George Miller

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fitzpatrick) for his comments and for his support of this legislation. I had a couple more speakers who were supposedly coming to the floor, but at this time, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim the balance of my time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I would say that I spoke to you this morning, and we will obviously continue to work with you. We have tried to draw the line at serious felony violent crimes that people have participated in with respect to the ban. In terms of drug arrests or whatever, there is a 5-year window that we have started, and we will be glad to continue that conversation.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. If the gentleman will continue to yield, that is why an appeals process is included in this legislation.

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

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to a dear friend who spent his life trying to educate people about America's role in the world in an effort to make that world a better place. Saul Landau passed away last month at the age of 77 after battling cancer for almost 2 years. Saul was not only a very close friend of mine and my wife Cynthia's. He was a constant mentor, educator, and agitator. He was one of the smartest and hardest working people I have had the pleasure of knowing, and he was one of the funniest. Saul will be remembered as an award winning documentary filmmaker, an author, an investigator and a columnist. Upon his death, his friends and colleagues and family were treated to a collection of obituaries across the country that paid tribute to his exhaustive body of work, his infectious personality, and his deep caring and passion for his country and the world around it. I am including here for my colleagues' benefit just two of those remarkable pieces so that others may benefit from reading about this one man's extraordinary life. To Saul's family, I extend my sincere condolences for their loss. But I offer to them as well a deep appreciation from the halls of Congress of the work and thought that Saul Landau contributed to our public debate. One of the obituaries carries this quote from Saul. ``You want to do what you can while you're on this earth.'' Saul should rest easy knowing that he did that and more. I will miss my friend. Following are obituaries that appeared in the New York Times on September 11, 2013 and in the Los Angeles Times on September 13, 2013. [From the New York Times, Sept. 11, 2013] Saul Landau, Maker of Films With Leftist Edge, Dies at 77 (By Douglas Martin) Saul Landau, a determinedly leftist documentary filmmaker and writer whose passion for asking what he called ``the most intrusive questions'' yielded penetrating cinematic profiles of leaders like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende, died on Monday at his home in Alameda, Calif. He was 77. The cause was bladder cancer, his daughter Julia Landau said. Mr. Landau aspired to marshal art and literature to illuminate social and political problems, and his point of view was almost always apparent. In the 1980s, he wrote essays berating the administration of Ronald Reagan for trying to depose the leftist government in Nicaragua, and recently he urged the United States not to become involved in Syria. He said he saw no difference between documentary and fictional films. In both, he said, a director manipulates light and sound to put across a vision. ``One has to simulate reality,'' he said in 2005 in an interview with The Capital Times in Madison, Wis. ``The other one says, `Here's reality,' whether it is or isn't.'' Mr. Landau emerged from the roiling New Left politics of the 1960s to make more than 40 documentaries, including six about Mr. Castro. One of them, ``Fidel,'' released in 1969, was a rare intimate look at the Cuban leader. It shows him arguing with a finger-wagging peasant woman, visiting his nursery school and playing baseball and striking out. ``I found Fidel a sympathetic figure and a hell of a good actor,'' Mr. Landau told The Washington Post in 1982. His most acclaimed film was ``Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,'' which he directed with Jack Willis in 1980. With cinematography by Haskell Wexler, the documentary, broadcast on PBS, told of the cover-up of health hazards from a 1957 nuclear-bomb test in Utah. The film won an Emmy Award and a George Polk Award. The title referred to Mr. Landau's friend Paul Jacobs, a journalist who died of cancer--believed to have been caused by radiation exposure--before the film was completed. Other films by Mr. Landau portray poverty in big-city slums, the destruction of indigenous Mexican culture, the inner workings of the C.I.A., torture in Brazil and life inside a San Francisco jail. Most have a leftist political edge that some saw as propagandistic, but Mr. Landau characterized the films as educational. ``All my films try to teach people without preaching too hard,'' he said. ``I try not to be too tendentious.'' Mr. Landau released two films relating to Mr. Allende, the Chilean who had become Latin America's first democratically elected socialist president the year before. One was an interview with Mr. Allende. The other film, ``Que Hacer!'' (1970)--the title is a translation of the title of Lenin's book ``What Is to Be Done?''