Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I sit on the Government Oversight and Reform Committee, and in that committee, we found out that we sent $9 billion in cash over to Iraq, on pallets, handed it out in duffel bags. We found out that when we were subcontracting to these subcontractors to do security, they subcontracted again, and they subcontracted again, and everybody takes a little money off the top every time. We did not know. We had not heard about any of that until we started doing hearings. So you are exactly right. Hammer that point home. This is not doing hearings for hearings sake. This is doing hearings to uncover the waste, fraud and abuse that has been happening in this government. This is my taxpayer dollars. This is my neighbor's taxpayer dollars that are going down the drain with some of these programs. This is real stuff.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me highlight one thing before we leave this subject. This is going to be a chart that we might see a few more times on the 30 Something Working Group hour here. I just want to make sure the people know we are back to business here. This is 81 hearings that have been held on issues related to the Iraq War this year. I mean, you go through the list just the week right after we got back from recess, the last week of February, on Tuesday, the 27th, two hearings; on Wednesday, the 28th, five hearings; on Thursday, the 1st, three hearings. Now, that may seem like a lot. It seems like, well, what is Congress doing with all these hearings. There was so much work to be done to uncover all of these abuses. I think that is going to kind of level out over time, but right now we needed to get back to the work of starting to do some oversight when it comes to this war, to start uncovering many of these abuses. We will continue this chart going forward. This idea that you presented that we have got two jobs, fix it and hold people accountable, we are doing both. This continuing resolution that kept the government running had historic levels of funding for veterans care. I think we are going to be able to do something similar with the supplemental authorization that we will vote on in the coming weeks. But we are also doing that second part, which is holding this administration accountable, to make sure that it does not happen again, because I do not want to be here a year from now just trying to play catch-up and plugging all the holes that this administration creates. I actually want to solve the problems and make sure that competent people get into places that matter in this administration. I want to make sure that the President starts putting budgets before us that make sense so that these oversight hearings, 81 hearings that have been held already in this Congress, are going to start to get us there. That is maybe the moment to turn. We have got a few minutes left to talk a little bit about this budget.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Sure.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Altmire, we have to look at veterans' health care, care for our wounded as part and parcel of the cost of the war. The cost of the war is not just troops on the ground, the equipment, the weapons. The cost of the war is all of that, which, of course, runs into the billions, racking up hour by hour, day by day, but the cost of the war also includes top rate, gold standard care for those troops when they return to this country. Sometimes you talk about the cost of the war and veterans' health care. They are in kind of different silos in Washington speak, and we are figuring out how Washington talks versus the rest of the world. Out there, what our veterans and soldiers talk about is a cost of battle, a cost of sending our troops overseas, which includes making sure, when they come back to this country, they get everything they need. That is part of our challenge. We came down here I think, not to speak for both of us, but to sort of change how Washington thinks about this world and start making it match up with the reality out there in our communities. We sat there for the last 2 years campaigning to get here, listening to people screaming and yelling about rising energy prices. We listened to families talk about how they couldn't afford to send their kids to college, and we heard seniors talking about how the Medicare prescription drug bill does not work. And they watch Washington do nothing about it. There is a disconnect that has happened over the past 12 years, and certainly over the last 6 years especially, and how people talk about their problems in the world and how Washington views them. There is no better example than veterans' health care. To veterans and soldiers, the cost of the war includes taking care of soldiers when they return to the United States. We have to make people understand that again. We sat for that very long debate about the escalation of the war. We listened to the people on the other side of the aisle make a ridiculously simplistic argument. They said, to support the troops, you must support the commander of the troops. Part of supporting the troops has to be supporting everything he asks you to do. You can't make an independent judgment about whether what he wants is right or wrong; you simply have to line up with him, or we are going to tell you that you are not supporting the men and women who fight for this country. We know that is wrong. We know that the American people don't believe that, and we know this election was in part about separating what is right for the troops, the country and what the President has asked them to do and has vastly under-equipped them to do. But you just detailed maybe example number one where what the President's policies are over the past several years has been the exact opposite of what is right for our troops, cuts to veterans' health care, increases in premiums. That is as bold and plain and simple and concise as you can make it. You can't stand here and say, in order to support the troops, you have to support the President when the President puts forth a budget, year after year, budgets that don't do justice for the veterans who return. I think the American people have weighed in on that issue on whether or not we need to support the President on everything he does in order to support the troops, but there is yet another example. Mr. Altmire, I think we also have to talk about the issue of accountability here. Here is the problem, is that our military is stretched thin right now. This isn't just about supporting the troops; it is about supporting the generals that oversee those troops and supporting the commanders who are struggling to do more with less. Let me read a quote from General Peter Schoomaker, the Chief of Staff of the Army. He says, ``To meet combatant commanders immediate wartime needs, we pooled equipment from across the force to equip soldiers deploying in harm's way. This practice, which we are continuing today, increases risk for our next-to-deploy units and limits our ability to respond to emerging strategic contingencies.'' This