not have adequate protection. This week, the Administration will use the supplemental process to obtain new billions for Iraq. The fact is, the supplemental process carries less scrutiny than the normal budget process. We know the right questions to ask, but getting the answers is a different story. Billions of dollars have been awarded in non-competitive contracts. Recently, the military acknowledged that 8 billion in cold, hard cash is missing in Iraq. It's happened before in Iraq, and unless something changes, there is no reason to believe it won't happen again. Halliburton has already been found to have overcharged the Pentagon by billions of dollars for providing meals to soldiers and importing fuel. They're still getting paid and no one really knows if we are getting what the American people are paying for. On a rare occasion, the Defense Secretary admits there is an issue; quoting Secretary Rumsfeld: ``According to some estimates, we (DOD) cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.'' The Pentagon's own auditors admit that the military cannot account for as much as \1/4\ of what it spends. Defense makes up half of all the discretionary spending in the budget. Standard issue Republican rhetoric decries waste, fraud and abuse. Well, it's time to turn the rhetoric into a plan of action. The Truman Committee eliminated corruption, profiteering and mismanagement. It uncovered defective systems, improved efficiencies in existing programs, and freed up billions of dollars for more crucial procurement. Point of Order

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, as co-chair of the Congressional Kidney Caucus, I want to make everyone aware that March is National Kidney Month. A growing epidemic, diabetes has a significant impact on kidney disease. Diabetes is the single Ieading cause of kidney failure in the U.S. today. Approximately 17 million people living in America, or more than 6 percent of the population, have diabetes. Because a cure for diabetic kidney disease has not yet been found, treatment involves controlling the disorder and slowing its progression to kidney failure. Recent research has shown that the presence of high blood pressure may be the most important predictor of which diabetics will develop chronic kidney disease. Therefore, the detection and control of high blood pressure are very important in diabetic patients. March is National Kidney Month and the Kidney Caucus in partnership with the National Kidney Foundation is urging all those at-risk for kidney disease, including diabetics, to get checked out by their doctor. Treatment to prevent diabetic kidney disease should begin early, even before kidney damage develops. To accomplish this, experts must make diabetic patients aware of the severity of this disease and its symptoms, and must educate diabetics on ways to control the disease.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, the question is when is the Congress going to stop letting American businesses and workers down? It is time to roll up our sleeves and chart a path to economic freedom. It is time to govern. Today the Republicans again ask us to consider a bill with provisions that will make its mark by missing the mark. It inflates government bureaucracy and deflates workers' opportunity. American business needs the best, most qualified workers on earth, but this bill does nothing to reach that goal. Workers, especially the working poor, need a credible realistic road to economic freedom. This bill is a dead end. Our workforce is in trouble. The ``L.A. Times,'' which I will enter into the Record an article from the ``L.A. Times,'' recently reported that the volatility of income for the working poor has doubled in recent years. Income among the working poor now fluctuates by as much as 50 percent annually. One cannot buy a home with a wild fluctuation like that. One cannot plan for their children's college education with income swings like that, and they are lucky to put food on the table. Mr. Chairman, we need to rethink the systems we have in place to help workers and employers maximize productivity and profitability. We continue to pursue open trade to open our domestic market to foreign competition, but we are not employing the same vigor toward pursuing the means to ensure that our workforce can compete and be the best trained and equipped in the world. This issue, investing in our workforce, transcends social and economic status. I represent the 7th District of Washington, Seattle, where the economy is driven by manufacturing as well as by innovation and the service industry. Everyone in these industries is competing for their jobs against someone overseas. Making the proper investments and systems to helping the working poor obtain access to job training and education is even more important. The so-called Personal Reemployment Accounts compel, compel, unemployed workers to take the first job they can get and forego current job training opportunities. Instead of economic independence, this bill produces economic surrender. We can do better. We ought to significantly invest in continuing education training programs for people in industries that are challenged by global competition. Furthermore, we ought to seriously consider wage insurance. This would enable the working poor to move into jobs that may begin by paying a little less but have greater opportunities for wage growth and economic stability down the road. This bill, even without the bad provisions such as Personal Reemployment Accounts and the provisions that allow workplace discrimination based on religion, does nothing to meet the new challenges that workers and businesses that rely on them face in the new global economy. The question again, Mr. Chairman, is when will you tell your chairman to start taking these responsibilities seriously rather than playing politics, as we are here today, putting the same bill before us that we have put here before, we know it is not going anywhere, it is a waste of time, and it does nothing for the workers? This is not even an election year. [From the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004] The Poor Have More Things Today--Including Wild Income Swings (By Peter G. Gosselin) ``The poor are not like everyone else,'' social critic Michael Harrington wrote in the 1962 bestseller ``The Other America,'' which helped shape President Johnson's War on Poverty. ``They are a different kind of people,'' he declared. ``They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class.'' How then to account for Elvira Rojas? The 36-year-old Salvadoran-born dishwasher and her partner, warehouse worker Jose Maldanado, make barely enough to stay above the official poverty line--$18,810 last year for a family of four. But by working two, sometimes three, jobs between them, they are grabbing at middle-class dreams. Rojas and Maldanado live in a two-room apartment in Hawthorne but have china settings for 16 tucked in a wooden hutch. Their two young daughters receive health coverage through Medi-Cal but get many of their clothes at Robinsons- May. The family struggles to meet its monthly bills but has taken on a mountain of credit card debt. They have used plastic to buy a large-screen TV and other luxuries but have also relied on it to cover bare necessities such as rent and emergency-room visits. ``That's why I'm really poor even though I work so hard,'' Rojas said with a rueful laugh. Some see circumstances like Rojas' as testament to the economic strides that America has made over the last generation, rather than a reflection of its failures. ``We've won the War on Poverty,'' asserted Robert Rector, an influential analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. ``We've basically eliminated widespread material deprivation.'' But if deprivation is no longer as big a problem, that hardly means all is well. In many ways, Rojas is the new face of the working poor, suffering not so much from a dearth of possessions as from a cavalcade of chaos--pay cuts and eviction notices, car troubles and medical crises--that rattles her finances and nudges her family toward the economic brink. In this way, Rojas and millions like her are not--as