--is a fictional movie, a playful spy story with music concerning a C.I.A. case officer in Chile. There are two casts: a Chilean one directed by Raul Ruiz and an American one directed by Mr. Landau and Nina Serrano, his wife at the time. Country Joe McDonald performed and produced the music. The film won awards at film festivals in Cannes, Venice and Mannheim, Germany. Orlando Letelier, Chile's ambassador to the United States, invited Mr. Landau to screen it at the Chilean Embassy in Washington, and they became friends. A few years later, Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government and imprisoned Mr. Letelier. Mr. Landau worked with other international supporters to win Mr. Letelier's release and to arrange a job for him at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing research organization in Washington Mr. Landau had joined in 1972. In 1976, Pinochet agents used a car bomb to kill Mr. Letelier and another institute worker. In 1980, Mr. Landau and John Dinges published a book about the case, ``Assassination on Embassy Row,'' documenting the Pinochet government's ties to the killings. Mr. Landau was at least as prolific a writer as he was a filmmaker. He wrote 14 books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and reviews. Saul Irwin Landau was born on Jan. 15, 1936, a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and grew up playing stickball in the streets. His father was a pharmacist who had fled pogroms in Ukraine to come to New York in 1920. His mother was a teacher. As a youth, Mr. Landau once abandoned school to hitchhike across America. When he returned, his mother urged him to take the test for the academically elite Stuyvesant High School. He passed, and went on to perform brilliantly there. The summer after he graduated, he met Ms. Serrano at a camp in the Catskills, where he was the fry cook and she the drama teacher. Ms. Serrano, who became a published poet, encouraged his interest in leftist politics and a bohemian lifestyle, according to their daughter Valerie Landau. Ms. Serrano also accompanied Mr. Landau when he went to the University of Wisconsin. When a dean found out that they were living together, he threatened to expel Mr. Landau (Ms. Serrano was not a student then) if they did not marry. They did. At Wisconsin, Mr. Landau got involved in a so-called Joe Must Go club, which advocated the recall of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin over his demagogic attacks on people he accused of being Communists. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in history at Wisconsin, Mr. Landau became a researcher for C. Wright Mills, the sociologist, traveling with him to Western Europe, the Soviet Union and Cuba. Moving to Northern California with Ms. Serrano, he worked toward a doctorate at Stanford but did not complete the studies. In San Francisco, they gravitated to the Beat poets and the emerging New Left movement. Mr. Landau joined Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize the leftist magazines Ramparts and Mother Jones. He also joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for which he wrote, with R.G. Davis, a parody of a minstrel show, ``A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.'' Performers in the show, which satirized racial perceptions, appeared in blackface. The show traveled to New York and elsewhere. ``Through the entire evening there is really nothing to laugh at, no matter how funny it is,'' Richard F. Shepard wrote in The New York Times. ``There is the ominous theme of what hypocrisy and oppression breed.'' In 1966 Mr. Landau got a job as a reporter at KQED-TV, San Francisco's public television station, and a year later went to Cuba to make a news documentary. Mr. Castro liked it, and invited Mr. Landau to return to do an in-depth documentary about him. Mr. Landau's marriage to Ms. Serrano ended in divorce. Besides his daughters Valerie and Julia, he is survived by a son, Greg, and two other daughters, Carmen and Marie; his second wife, Rebecca Switzer; a sister, Beryl Landau; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. ``You want to do what you can while you're on this earth,'' Mr. Landau said in 2006. ``Otherwise the alternative is to go shopping.'' This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: September 17, 2013 An obituary on Thursday about the documentary filmmaker Saul Landau omitted a survivor. Besides his wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Mr. Landau is survived by a sister, Beryl Landau. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: September 19, 2013 An obituary on Sept. 12 about the documentary filmmaker Saul Landau omitted a writing credit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe production ``A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.'' It was written by Mr. Landau and R. G. Davis, not solely by Mr. Landau.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, this is now the second week of the Republican shutdown of our government--shut down because they want to put insurance companies back in charge of America's health care. Republicans in the House think they can get out of this horrible mess they created by partially opening one part of the government or another. Today, it's Head Start--a program I strongly support and one that used to be supported on a bipartisan basis to provide education, health and nutrition services to at-risk children. When Republicans voted to shut down the government, they closed the doors on thousands of these children and their families. After several bad news articles about the Republicans shutting down Head Start, they now want to partially open it. Keep in mind, restoring funding to Head Start only serves a small percentage of at-risk children who need preschool and are eligible for it. It is not enough to restore one set of early-learning services for at-risk children but to not fund the Child Care and Development Block Grant, special education services, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provides early childhood services for children from low-income families as well. If the Republicans are serious about supporting early childhood education, we should vote on the clean, Senate-passed budget to reopen the government so that services for those kids and their families can be fully restored.