Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, my remarks should not be taken as any kind of a statement about the Committee on Ways and Means, because we had nothing to do with this. But I remember the verse in the Bible where they were asking Christ how you would know if you were really a good Christian, and he said, well, it is how you take care of the least of these, meaning the poor people and the sick and all of the rest. This bill is an absolute travesty. Nobody wants to talk about it. Now, let me tell my colleagues what Republicans say. Mark Schweiker, the former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania said, ``Meeting the work requirements in the House bill would require us to dismantle much of our time-tested and effective welfare program and replace it with costly programs with little utility. These changes, including significant new child care costs, would cost the taxpayers of Pennsylvania more than $300 million.'' That is a Republican Governor talking. Or we could take the Republican Senate chairman in Iowa. Her name is Mary Cramer. She said, ``We are concerned that the proposals such as the legislation passed by the House will restrict Iowa's successful efforts to provide training to welfare recipients and meet the needs of local businesses. We urge you not to take a step backwards and further restrict education and training options.'' I could go on like this. Anybody outside the Beltway, outside of the office of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), knows that this bill is not going to make it better; it is going to make it worse. Now, I have a whole long list of things. The GOP will say today that welfare reform has been a great success. If that is, why have 41 out of the 47 States said, the Republican plan would force fundamental change in their current welfare program? Why are we changing it if it is not broken? What is the point? The point is to squeeze poor people. We heard earlier that child poverty has fallen dramatically because of welfare reform. No, that is not what everyone else who is an economist says. It is a good economy, and it has been the earned income tax credit, and we still are forcing families, with a family of three living on $2,500 a quarter. Now, that is 70 percent of the Federal poverty line. We call that success? That is what we are being led to believe out here, that we have a success and we ought to squeeze them more. They got too much. That family of three with $10,000 for a year ought to be squeezed some more. We will also hear, and we did hear, that this bill gives more flexibility because we allow States to define 16 of the 40 required work hours in the bill. This bill increases the current law direct-work requirement from 20 to 24 hours and eliminates job search. Looking for a job does not count anymore; you only get credit for working. So if you have a job making $6 an hour and you spend a little bit of time out looking for a job, you do not get any credit whatsoever for that. The CBO estimates that the paperwork involved in this is going to be a cost of $6.2 billion over the next 5 years. So we will pay for $6.2 billion worth of paperwork; but we will not think about the people, because we need to pass the committee, we need to get it right out here and get it passed because TANF expired on March 31. What they did not say when they came out on the floor was, the Senate Republicans included a 6-month extension of the current law through September 30 in the Omnibus Appropriation Act we are about to take on. Now, that extension is supported by the National Governors Conference, so Republican legislators are going out and sticking their thumb in the eye of Republican Governors. Now, if the House negotiators would withdraw their objections to that extension, we would have plenty of time for thoughtful consideration of their program. We would have the next 6 months to think about it. The thing I really like best is, we had plenty of debate last year so we do not need to debate it this year, as though, if you discussed it in 1941, it is good enough; we do not need to discuss it again, right? Well, do things change? Did we have a new Congress elected in November? We have got new people here. Some of these people have never, ever considered these issues, a lot of them. There has been no public debate whatsoever, and we passed last year's bill on a party line vote, and no attempt was made to work it out with the minority then. This is more of the same. This is just rubber-stamping George Bush's proposals, and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) leads the politburo, and he keeps sending things up here.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I am not going to talk about the bill. I am going to talk about the process, because that is what is really wrong with what happened here. When we organized the Committee on Ways and Means, I asked the chairman in open committee whether we would have hearings on this bill. The chairman said that is what he wanted. But it is pretty clear that this House is being run by a politburo run by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay). The gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) obviously told the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, which is supposed to be the most powerful committee in Congress, you cannot have hearings on this; we are dealing with this on the floor without any discussion, no debates. Now, if this were a good rule and you made it an open rule and let us put any amendments forward we wanted to, if we could have the debate out here in public, that would be okay. But you closed that off, as well as having any kind of public discussion in the committee system. Now, this Congress, I am sure, is going to do more and more of that, because it is clear what you are trying to do is run stuff through here so quickly that we will be out of town when some war begins, and there will not be any Members of Congress around here. You will have done