Harrington described them--fundamentally different from most other Americans; they are remarkably similar. Indeed, today's working poor are experiencing an extreme version of the economic turbulence that is rocking families across the income spectrum. And the cause, no matter people's means, is the same: a quarter- century-long shift of economic risk by business and government onto working families. Protections that Americans, especially poor ones, once relied on to buffer them from economic setbacks--affordable housing, stable jobs with good benefits, union membership and the backstop of cash welfare--have shriveled or been eliminated. These losses have been only partially offset by an expansion of programs such as the earned-income tax credit for the working poor and publicly provided healthcare. For the most part, the poor have been left to cope on their own, scrambling from one fragile employment arrangement to the next, doubling up on housing and borrowing heavily. ``Families up and down the income distribution are bearing more economic risk than they did 25 or 30 years ago,'' said Johns Hopkins University economist Robert A. Moffitt. ``But the increase has been especially dramatic among the working poor.'' As a result, their earnings are jumping around like never before. During the early 1970s, the inflation-adjusted incomes of most families in the bottom fifth of the economy bounced up and down no more than 25% a year. By the beginning of this decade, those annual fluctuations had doubled to as much as 50%, according to statistics generated by the Los Angeles Times in conjunction with Moffitt and researchers at several other major universities. For a family with an income at the 20th percentile--or roughly $23,000 a year in inflation-adjusted terms--that has meant recent annual swings of as much as $12,000. Twenty-five years ago, those swings tended to be no more than $4,300. The Times' figures are based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a database funded by the National Science Foundation and run by the University of Michigan. In contrast to most economic indicators, which involve taking random samples of different Americans at different times and comparing the results, the panel study has followed the same 5,000 nationally representative families and their offshoots for nearly 40 years. In supplementing conventional statistics with the panel- study data, the newspaper has sought to explain why Americans in rising numbers report being less financially secure, even as the nation has grown richer overall. In a nutshell, The Times has found that behind the upward march of most economic averages are increasingly frequent instances of financial setback and hardship for a large swath of the population. Even those in the top-10 percent bracket-- making well over $100,000 a year--have seen their incomes grow more volatile and therefore prone to steep dives. But for the country's 20 million working-poor families, the findings are particularly sobering: They now run the risk of seeing their incomes slashed by half in any given year. That's almost double the volatility experienced by families in the middle of the economic spectrum, the newspaper's findings show. ``The only way to improve your life if you're poor is to be very prudent and make very, very few mistakes like getting fired or splurging and ending up with a lot of debt,'' said Christopher Jencks, a Harvard University authority on poverty. ``Most people aren't that prudent.'' Finding a Foothold Elvira Rojas headed for the U.S. at age 21 in search of two things that were in short supply in her native EI Salvador: peace and prosperity. Combatants in that country's bloody civil war engaged in firefights outside her family's home in Acajutla, and Maldanado had received death threats because of his role as a former military man. In addition, Rojas discovered that the only job she could get with her high school diploma from El Instituto Nacional was at the local fish-packing plant. The pair arrived in L.A. in May 1989. She quickly found work cleaning houses with two of Maldanado's aunts. He landed a job at a Hawthorne dry-cleaning plant. Between them, they made about $200 a week. But with the average rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the city then running about $600, they could not afford a first foothold in their new country--a place of their own to live. ``I felt bad in the beginning because I had nothing,'' Rojas said. ``I wanted to go home.'' With nowhere else to turn, they moved in with one of Maldanado's aunts, her five children and four cousins in a two-bedroom house on Firmona Avenue in Hawthorne. They slept on the kitchen floor. As the couple began to make more money, they moved into a succession of other apartments. Each was a little larger than the last but still crammed with relatives. Rojas and Maldanado had few alternatives. During their first years, they were effectively excluded from Federal rent subsidies or State help because they were illegal immigrants. In 1991, the two gained legal status under a program that allowed people fleeing war in their homelands to be counted as refugees. But their new standing was thrown into question in 1994, when California voters approved Proposition 187. The initiative was designed to cut off state assistance to undocumented immigrants, but many legal ones interpreted the measure as a blanket ban aimed at them too. Rojas, for one, took no chances; she never applied for housing assistance--or almost any other kind of aid--although it appears from her Social Security records and tax returns that she would have qualified. ``I didn't want to be a burden on the government,'' she explained. It's probably just as well. By the mid-1990s, the state and federal governments were winding down most of a six-decade- long drive to help poor families meet their housing needs. That effort had begun under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who decried the conditions gripping America. ``I see one- third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,'' he said in 1937. In the years that followed, a booming private sector largely solved the food and clothing problems. And a combination of financial market innovations and federal power applied through a battery of agencies--the Veterans Administration, the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--greatly expanded home ownership, especially among the middle class. But that still left what to do for poor families, most of whom could afford only to rent. Washington's first answer was to have the government build and run housing projects. Some worked. But many degenerated into vertical ghettos, victimized by disastrous design, racial and economic segregation, drugs and crime. In 1974, President Nixon and Congress turned to another solution: the Section 8 program. Instead of putting up buildings itself, the government would subsidize private developers to construct housing and give poor families vouchers to rent apartments in the open market. But developer subsidies produced cost overruns and political scandals in the 1980s and were largely phased out. That left only the vouchers, which recently have been cut back. In all, the amount of money that Congress and the president have authorized to be spent on housing assistance has plunged by nearly two-thirds in the last 25 years, from an inflation-adjusted $82 billion in 1978 to $29 billion last year. Washington's latest answer has been more laissez-faire: offer tax breaks for the creation of low-income housing but otherwise leave it to the marketplace to decide how much gets built. In hot housing markets such as Southern California's, little has. ``We've produced tens of thousands of units recently, but the well's been dry for so long we should have been producing hundreds of thousands,'' said Jan Breidenbach, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing, which represents many of the region's developers of low-income housing. In the absence of substantial government help--and with housing prices soaring beyond the reach of even the middle class--most working-poor families have been left to fend for themselves. By 1997, Rojas and Maldanado