was from a Washington Post story. That is a pretty amazing statement to come from our Nation's top military brass. To come out on the record, flying in the face of what the President is telling the American people and saying that we are endangering the lives of our troops by overextending the limits of our equipment and our machinery within our Armed Forces. So we also have to force the military commanders who are desperately trying to do the right thing with a very flawed policy and with an administration which pays no attention to the root causes of the insurgency which puts our forces in harm's way and who doesn't give the Army the resources they need to fight this battle and obviously doesn't treat the soldiers the way they need to be treated when they come home. This is about supporting our troops and about supporting our commanders and about supporting our Armed Forces in general. They are being asked to do so much more with so much less. This is no secret. When we come and vote on the supplemental request from this President, you better believe that Members on this side of the aisle are going to make sure that there is a historic commitment to veterans, just like there was in the continuing resolution. We have to make that a priority in this new authorization of funding because we are beginning to talk like everybody else talks out there. We are beginning to understand that the cost of this war is the money that it takes to fight the battle on the streets of Baghdad, but it is also the cost of taking care of those soldiers when they come home. Mr. Altmire, you underplay your effect on that discussion. You were a real hero on that issue of making sure that the veterans' care and funding were in that continuing resolution. I hope people back in your district understand what you did on that issue to ensure that those funds were part of that continuing resolution.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Altmire can you yield for a moment? Because I want to talk about, as these revelations were coming out in The Washington Post and in articles that followed, this administration had a choice to make. They could open up this issue and they could allow for a vetting of these problems and put them out in the open air and come together, as Republicans and Democrats, to solve them; or they could try to paper over it and cover it up. And some of the most disturbing things that have happened in this sequence of events, which are a little bit later on your time line, is what happened after these revelations came into the light. We know that in the days following that article that the soldiers at Walter Reed were told that they couldn't speak to the media about what was happening. We know that the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which I sit on, had to subpoena the former head, the fired chief of Walter Reed Army Medical Center after Army officials told him that he couldn't come testify at the hearing. And so I am so thankful that we have a majority now in charge of this House which is actually going to do the work to uncover, I hope, not too many more abuses that we haven't already seen in the newspaper reports that have come out. But the fact is that right now we don't have an administration that is helping us try to correct this, Mr. Altmire. And it makes our job even harder; but makes me, I think, and I think the American people are in the same position, that they are thankful that there are people here doing that work.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Altmire. I want to let you get back to the time line because I think it is important for people to understand where this started, and to talk a little bit about where we are going, because so much of the news these days is filled with bad news, bad news for our veterans, bad news for the security of our country. And we talk about that a lot here. Mr. Altmire, as you know, this place focuses on crises often and on bad news. The good news is that things are changing. The good news is that there is a commitment now to make up for the wrongs of the past. But it is fairly mind-blowing to people out there to think that it took The Washington Post to uncover what was happening in our veterans system. Because, Mr. Altmire, as you know, veterans back in our districts, back in Pennsylvania and in Connecticut and throughout this country, have known what is going on with veterans for years. I mean, they have been down here in Washington, DC, month after month, year after year trying to tell this Congress that there are waiting lines for care; that the conditions are often substandard because of years of neglect in capital improvements; that they simply don't have the access to the funds necessary to pay for the rising premiums and rising copays. And before this story in The Washington Post broke, you, Mr. Altmire, and those of us in the 30-Something Working Group were yelling about this on the House floor. We got here with that mandate, to change things. So you are going to run through, I think, some fairly amazing comments from some of the soldiers and staff at Walter Reed Hospital in terms of what they have been dealing with over the past several years. But we just need to remind people out there that you can't absolve this former Congress in the last 12 years from the catastrophes that we are uncovering within our medical system, specifically, in this case, within our veterans medical system simply because The Washington Post didn't get around to writing about it until last month, because if you were back home listening to this, you heard it time after time again. I mean, here is the thing. We are talking about a substandard level of care for our veterans. We should be talking about the gold standard of care for our veterans. And we shouldn't be talking about just lifting up Walter Reed Hospital so that it meets the standards of dignity that every other hospital in our health care system abides by. We should be talking about raising up veterans care so that this is the highest standard. It is what everyone else in the medical community and the provider community seeks to meet. The people coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, people coming home from Vietnam and previous engagements should come home to the best care this country can provide, Mr. Altmire. And I would like to yield back to you so you can continue to tell the story of what we have found at Walter Reed hospital.