Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much. As I said before, coming back from the campaign trail I got to watch the three of you down here, and I think stole a lot of your material. So I am glad to maybe provide a little bit of material for the next crop of 30- somethings. May I do Mr. Ryan's job today?

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We had another member of the Florida delegation. I am honored to be part of the 30-something group, but to be part of the Florida delegation here today was just as impressive.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are exactly right. I remember standing at a supermarket in my district during the campaign or maybe a few years before, and a woman who was, I think, 59, 58 years old, who had been laid off, and who understandably was having trouble finding new employment. It is difficult for older Americans to find a new job, especially one that has a comprehensive package of benefits. And she looked at me with this blank face and said, ``Why am I in this position? Why can I not get health care when I know the Medicare program is right there? I am willing to pay for it. I am willing to contribute to it. And yet I can't get access to this program simply because I have been put into a situation where I can't find a job or I can't find a job with benefits, and I don't qualify for the program.'' So there are ways that we can help, as you said, those older Americans who are on the cusp of being able to qualify for Medicare, and certainly the millions of children around this country who have no health care insurance and end up getting sick. I mean, they get sick, and they come into our emergency rooms to get the care they need. Mr. Ryan said here the other night, we do have a system of universal coverage in this country; unfortunately, it is in our emergency rooms rather than in our doctors' offices and our primary care doctors' offices. And maybe just to tie this back to what we were talking about before when it comes to the war in Iraq. You know, we have an obligation to our veterans when they come back, and what we have done here over the past 10 years to the health care system for veterans is a travesty of justice to the brave men and women who have fought for this country. I absolutely support moving towards universal coverage. I think you are right, it doesn't have to be done all at once. In fact, I think the best proposals before this body are to really take some commonsense approaches to it. But maybe the first thing we should do is start to repair some of the damage that we did to the veterans health care system to make sure that when you volunteer to serve this country abroad, that when you come back, you are going to get the mental health care that you need, that you are going to not have to wait in line for a surgery that you badly need. Maybe that is our first obligation is to take care of those folks, because in the end we are here to serve everyone, but we are certainly here to make sure that those people that fight for us, Mr. Meek, are taken care of. And I would yield to you.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you for yielding, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I think that was the feeling that a lot of us here for our first State of the Union felt as well. I was able to sit with a lot of the first-term Members to listen to the speech, and we all left shaking our heads, because when we went out and campaigned to come to this body, and when we go back to our districts to talk to people, I mean, it is very clear that they don't want patchwork solutions when it comes to health care; they don't want a little tinkering around the edges when it comes to energy reform. They want bold leadership from Washington. It is no small thing for a bunch of people across this country to go out and cast out long-term incumbents, which is what happened in a lot of these districts. It takes a lot of courage in order to make that decision for change. And, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I think you are exactly right that they are looking to us to have that same type of courage. They are requiring us to take that same type of bold action that they took by turning over this body into new hands, into new leadership. And the President's suggestions last night when it came to health care and when it came to energy policy simply don't measure up. Let's think about it; 6.8 million people in this country have lost their health care insurance in the last 6 years. Premiums during that time have risen 81 percent in the last 6 years while wages stayed flat. Now, if the President, as you said, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, listened to counsel besides his own, he would know that a tax deduction doesn't help the people that don't have insurance because about 50 percent of the uninsured aren't paying income taxes right now. So the people that we need to help, the people that right now are clogging up our emergency rooms, and, as you know, this is not just a matter of doing the right thing for the uninsured, this is doing the right thing for all of us who are subsidizing the people who walk into the emergency rooms, get this extravagantly expensive care simply because they didn't have the insurance to get them in to have preventative care. The proposal he unveiled yesterday really, I think, does grave injustice to those people out there who were struggling with a system that is fundamentally broken, and it simply isn't going to be fixed around the edges.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Meek is very right. It is going to be in a bipartisan way. And there are moments when maybe public opinion and things you hear back in the district don't always match up with maybe the things that you hear from the experts on that particular issue. That is inevitable in public service. And there are choices to be made, and inevitably your obligation in the end is to side with the people that you represent. But on this issue there is a growing hegemony of opinion that backs up public opinion within the military community. Mr. Meek quoted some of the leaders of both parties who have come out against this plan for escalation, but the military has come out against this plan as well. Let me just give a quick quote of Colonel Paul Hughes, who was the first person that was put in charge of strategic planning of the U.S. occupation in Baghdad, the first person on the ground to start planning on how we were going to keep Baghdad stable. We obviously failed pretty miserably in that mission, but here is what he said about the President's plan to escalate this war. He said: ``Just sending more troops to Baghdad is like pouring more water in the sands of Al Anbar. It's going to disappear without accomplishing anything.'' And that is what we have heard over and over again. There may be a number of troops that you could put into Baghdad or, lest we forget, the 12 other, 11 other major areas of conflict in Iraq. There might be a number, but it certainly isn't 21,000. And the President in his speech talked about not only using those troops to secure Baghdad but also using them to secure Al Anbar Province, also trying to do increased training, also trying to better secure the borders around Iraq to prevent the insurgents from coming in. Twenty-one thousand troops can't do that, and what ends up happening, as many of our military experts have