thought they had succeeded in doing that. He was making $5,800 a year at the dry-cleaning plant. She was making more than $12,000 dashing between a part-time job at an airline linen service on Prairie Avenue in Hawthorne and a temporary position with Kelly Services, packing magazines, perfume and shampoo in samplers for direct-market mailings. In the fall of that year, the couple, with another of Maldanado's aunts and her children, moved into a white stucco bungalow on Burin Avenue in Inglewood, not far from Los Angeles International Airport. Although the house sagged in the middle and had drainage problems, it featured two kitchens and two living rooms, plenty of space for each family. The place cost Rojas and Maldanado $550 a month. That was more than 30% of their earnings, a level the government considers the outer limit of affordable, but it was still something they could bear. The bungalow ``felt good because there were not so many of us,'' Rojas said. ``It was the most room I've ever had.'' The following year, the two families celebrated Christmas by stringing sparkling lights along the structure's faded blue eaves and inviting neighbors for a party. Heading West for Work Albert Grimes arrived in Los Angeles a few years before Elvira Rojas did, similarly hungry to start over. He came from Cleveland, where his family was a pillar of the African American community. His father, ``Big Joe'' Grimes, had returned home from World War II and used the GI Bill to buy a house. He opened a barbershop, founded a youth marching band called B.J.'s Raiders and became a kingmaker of sorts in Cleveland politics. Albert's uncle, Walter Dicks, ran the municipal workers union and helped the younger Grimes find a job right out of high school on a city sanitation truck. It paid about $15,000, equal to about $30,000 in today's dollars. But Albert was laid off during one of Cleveland's periodic fiscal crises. In 1985, at the age of 29, he left home and headed West. He had no trouble finding work with one of Los Angeles' big employers. For most of the postwar era, working Americans could count on big business even more than big government to provide safeguards against economic risk. In a reverse of the current passion for temps, outsourcing and lean workforces, corporate America felt it had a civic duty to offer full-time jobs with good wages and solid benefits, even to those like Grimes with no college education. ``Steady, year-round employment is so right from the standpoint of the employer, so right from the standpoint of the workers and so right for the country as a whole . . . that it is hard to see why we manufacturers have not made more progress in its application,'' Procter & Gamble Co. President Richard Deupree told a 1948 audience. As the decades passed, Los Angeles became the hub of the nation's aerospace industry; a second home to U.S. automakers, after Detroit; and a major financial center. Among the region's largest employers: Lockheed Corp., McDonnell Douglas Corp., General Motors Corp., Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., First Interstate Bank and Security Pacific Bank. By the late 1970s, the typical L.A. County workplace had nearly 30% more employees than the U.S. average, according to government statistics--a situation that translated into a high level of economic security. ``There is a close correlation between firm size, employment stability and generous compensation,'' said UCLA economist Sanford Jacoby, who has written extensively about the new risks that working people face. ``Big firms underwrote the creation of America's--and Southern California's--blue-collar middle class.'' As for Grimes, he found his way to Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s massive warehouse at Olympic Boulevard and Soto Street, where he was hired as a merchandise handler represented by the Teamsters. He did well for himself there. His Social Security records show that his income rose steadily--from $12,000 in 1987 to $20,000 in 1990 (or nearly $28,000 in today's terms). On top of that, his health care was covered. But in 1992, Sears stumbled, the result of a failed strategy to sell everything from socks to stocks. Grimes, then on leave with a bad back, soon found himself out of a job. It was a particularly bad time to be without work. The combination of recession and steep cuts in defense spending, brought on by the end of the Cold War, walloped Southern California. Unremitting pressure from low-cost foreign producers and wage competition from new immigrants such as Rojas took a severe toll on unskilled workers like Grimes. Any chance that he would be rehired by Sears soon evaporated when the company's warehouse and adjacent store were damaged in the L.A. riots. The warehouse was eventually shuttered. By the time the region bounced back, the nature of employment had changed. Gone were many of the corporate giants that had delivered a generation of blue-collar security. In their place were tens of thousands of relatively small employers whose job-generating capacity is now regularly praised by the nation's leaders but whose instability, often-low wages and meager benefits are less remarked upon. Government figures show that the average size of a workplace shrank by 18% nationally between its late-1970s peak and last year. The slide was even steeper in L.A. County, with the average size of a workplace plunging 50% to 10 workers. This trend, according to Jacoby, ``is one of the most important and least appreciated reasons why so many people are having a tough time making a go of it today.'' For several years, Grimes all but vanished from the regular economy. He, his chronically ill girlfriend and the couple's young son lived off a mix of workers' compensation, disability payments and her welfare checks. In 1995, he resurfaced, this time as a security guard and-- befitting the U.S. economy's free-market transformation--a self-employed entrepreneur. ``I set myself up as a corporation,'' he said proudly. With the help of a friend, Grimes persuaded a string of businesses in a run-down neighborhood along Bixel Street near downtown to hire him. For three years, he watched over a dental office, a parking garage, a liquor store and a methadone clinic. His earnings climbed from $5,600 when he launched his venture to more than $27,000 two years later. He bought himself a used Pontiac Grand Am, a washer and dryer and a Rent-A-Center living room set. Then in 1998, he found out how risky the life of an entrepreneur can be: The city bought up the properties along Bixel Street to make way for the Staples Center. The businesses that employed Grimes closed. Demolition crews flattened the buildings and, along with them, Grimes' income. His earnings that year went clear to zero. High Hopes As Grimes' world caved in on him once more, Rojas' prospects were looking up. She was still shuttling between her jobs at the airline laundry service and as a packer of sundries when one of Maldanado's cousins told her that the dishwashing department at the Wyndham Hotel on Century Boulevard near LAX was hiring for the 4-to-midnight shift. The full-time position paid more than $7 an hour and, because the workers were represented by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 814, it came with holidays and family health insurance. The latter would prove particularly important when Rojas suffered a miscarriage in 2001, and her health plan picked up the tab for more than $5,000. Rojas saw the job as a turning point. Until then, virtually everything she had in her life had belonged to her in-laws. ``If we used dishes,'' she remembered, ``they were theirs. If we watched TV, it was theirs.'' But all that would change when she went to the Wyndham. ``I knew at that point I would have my own things,'' she said. By 1998, as Rojas and Maldanado's income more than doubled to $26,000 ($30,500 in today's dollars), the couple began assembling the pieces of a middle-class life. Rojas bought china by Royal Prestige. She purchased a hutch from Levitz Furniture in which to display the dishes. She and Maldanado acquired a couch, a bed and a dining table. They shelled out for two large-screen TVs and signed up for satellite-dish