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of the rule. Like many of my colleagues who we have heard from today, my family was built on good working class union jobs. My grandfather and great- grandfather worked at Fafnir Ball Bearing in New Britain, Connecticut, and I am, in some sense, the product of that American dream, a dream in which my grandfather's daughter could be the first woman in her family to go to college, a dream in which his grandson could be standing here on the floor of the House of Representatives, fighting for what is right and what is fair in the workplace. But, Madam Speaker, this disappearing middle-class has no lobby here in Washington, DC. They are not organized as a special interest. And maybe because of this, their interests haven't been very well represented on this floor in the past several years. But things are changing. Workers who belong to unions on average earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers. They are 63 percent more likely to have health care. They are four times more likely to have pension benefits. But unfortunately, over the years, the rights of these workers to join unions and to bargain collectively with their employers have eroded because of anti-union campaigns, employee intimidation and ineffective penalties for employers who violate worker rights. Today, we are making standing up for what is right in the workplace a little easier, Madam Speaker. This isn't about making doing business more difficult; this is about strengthening the society in which families like mine were allowed to succeed.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. It is not a secret, Mr. Ryan. I am very proud of my Polish heritage. I'm glad that it has come out into the open this afternoon.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, and I do not know how long my career will last either, but it is starting here in my first 8 weeks in the House only because me and 100,000 other people in northwestern Connecticut decided things had to change, there was no choice; that we could not sit back any longer and let the status quo go on; that we could not watch the disparity between rich and poor, those doing well and those struggling to make ends meet, could not watch that get any worse. So what this election was about, what this first 100 hours was about, what everything that comes after that is about is about restoring that balance. So for all of the challenges that we put before this House during the time we spend here, for as many charts that paint a gloomy picture, I mean, there is light on the horizon. The work we have already done here means something. You talked about the 400,000 kids that did not go to college because they could not afford it. Well, if we can get this student loan bill through the Senate and to the President's desk, that is almost $5,000 in savings. I bet you there is a good percentage of those 400,000 families that if they knew that college ultimately, after they paid back all their loans, was going to cost $5,000 less, they would make the choice to go. Things are happening here which are going to make those concerns of middle-class families tomorrow with the Employee Free Choice Act and later as the bills in the 100 hours come through this process, they are going to make a difference.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I like sharing stories, an Irish story from my Polish mother. She tells a story about she was going back to school to get some classes for her degree in teaching. She was getting some classes at the local community college, and she told this story to me when she came back from registration. She was in a line to register for her course, and there were a number of different lines to register for different courses. About three or four lines down from her, there was a gentleman who was waiting in line sort of nervously, thumbing through his pockets, sort of counting the money in his pockets. He got to the head of the line, and she could sort of see what was happening over there and realized that he was maybe $30, $40 short of the cost of that particular class. He fumbled through his pockets. A couple of people behind him tried to help him come up with the money. He did not have it and walked away, walked out that door. What my mother said, and I agreed with her, was you can imagine the courage that it took that young guy who maybe had not been to school in a very long time, decided this is it, I am going to go back, I am going to start down that path again, I am going to go to my local community college, I am going to have the courage to step up and restart my education, and gets in the line and realizes he does not have the $380 that it costs to get that class. That right there, that could be that welder. That could be that information technology worker. That could be somebody using the stepladder of education to become part of this incredibly productive economy. Because we still have barriers to increasing your educational opportunities, to being a more productive member of our workforce, we handicap ourselves. We handicap ourselves. And I think of the story of that guy over and over again when I think about higher education funding, when I think about not only what that would mean for him personally, but what that means for our economy in general. Our strength is our workforce, and if we do not start investing in it, we are going to have even more trouble than we are competing in this global economy.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If the gentleman would yield for a moment, a story for you.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. You are exactly right, and that is where the American people are. There are folks out there that are far to this side of the political and ideological spectrum, and there are people out there that are far to this side, but you know where the majority of bread-and-butter Americans lie. They lie in that place where they are seeking some solutions here that are part of that middle way, a part of that third way. In Connecticut, I spent 4 years as the chairman of the Health Committee. In Connecticut, we have a lot of pharmaceutical companies, and we found a way to try to mitigate some of the deleterious influences that that structure imposes on citizens, while trying to partner with them to do some of the good work that can grow that new economy. I disagreed day and night with the pharmaceutical industry when I tried to get Connecticut to be part of reimporting prescription drugs from Canada, but you know what, we fought hand in hand, arm in arm, linked together when we were trying to make Connecticut one of the first three States to invest in stem cell research because we knew that our pharmaceutical industry, we knew that our biotech industry were going to flourish if we helped plant some of the seeds with government funding because we know in today's economy that venture capitalists are not terribly interested in funding some of those new biotech ideas, funding those new baseline pharmaceutical research. So government in that instance can spend a couple cents to grow a couple private dollars. So there is that way to sort of say enough is enough, we are going to do something about trying to help citizens get some cheaper drugs from Canada, we are going to talk about trying to use the power of the Federal Government to negotiate lower prices, but there are so many places we can cooperate. There are so many places that you as a pharmaceutical industry, you as an information technology industry can be part of growing this country. You know as well as I do that the reason that businesses are still here in the United States and the reason why businesses come to a high- cost area like the Northeast is the workforce. We still have the best trained, most highly educated and, most importantly, most productive workforce in the Nation. So when we are investing in the minimum wage, when we are investing in higher education funding, I mean, we are investing in what is the current and the future of this economy.