Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, it is with great pride that I rise today in honor of Heritage Village in Southbury, Connecticut. Heritage Village, the largest and oldest condominium complex in the Northeast, is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary. For 40 years, Heritage Village has stood as a model community for mature living. Heritage Village is home to 4,000 residents covering 1,000 acres in scenic Southbury. More than just a housing complex, Heritage Village combines residential services with a diverse range of activities to create an active and wonderfully vibrant community. The success and longevity of Heritage Village is a testament to the strength of such a tight-knit and active environment. From day one, Heritage Village was planned as much more than just a place to live--it was designed as a place where activity and opportunity would be encouraged and where neighbors caring for each other would define its legacy. That mindset, situated in one of the most beautiful settings in Connecticut, has allowed Heritage Village to thrive and grow. For 40 years, Heritage Village has been a shining example of community living, and I know it will continue in that tradition for years to come. I am therefore extremely proud to come before my colleagues in this House to recognize Heritage Village, its administrators, residents, and staff for their contribution to Southbury and to the State of Connecticut.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Chairman, I thank my friend for his great work on this issue. I think it is important to address the concept presented by our friends on the other side of the aisle that the folks who are the recipients of these vouchers are victims. Well, they might be victims, but they are victims of an economy which says to far too many people out in this world that if you play by the rules, if you do everything we ask of you, if you go out and get a job, a full-time regular job, that you are still going to be living in poverty, that you are still going to need a little help to be able to survive in this world. In a high-cost-of-living State and a high-cost-of-housing State like Connecticut, 5,000 vouchers does not do it for the working poor there. We have people in our neck of the woods that are paying 60, 70, 80 percent of their income, hard-earned income on rent. We are a part of the world that desperately needs more section 8 housing vouchers to help the working poor, the people who are doing everything this society asks them to do. But because we live in an economy where wages are stagnant and the cost of living continues to rise, a program like this is a very valuable and needed helping hand.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. For all that we disagree on here today, we agree on one thing: We all want a stable, independent Iraq. What I can't understand is how anyone can still believe that our continued, open-ended military intervention there will lead to a stable nation. In fact, it's doing the opposite. The Iraqi Parliament and ministries are in unprecedented disarray. The President's own report to Congress will say that we haven't met any of our political benchmarks there, and an estimated 13,000 Iraqis are dead since the escalation began. The fact is, as someone much wiser than I said, the Iraqis today are paying wholesale rather than retail for their political decisions. So long as we are the military bodyguard for every major Iraqi political group, so long as we are subsidizing the political decisions of Iraqi political leaders, they will never make the difficult political concessions necessary to create a stable society there. I support this bill, Mr. Speaker, because not another American soldier should die for a strategy that is unfathomably making Iraq less safe and less stable.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I guess I wonder whether the water is different in the Republican cloakroom down here than it is in the Senate cloakroom, because what we've seen in the last couple of weeks, and I've got a list here of all of the people who have changed their opinion on the war in the last several weeks and all the quotes from Republicans in the United States Capitol regarding their new opinion of this war, which is that we should set a date for withdrawal, and it is Senate Republican after Senate Republican after Senate Republican after Senate Republican, Dick Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Domenici, Lamar Alexander, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins. What's missing from that list, for some reason, are members of the Republican minority here in the House. This is the body that's supposed to actually be more responsive to the American people, not less responsive. So I haven't been here long enough to understand what the difference is, but some Republicans are waking up to the notion that it's time for a change. It just hasn't happened here yet.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. To go deeper than that, let's explain exactly what the deal is. Let's delve one layer deeper into this, explain exactly what the deal is for banks here. We already guarantee all of these loans for the banks. That's a great deal. You tell me that I'm going to lend money to somebody and if they don't pay it back, somebody else is going to pay me back? Well, guess what, I'll probably make that loan. But then what we did on top of it, on top of it was we gave them a cut of the loan, too. You know what we figured out? They're still going to make the loans even if you don't give them a cut of the loan. They're guaranteed loans. They're essentially guaranteed loans. That's just commonsense. And so as Mr. Ryan said, this becomes sort of a socialist welfare program for just a different set of people, people that are doing pretty well already. So, to me, this is just commonsense. So to a lot of people it's commonsense. When we go back in our districts, we're hearing a lot of people talking about Iraq. People are behind the Democrats' plan to reorder our priorities there and start going after the real bad guys, but there are a lot of people struggling just with getting by every day and every week, and there are a lot of young parents who are raising young kids and looking at college costs, thinking to themselves how on earth am I going to do this. And to think that one of the things that stands in their way is a system now that subsidizes some pretty well-off banks, at the expense of those parents and their kids, is ludicrous. I mean, frankly, I could probably sit there, even coming from a pretty fiscally conservative State like Connecticut, I could probably sit here and justify bringing in new revenue somehow in order to increase money for student aid. I think I could sell people back in Connecticut, and say, listen, we've got to put a little more into the pot and we're going take care of students who need help, I mean truly meritorious students. We don't even have to do that here. We don't even have to make that argument. All we have to do is say listen, we've just got to shift moneys from the haves to the have-nots. That's the brilliance of this program.