service. They bought a 1987 Plymouth Sundance to go with their aging blue Toyota Camry. And they traveled. ``We would go to Las Vegas and Disneyland,'' Maldanado recalled. ``We had more money to spend.'' When the first of the couple's two daughters was born the following year, Rojas was so eager for her to be part of the fabric of America that she resisted entreaties to name her Maria after five of Maldanado's aunts, and instead gave her the name Katherine. She would make a similar choice when their second child was born last May, rejecting Maldanado's suggestion of Elvira in favor of Melane. The new job let Rojas dream about owning a house where, she said, ``my daughters can have their own rooms'' and ``maybe one day I can take care of my grandchildren if I have some.'' Meanwhile, any thought of returning to Central America faded away. ``Here,'' said Rojas, ``my family will go a lot farther than in El Salvador.'' In the summer of 2000, the Wyndham's owners announced that they were closing the hotel for renovations. Rojas remembers hearing ominous rumblings that more would change than the color of the lobby--something about the parking attendants' jobs being contracted out. But she was not worried. To tide her over during the shutdown, Local 814 had steered her to a job at a unionized Burger King at LAX. The fast-food outlet offered a wage-and- benefit package almost as good as what she was making at the Wyndham. About a year after it had closed, the hotel on Century Boulevard reopened. Only now, the sign outside read ``Radisson.'' The Wyndham name wasn't the only thing that was gone either. So too was the union--part of a broader trend sweeping corporate America for more than two decades. Unions, which represented 17 percent of the nation's private-sector workforce in the early 1980s, counted only 8 percent as members by last year. Rojas could have her dishwashing job back. But instead of $8.89 an hour, her top wage at the Wyndham, she said, she'd be pulling down only $7.50 at the Radisson, with no employer- paid family health insurance. She signed on anyway and, to make ends meet, kept her job at Burger King as well. It was hard running between two jobs again, but the family's income finally seemed to be stabilizing. As it turned out, their financial roller-coaster ride had only just begun. Shrinking Welfare For the poor, the most dramatic of all the safety-net cuts that the government has engineered in the last 25 years came in 1996. That's when a Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, overhauling the nation's cash welfare system. The law sought to push people off the dole and into work. In doing so, it essentially reversed the poverty-fighting strategy that Washington had pursued since the 1960s in which poor Americans were promised a certain minimal standard of living. By last year, the law had reduced the nation's welfare rolls by 3 million families, or one-half, and had sliced inflation--adjusted welfare spending by about $10 billion, or one-third. These numbers, though, are about all the experts can agree on. Advocates have hailed the measure as a spectacular success, saying it has increased the incomes of many poor people while triggering a steep drop in poverty among black children. Critics have denounced it as a failure, saying that many people are poorer today than they were before the law was changed. For its part, Grimes' household has remained largely unaffected by the law's ``work first'' requirements. That's because California has maintained relatively generous benefits and because Grimes' domestic partner, Jacqueline Harvey, has a chronic intestinal disease and is exempt from work requirements. She has thus continued to collect benefits off and on from the state's cash welfare program, CalWORKs. She now receives $583 a month. But Grimes, in the meantime, has been staggered by another, lesser-known element of the 1996 act--a significant toughening of child-support enforcement rules. This part of the law built on other efforts undertaken since the 1970s to go after absentee parents and compel them to help finance their kids' upbringings. Grimes and Harvey's son, Albert Jr., was born in 1988. Nine years later, when the elder Grimes applied for custody of a nephew, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office sued him for child support for Albert Jr. The D.A. took action even though Grimes, Harvey and their son had always lived together and, they and several relatives say, Grimes always helped raise the boy. Nonetheless, Grimes declined to challenge the county, which won a court judgment against him. Grimes said he thought that he had to go along with the support order to obtain custody of his nephew and to ensure that Harvey would continue receiving publicly funded healthcare. It's also unclear whether counting Grimes as a parent in the house would have jeopardized the size of Harvey's welfare checks. Whether a mix-up or not, the effect on Grimes' finances has been devastating. California courts not only have imposed high monthly support payments--often unrelated to a parent's ability to comply--but also have added interest at a 10 percent annual clip to past-due amounts. A recent study commissioned by the state found that past- due child-support payments in California have soared to almost $17 billion from $2.5 billion in the last decade. Most of that money, moreover, is earmarked for state coffers--not for the children who need support. ``The system was largely about welfare-cost recovery, not helping families,'' said Curtis L. Child, who stepped down recently as head of the state Department of Child Support Services, which was created in 2000 to remove enforcement power from county district attorneys and restructure the system. ``In imposing these huge judgments on fathers, we're confronting these men with an awful choice: Go underground, which is just what child-support enforcement was intended to stop, or let themselves be financially ruined.'' In August 1997, Grimes was ordered to start sending the county $173 a month in current payments, plus an additional amount for past-due support totaling $4,900. When he fell behind after his Bixel Street business collapsed in 1998, the past-due total began to swell. It now tops $8,000. Plastic Safety Net In one great clap, the 9/11 terrorists brought down the twin towers in New York, shattered Americans' sense of security and shoved Elvira Rojas down the economic ladder. It took her five days to reach Burger King after the police and military sealed off the airport in the wake of the September 2001 attacks. When she finally was allowed in, Rojas found that her manager had cut her shift to just four hours. Within a couple of weeks, she was laid off. Things were little better at the nearly deserted Radisson. Rojas' hours there were reduced to practically nothing. Over the next 15 months, Rojas grabbed whatever hours she could get at the hotel and worked a second job ironing clothes at Hermosa Cleaners in Hermosa Beach. It was a tough schedule even before she got pregnant in 2002. And still it was not enough to keep her family's income from sliding almost 20% from its 1998 high to less than $22,000. So she and Maldanado turned to what has become one of the few reliable safety nets left for many poor Americans: their credit cards. In May 2002, Rojas was rushed to the emergency room at Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne, where she suffered a second miscarriage. This time, with only minimal health insurance from the hotel, she said she had to put $2,000 of her $4,000 medical bill onto her MasterCard. ``I didn't have the money otherwise,'' she said. As the credit card industry emerged in the late 1950s and '60s, some expressed concern that even well-provisioned middle-class families would be unable to resist the lure of instant credit. Betty Furness, President Johnson's consumer affairs advisor, warned that credit cards were ``modern traps'' that would turn Americans into ``hopeless addicts.'' But over the last 25 years, card issuers have not let up in pushing their products. Instead, they have reached out for ever more low-income households. Federal Reserve figures show that among families