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I was asked a question at a Chamber of Commerce meeting that I went to back in my district last week. Someone challenged me and asked a question that went something like this. They said if you had the choice to take a dollar and put it back into the economy through the private sector or through the public sector, which one do you think does a better job at stimulating our economy. I kind of didn't understand the gist of the question. What he was getting at was this idea, I think, that he thinks that people on this side of the aisle somehow think that government spending should be done for the purposes of stimulating our economy. Listen, that couldn't be further from the truth. What we want to do is decide on a set of services and a set of priorities that the government will be a part of, and then find the money that is sufficient to pay for that. We all agree that if we have our choice, every extra dollar goes right back into people's pockets. Every extra dollar we have goes right back into the economy. All we need to agree on here, and it is a big all, is what those set of priorities and services are. People in my district think one of them should be investing in stem cell research. That is just my district. But they think you know what, one of the things that we can probably do better together rather than separately, rather than simply through philanthropic contributions, is to take on some of the most insidious and terrible diseases known to man. That is something they think we should do. It wasn't agreed upon by this Chamber until the Democrats took back this House and Nancy Pelosi took over the Speaker's chair, but now we include it in the group of things that we think we are going to do better together. I think we all agree that every extra dollar we have goes right back into this economy. But let us think about this. When we are talking about putting dollars back into the lands of middle class folks, lower middle class folks, working class folks, whether it is through tax breaks to small businesses that employ them, whether it is through a cut in the student loan interest rate, or whether it is through a minimum wage bill that gives them a little more every week, we know that every single one of those dollars is going right back into the economy. Now that is, in part, because there is not a lot of flexible income for people in that situation today. Every dollar they get has to go back into the economy. When you talk about tax cuts and where they should go, you talk about new government programs and whether they should benefit the pharmaceutical companies or whether they should benefit senior citizens, I will take middle class workers, I will take senior citizens every time, not just because I think they are who we should be here sticking up for, but because I know that every dollar we put back in their pocket is going to end up at the local florist, is going to end up at the local grocery store, is maybe going to end up being put into a local charity or community group. We are talking about recycling good community money when we are talking about trying to give a leg up, Mr. Ryan.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. You spoke earlier about the need for unions to be flexible. I couldn't agree more. This is an inexorable march to a very new global economy, and nobody can deny that is happening, and we have to ask our workers and the unions that represent them, just like we ask our employers, to figure out a way so America can compete in that new environment. You talked about the steel industry. That is a remarkable instance. Actually, not that remarkable; it happens more than I think people are given credit for, of workers and industry really coming together before this body and singing a very similar tune. We have to remember that as much press might be given to unions and the companies that they work for fighting over contracts, when it comes down to it, both of them only are able to prosper if the economy is strong and if their company is strong. So on the vast majority of this that they are going to come and talk to this Congress about, they are going to advocate in their communities for, they are going to be on the same page. When you talk about that, maybe there is no better example than our health care system. You are talking about it in the context of our new Medicare prescription drug program, but if we want to figure out a way to compete in this world, we have to figure out why $1,500 of every car sold in this country goes for retiree health care benefits compared to only a couple of hundred dollars in Japanese manufacturing plants. We have to figure out a way to deal with the fact that 16 percent of every dollar spent in this country goes to health care costs compared to 9 or 10 cents in most of the countries that we compete with. We put an exorbitant amount of money into employee benefits and health care in general, which puts us at a tremendous competitive disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. That is something that employers, workers, government officials, we should all be able to agree on. We should all sit here and try to tackle that very grave question of how do we get health care costs under control. That is the salvation of American manufacturers and American small businesses. Frankly, it is also the salvation of American workers and unions. If we can figure out a way to have that conversation, that benefits everybody. We have given a lot of emphasis and put a lot of light on the fact that everything we have done here as part of that 100-hours agenda has had very large numbers of our friends from the Republican side of the aisle supporting us here. You have the numbers right in front of you. You can tell the story, Mr. Ryan. Sometimes government gets shed in a light that tries to accentuate controversy, just as sometimes the relationship between workers and their employers tends to be told in a manner that accentuates adversity and strife. Well, in this Chamber, in my first 8 weeks as a Member of Congress, it has been remarkable the amount of bipartisan cooperation we have seen. It shows in the vote totals. Maybe it doesn't show in the headlines, but it shows in the vote totals. I think the same story can be told about the relationship between workers and employers in this country. I think there will be a bunch of people grousing about what comes out of this House tomorrow, but I think in the end, by leveling that playing field, we will stimulate a lot of productive cooperative relationships in our economy. I thank the Members of the 30-something Working Group who have over the last 2 to 3 years stood up on this House floor to talk about the fact that this place had to work together. I think a lot of sectors of our economy, a lot of members of our community takes cues from what happens in Washington. I think to the degree they see this place just being about Democrats and Republicans fighting, then I think they may reflect that in their operations and in their daily life. I thank members of the 30-something Working Group and other Members who have talked about bipartisanship. I think what has happened here in the past several weeks is going to be instructive to a lot of relationships in our country and in our economy going forward.