George Miller

Mr. MILLER of California

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Woolsey]. (Ms. WOOLSEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island [Mr. Reed].

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from Alaska [Mr. Young] made the point that we are making. That is, there are those individuals who seek to come to the floor to support this legislation and try to hide an atrocious environmental record where they have voted 5 for 5, in some cases 15 for 10, against very important environmental protections: the removal of arsenic from drinking water; the removal of dioxin from our environment, from our drinking water; the removal of lead, to protect children; those kinds of measures. The gutting of the Clean Air Act, they supported it. The gentleman from Alaska [Mr. Young] has a perfect record on that. He needs a fig leaf, because he is trying to hide that record by supporting this legislation. The gentleman would say that the last three speakers in fact do not need a fig leaf, because their environmental records have been consistent. They have been consistent because of the tough environmental bills they have supported true environmental protection, and on this legislation they are supporting a good piece of legislation. That is not what is going on here. That is because of the fact that under a directive from the caucus they are putting this measure forward. The gentleman from Alaska has always found some reason why he could not support environmental legislation. He does not like the Federal government. He does not think we should be able to have some kind of national standards for clean air or clean water. But as I think one of the previous speakers said in support of this legislation, the environment knows no geographic boundaries. If you have dirty air, if you have dirty air in California, people in Nevada and Arizona end up breathing it. If we put dirty water into the Mississippi River at the top, the people down in Louisiana and elsewhere end up having to contend with that dirty water. That is because we need those standards, and before we had those standards, that was a problem. Coastal zone management: What moves up and down the coast between the Carolinas and Virginia and Florida has to be somehow managed in a fashion to protect all coastal communities. That is true on the West Coast and others. That is what we are talking about, that there is some consistency between people's records. You cannot just trot out unanimous bills that there is complete agreement on and therefore say that somehow you have created the environmental record when for 16 months, when given the opportunity, people have voted and earned themselves a zero rating. That is the point being made.

Mr. MILLER of California. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. MILLER of California. Seaweed?

Mr. MILLER of California. And the point made by the gentleman is in fact historically we have worked on a bipartisan basis on most of these measures.

Mr. MILLER of California. The Outer Continental Shelf was passed on a bipartisan basis, as was Clean Air, Clean Water, Endangered Species Act, all of the other great environmental laws.

Mr. MILLER of California. What we have seen is unfortunately people like the gentleman from Alaska apparently prevail in the caucus, rather than the gentleman himself. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, that is to say, those who want to not only have a fig leaf to hide behind, as the gentleman from California just earned by his voting record, but those who now want to suggest they were hiding behind property rights, I do not know what the property right is that allows you to take pollution from your land and dump it into the streams and the bays and the waterways of this Nation. I do not know what that property right is that allows you to take non-point pollution, pesticides and toxics, and dump them into the bays and the rivers and eventually end up in our coastal zone. There is no property right that gives you the right to pollute the public waterways and to diminish the resources available to other Americans. I know the gentleman came on the floor a little late, and so maybe he got caught up in the rhetoric of the gentleman from Alaska [Mr. Young] about private property. That had nothing to do with the voting records, on whether or not you voted to dump sewage into the oceans or control nonpoint pollution, or voted for the Clean Water Act or allow EPA to enforce wetlands protections. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. MILLER of California. We have no further speakers, but I reserve the balance of my time, given what happened on the last bill.

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, it depends on how many speakers the gentleman from New Jersey has. If I can say to the gentleman, at the moment, I would not yield back my time. Does the gentleman have additional speakers?