in the bottom fifth of the economy, the percentage of households with credit cards has soared from 11% in the late 1970s to almost 40%. Their average balance on those cards has climbed, in inflation-adjusted terms, from about $825 to more than $2,000. Some analysts applaud the greater availability of credit. Gregory Elliehausen, of the Credit Research Center at Georgetown University, said the spread of cards and other kinds of lending was part of a sweeping ``democratization of finance'' that has allowed poor families to operate more efficiently by, for example, buying decent cars to get to work. Economists Dirk Krueger of the University of Pennsylvania and Fabrizio Perri, a New York University professor now on sabbatical at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, say families of all incomes increasingly rely on loans, rather than on business and government safety nets, in times of trouble. They borrow their way through the bad patches and pay off their debts in flush periods. The problem comes when there are no flush periods. Some of the items purchased on Rojas' and Maldanado's credit cards can seem frivolous or extravagant--the TVs, for example, or a $150 set of sepia-toned studio photographs of Katherine and her mom dressed in feather boas and gowns. But most of the charges appear to fit the definition of safety- net spending. Beyond the emergency room charge, there was $130 for a new fuel pump for Rojas' Toyota and $170 to repair the power steering. There was $300 at the start of September to cover rent and a $1,000 cash advance that Rojas said went to help a brother bring his wife to the U.S. from El Salvador. Chipping away at what's due on their cards is virtually impossible. That's in large part because the interest the two are charged is about double what a typical middle-class borrower faces. By the time they cover that, there is little left to reduce the balance. Although the stated interest on the couple's most heavily used cards, a pair of Direct Merchants Bank MasterCards, ranges from 20.49% to 31.99%, a review of recent bills indicates that they are consistently charged close to the higher amount. (The Minnetonka, Minn., bank recently was ordered by federal regulators to pay $3.2 million in penalties for ``downselling''--offering low pre-approved rates and then moving customers to higher-rate accounts without fully disclosing the switch. It is not clear that this happened to Rojas and Maldanado.) Rojas and Maldanado now owe $14,592 on their four credit cards--a burden that financial experts say is appropriate for a household making about $100,000, but not one like theirs. Falling Behind In the spring of 2000, two years after Grimes' Bixel Street business failed, he found a job as a security guard five blocks away at Ernst & Young Plaza. For a while after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the building's owners and tenants treated Grimes and his co- workers with newfound respect. Managers listened to his suggestions about how to improve safety at the 41-story structure. He was promoted to ``lobby ambassador,'' a sort of informal emissary to the building, and then to lobby supervisor. His annual earnings climbed back above $20,000, and he began to imagine himself becoming a director of security. ``My goal was to have a facility of my own,'' Grimes said. ``I thought I should have a situation where I'm in control.'' But for most of the last year, Grimes has been anything but in control. In February, after a dispute with their landlord, he and his family were evicted from their apartment on Fedora Street, where they had lived for several years. All that he was able to save from the place were three mattresses, two chairs and a Sony PlayStation. By April, he had run through several thousand dollars paying for a $90-a-night motel room while he looked for a new apartment. He and Harvey eventually rented a two-room Hollywood walk-up for $875 a month, or more than 40% of their combined income. Before long, he fell behind again on his court-ordered child-support payments. In July, things took another turn for the worse. After a series of clashes with his boss, Grimes was ordered out of the Ernst & Young tower and told he would be reassigned. Instead, he quit. For the time being, he is working for the Service Employees International Union on a campaign to organize security guards in the city's high-rise offices. Grimes is determined to recover from the latest round of reverses. He dreams about what his father had--a house, a secure job--and is convinced he'll fare as well someday. ``I'm trying,'' Grimes said, ``to get back to what he had.'' Another Eviction A month after Grimes was forced out of the Ernst & Young tower, Rojas and her family were evicted from the Burin Avenue bungalow where they had lived for seven years. A developer is preparing to raze the place and put in half- million-dollar townhouses. It's not clear how long they could have afforded to stay there anyway. A week before they moved, Maldanado was laid off from the dry-cleaning plant to make way, he said, for new immigrants who were willing to work for less. He has since gotten a new job, packing items at a warehouse, for minimum wage. The family's new apartment is so small that the bedroom is a single mass of mattresses and cribs. The hutch and couches fill the living room to overflowing. And the cabinets in the kitchenette are so stuffed that Rojas must store her supply of infant formula in her car trunk. But the couple has plans--to turn around the slide in their income, to look for a house, to make sure that the girls continue all the way through school. ``I don't want them to be struggling like us,'' Maldanado said. Rojas is making other plans as well. Soon after arriving in the U.S., she took out a loan to finance her future at the Inglewood Park Cemetery. She now owns two plots at the cemetery's Mausoleum of the Golden West, and recently signed papers to pay $82.79 a month for the next five years to buy two more. By the time Rojas is finished, she will have spent more than $12,000 in total. But she's convinced it's worth it. ``Now if I die, I won't have to worry about my funeral,'' she said. ``I won't leave my family with a financial burden.'' The Source of the Statistics and How They Were Analyzed The Times used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for its analysis of family income volatility. The panel study has followed a nationally representative sample of about 5,000 families and their offshoots for nearly 40 years and is the most comprehensive publicly available income and earnings database in the world. It is run by the University of Michigan and principally underwritten by the National Science Foundation. The families' identities are kept confidential. The Times employed techniques for gauging income volatility that were developed by economists Robert A. Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University and Peter Gottschalk of Boston College. The Times also consulted with Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, who has conducted his own analysis of income volatility among households in the panel study and has published results linking it to economic risk. The Times employed two Johns Hopkins graduate students, Xiaoguo Hu and Anubha Dhasmana, to help generate the data. Moffitt guided them and advised the newspaper. The Times' analysis looked at five-year increments from 1970 to 2000 and examined the annual fluctuations in each family's income. For example, for a family whose income rose by $5,000 over a five-year span, the paper examined the journey from the lower number to the higher: Did the change occur in steady $1,000 annual increases? Or did the family's income take a big jump in one year and plunge in another? The Times' basic finding is that the fluctuations in annual income that individual families have experienced have grown larger over the last three decades. Based on the panel-study sample, The Times estimated the annual income swings, up or down, for 68% of all U.S. families--those who did not have the most extreme fluctuations. As a result, the newspaper's conclusions don't rest on cases outside the mainstream: the movie star whose career dries up overnight, say, or the hourly worker who wins the lottery. To zero in on working families, The Times focused on men and women 25 to 64 years old whose households had some income. To analyze the working poor, the paper ranked families by their average income during each five-year period. It then concentrated on those in the bottom one-fifth of income earners and especially those right at the 20th percentile. The average annual income of panel-study families at the 20th percentile is close to the government's official poverty line for a family of four most years. The analysis looked at pretax income of all family members from all sources, including workplace earnings; investments; public transfers such as jobless benefits, food stamps and cash welfare; and private transfers such as inheritances. All amounts were adjusted for inflation, expressed in 2003 dollars.