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. And it is quite an honor to be able to share the floor with a gentleman as articulate as yourself. I know where you are from, and I can imagine that you have a lot of families, probably including your own, that shares the story of my family. My great-grandfather and my grandfather both worked at Fafnir Ball Bearing, which was a massive ball bearing factory in New Britain, Connecticut. It employed thousands of people in the New Britain area and partnered together with the Stanley Tool factory. Those two together employed over 10,000 people in New Britain in its heyday. The city looks very different today. Those sites are either brownfields with nobody in them, or now sort of struggling office parks. My office, which I inherited from Congresswoman Johnson, is in actually a site that used to be owned by those manufacturers. But the story that we are talking about today is not necessarily a story of manufacturing, it is a story of the workers that were there. It is no coincidence to me that as you chart the history of our middle class in this country, as you chart the growing disparity between those that are doing very, very well and those that are struggling just to get by and cope with the daily cost of their lives, I don't think that it is just a coincidence that during that time, as we have seen a middle class vanish before our eyes, or at least become on the precipice of vanishing, and you see that disparity, that gap between rich and poor grow bigger and bigger, that that has happened during the same time that we have seen unionization rates drop through the floor. Because the middle class that my family came up through, which is that working-class middle class, the folks that are making enough money to get by, enough money to give their kids a little bit better chance at life than they had, but they are not doing enough to buy a second home, they are not doing enough to buy many luxuries, that group of Americans, diminishing by the year, doesn't have a lobbyist up here. That group of Americans doesn't have a pool of money in which they can employ people to advocate on their behalf here in this Chamber. The group that has done that historically over time have been unions. They advocate to make sure that their ranks are swelled as well, but they also have been, frankly, the people that have been advocating year in and year out up here in this House to make sure that we have a healthy middle class. And so I am fairly unapologetic about my support for the bill tomorrow, that we are going to basically level the playing field. I think that is what you were talking about, Mr. Ryan, is that we are not giving any unfair advantage to workers, we are simply saying that we want to level the playing field when it comes to organization in this country. And I think that is the right thing to do for workers. But as a member of a family that only has survived because of a society and an economy that once produced jobs that had real pensions and real health care benefits attached to them, we need to start figuring out a way to make sure that those folks get advocated for here in this House. And as you recited that long and important list of achievements here in the House during the first 100 hours, that is all about that group of people. That is all about making this House a place where those middle-class, working-class folks get a voice: again, minimum wage; taking away the big tax breaks for the oil companies; starting to lower the cost of health care; investing in life-saving research. That is bread-and-butter work for the middle class. The gist of it is this: This bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, tomorrow is going to level the playing field to allow some of these folks that have been before Congress fighting for a very long time for that healthy middle class to be able to continue to emphasize and increase that voice. And that is as important as anything we do here because, as Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz have been talking about on this floor night in and night out for far too long, the voices that have mattered here have been the folks that have the big wallets that can pay the high-priced lobbyists to come in this building. And we don't begrudge the work that people who advocate on behalf of people do here, but frankly, we need advocates here for folks that don't have those dollars. And whether we like it or not, unions in this country have done that job, and they have done it well with decreased numbers because of a system we have set up that ends up making it very difficult for workers to organize.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Here is what we are talking about here. So how do we take that chart that you are showing there, which I agree cannot continue to be the way that our society operates. We cannot be a flourishing democracy, we cannot be a flourishing economy if we have so many people doing so poorly and a small group of people doing very well. So how do we go about changing that? And I think the message is that we are not talking in this Chamber about big new government programs. We are not talking about creating new departments and new bureaucracies. All we are talking about is take the existing programs, take the existing set of rules and make them fair. Make them fair. Give everybody a chance to compete. That is what increasing the minimum wage is. I mean, 10 years, while every other cost goes up and the minimum wage stays where it is? Just bring it up to where it needs to be. Just match inflation with your minimum wage. Student loan rates. As the cost of college goes up 41 percent since 2001, well, let's help families match that increasing cost of higher education. And the same thing with the Employee Free Choice Act. Let us have our eyes open to what the reality is on the ground for those who want to organize. Let us recognize how employers have changed some of their tactics, and let us give employees the opportunity to operate on that same level playing field. That is what this is all about. This is about taking the rules that we have and making them fair, not coming in and creating big new government bureaucracies to help these folks. One of the most important things we did here was the bill in the first 100 hours that allows the Federal Government to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies. That is a great example of one of the few instances where this Congress did create a new bureaucracy, and when they created it, they set rules that disadvantaged regular, average taxpayers and the senior citizens who were supposed to benefit. They created this big new health care program and created the rules to tilt the playing field in favor of those people who needed no extra help. This Congress has to be about taking those programs that are right there in front of our faces and making them work again. I think if we do that, we will live up to your mandate that we cannot let this stand.