all the business, you will not have any hearings anyplace, and you will simply pass the legislation over to the Senate and go home. That is a travesty on the process that has been in place in this country for 200 years. This is not a minor little bill. This is not ``shall we name the post office in Oologah, Oklahoma, after Will Rogers?'' This is about what we do with the poor people of this country. And for Members elected not to have an opportunity to debate amendments and discuss the issue, I know what they are going to say when we get out here with the regular bill; they are going to say we did it last year. Listen, things have continued down the drain. We have got higher and higher unemployment, and more and more of us are facing problems in State legislatures that cannot respond to this. The President has made no proposal to deal with the problems of the States in dealing with people who are on welfare, who are in trouble, kids. The President says, ``Leave no child behind.'' Well, I guess he means they can go to school on an empty stomach. That is okay with him. Okay, that is good. But why not have a kid with a stomach with some food in it so he can pay attention to the books? But if we had this debate and we had all these amendments put out here and we argued about whether you could actually get 30 hours of work, or should you count training or whatever, all those issues would then make it very clear what you are doing to poor people. You do not care whether they have a livable wage; just shove them off the rolls and leave them out there. And when we start to get the kids, we are going to get the kids from the programs in every State that deal with child abuse. People are going to say, these parents are not taking care of these children. We have to take those children away from them. It will be created by a bill that never had a hearing. Shame on the Republican leadership.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we are going to pass the welfare reform act without a single hearing in the subcommittee or in the full committee. It simply went to the Rules Committee and will come to the floor without debate in this House. I implore you, Mr. Speaker, to bring the domestic security enhancement bill to the committee and then to the floor with full debate before you try and run it through in the confusion around some terrorist act. I give two quotes and let people decide who said what. The first is: ``The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.'' The second quote is: ``To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: `Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.' '' The first is a quote from Hermann Goering, the propagandist for the Nazis. The second is John Ashcroft. Consider the similarity. We do not need to lose more of our liberties to defend ourselves in this country.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Well, I want to thank the gentleman from Oregon for yielding to me. I wish that tomorrow night we were going to have a speech like John Kennedy gave in 1961, when he came and said, we are going to go to the moon. He gave the American people a goal. He gave them hope. He gave them a vision of what they could be as a country. Unfortunately, I am sitting here preparing myself to come tomorrow and not hear any of that. I wish that the President were going to say tomorrow, when he stands up here behind me, that in 10 years the United States is going to be off their oil addiction; that they are going to break the oil addiction that is killing us. They are going to do the things necessary to get off an addiction. The United States is just like somebody who is on heroin or cocaine in terms of oil. We use oil in tremendous amounts, although we have scarcely any of it left in our own country. The President wants to drill everywhere in sight, but we still are not going to get enough oil from the United States. So we are forced to get our oil from Venezuela and from Nigeria and from the Middle East, and it is not necessary for this addiction to continue. If the President of the United States would set a goal tomorrow night for us to move to oil independence in the world and begin to push solar and wind and hydrogen cells as a way of solving our transportation problems and the energy needs of this society, we could do it. San Francisco has already started to move. They got burned by Enron, so San Francisco said, this is never going to happen again to us, and they passed a $100 million bond issue, and they are putting solar panels on every public building in San Francisco. Now, if the President of the United States said that we are going to do it all over the country, we would absolutely change our relationship to the Middle East. This misbegotten proposal to go to war to get 20 percent of the world's oil reserves from Iraq would be irrelevant. They could do it in San Francisco, yet our President cannot say let us do it in the whole country. California, every single day, has fallout of the sky seven times the energy they use in California. All they have to do is catch it and turn it into electrical energy, and they can do what needs to be done. Now, that is true in many parts of the United States. Even in my State of Washington there are areas where this makes good sense. Now, let us talk about hydrogen cells. People say we are talking about something that is way, way, way out there somewhere. Most people do not realize Honda and Toyota delivered to the Los Angeles mayor hydrogen cell cars within the last 2 months and said, we want you to use these over here and see how they work and what the problems are. The Japanese are, once again, miles ahead of us. They did it with little cars, then they did it with hybrids, and now they are doing it with hydrogen cells. But our President says, no, we have to stick with that oil, and we have to put it in the gasoline engines, and we have to do the same old thing. Now, as a psychiatrist, one of the things I learned was that people who