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. We should have that vote today. It's time to stop the Republican shutdown. I call on the Speaker to let us vote. Let us vote. Let us vote on a bill to open the whole government. As of today, enough Republicans have publicly stated that they're ready to join all of the Democrats to vote to open the government. Republicans should allow the House to vote on the Senate bill--a bill that was negotiated by the Speaker of the House, Mr. Boehner, and the leader of the Senate, Mr. Reid, but was rejected by the Republican caucus. Bring that bill to the floor. Let us vote, and let these children get these services.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, this last week must have been quite a civics lesson for the members of the Tea Party who thought that they could shut down the government-- and, in fact, shut down the government--and nobody would miss it. But soon they discovered that there were serious problems with that. Now we see one bill after another: to restore the NIH because they found they stranded cancer patients and other people in need of their health; to restore the WIC program because they found out that the newest born infants in this country would be without nutrition, the veterans programs because they found out our veterans would be stranded, the assistance to go to school would be cut off. Our national parks, they never thought those communities would be impacted by the national parks. They didn't care about that. They shut them down. But they were here asking for relief. They found they needed the weather service as the hurricane was approaching our Gulf States. They needed FEMA. They needed someone to organize the evacuation routes in case it became a full-blown hurricane. The CIA, they discovered they laid off 70 percent of the assets within the CIA. This goes on and on and on and on. Welcome to America, a big, diverse Nation where we all need one another at one time or another.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I thank the gentleman. Madam Speaker, Congress should reopen the Federal Government in its entirety and not continue to hold the Federal Government and the American people hostage. The fact is, by closing the Federal Government, Republicans in the House are jeopardizing critical services for mothers and their children. They should have realized this when they shut down the entire Federal Government. It is not enough just to restore one set of services for women, infants, and children, like the WIC program, but not to fund food stamps or income assistance or housing vouchers, for example, which the same mothers and children rely on to hold their families together. This is literally taking food out of the mouths of children. Republicans are taking a lot of heat for closing down the government, so they want to open up one part or another to relieve the pressure under them. But this doesn't help these families. This doesn't help these families because they're cutting other resources and services to these families. Republicans should allow the House to vote on a bill to open up the whole Federal Government, and then we can sit down and talk about what the budget will look like for the rest of the year. They should stop trying to kill the new health care law that will help some of these very same families that depend upon WIC. And they should stop picking winners and losers based upon the political realities out there that the American public is getting angrier and angrier at how they're treating the recipients of Federal assistance in this country today. I urge people to vote against this legislation.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, the House floor is starting to feel like a new episode of ``The Hunger Games.'' Every day, the Republican leadership tries to find a new way to pit one desperate group of Americans against another. Today, because of the shutdown, Republicans are pitting kids with cancer against kids who are hungry. This bill is designed to release funds for the NIH today so that they can reduce funding for programs for kids, programs that keep children with the nutrition that they need. For a little bit longer, they can go hungry while we take care of the kids with cancer. I don't buy their newfound concern about NIH funding, and the American people aren't buying it either. What did they think was going to happen when they shut down the NIH? Did they have any working knowledge of what takes place at the NIH? The gentleman from Arkansas has just related the integral nature of the NIH to universities and research facilities all across this country, and yet they thought it was free to shut down the NIH? Now they've discovered that hundreds of children are receiving treatment at the NIH for cancer, and now they think the NIH ought to be open, but they're not sure that the Head Start reductions ought to be brought back? This means kids can't get their meals during the day--some 85,000 kids in Arkansas--and they'll go without nutritional assistance because of this shutdown. What about those? Are they next in the barrel here? Will you come and rescue them? Will you come and rescue the Head Start children who are losing the opportunities to go to school? What about the active servicemembers who are now facing 4-day school weeks in their classrooms? What about the elimination of important summer programs because of the shutdown? When are you going to take care of the military service's children? What is this going on here? Every day, we pit one unfortunate victim of this shutdown against another helpless victim of this shutdown, and they think that they can cure it one bill at a time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. There are millions of people all across the country and millions of businesses and millions of unfortunate people who have nowhere else to go to get help because of diseases, because of the threats to their lives. I thank the gentlewoman for bringing this opposition to the resolution to the floor. I would hope that all Members of Congress would just do what they can do, which is, in the next couple of hours, simply have a clean CR to open up the government. Let the people get the services that they need, and let the public servants who provide them those services go back to work in the name of country.