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. At some point, we've got to talk about what results we're getting for our money, and if you can turn around even a portion of the money that we're using over there to make this country less safe, turn it around and college age, children's health care, I mean meat and potatoes things that matter to middle-class families, those are the investments that I came to Congress to work on. Those are the investments that millions of Americans around this country sent a new class of Democrats here to work on, and if we can get some Republicans to stand up with us this week, as we have seen happening in the Senate over the last week and a half, we'll start to make good on those promises.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. The coalition of the willing is no more, Mr. Meek. What is left are the military family, and their friends and families have been asked to shoulder almost the entire burden of this war. When we talk about where we are going to spend the taxpayer dollars, you have to talk about what we are getting for that investment. You gave the statistics on the casualties since the beginning of the war, but it is even more terrifying when you talk about what has happened simply since the surge has begun: 593 soldiers have died since January 10; 3,500 have been wounded; 1,600 wounded so badly they cannot return to battle. We are talking about 13,000 Iraqi civilians and members of the military police who have been killed or wounded since the surge took place. So you have to ask what we are getting for this investment. It has gone from $8 billion a month to $10 billion a month since the surge has gone into effect. What we have gotten is an Iraqi political institution or Iraqi political infrastructure which is even less willing to take responsibility for its own actions, even less able to take control of their own country. It was reported in the Associated Press of the President's report on progress in Iraq that the Iraqi government has not ``met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform.'' Has not met any of the targets we have given them for economic, political reform. Parliament is going home for the summer. There is a parliament where the biggest Sunni group has pulled out. You have an inability for the Iraqis to deal with their own shop. As someone said, right now the Iraqis are paying wholesale for their politics because we are subsidizing every decision that is being made there. It is time they start paying retail for their political decisions, and that is only going to happen when they have a sense of when the crutch is going to be taken away from them. So, Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan, I think to myself when we talk about how we are going to spend money, whether we are going to spend $120 billion a year in Iraq or whether we are going to spend $40 or $50 billion on children's health care insurance, and I think, as Mr. Ryan said, that $120 billion investment is getting more and more Americans killed every day and is making this country less safe and less safe every day, and is making it less and less likely that the Iraqis will ever be able to take control of their country. That's a terrible investment. That's a bad investment. When I think about $50 billion in children's health care, by doing the right thing, the moral thing for kids, and at the same time, probably making our health care system more affordable and less costly in the end, because we're hooking kids up with preventative health care, that's a great investment. That's a worthwhile investment.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you. We know because we have talked to these families. When they are crying about their loved ones injured in the field of battle or, God forbid, have not come back, there is also a sense from military families that their despair is because they realize they are the only ones that are being asked to sacrifice for this war.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If the gentleman would yield, just to make one last point on this, and I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for coming down, before I came here, I was the chairman of the Public Health Committee in the Connecticut State Legislature. What we figured out over time, because we were a State that submitted waivers to the Federal Government to expand our children's healthcare program, so we actually ended up with one of the more generous SCHIP programs in the country. We had more kids as a percentage of children who were eligible for children's healthcare, sponsored and subsidized by the State and Federal Government, than most other States, and what we found was that was actually reducing the cost of healthcare over time. I got to listen to a little bit of the rhetoric on the other side of the aisle earlier, and they act as if we have existing today a fiscally responsible system of healthcare. We don't. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world. You may have covered this earlier before I got on to the floor. But we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world for outcomes that are lucky if they rival those of countries that spend 50 percent less on their healthcare, 16 percent of GDP in this country compared to 10 or 11 percent in other countries that insure everybody and get basically the same or better outcomes. So what we found in Connecticut was as we expanded the reach of our SCHIP program and got more kids eligible and enrolled, we were actually cutting the cost of care for those kids because, guess what? Preventative care, as I am sure has been said on the Floor, is much less expensive, much more fiscally responsible than crisis care, when these kids show up in the emergency room with much more complicating, debilitating illnesses that require much more expensive care. So, for my money, investing in children's healthcare insurance is the right thing for taxpayer dollars. We certainly know it is the humane thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, to insure children who have no healthcare through no fault of their own. But it is certainly the right thing to do if we are going to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. If I were sent here, as the folks on the other side of the aisle believe they have been, to be stewards of taxpayer dollars, I would be investing in preventative healthcare every single day I was here, and that is what the SCHIP program does.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If I was one of those high-priced political consultants and a prospective candidate came to me and said, listen, this is what I want to be for, this is what I want to be known for, I want to stand with the President every turn, make sure we stay in Iraq for as long as we can. I think I am also going to be against children's health care insurance. I am going to try to defend the status quo on our health care system. I think it's about right, I think we got it right. Also, I think I also want to be against affordable college. I think I also want to fight against increases in Pell Grants and Stafford loans and all the rest. If I was that political consultant I might sort of look at my watch, look at my date book, and, you know, take a pass on that one. You know why? It's not about Republicans or Democrats. It's what the American people are asking for; it's what the American people have been crying for. They want a new direction in Iraq. They want help with the cost of getting by every day, which certainly includes the cost of health care and college affordability. They want a place that is listening to them again instead of listening to the White House and the banks and everyone else that has had the run of this place for a while. It will be another good week here, and I hope sooner rather than later some of our friends across the aisle join us in standing up for what the American people have been crying for for a real long time.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Just a quick point. During the May break, I went back and spent most of the week visiting with manufacturers and businesses in northwestern Connecticut. I could imagine what I heard was the same thing from what anybody who makes that trip will hear. It's all about workforce, workforce, workforce, that our economic salvation as a region in the Northeast, but also as a country, is not going to necessarily be, in terms of how cheap we can turn out the rubber balls, it's going to be about the quality of our product, and the quality of our production capacity. That's all about training the new generation of workers. I mean, this money that we are talking about, it doesn't just go for students who are going to a 4-year Ivy League school. This is also money for kids that are going to community technology colleges that are being trained to be tool- and-die makers, that are being trained to be computer technicians at the shops and the manufacturing centers of the next decade and the decade beyond. If we are going to compete as a Nation, as you say, against China and everyone else who is undercutting us, it is going to be because we have the best trained and the most productive workforce in the country. That's what our manufacturers are screaming for, and that's what you address when you talk about putting money into higher education.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Chair, I move to strike the last word. Madam Chair, I was going to offer an amendment today, but would like, rather, to speak on the subject of the amendment. Madam Chair, I'd like to thank Chairman Dicks for all of his hard work on this bill. Last week, Madam Chair, I was joined by Representative Gerlach and Representative Pitts as we relaunched the Bipartisan Land Conservation Caucus. And as one of the new co-Chairs of that caucus, I'm thrilled that the Interior Department budget that Mr. Dicks and his subcommittee have put together includes a major new investment in open space preservation funding, and I applaud their work here. But protecting these spaces, once preserved, is a time-consuming, expensive, and often complex process. We're lucky in this country, especially in New England where I hail from, to have amazing partners in this process, which are local land trusts. These land trusts were started by community members who want to preserve and protect the regional character of their special part of the world. Since their creation, they've grown into full-fledged partners in the conservation effort. Many of these trusts across the country have expanded and now have up to 10 or 20 full-time staff members; however, many still remain very small volunteer organizations with no staff support. For example, of the 128 land trusts in Connecticut, 103 of them are comprised solely of volunteers, the largest number of volunteer trusts in the country. It's these small land trusts that do most of the on-the-ground work, saving historic sites and priceless vistas that are so important to our regional character in New England. However, in recent years the burden on these small land trusts has grown tremendously. In addition to their original task of seeking out lands to preserve, they are also now bound by IRS red tape and heavy enforcement duties. These land trusts are now responsible for ensuring that any conservation donation qualifies for the tax deduction offered by the IRS. These tax deductions have caused legions of landowners to choose to put valuable conservation easements on their land; however, a local volunteer land trust with no paid staffers cannot be expected to do the IRS's work for them to evaluate and sign off on every donation. In addition, these small land trusts are now required to enforce and patrol the easements that they already hold. As more and more land is put into easements, more and more burdens are put on local land trusts to make sure that these easements are enforced. In Connecticut, there are now over 24,000 acres of land with conservation easements, and more and more land is added every year. If the government is going to rely on these land trusts to do the administrative work associated with these easements for programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Forest Legacy, it makes sense that we should partner with them to help them with these administrative duties. I had planned on offering an amendment that would have allowed 1 percent of all land and water conservation funds appropriated by the Bureau of Land Management to be available to competitive grants to volunteer land trusts across this country. That money could be used in order to help them with some of the administrative costs that have been imposed.