do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, that is really a sign of sickness. We have been doing this for 100 years. We have been putting gasoline in cars and sending up clouds of pollution, which is the second thing the President could be dealing with. If he gave us this goal of energy independence, he would stop the process of us polluting the air and destroying the ozone and global warming. All you have to see is pictures of glaciers all over this country and north of this country that have been melted by the global warming. It is absolutely without question going on. Yet our President says, no, we cannot have anything to do with that Kyoto Accord, because that would mean we would have to stop using our oil. But I wish the President were coming tomorrow to say to us that we are going to get off that because we are going to do something about the energy and how we are killing the environment. Mr. Speaker, I heard a story on NPR recently which disturbed me, having been a child psychiatrist for a number of years. Every child born in this century has a 100 percent chance of getting skin cancer if they are not protected because of the destruction of the ozone level; they are being subjected to rays of the sun that is going to make them develop skin cancer. The President of the United States could do all of this if he could simply say we are not going to go to war to get 20 percent of the world's oil reserves; we are going to go in another direction. We are going to change the direction of this country. Unfortunately, the President of the United States is going to stand up on the podium and beat the war drum for an hour and tell us we must go after Saddam Hussein, and he has never made it clear what we are going for, but it is really about oil. What makes me sad about what is going to happen tomorrow night is that the American people are going to listen to the speech and think that their only solution is to take Saddam Hussein out; and if we do that, we are going to be really safe. All of the security will be settled; we will be safe forever. Mr. Speaker, does anybody really think that the American public is going to believe that? I do not. I wish the President would come tomorrow and talk about energy independence.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kleczka).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 15 seconds to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kleczka).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am glad to hear the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania tell those 44,000 people in Pennsylvania to hold on, hold on. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I would remind the gentleman from Colorado that according to the U.S. Department of Labor, for every job opening, there are 2.7 applicants. So if the problem is immigration, I do not know quite how we are going to fix this. We already have too many people looking for jobs. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Becerra).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I listened to my distinguished colleague from the State of Washington, and she had this list, and she said that the Republican bill helped 134,000 members or something in the State. I have my list here, which is the list of all those people we do not help, and the question is why can we not do that? I mean the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn) and I have 31,500 people that this bill does nothing for. They are the people who exhausted their benefits. I know she cares about them. I am absolutely sure she does, and I care about them, but we are told that we cannot do anything about it because the Senate has acted unanimously. I am sorry, but I have been in legislatures, State legislatures, the House and Senate, and I have been here in the House, and I have been doing this for 30 years, and I have seen things go through legislatures in an hour through both houses, no problem, if you want to do something. Of course if you do not want to do something, then you say, oh, the heavy burdens of the legislative process, the Senate has acted, the House has acted, oh, we cannot get it done, the President must have it on his desk tomorrow at 11 o'clock, that is the time his press conference is, I think, so he can sign it at the press conference tomorrow to put it out. Now for those 31,000 people in the State of Washington that the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn) and I care about, we are just saying to them we do not have time because the press release is already printed. I am sorry, folks. It might take an extra 3 or 4 hours to get the House and Senate to get it done, but have no fear, 31,000 people, the President has you on his mind, deeply on his mind. He went to Chicago to make the speech about how big and how heavy his heart was about your problems. He is proposing to put $674 billion into the economy, not to you of course, no, unless you have capital gains that you might benefit a little bit from his bill, but it is really for the rich people on the top. They are going to get 75 percent of it, and then they will think up some way to put you to work. So hold on and we will pass this tax bill and then in April of 2004 when they got this money back, then they are going to invest it and make you a job. So if you can hold your breath for a year for that tax break to take hold, why, things are going to be all right. And the worst thing about this whole process, why it is an empty promise the President is making, is that in today's newspaper there is an article entitled War's Cost May Dwarf Stimulus Effect, from the Washington Post, January 8. This article says that as long as this country is threatening the whole world with the war in the Middle East that what is going to happen is that we are going to suck all the juice out of the stimulus package by the war. The gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn) and I represent an air company that makes airplanes. Last year they made 400 and some odd planes. Do my colleagues know what their orders are for this year? Two hundred twenty-one. Now, why are airlines not buying airplanes? Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that people are not flying. They are not getting on planes and flying all over the world like they used to. So this war on terrorism that is scaring the living daylights out of the travelers is knocking the jobs out. We have lost 30,000 jobs at Boeing this last couple of years. And the President says, yes, but we are going to Iraq and we are going to have a war there and that is going to fix it all, and then after that Iraq war everybody will feel comfortable again and we will go back to living the way we have always lived. Nonsense. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott) was right. We are going to be back here in 3 months with this very same bill or something just like it because you are not going to get a stimulus in 90 days and you certainly would not want to have this linger on into the next election period. You had better have something on the table for them. Maybe you will wait until this time next year to put a little something more on the table, but by then there will be a million more. The long- term unemployment in the State of Washington has risen by 35 percent in the last 2 years, 35 percent. I admit we are the point persons, Washington and Oregon, for the unemployment problem in this country; so we have got it a little worse than the rest of you, but if you think it is not going to affect you, that somehow you are going to slide by this thing, you are wrong, and to say here today that we have not got an extra hour to add an amendment to take care of a million people and then ship it back over to the Senate and say would they please accept the House amendment, I have done it. I am sure I have done it 500 times in the last 30 years, to send an amendment over and it gets accepted and that is the end of it. You know you could do it. You do not want to do it. You do not want to do it. You do not care about those million people. No matter what you say or how you wave your arms and whatever you want to say, the Republican Party does not care about those million unemployed because you have the Presidency, you have the Senate, and you have the House, and if you cannot do it, you have two choices, I guess. You could be stupid and not know how to do it. That is one possibility. I do not think that is true. The alternative is you do not want to do it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. [From the Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2003] War's Cost May Dwarf Stimulus Effect (By Jonathan Weisman) Mindful of his pending reelection bid and his father's political mistakes, President Bush is plowing ahead with an ambitious 10-year, $674 billion economic stimulus plan even as U.S. troops pour into the Persian Gulf region preparing for war. The president's determination to push more tax cuts as the nation prepares for war has struck some economists as folly, since the economic shock of war would likely dwarf the impact of Bush's stimulus plan. Moreover, no tax policy at the moment could actually address what many economists believe to be the greatest drag on the nation's economy: the uncertainty of war. ``Clearing away the clouds over Iraq would open the paths for expansion, regardless of what the Bush administration is proposing,'' said Robert DiClemente, a managing director at Salomon Smith Barney who has studied the potential impact of an Iraq war on the U.S. economy.'' That is undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to expansion right now.'' Bush was explicit about his two-track policymaking yesterday, beginning his speech in Chicago by addressing the threats of terrorism, Iraq and North Korea. He then added, ``Even as we confront these dangers, you need to know I know we have needs here at home, especially the need for a vigorous and growing economy.'' But it is becoming increasingly difficult to address those domestic needs without first confronting the problems abroad, economists said. The goal of the president's plan is to inject $102 billion into the economy this year, by accelerating planned income tax cuts, excluding investment dividends from taxation, boosting the child tax credit and speeding tax relief to married couples. The elimination of dividend taxes alone could boost the stock market by 10 percent, according to White House allies. But all of that could be undone by a war in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, especially if the war were protracted and led to terrorist attacks and the use of weapons of mass destruction. Last month, Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus published an analysis that dramatized the uncertainties the United States faces. The cost to the Treasury of a war with Iraq could be as low as $100 billion over the next decade or as high as $1.6 trillion, he concluded. Most likely, the economy would take a $391 billion hit in the next two years, Nordhaus predicted, which would dwarf the cash infusion the president is offering. ``If energy prices spike up, it wouldn't take much to offset all of this stimulus,'' said William G. Gale, a tax economist at the Brookings Institution. A recent analysis by experts convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies predicted that any war would knock down stock prices by as much as 25 percent, more than undoing the anticipated benefit of the dividend tax elimination. Recovery would depend on how a war with Iraq unfolded. If the war ended swiftly, stocks and the economy as a whole would recover quickly and grow at a rate faster than they would if there were no war, thanks to the lifting of uncertainty, falling oil prices, higher government spending and rising consumer confidence. In that event, the Bush plan could end up harming the economy by fueling inflation or pushing interest rates higher, said Laurence Meyer, a former Federal Reserve Board governor