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I apologize for missing votes on the evening of January 25, 2005. I was on my way back to the United States from Chad and Algeria, where I witnessed first-hand the results of the genocide occurring in Sudan. Had I been able to, I would have voted: ``Yes'' on H. Con. Res. 16 (rollcall vote No. 8); ``yes'' on H. Res. 39 (rollcall vote No. 9).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to bring terrible news from Africa. Seventy thousand people are dead, and more are dying every hour. This would be tragic enough if the deaths were caused by some natural cataclysmic event like a tsunami. But the truth is the 70,000 in Africa have died because they were killed by a regime bent on genocide. In a region of horrific tragedy, of violence and death, millions have lost their lives, but many have not lost their hope. These are the notes handwritten by members of the Sudanese refugees in the camps. They gave them to us when we were there 2 days ago and asked us to read them; pages upon pages of handwritten requests to Members of Congress, to the American people. I accepted them directly from these people walking away, because we could not spend all day there. They said, would you please take them home and read them? Their words, their hopes, their calls for help are being translated at the moment, and I will share them with my colleagues when they are done. But I want to share my thoughts about Africa with some of my colleagues in the House, and with the American people. In the past week I was invited to join a congressional trip to the Sudan region by a Republican, the gentleman from California (Mr. Royce). I say this because this House and the American people need to know the depth and the breadth of a man who serves his constituency with distinction and his country with honor. The gentleman from California (Mr. Royce) knows how to reach across the aisle, and I applaud him for his leadership and his humanity. He knows of my love and interest in Africa. That transcended any label of Republican or Democrat. As chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, Mr. Royce put together a trip so that we could see firsthand what was happening. It was done in a 5-day period. The wheels never stopped rolling. There were a handful of House Members on the trip and also someone that the gentleman from California brought along by the name of Don Cheadle, who was recently nominated for a Best Actor Award for his part in the movie ``Hotel Rwanda.'' It is galvanizing when one sees that movie, because it is so reminiscent of what is going on today. It went on 10 years ago in Rwanda. But in that film one sees with their own eyes with chilling accuracy what we saw on the ground in Chad. It will become an instrument of good, and for that we should be grateful. I have been to Africa many times. I have seen the pandemic of AIDS. I lived in Africa as a doctor and as a psychiatrist. I know about the suffering and the emotional trauma from a tragedy of global proportions. What we saw there was an old story. Here are 18,000 people living in make-shift houses in an area. There are 250,000 of them in Chad, having come across the border from Sudan. They have no running water. They have no toilets; they have latrines. Water has to be brought in by truck. You see old people, you see young people with amputations from having been bombed by the Sudanese Government. You see people who are there sick, crying, having no schools for the kids and no health care, or very little health care, all created by a regime that refuses to deal with the issue. Now, we sat, many of us, on the floor of this House during the whole Rwanda experience. We watched it happen, but we kind of closed our eyes. We would not see what we were seeing. It could have been prevented. Everyone in this body ought to have to see that movie and see what happens when the United States, rather than leading, sits on its hands. We say we are a leader in the world. Well, there is a situation out there today that requires us to act. Now, unfortunately, Chad is almost the poorest country in Africa. Sudan is a little bit better because they have oil. But these people living in Darfur are not involved in the oil. They are hundreds of miles away from it. So they become sort of irrelevant to the strategic purposes of this country. If we are going to be a humanitarian country, and we want people to understand that we care, we have to act when we see things like this in spite of the fact that it has no economic value to us. In the days ahead I am sure others will talk about this. America has been a leader and will be again. It is the right thing to do. We should act now.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am unable to be in Washington, DC today. Two weeks ago, I injured my leg and my physician prefers that I not put it through the stress of an airplane flight from my home in Seattle, WA to Washington, DC. Were I able to attend today's session in the House of Representatives, I would have voted in support of H. Res. 854 and voted to defeat S. 2986 and H. Res. 856.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am unable to be in Washington, DC today. Two weeks ago, I injured my leg and my physician prefers that I not put it through the stress of an airplane flight from my home in Seattle, WA to Washington, DC. Were I able to attend today's session in the House of Representatives, I would have voted in support of H. Res. 847, H.R. 5370, S. Con. Res. 8, S. 2618, H.R. 5365, S. 2781, H.R. 4324, S. 150, S. Con. Res. 146, H.R. 5360, H.R. 1350, H. Res. 858, and H. Res. 859.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am unable to be in Washington, DC today. Two weeks ago, I injured my leg and my physician prefers that I not put it through the stress of an airplane flight from my home in Seattle, WA to Washington, DC. Were I able to attend today's session in the House of Representatives, I would have voted to defeat H.R. 4818, H. Res. 866, H.R. 5382, and H. Res. 846.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to be in Washington, DC yesterday. Two weeks ago, I injured my leg and my physician prefers that I not put it through the stress of an airplane flight from my home in Seattle, WA to Washington, DC. Were I able to attend today's session in the House of Representatives, I would have voted in support of H.J. Res. 110, H. Res. 750, S. 2693, S. 2214, S. 2640, and H. Res. 641.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am unable to be in Washington, DC today. Two weeks ago, I injured my leg and my physician prefers that I not put it through the stress of an airplane flight from my home in Seattle, WA to Washington, DC. Were I able to attend today's session in the House of Representatives, I would have voted in support of: S. 1301, H.R. 5364, H. Con. Res. 430, S. 2965, H.R. 4516, H.R. 3204, H.R. 1350, H.R. 1417, S. 2302, S. 2042, H.R. 5363, S. 2302, H.R. 1417, S. Con. Res. 145, S. 1146, S. 1466, S. 434, H.R. 1284, S. 1727, S. 1241, H.R. 1446, H.R. 1964, H.R. 1113, H.R. 4593, S. 437, S. 2484, H.R. 3936, and S. 2486.