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MILLER of California

Mr. MILLER of California. I thank the gentlewoman for taking this time, and this very opportune time. Not only are we struggling to get a clean vote on increasing the minimum wage for those millions of American workers who need it to support themselves and their family, but now we start to see the limits to which the Republicans will go to keep us from having a clean vote. They talk about attaching all kinds of anti-labor riders or attaching a lot of legislation that they think will be unacceptable to us and to the President so that he would have to veto the bill. Majority Leader Armey has said he will resist the minimum wage increase with every fiber in his being. Apparently, that is what is going on here. But what they have done in the last couple of hours by suggesting this proposal to take the earned income tax credit away from poor single workers to provide for people with families with children is incredible, because what the Republicans are saying is they are now going to tax the poorest of workers in this country. They are going to raise their taxes because those people will have less income after this action than before and they are going to give it to other poor people to increase their income. But why are they doing it? Because they have decided they would rather have the taxpayers in this country subsidize low-income jobs than have the marketplace provide a livable wage. Now, it is ludicrous on its face. As was pointed out by the gentleman from New York, they are talking about one tax rate for workers without children, workers with one child, with two children. We just passed the farm bill, where we provided hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to farm families. We did not distinguish between farm families with children, farm families with one child, farm families with two children, farm families where only one person is working with farm without children. We based it upon their outcome and output of that farm. Why do we not tax rich people? Rich people with a lot of children would be at one tax rate and single rich people would be at another tax rate and we could give that to poor people. What do we say about work in this country? Equal work for equal pay. But now what the Republicans have decided is in fact it is going to be some other classification to determine whether or not Americans will get paid. It does not say the employer cannot provide an increase in the minimum wage. Under this the incentive is for the employer not to provide any increase. The Government will pick up the tab. The Government will go into the marketplace and subsidize his employment. In fact, we essentially have an incentive not to pay an increase in the minimum wage, not to increase your wages. Why? Because the Government will pick it up. We could understand this on its face if we did not know the history of this party, the Republicans on the other side, because not only are they against the minimum wage, but they also have been slashing all of the supports to those people who are working at the minimum wage and cannot sustain a livable wage for their family even though they go to work every day. So what we see is there are only two places people can go. They can either go to the Government or they can go to the marketplace. But what the Republicans are saying is the market has no obligation to provide you a livable wage, a wage that will support you or your family. So what we will do is we will just have the Government subsidize those employers who simply choose not to pay the minimum wage. This is ludicrous. It is absolutely ludicrous. If that is a conscious decision, and they will be back here cutting the EITC, as they did the beginning of this year when there was no intent that they were going to pass it on, they were simply going to use it to balance the budget or pay for their tax cuts. We simply cannot allow that to happen. I think there is a fundamental decision. If you choose, if you chose and you admit that the American economy cannot provide livable wages, then you may be dissident. But I do not think that is what this is. This is an effort to derail a clean vote on the minimum wage. This is an effort to try to put something up here so people can look, sort of like we saw today, where they put some bills so they could look like they were friends of the environment but their voting record was completely to the contrary. That is what this is. It is an outrageous proposal to tell two people who work hard side- by-side that somehow that the employer has no obligation to them to provide an increase in their wage, if in fact they have a child or they have more than one child, even though they are doing the same job, they are working the same hours and working the same schedule.

Mr. MILLER of California. I will in a moment. It is actually the gentlewoman's time.

Mr. MILLER of California. I did not refer to you.

Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, could we have regular order here?

Mr. MILLER of California. Well. The point is this, that what this country deserves and what its low income wage earners deserve is they deserve a raise, they deserve the dignity of having the ability to stay even with the increasing costs in our economy; to be able to provide for their family; hopefully maybe even to reach out and provide health care, which is unreachable to most of these individuals. But what happens? The employers in this country simply choose not to pay that wage. Quite legitimately, there are some owners that may not be able to, but there is no distinction in this provision. You simply choose not to pay it and the Government comes in and picks up your costs. There is a lot of people in the same business side-by-side in the same towns, we know them all, people pay more than the minimum wage and other people choose not to. People offer health care in the same business, the other person chooses not to. Do not offer health care, the Government will pick up the cost. Do not offer a pension, the Government will pick up the cost. Now do not offer a minimum wage, the Government will pick up the cost. This is starting to sound like corporate welfare. This is starting to sound like people who decide they are simply not going to meet their obligations to their fellow human beings in terms of their work, their labor, and their efforts on their behalf. This is the suggestion that the corporate body, the working party, is only because of the owner of that capital, or somehow that they are the only people that contributed as opposed to the employees who work every day for these individuals.

Mr. MILLER of California. What we need is we need an up or down vote on the minimum wage. We now have a majority in this House asking for that up or down vote. We have a majority in the Senate asking for that up or down vote, and what they ought to stop doing is throwing all of these things to try to throw people off the track and suggest that somehow they are there for low income working people in this country, because the fact of the matter is they are not there for low income working people in this country. These people are going to work every day, and when they get done at the end of the year after working every day, they end up poor and they cannot provide for themselves or for others, and that simply is unacceptable in this country. The country recognizes it is unacceptable. Apparently only the leadership in the House of Representatives and the Republican Party fails to recognize the need to do this and the need to do it now and to do it in a clean fashion.

Mr. MILLER of California. It is the time of the gentlewoman from Connecticut. I want to thank the gentlewoman for raising this issue and taking this time so that we could discuss this issue.

Mr. MILLER of California. What we have seen is time and again, time and again, that as this issue has been discussed, they have tried to avoid it. Now, because a few Republicans have broken ranks, a few Republicans have even suggested they would be prepared to sign a discharge petition, as necessary, because apparently what we will not get is we will not get a clean vote on this matter. They will try to trick up the bill in the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities or trick it up with an amendment on the floor or in the Committee on Rules. We have watched this process now time and again for the last 16 months in the House of Representatives. What the committees do does not matter, so, then, they go to Rules and they trick it up there. The fact of the matter is this, what a majority of this House of Representatives has now asked for is a vote on the minimum wage, to raise it either 90 cents or to raise it a dollar. And what we now are starting to see are a whole series of proposals suggesting what they could do to load down that legislation so that either people who would support the minimum wage will not be able to get a vote. One of the things that angers the public the most is the notion of riders, is the notion of taking subject matter A and attaching subject matter B to it. When President Reagan stood here and said never again would he sign a continuing resolution with all of these riders on it, he was cheered across the Nation. So what do we see now? We see the same old parliamentary tricks that are going to be used to try to keep this House away from a direct up or down vote on raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage, I think the gentlewoman said, I do not know, that it is the lowest now that it has been in?