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, the chairman of the committee says that we should think of the impact before we act; that we should think of the impact on the parks before we vote against this bill. Did you think about the parks when you voted to shut down the government? Did you think about the impacts? The gentleman from Montana yesterday came to the floor and said it's hurting the local economy. The gentleman from California came and said it's hurting the towns around Yosemite. Was he thinking about that when he voted originally to shut down the government? He was prepared to sacrifice the local economy. He was prepared to sacrifice the towns around Yosemite when he was on the jihad against American citizens getting access to health care. He was fully prepared to sacrifice the parks and the economy and fire recovery. But you know what you found out in the last 24 hours? That millions of Americans went to find health care, to sign up for health care, to get access to health care. And millions of Americans decided that you're doing the wrong thing in shutting down their government. So when you were on the jihad against Americans' access to health care, shutting down the parks wasn't a problem. Shutting down NIH wasn't a problem.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I was telling them, Mr. Speaker, that they thought it was okay to shut down----

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. * * *

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize and thank Edmund L. Regalia for his many years of service as Founding Director of the Kennedy-King Memorial Scholarship Fund. Established in 1968 in memory of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy the Kennedy-King Memorial Scholarship Fund provides financial aid to graduating community college students from minority groups under-represented at California's four-year colleges and universities. Many award winning students have excelled academically but are faced with financial hardships. Since its creation forty-five years ago, the Kennedy-King Memorial Scholarship Fund has raised well over $3.5 million to help send more than 600 community college students from Contra Costa to four-year universities. None of this would be possible without Ed Regalia's dynamic leadership in the community and his unwavering commitment to students. Recently Ed was named a ``Hometown Hero'' by our own Bay Area News Group-East Bay in partnership with Comcast Corporation specifically recognizing his work with Kennedy-King Memorial Scholarship Fund. For those of us who have known and worked with Ed these many years, the term Hometown Hero is certainly fitting. He and his wife, Gwen, have made a decided difference not only in the lives of the deserving students but through their community service and philanthropic work. Truly, they have touched the lives of all of us in Contra Costa County. Please join me in congratulating Ed and Gwen Regalia for their dedication to our students and our community, and I commend my colleagues to read the following article recognizing their work: [From the Contra Costa Times, Sept. 3, 2013] Hometown Hero: Walnut Creek Attorney's 40 years of Handing Out Minority College Scholarships (By Matthias Gafni) Shortly after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 and months after Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, a young Ed Regalia met with his Democratic Club in a friend's Walnut Creek backyard. The idealistic young attorney, along with wife Gwen and others, thought of how they could honor the two men's contributions to society. They decided to create a scholarship fund for low-income, minority students in Contra Costa County. They consulted a black professor at Diablo Valley College, Regalia said. ``He set up a program that he recommended, and we followed his rules,'' Regalia said in a recent interview from his Walnut Creek home. More than four decades later, the Kennedy-King Memorial College Scholarship Fund has helped send more than 600 Contra Costa community college students to four-year universities, raising more than $3.5 million. ``We're very grateful,'' said Regalia, now 82, retired and recovering from a stroke five years ago. The well-known attorney, whose wife served as Walnut Creek's mayor for many years, still sits on the fund's board. His work with minority students began even earlier, when he was a 16-year-old El Cerrito High student leading the Del Mar Hi-Y club. A district official wrote a letter to the teenage Regalia in 1948 about a recital, saying, ``The spirit of your organization in being willing to agree to sponsor a colored boy before the public was, to me, far more important.'' It was a year after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball, his wife pointed out. Regalia was born in El Cerrito; his father laid bricks for a living. Regalia attended nearby UC Berkeley while earning a scholarship from the Navy. He served three years during the latter part of the Korean War, leaving the military as a lieutenant before returning to Cal