who convened the CSIS conference. But if the war lasted six to 12 weeks, stock prices would continue to fall, interest rates would rise and economic growth would slow by 1\3/4\ percent, the CSIS analysis said. A worst-case scenario--in which the war dragged on for 90 to 180 days, oil supplies were significantly disrupted, and serious terrorists attacks ensued--would push the economy back into recession, regardless of economic policymaking. In that case, the economic response would probably be far different from the one Bush is proposing now, Meyer said. That range of potential outcomes makes policymaking at this point ``treacherous,'' he said. ``The best policy right now is to wait, to see what happens ahead, and to plan in the background some contingency plans, just in case we have an adverse outcome,'' Meyer said. Not everyone is so cautious. DiClemente said the Bush proposal could provide a buffer for the shocks that would come from a war. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted that a war with Iraq could be long over by the time Congress passed a stimulus plan. In that case, he said, Bush might as well get the ball rolling now. But, for the president's critics, the timing and boldness of the Bush plan present an irresistible target. ``Whenever the president talks about war, he talks about a spirit of shared sacrifice,'' Gale said. ``But for rich people, shared sacrifice appears to be accepting tax cuts, and for the poor, it seems to be accepting cuts in social spending. There seems to be a disconnect bordering on the dishonest.'' Fumed Rep. Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, ``Never in a time of war have we reduced the tax burden on the most privileged.'' Even some of Bush's allies in past tax fights expressed exasperation yesterday, given the gathering clouds of war. ``I understand you can't just put everything on the back burner and ignore it,'' said Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), a key ally in the battle over the president's 2001 tax cut. ``But what you can do is take modest steps, and $670 billion is more than modest.'' Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks, and include extraneous material.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah). (Mr. FATTAH asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I would remind the gentleman from California that under the Republican bill, that if you had exhausted your benefits under your bill, you would have gotten absolutely nothing. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, my heart goes out to the gentleman from Pennsylvania who is not allowed to put up an amendment. He is the only one I have ever heard of talk about exhaustees on the other side. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin). (Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I think all that needs to be said has been said already, but I would only emphasize the fact that what we are hearing today is what we heard from the Supreme Court of the United States at the time of the election of the President. The Supreme Court said, we do not have time to count the votes. We have to declare a winner here. In this instance, we are telling a million people out there that we do not have time to do anything about extending their benefits. If they happened to run out of them last year, well, that is just tough luck. I guess they can wait for the economy to pick up, and we wish them well. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal). (Mr. NEAL of Massachusetts asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to commit.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Yes, Mr. Speaker, I am.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion at the desk.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Yes, in its present form.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter) for yielding me time. The President is intent on going to war. He continues to take us down a path to war. The papers carry today the story that the stimulus package is going to be eaten up by the war. You can pour that $700 billion into the economy, and it will not do any good because nobody is going to invest, which means we are going to continue to have long-term unemployment. My State has the highest rate of unemployment. The distinguished gentleman from California says, well, they are going to get some money from the stimulus package when they get their capital gains excuse there. I am going to tell the 30,000 people in my State that are not covered by this bill that we will try to get an address where they can go and get their money for their non-existent tax benefits. This is a travesty, and what you are doing is you are putting a little Band-Aid on it today because you have got public pressure. You will be back. I guarantee you will be back in March. You will be out here saying, well, amazingly, the economy has not picked up. We do not know what to do, so we have to give a few more benefits, a few more nickels and dimes out the door. If you continue down this path to war and spend the money out of the Treasury of the United States in a stupid tax giveaway to the wealthy, 70 percent of the people in this country will not get more than a $100 out of it. If you think that is a stimulus to the economy, you do not understand ordinary people. So you are wasting $700 billion. You are taking us into a senseless war, and you will not take care of people who are sitting in your own districts. And you will not let us debate it. You say, well, we have the budget, we have the budget, you know, we have to keep the budget in balance. You gave that up and you are going to give it up. The President says we are having a wartime budget. So in a wartime budget you do not have to worry about what is going on. You can just spend money on all kinds of things but not on the unemployed, even though the $25 billion is sitting right in the account right now, and they will not acquire a damn dime. Announcement By The Speaker Pro Tempore