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we marvel at the wonders the Hubble Space Telescope has brought us. We gaze in amazement at the images beamed back from a rover on Mars. As astonishing and inspiring as these discoveries are, sometimes you don't have to go very far for a major discovery. In fact, sometimes the wonder is as close as the nose on your face. We learned that earlier this week with the announcement that Dr. Linda Buck from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Dr. Buck and Dr. Richard Axel of Columbia University will share a Nobel for their pioneering research on the sense of smell. The more we learn about the human body, the more amazing we know the human body is. On behalf of the people in the 7th Congressional District, I want to congratulate Dr. Buck. This is the third time that the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has been home to a Nobel laureate. That is an extraordinary achievement in and of itself. This is a proud moment for Seattle, Fred Hutch and our distinguished research scientist. Thank you Dr. Buck for an individual achievement that we can all share.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, Taiwan will be celebrating its National Day on October 10, 2004. On this happy occasion, I join my constituents in wishing Taiwan the best in its endeavors. This past September I had the opportunity to meet with Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian in Seattle. He was returning to Taiwan from a trip to Central America. I was impressed by his sincerity in seeking an early dialogue with China and maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. Mr. Speaker, peace in the Taiwan Strait is vital to the political development and economic prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole. In past years, Taiwan and the United States have been friends and allies. In times of turmoil, both have come to each other's aid. I appreciate Taiwan's efforts and actions to protect U.S. citizens in Taiwan after 9/11 and Taiwan's cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies in combating global terrorist activities. I am also aware of Taiwan's support for the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. Taiwan is our friend and deserves our support. The future of Taiwan-U.S. relations is brighter than ever. With the appointment of Dr. David Lee as Taiwan's chief representative in the United States, I look forward to working closely with Dr. Lee on issues of mutual importance. Congratulations to Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and the people of Taiwan on their National Day.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the President stepped up to the plate last night and, Strike 2, the President swung right through on an easy pitch. It was not a fast ball or a curve or a slider or a sinker. It was ordinary Americans pitching the truth to the President of the United States, and he could not even foul it off. He flat out missed it again. He has not kept his eye on the ball on the war on terror; he has not kept his eye on the ball on the faltering economy. Everyone saw the pitch last night and everyone saw what the President did with it. The truth is, a home run pitch right down the middle, and the self- proclaimed steward of the land missed it again. For the third and last night, next week the President steps up to the plate. On November 2, 24 days from now, it will be Strike 3, and the American people will say, ``You're out, Mr. President.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I want to introduce Members to four young men: Justin Sane, Chris #2, Chris Head, and Pat-Thetic. They are a major punk band called Anti-Flag. Do not let this stage name fool you. These kids care about their country. For over a month, they have been touring America and singing to get kids involved in this election. Yes, they have mohawks and rings, but in the 1960s, we were considered radical because of long hair and beads, and we changed this country. And these kids will, too. They are straight-edge punk; no drugs, no alcohol, just kids from Pittsburgh with interesting-colored hairdos and a great message for young people, register and vote or be told what to do and where to go and fight by an administration that will not talk straight to the American people. To their parents I say, be proud; they are smart kids. I ought to know. I am a child psychiatrist. Do not worry about the hair. It will change. To the country, all I can say is kids are listening and change is coming because voting is going to be the in thing in 2004. Mr. Bush, your days are numbered.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, by now everyone has heard the latest revelations that Saddam destroyed his stockpile of chemical and biological munitions in 1991, 13 years before the President needlessly took us into war. Saddam disarmed himself in 1991 because the economic sanctions were working. The evidence was there but the die had been cast. The President was going to war. The details were merely inconvenient. The American people have hard new evidence proving once again that there was no justification for taking the U.S. to war against Iraq. Americans will believe it. The administration will deny it as usual. Every time he does, the President faces a fundamental issue in this campaign: it is the credibility of the Commander in Chief. The President can deny that he blundered into war. He cannot deny that more Americans know it. The day of reckoning is coming. In 26 days this President will not be able to deny that he was just voted out of office.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, today's martial law bill is necessary because we need to pass this Republican tax bill which is a cookie jar of tax cuts for corporate interests. The bill contains goodies for the restaurant association, the ethanol producers, the big timber companies. It provides sweets for those who have enough money to own their own corporate jets. It even dishes out rewards to the railroads like Treasury Secretary Snow's former company, CSX. What is appalling, Madam Speaker, is not that the bill provides goodies for U.S. firms. The Republican Congress does that all the time. What is appalling is that most of the cookies here in the jar are U.S. companies that take their profits and their operations and American jobs overseas. This is an overseas cookie jar. Some of the biggest winners in this jar are multinational corporations. There is a cookie here for big oil and a cookie here for big tobacco and a cookie here for the alcoholic beverage industry and a cookie for the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine that. They have been doing so badly, you know. These companies enjoy record profits. Oil is $52 a barrel today. American consumers are getting gouged. But instead of passing an excess profits tax, this Congress is going to give the oil companies another tax break. No wonder ExxonMobil's stock is now up 30 percent. If you sniff real carefully, you can see why Wall Street can smell these cookies. They have been hanging around in the halls up above my office for the last couple of days. This bill is going to raise taxes on America's biggest exporters and lower taxes for businesses that go offshore. For those firms that move offshore, we are going to give you some cookies. Republicans think that passage of this bill the day before the President's debate on domestic issues with Mr. Kerry will somehow either get lost in that or will be used in it about how I gave big tax breaks to the companies. I do not know what they are going to do with it, but they have got something planned for tomorrow. It did not come up today under martial law because they had not planned it for 6 months. Now, come the 2nd of November, Madam Speaker, this Congress is going to learn that that is not how the cookies crumble. I urge my colleagues to vote against this rule and against the conference agreement and get the special interests' grubby hands out of their cookie jar. If you did not get a cookie in your area, you can have one from my jar. Just come on over and get it.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, well, the Republican rhetoric about the economy does not match the reality on this issue either. New figures show U.S. companies announced layoffs of more than 100,000 people last month. If that is not bad enough, the pace of new job postings plunged in September to a mere 16,000. This is the President's economic equivalent of Mission Accomplished. Over the third quarter, job layoffs topped a quarter of a million workers. That is 20 percent worse than the last quarter, and they call it progress. The September figure for layoffs was the largest number in 8 months, and they call it progress. They cannot create a job, so they create a sound bite. They do the same thing in Iraq every day. Things are getting better, they explain, while the rest of America looks at the nightly news and wonders what in the world these people are talking about. Every night, they deny what is before their eyes. They have not done the job. The record is clear, and so is the outcome. In 27 days, the American people will give the President and the Vice President bus fare out of town. {time} 1015