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Chair, reclaiming my time. I thank the chairman very much for his offer to help. This is a historic investment in this bill in open space preservation and land preservation funding. I thank the chairman and his committee for their commitment to this very important issue, and I look forward to working with him to make sure that we are doing all we can to help those land trusts make the best use of this new historic and incredibly important commitment to land preservation and open space preservation.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, first I would like to thank Chairman Visclosky for all his hard work on this bill. As a former appropriator in the Connecticut General Assembly, I know how hard this job is, and I am honored to stand next to him today. Mr. Chairman, my amendment at the desk will bar the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, from using funds to issue permits for projects that have not been the subject of a local public hearing. This amendment is based on a simple premise. Public policymakers cannot and should not act without the input of citizens who will be affected by the decisions that they make. As legislators, we know that we can't sample public opinion by just sitting here in Washington. We need to go back to our districts and solicit opinion, whether it be in public forums, town fairs, or even at the supermarket or the post office. A regulatory agency should be held to the same standard. This amendment does nothing to alter or constrain the final decisionmaking authority of FERC. It just assures that the commission hears all sides before making any determination on land-use issues. Though this amendment would help many communities where FERC has refused to hold a public hearing in an affected locality, and I know Mr. Arcuri from New York, who may not be able to join us, holds this concern as well, I come to this issue with my concern through my constituents who live surrounding the Candlewood Lake area in Connecticut, the largest inland body of water in the State. My constituents there have been unable to secure a public hearing from FERC to air their concerns regarding a shoreline management plan proposed by the utility that owns the lake. This shoreline management plan will change how they enjoy the land surrounding their homes and the price they will pay for the privilege of living on the lake. Local feelings on the appropriateness of the plan are mixed. However, whatever residents may think, what is clear is that they should have the opportunity to directly make their case to FERC. FERC has continued to deny requests, both from my office and from constituents to hold a local hearing, and this is unacceptable, I think, to every Member of Congress. I understand the Appropriations Committee, as well as the Energy and Commerce Committee, may like some more time to look into this issue. Mr. Chairman, if the chairman of the subcommittee would be willing to work with me on this issue, I would be honored to yield to him at this point.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, with the subcommittee chairman's concern on this issue, at this time I would ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Now, Mr. Speaker, here is what we are doing. You mentioned that we have a balanced budget, in 5 years we are going to balance this budget. But on top of that, we are starting to fix some of the biggest messes they left this Democratic Congress. Take for example the Alternative Minimum Tax. Now, not a lot of people know what this thing is. You know it if you are paying it, and you are going to start paying it year after year. More people will start paying more and more. This is the biggest middle-class tax increase potentially in the history of this country, imposed by a Republican Congress. And, guess what? We are going to fix it. We are going to take it on. For the first time, legislation that comes before this House actually has to be paid for as we go along; the pay-as-you-go rule. Every spending increase that this Congress proposed has to be accompanied by either a revenue offset or a spending offset. That's real fiscal responsibility; rules passed by the Democratic majority here that are going to finally impose some fiscal discipline on this place. So the Republicans and the minority can say over and over again whatever they want. They can hope that if they say it often enough that they will believe it and maybe a few people out there will believe it. But what is going to happen here over the next few months is results, Mr. Ryan. It is going to be rhetoric matched with results: Fixing the AMT, balancing the Federal budget over 5 years, making sure that every bill that comes before this House is paid for as we go along, record increases for veterans programs, for education programs, for the things that people want to have funded in their communities. There are finally going to be some words that are matched with actions here. As much as the other side of the aisle may try to make this disappear, they are going to find an American people that isn't as gullible as they used to think they were.