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We are talking about the best of the best. If anyone was able to operate and achieve under the strain, it is the men and women in our Armed Forces, and so we expect a lot of them because we know the training they have been through. We know the kind of people they are, but we have asked so much of them that we can ask very little more. We do differentiate at some level between our enlisted men and our National Guard and Reserve troops, and I think it is appropriate because when you are talking about them, you are talking about ripping somebody out of a family, out of a community. These are not just fathers and mothers. These are small businessmen. These are employees. These are employers. These are members of the PTA. These are members of the Elks Club. These are people who hold communities together. That is the type of people that our members of the Armed Forces are. Those people that sign up for the Reserve and National Guard do that because they have this commitment to their community, and it does not end with their commitment to their military service. They are part of the community in ways that a lot of other people are not. So when you talk about bringing people out two or three times to serve in the Reserve and National Guard, you are breaking up families and communities. That is why we had an enlisted service. I think one of the discussions that we will have going forward, and one that I think will be bipartisan agreement on, as there has been with most everything we have done here, is that we need to have an honest conversation about increasing the troop strength of our military, increasing numbers of troops that are enlisted and doing this as a permanent job, because it has gotten to the end of the limit of a lot of the people who are serving in our National Guard and our Reserve.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I think the real lesson from Mr. Altmire's story is that he is like a Boy Scout, he is always prepared. He has the information at his fingertips that his constituents need. You can learn something every day from our colleagues. To get in touch with the 30-something Dems, the e-mail is 30SomethingDems@mail.house.gov. And then on the Web site where a lot of the information we are talking about here tonight and in previous nights can be found is www.speaker.gov/30Something. And with that, I will yield for final thoughts back to Mr. Meek.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If you sort of listen to the rhetoric coming out of the administration, you would think this grand coalition has, what, 50 percent American troops, 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent? No. Ninety-two percent. Ninety-two percent of the troops on the ground in Iraq are American forces. We went from a high of coalition troops, those are non-American troops, of 25,000, and now down to almost below 15,000 troops and dropping by the day. So I think that is just a point of information that we have now decided on a path that isn't even going to have a hint of coalition- building. We have decided to go this on our own. And, frankly, I think that has grievous consequences for what is happening on the ground in Iraq, frankly has just as important consequences for the future of foreign policy when we have gotten to a point where we don't even talk to our allies about our strategy there. And I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I just want to bring up one other topic here as well before we yield back to Mr. Meek, and that is also, when we ask our men and women to go over there and fight, and then when they come home and they are not taken care of, we also need to remember who we are sending over there, our Reservists and National Guard, but who is joining them over there. This is a tangential but important topic. President Bush has talked a lot about this coalition of the willing, and we need to understand that the American people, when they hear about the allied forces over there, know who they are now, because people are jumping ship faster than the evening news can keep up with it. Great Britain, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea. By the week, somebody else walks away. And as we make decisions in Iraq, like this plan for escalation in which there is not even a pretext of reaching out and forming some international consensus, remember when we went into Iraq in the first place, at least we tried to pretend that we were going to go through some international decision-making process. At least we sort of gave some faint illusion of using the United Nations as a forum for which to have this discussion. You didn't even hear a conversation about trying to reach out to our allies with this plan to escalate this war. I mean, we didn't. Because why? Because we knew if we asked Great Britain or Poland or South Korea or Lithuania to be part of this force, the answer would be pretty simple.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Altmire. Your veterans in your district and veterans across this country have you to thank, along with others, that you helped rally to the cause to make sure that the continuing resolution that we passed here, which is effectively the Act that keeps the government operating, that provides the resources to different agencies, including the Veterans Administration, you made sure that that bill had the proper resources in it for our veterans. Here is the good news. We are talking about what is past and we also have to talk about the prologue as well. A new sheriff is in town, and the good news for veterans and for the American people is that we are going to make those investments in veterans health care. We are going to change things in this Congress. Mr. Altmire and I ran in part to make those changes, and Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz stood up here night after night after night making the case for that change. If the American people spoke out about many things, one of them certainly was that part of our change in foreign policy had to be doing justice to those veterans. So I hope that when people hear us talk about some of the bad things happening within our veterans system here, they understand that we are only saying it because we are part of the movement which is going to change that. The Disabled Veterans of America were in my office today, and they shared with me a pretty remarkable statistic, and I hope I get it right. In previous foreign conflicts, the ratio of those killed to those that were wounded in battle was 3 to 1 wounded