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his response. We look forward to working with him.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger) for bringing this legislation to the floor today. Often this close to an election, we waste a lot of time on nonsense aimed to affect the election. But today's bill is really important because it aims to improve the chances of foster children to find permanent homes more quickly. This bill provides incentives to States that quickly place out-of-state children into permanent homes. But it also penalizes States that place children too slowly. I am concerned that there may be situations where the delays in placement are caused by Federal agencies, not by State mismanagement; and I would like to ask the gentleman from California to engage me in a brief colloquy. Since the bill calls for a government study to look at the reasons for delays in conducting background checks on prospective adoptive and foster parents, is it the gentleman from California's intention to work with me and my colleagues to address any barriers that the study finds especially at the Federal level?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the Office of the President of the United States transcends politics. Even when the person occupying the office violates the public trust, as President Nixon did, the American people lost faith in the politician but not the office. It was an extreme display of patriotism and optimism. America is on the verge of doing that again. When an administration that claims, as this one did, that it had hard incontrovertible evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the American people believed it because it came from the Office of the President. Now the President's security adviser admits there were serious doubts that Saddam had the aluminum tubes needed for weapons of mass destruction, the very basis for going to war; but the administration ignored the evidence and manufactured the sound bites that took America to war. In so doing, the administration violated the trust the American people place in the Office of the President. The American people will take the first step in restoring integrity to the Office of the President when they elect John Kerry as the next President on November 2. It cannot come too soon.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the Republican ploy is not going to work. Finally, it is out in the open. H.R. 163, which the administration denied for 18 months, that is the national service bill, is not going to go away because the Republicans will it. They opened Pandora's box with this needless door, and they cannot close it, no matter how hard they try. Finally, the American people are going to get the truth. H.R. 163 is out in the open. The administration denied the existence of the possibility of a draft since the day we proposed it. They refused to face the issue of who would fight and die in the President's war. They ordered the Republican majority to bury 163 alive; refer it to the Department of Defense where it would be placed in solitary confinement forever; lose it in the system, just like they lose human beings in the system in Iraq. But they did not count on the kids, our sons and daughters or nieces and nephews our godchildren and grandchildren. The Republicans did not count on the kids. It started on the Internet blogs. Go look for yourself. We raise smart kids, America. They were the first to see through the administration's rhetoric. The administration claims we have enough soldiers in Iraq, but they stop-loss soldiers who have survived a year on duty in Iraq, and this administration orders them to stay and fight some more. They claim we have enough soldiers in Iraq, but we call up the ready reserves and order them out to Iraq. They claim they have enough soldiers in Iraq, but they got rid of the general, they retired him, who said it would take 300,000 troops in Iraq. They get the names and addresses of our high school kids through the PATRIOT Act and send the recruiters on a mission. Yes, America, the PATRIOT Act helps them locate your children. One parent in Seattle called it ``outrageous'' and ``disgraceful.'' How right he was. The PATRIOT Act. You know, the bill the administration claims it needs to catch the terrorists; but it nets the government the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of your sons and daughters, every single one of them. They not only know where you live, they are coming to have a talk with your kid. They say they do not need a draft. They sure do not act that way. And that is before the election, the only thing they fear. Even their own guy, the former Iraqi administrator, told an audience yesterday the U.S. went into Iraq without enough troops. The looting, the violence, there was no way to stop it. Paul Bremer said this in a direct quote: ``We never had enough troops on the ground.'' Later, aides said his comments were meant to be off the record. Apparently, that is where the administration keeps the truth these days, off the record. Likewise, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday that he knows of ``no strong, hard evidence linking Saddam to al Qaeda.'' When that one got into the news media, the Secretary said he was misunderstood. I just bet he was. I know one person who was not misunderstood, the Vice President, who spoke on the record in a disclosed location, Seattle, Washington. This is worth repeating, given the Vice Presidential debates tonight. The Seattle Post Intelligencer and its columnist Joel Connelly found a transcript of a 1992 Seattle appearance by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. He was explaining why the U.S. had left Saddam in Iraq after the first Gulf War, and this is a direct quote: ``And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision we had achieved our objectives and we were not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.'' Not going to get bogged down. Does anyone think the Vice President will talk straight about this later tonight? Not a chance. And they wonder why the kids get it. Every time this administration says there will be no draft, the kids get online and the phones to my office and the office of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) ring off the hook. The kids know the difference between the truth and Republican rhetoric. H.R. 163 is out of solitary confinement, and it is in the open. What 18-year-old can believe an administration who said there were weapons of mass destruction, knowing their own people doubted it? What 18-year- old can believe they do not intend to get them to Iraq, whether they call it a draft or a precondition for a college loan? What 18-year-old can believe they will tell it straight when they pronounce ``mission accomplished'' over 900 casualties ago? The kids know, Mr. Speaker. They know just like other generations. The kids are forcing their parents to look at reality and see the truth. The kids may have funny colored hair or a ring in their ear or nose, but they have a good head on their shoulders. Punk rock music may not be the in thing to listen to, but these kids are making voting the in thing to do, and the Republicans are terrified.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take my Special Order at this time.