and graduating from Boalt Law School. By 1964, Regalia joined Boalt classmates Harry Miller and Marvin Starr to form the Miller Starr Regalia law firm. Dealing almost exclusively in civil litigation, Regalia led the firm in real estate and business issues, representing title companies, banks, savings and loans, and other companies. The father of four was involved in many major cases, litigating once for a woman whose house was damaged from a landslide. That case wound its way to the state Supreme Court and led to requirements to provide disclosures for homebuyers. His work with the scholarship fund raised some eyebrows, with most thinking it would quickly fizzle out. At the inaugural dinner, held June 14, 1969, in Concord, Regalia's group awarded $2,000 scholarships each to the first two recipients. The organization spent months personally collecting pledges from various politicians and Contra Costa movers and shakers. U.S. Rep. George Miller's father, then a state senator, pulled a $100 bill from his money clip when the couple approached him, Gwen Regalia said. The younger George Miller continues to raise $8,000 each year to fund a scholarship, she added. The fund has always reached across the political aisle. At the first dinner, the speakers included former Democratic U.S. Reps. Pete Stark and Jerome Waldie, and Republican State Sen. John Nejedly. Over the years, more and more of the fundraising came from corporations, enabling more students to get help. The fund requires low-income minority students to have spent two years at one of Contra Costa's three community colleges, and the scholarships help pay for their junior and senior years at four-year universities. Graduate school scholarships also are available. Alameda County deputy district attorney Mark Jackson, who is black, received an undergraduate scholarship in 1988 as a Contra Costa College undergraduate, and it allowed him to finish his degree at San Francisco State. He won the scholarship again in 1991 as he tackled his law degree at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. As a college student, Jackson struggled to earn enough money to attend college. ``The scholarship was very helpful in enabling me, in conjunction with working two jobs and with my family's help, in graduating college without any student loan debt,'' Jackson said. ``These students need every dollar they can get from this program.'' Jackson, now 45, has since served on the scholarship's board and started a pre-law program at Contra Costa College. ``Whenever they finished and got a job, they were expected to devote their time in the community,'' said Gwen Regalia, who has served on the scholarship fund board, as well as 21 years on the Walnut Creek City Council and nine years on the Walnut Creek school district board. In May, Ed Regalia's organization awarded scholarships to another 20 students who will attend undergraduate and graduate schools, including San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Mills College, University of Alaska, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal State East Bay, Holy Names University and Samuel Merritt University.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the majority and the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for bringing this legislation to the floor. This is bipartisan legislation which promotes initiative, achievement, and excellence among young people. The Congressional Award Act empowers young people to take greater responsibility for their own lives, to discover new talents, to advocate on behalf of others, and to take positive action in the community. The Congressional Award Program has helped thousands of young people, including some of the most disadvantaged youth, find ways to get involved in public service. It shows young Americans how to set goals and to achieve them. Through this program, these young people gain self-confidence, problem-solving skills, and the ability to work as part of a team, traits that are valued by employers and institutions of higher education. Since its inception in 1979, this program has grown substantially. Today, total participation in the Congressional Award Program exceeds 35,000 participants. In my home State of California, 6,491 participants have enrolled since 1979, completing over 450,000 hours of community service. As a nonprofit organization that operates almost exclusively through private donations, the Congressional Award Act is an excellent example of successful public-private partnerships, and I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. Again, I thank the committee for bringing it to the floor. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, House Republicans are doubling down on a bad idea. These food stamp cuts will not only increase the incidence of hunger but result in a loss of thousands of jobs throughout the food industry alone. Because when poor families, children, the disabled, and the elderly can't afford food, they simply must go without. That's not economic stimulus--it's a national outrage. It's outrageous that 26 anonymous individuals received over $1 million each in farm subsidies, but $1.40 per meal for a hungry child is considered government waste. It's outrageous that some Members of Congress are voting to enrich themselves and wealthy special interests with farm subsidies while refusing benefits to millions of the neediest and most vulnerable Americans. I issued a report earlier this year that detailed 14 Members of Congress who are collectively worth up to $124 million, received at least $7.2 million in farm subsidies, and yet voted to cut the nutrition allowance for 47 million working poor families and children. Imagine that. In honor of the Chair, let me just say, ``And that's just the way it is.''