to killed in action. In this conflict, it is 16 to 1. Now, that is great news, that we have made advances in protection for our soldiers, in armor, in the ability of our medical professionals to intervene on the battlefield that we are saving that many lives. It is a tragedy that one is lost, never mind the 3,000. The stress, though, that that puts on our system is a great one. We have more and more wounded, more severely wounded coming into our hospitals, and it means that we have to step up to meet that new obligation. We are so lucky to have people coming back that can still go on to lead productive lives, but only if we provide them with those resources. The other story that they told me was of the number of young soldiers just back from this war who are ending up in in-patient care in our State veterans hospitals, those that have been afflicted not just by the physical wounds, but by the mental wounds as well. Our obligation has to be not just to treat the broken bones, the damaged bodies, but also to the mental stress that these brave men and women have come back with. I just want to talk for a minute about who we are talking about here, because we have fought previous battles in a very different way. We have relied largely on our enlisted men and women to fight these wars, and I think we need to remember who we are asking to go over to Iraq and to Afghanistan to fight because no longer is it just our enlisted men. We are treating our National Guard basically like they are our normal Army today. Sometimes we forget that. It is good we are the 30- something Working Group here because sometimes young people that have only seen this conflict think that that is how things are, that the National Guard and the Reserve are sort of like everybody else and they get sent over there, and that is what they signed up for. Well, that is not what they signed up for. That is not how we have conducted our military interventions in the past. We have zero active duty or Reserve brigades in the United States right now that are considered combat ready. We have 84,000 members of the National Guard and Reserve that have been deployed two times or more since 2001. The average mobilization for a Reserve or National Guard member is 18 months, and now, as we are learning that the President is once again going to rely on National Guard forces to be part of this new escalation in Iraq, we are finding out that these forces, as they get ready in their hometowns and their home States, are not even close to combat ready in terms of the equipment they need. The Oklahoma National Guard reports that one-third of their members do not have the M-4 rifles.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If the gentlelady would yield for a moment, let us also think about what this message is to those that would sign up for this volunteer military force being sent to defend our country overseas. Not only is this unconscionable to those who have sacrificed everything to fight for this country in Afghanistan and Iraq, but think about those who we are asking to join the Armed Forces. We don't have a draft any more, and many people are thankful for that. We rely on the decisions by courageous men and women across this country to join voluntarily our Armed Forces. So when they see people coming back from these wars, being treated without the basic dignity that any of us would expect those men and women to be treated with, I would think, I hope it doesn't, but I would think it might give pause to those that would join our military. So I think of this from a point of conscience deep inside me, and I also think about it from a standpoint of national security. What kind of signal are we sending to those who are going to be the next generation of troops when this is how we treat them when they come back.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I often get confused with my good friend from Pennsylvania. Let's just touch for one minute, before I address the resolution on the question that our friends from the other aisle brought to us today and that Mr. Ryan was so good enough to talk about as well, that is this notion that in order to support the troops, you have to support the commander of the troops. Well, having spent the last 2 years walking around talking to every sector of the constituents of the Fifth District of Connecticut, having a sense of where the American people came down in November on this question, the American people seem to agree with folks on this side of the aisle, which says this: There is a difference between supporting the troops and supporting the commander. It is not an issue of patriotism necessarily, it is an issue of differentiating between the brave men and women who are over there fighting and dying for this country, and the man who sends them into battle. You can disagree with him and you can support the troops. You can do that out in the public as a matter of your private advocacy, and you can do that here on this floor. That is where the American public came down on election day. They said loud and clear that day, ``We support the troops.'' They go every day to celebrations of those troops when they leave and when they come home. They go to much more somber ceremonies when they don't return home. And then on election day they come out and they say this: ``I support those troops. I don't support the man who put them into harm's way in the manner that he did that.'' Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer for allowing us to be here this morning. It is late at night, and I will be brief in my remarks on the resolution before us. Amidst the embarrassing overabundance of thorny foreign policy questions before this House currently, the question before this Chamber tonight is a fairly simple one: Do we agree with the Nation's military establishment, with the country's foreign policy community, with popular opinion, and reject this President's very wrongheaded plan to send 21,000 more troops into Iraq? Or do we remain silent in homage to Congress' past and allow this potentially disastrous escalation to move forward? I think the question answers itself. And I am proud today to stand here in support of this resolution, and register my strong support of our troops and my strong opposition to escalating this war. As we finish the debate tonight, I have been joined in these final remarks by some of the younger colleagues in the House of Representatives. And I think our unity is significant. I should remind other Members of this House that we are discussing the fates of many young men and women, my classmates, my friends, that are this hour fighting and dying in a country halfway around the world. As younger Members we also serve as reminders that our duty here is not just to set policies to secure the safety of our country in terms of months or years but also in terms of decades. Mr. Speaker, I have never fought in a war. I haven't shot another man on the battlefield nor have I been wounded myself. But I have been allowed the privilege to represent my constituents in this body because of the selfless