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan. I think what happened here over the last 12 years, and I was watching it all from the outside, is that the Republicans, for a very long time, vastly overestimated the gullibility of the American people. They thought they could stand up here and say over and over again that the Republicans are being fiscally responsible, and that the American people wouldn't notice that they were racking up record amounts of debt, $3 trillion, up to $9 trillion now is the amount of Federal debt that this government has racked up. The fact that they wouldn't notice that every single dime for this war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been borrowed money. I think you give them too much credit, Mr. Ryan. You said they were spending like a bunch of drunken sailors. Well, drunken sailors spend their own money at least, they probably don't spend it very wisely, but their own money. These are like a bunch of thieving drunken sailors. They were spending other people's money, my money, my parents' money, my neighbor's money, all the while kind of pretending that we weren't ever going to have to pay it back. So what we've seen here tonight and what we've seen over the last few days is a Republican minority now that continues to vastly overestimate the gullibility of the American people. They think they can stand here, try to make disappear everything that happened over the last 12 years, and that once again they can stand here and talk about being fiscally responsible, while the very mess that we're here cleaning up is all theirs in the making.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I think it was a pretty simple formula. It was that we were going to squeeze and squeeze the people who have the least in this society, and that is the hospitals that care for the sick and the uninsured, it is the families that have the courage to send their loved ones off to war, it is middle-class families who can't afford to pay another dime. Those are the people that are going to get soaked in order to fund these giant tax cuts for the people.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Even when they did spend money, they spent it in such a ludicrous way as to waste the taxpayers' money on essential programs like the prescription drug benefit. Even when they chose to roll out a brand new and expensive new domestic program, they overspent to the tune of potentially $50 billion a year by cutting a deal with the drug companies so as to prohibit the Federal Government from using its bulk purchasing power.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Ryan, one of the most perplexing bars on that graph is the amount of money that we have borrowed from OPEC nations. You want to talk about why we can't stand across the table from the countries that are pillaging American consumers with these ridiculously, monstrously high gas prices? Guess what? We can't sit across and be an honest broker from them because they hold the mortgage to this country. The same can be said of the Chinese and the same can be said of European nations. We have lost so much of our ability to sit and be an honest broker in negotiations over energy policy and foreign policy, because they own our currency. They hold all of our debt. So beyond how terrible this is for the American taxpayers, it is also terrible for the American foreign relations. It has to stop.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, let me tell you what happened in my district, because it happened in 40 other districts around the country last fall. All the people who are fiscal conservatives, people who were concerned about fiscal responsibility frankly probably voted Republican for a long time because they did believe that the words were backed up by the actions, finally saw through all that rhetoric. And all those true fiscal conservatives came out and voted Democrat. My district hadn't been Democrat for 24 years. And, guess what? It wasn't just the social progressives and the anti-war activists who came out and said we want change. It was the fiscal conservatives, the people who were concerned about the absolute and utter incompetency in this Government that came out and decided to change this place. And, guess what? They are seeing results here. They are seeing results because what they did was they saw a party that over the years started out as a collection of ideas that ended up just being a collection of special interests. Mr. Speaker, the words they used were still the same. Their allegiances changed over time. Their allegiances didn't happen to sit with the ideas that they held. Their allegiances sat with the lobbyists and the special interests and the folks that they were protecting every single day on this House floor. Those voters who came out and voted Democrat based on fiscally sound and fiscally responsible principles last year are going to do the same thing 2 years from now because they are going to see that balanced budget. They are going to see the Alternative Minimum Tax. They are going to see the pay-as-you- go rules. Those are all results. Those are going to be voters that will be sticking with the Democratic Party.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. It's a privilege to be a part of the 30-somethings, Speaker Pelosi's working group. You can e-mail us at 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov. You can visit us on the Speaker's Web page, www.speaker.gov and there's a link there to the 30-something's page.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, for all those people out there who came out to the polls and voted on national security or fiscal responsibility or competence in government, no matter what you hear late at night here or on the talk radio shows from the Republicans, pay attention to what happens here in the House of Representatives over the coming weeks and months. Pay attention to the Democratic majority's plan to balance this budget, to pass on tax relief to people that need it, to start restoring order in this world so we are fighting the right fight at the right time. Pay attention to what happens here. As we have said over and over again, for the first time in over a decade, words are going to be matched with actions. From one side of this Chamber, from the Republican side, you're going to see words. From the Democratic side, you're going to see words and action to follow. As a new Member of the 30-somethings and as a new Member of this Congress, that's what makes me proud to be here, is that we're saying the right things and then we're doing the right things behind it. All those people who came out and cast their votes based on those ideas are going to find those ideas put into action here.