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for yielding the time, and I want to thank him for devoting his entire political career to the idea of eradicating hunger in American society and around the world, an outstanding record of achievement, an outstanding record of compassion. And then today, it runs into the Republican reality. I know how you must feel, Mr. McGovern, after all these years of work, to see them cavalierly suggest that they can cut $40 billion in nutrition benefits to families, to children, to working people, to people searching for work, and that somehow nobody will lose their benefits, that somehow they're not throwing anybody off of the program. It's not that we said, you are throwing people off the program. It's that the Congressional Budget Office said that with the $40 billion cut, some 3.8 million people would lose their benefits and an average of nearly 3 million people each year over the coming decade. Over the coming decade, those people will lose their benefits. What does that mean? I specialize in education. I visit schools almost every week. I talk to teachers every day that tell me about the fact that when children come there that they are nutritionally deprived, that they may not have had dinner, that they may not have had breakfast, that they are not attentive in class, that they fall asleep in class, that they're irritable. And we're going to cut the benefits to these children. And yet we want these children to perform at a high level. And they should be able to perform at a high level. We expect them to achieve in school. But that's not what this program is about. This program is about cutting those benefits to those children in need. It's about cutting those benefits to those families in need. It's just unconscionable that they would think that somehow this is the road to prosperity, that you get to the road to prosperity by attacking the most vulnerable in our society who are in desperate need of these nutritional benefits for their families. Do they not know that one in five children lives in a home that experiences hunger on a regular basis?

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Do they not know this? Are they not aware of it? Or do they not care? Somebody has to answer that question. Because when this Nation was shocked that they were going to cut $20 billion out of these nutritional benefits for these struggling families and individuals, they came back and said, No, we're going to cut $40 billion out of these benefits. What, because they're angry that the last measure didn't succeed? They're angry about what happened to the Agriculture bill? Is it because of anger that they're striking out at these families?

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. It shouldn't be that way in this country, and it shouldn't be that way in this Congress. These families are entitled to better. They are entitled to jobs. They are entitled to provide for their families, but some can't. Those wonderful 60 months stripped trillions of dollars away from these families and middle class families in this country.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, on September 9th, I was unavoidably detained and missed Roll Nos. 448 and 449. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on both Roll No. 448 and Roll No. 449.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 256. This legislation includes provisions adjusting the minimum wage schedule for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands in a way that I think is appropriate and fair for both workers and businesses there. Current law requires CNMI to increase its minimum wage 50 cents a year until it reaches the Mainland's federal minimum wage level of $7.25. Current law also requires the GAO to regularly report to Congress on economic conditions in Commonwealth over the course of these minimum wage adjustments. These GAO reports are intended to give the public information so that, based on sound economic analysis, Congress can adjust the minimum wage schedule for the territories if warranted. The next GAO report is due in April of 2014. Since 2007 the Commonwealth's minimum wage has increased from $3.05 an hour to $5.55 an hour, an 82% increase in the past 5 years. This has brought new purchasing power and a higher standard of living for many workers than they could have negotiated on their own. This bill would skip an increase in the minimum wage in CNMI for 2013 and 2015, while still requiring increases in 2014, 2016 and subsequent years. This approach was recommended by the Saipan Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber stated in a May 8th letter that given the fragile economy in CNMI ``spreading the wage jumps over a two-year period seems prudent.'' This legislation is also recommended by Congressman Sablan, a tireless advocate for workers and for improving the Commonwealth's economy. Because CNMI's wages had been depressed for so long, it is a long march of nearly a decade to more than double their minimum wage. In a territory like CNMI, we have recognized that we would need to be flexible with the wage rate schedule over that time frame, as conditions warranted. Today's bill reflects that need for flexibility. It allows us to review the next GAO economic analysis for CNMI before another wage increase takes effect. Because of CNMI's unique economic circumstances and relatively undiversified economy, it is appropriate for Congress to adjust the minimum wage schedule in response to changing economic conditions, while keeping our long-term commitment to reaching parity with the federal minimum wage. I urge my colleagues to support S. 256.