bravery of those men and women around this country that made a different choice than I did, those that volunteered to go overseas and fight and defend this country. It is my duty to stand here today and thank them for their service, thank their families for their service, but also to be their advocate here tonight. Because the President is asking a cadre of our bravest young men and women to go house to house in Baghdad to root out an insurgency while he does virtually nothing to address the systematic causes of that insurgency. One hundred thousand troops may not be able to do the job that the President is asking 21,000 to do. Escalating the number of troops in Baghdad hasn't worked in the past and it most likely won't work here. Through his actions, the President is putting our soldiers' lives at unnecessary and unconscionable risk. There is a resolution in Iraq but it's a political solution. It's not a military resolution. And we owe it to our soldiers who have done everything that we have asked them to do to stand up to a President who would ask them to do a job that they cannot and should not do. And beyond our duty to our current generation of troops on the ground, our responsibility, quite frankly, also lies with the generations to come. I decided to seek a seat in this House at a relatively young age because I was fearful that the decisions that were being made here today would have dramatic consequences for the world that my future children and grandchildren will grow up in. And I came here to begin a conversation that acknowledges that what will make this Nation safe for generations is not a Nation built on bullying, not a strategy based on scattershot military intervention but a comprehensive foreign policy that combines American might with American diplomacy. In order to secure this Nation for the next generation, we need to acknowledge that the most important question we must ask is not who do we attack next, but instead how do we reset our place in this world in a way that would prevent the forces who would do America harm from becoming stronger? Mr. Speaker, we need to come to grips with the fact that we live in a world in which our own supposed allies create societies that foster extremism and violence amongst their most marginalized members. At the same time our Nation often strangely views cultural and political global detachment as a virtue rather than a weakness. This combination causes those that speak different tongues and those that worship different gods to look upon our great Nation with undeserved derision. This must change. For my mind, we do that in three parts. First, we must pass this resolution in order to pivot to a much broader conversation. And in that conversation in the coming days and months, we must redeploy our troops both to home and to fights that are central to the war on terror, such as in Afghanistan. The gentlemen from the other side of the aisle are right. This battle with terrorists who may do harm to this country does not end no matter what happens on the ground in Iraq. But we must focus on our energies there. Lastly, we need to begin, going forward from today, to renew that multilateral spirit that once made this country great by proving ourselves in the future to be both a strong America and a humble America. Mr. Speaker, I stand here today in support of this resolution.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. So here is what those of us who are new to this Chamber sort of see from the outside, and I think it probably matches up with what Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek keep seeing from the inside. What used to happen here was that the agenda that came before the House was decided essentially by folks sitting in the third floor of the Republican National Committee, a bunch of Republican Party insiders who decided that they were going to put a Republican agenda on the floor. They were going to put a party agenda on the floor at the exclusion of the minority party. So what you saw, for those us that turned on C-SPAN late at night when we were not watching the 30-somethings, we saw votes go up on the screen. And everybody sees those C-SPAN votes where they have got Republicans in one column, Democrats in the other column. You see all the Republicans voting one way, all the Democrats voting the other way, vote after vote after vote, because what was being put before this House was a Republican agenda. Occasionally you would have some people slide over, but by and large that is what you saw. Here is the difference. The agenda that was part of the first 100 hours and the agenda that was behind the continuing resolution, as Mr. Meek says, if we have anything to do with it, the agenda that will underlie the budget that finally arrives before this body is not going to be a Democratic agenda. It is not going to be a Democratic budget. It is going to be a people's agenda. It is going to be a budget that comes from the voices and the concerns and the hopes and the fears of people back in all of our districts, Republicans and Democrat. That is why you see on the 100 hours agenda and even on the continuing resolution, which is probably maybe the most controversial piece of legislation that came before that, even on the continuing resolution, the bill that kept the Federal Government going for the next few months, you have Republican votes, because no longer is the legislation that gets put before us a partisan agenda. It is now a people's agenda. And for someone who spent the last 2 years in my district campaigning to come here, talking to people that were so utterly frustrated with what was happening in Washington, yes, people were angry about the agenda here from issue to issue. They were upset that people were not listening to them about their concerns on rising energy prices, rising health care prices, why they could not send their kids to college. But they were maybe more overarchingly concerned with the tone this place had taken, and I think that is our lasting legacy, because, as I think I said the first time that I got to talk with you both on this floor, our legacy as a Congress may be that we have some small role in restoring people's faith in government. When we go around and talk to elementary schools, we are talking to some of the most cynical 10-year-olds you have ever seen, because all they think government is is a bunch of people fighting with each other, yelling at each other, disagreeing instead of agreeing. So what we do here is we are going to start putting those middle- class families first. That is what this budget will be about. If we can do it with Republicans, and when you do it with Democrats, in the end we make people believe a little bit again in government. And for those of us who are in this 30-something caucus who might be around long enough to hopefully see government do a few more good things over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, that could be one of the most important things we can do.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I hear people talk about him as well.