told us over and over again, is it just puts those men and women in even graver danger. That is an opinion shared not just by Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle but by the military community as well. And Mr. Meek talked about the oversight that is going to happen here in terms of our strategy going forward. And I think that these hearings have been so valuable because I think they educate the American public and educate all of us about our options going forward. But the oversight also has to be about how we conduct ourselves so far, because if there was any faith in our ability to manage this war and manage the reconstruction, then maybe we would look a little bit differently upon the President's proposal. But the fact is, and this number startled me, we have $8.8 billion of money, Mr. Meek, of money that is unaccounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority, $8.8 billion that we can't even explain where it went. That is about enough money to run the State of Connecticut for an entire year. And that is not the money we spent; that is the money we can't find anymore. Mr. Meek served on the Armed Services Committee. I am going to get the opportunity to serve on the Government Reform Committee under Mr. Waxman of California, and our focus there is going to be on that waste, fraud, and abuse that has happened within our military spending in Iraq. And it is important not just because of taxpayer dollars and because we were all sent here to make sure that every hard-earned dollar that our taxpayers send to Washington gets spent effectively, but it is important because it educates us on the inefficiency and the blundering in a lot of places that has happened in the conduct of this war and the conduct of the reconstruction. And there are a myriad of reasons why we should start listening to people like Mr. Murtha and others who are counseling us to redeploy our forces and to significantly draw down the number of troops we have there very soon. There are a number of reasons why we should take those arguments seriously and why many of us support bringing a large number of our troops home very soon. But at the top of that list is the fact that the money we are spending there, even beyond the philosophy, just when you are talking about the money, the money isn't being spent to make that country safer, to rebuild that country. That money is being lost, and as you said, Mr. Meek, through the Speaker, much of that money we are now finding out actually finds its way into the hands of the very people that we are fighting in Iraq. We can't account for it, and thus it finds its way into the hands of the insurgents who are attacking the convoys, who are taking the oil that is being produced there, and are, in fact, using our own money to fight our own efforts there. So it is our obligation, Mr. Meek, as you have said, not only to investigate, not only to hold hearings into the strategy and the conduct of our military operations but also to ask some questions about how all of our taxpayer dollars are being spent there, because I think we are going to find some very interesting things as we go forward in the next few weeks.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, you are very right. And I am glad those quotes are going to be on the 30-Something Web site because it really is a cross-section of this Chamber, the people who have been really speaking out and asking the President to revisit this plan to escalate the war. You have dozens of Republicans, more every day, that are coming out and suggesting that there has got to be a plan C, right? Plan A we know didn't work; we are now debating plan B, which everyone from foreign policy experts to the President's own military advisors suggest won't work. And we hope that some of the folks watching us on C-SPAN right now caught some of the hearings, Mr. Meek, before the Armed Services Committees and other relevant committees because you have heard some remarkable testimony from the President's own military leaders expressing grave doubts about this plan to put new troops into Iraq and into Baghdad. So we have got both sides of the aisle coming together and saying, listen, let's sit down and talk about plan C, because that is what this is about. This is not about just standing up here in front of TV cameras and telling people the President's plan doesn't work; it has got to be about setting another way. And there are other ways. We can talk about the redeployment of troops. We can talk about starting to rebuild our credibility in the world. The President talked last night, Mr. Meek, about the unification of the world's communities around the President's strategy. Well, that certainty doesn't comport with reality, it doesn't comport with what we are seeing; but it doesn't mean that the opportunity is lost, it doesn't mean that we still can't go back to the world community and say, let's together build a new strategy to get ourselves out of Iraq in a way that leaves that country as stable as we can. And, Mr. Meek, I don't know about you, but I think we can still do that. And I am actually interested. The President is going to speak to our issues conference in a week and a half, and I know there is some grumbling about that, but I am actually looking forward to him coming to us so that we might be able to have another chance to persuade him to work with both sides of the aisle here on this floor to come up with a new strategy that will allow us to lend stability to that country and rebuild the world community, and do it in a way that doesn't put more and more troops of ours in harm's way. And I know, Mr. Meek, of other Members who have been here much longer than I believe that we can do that together.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. I am only making a name for myself by associating myself with the works and deeds of Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan. You are exactly right. As you know, I am able to join you here as a second time as a new Member of this Congress. What we were charged with doing was really taking back this House and this place for people who are struggling every day to make ends meet. The cost of tuition since 2001 has gone up 41 percent, while we know wages have essentially remained stagnant, the minimum wage staying exactly where it has been for the last 2 years, while the cost of everything from food to school to gas goes up exponentially. What we are doing here, piece by piece, is really restoring that American dream, that idea your kids might be able to do better than you, that your grandkids are going to live in a world with a greater quality of life than you were able to live in. The first 100 hours were about doing that, and, as I know you both have remarked, doing it in a bipartisan way, doing it in a way in which the votes that came before in the first 2 weeks drew an average of 60 Republican votes. As Mr. Meek was saying as I walked into the Chamber, I think the President tonight will find a very receptive Democratic side of the aisle if he seeks to embrace that same type of middle-class/working- class agenda that we have made really the central feature of this place for the last 2 weeks. Mr. Ryan, if I might, I wanted to talk just for a moment about health care, because we are going to hear something from the President that, unfortunately, we have heard for the last several years. We have heard that the President wants to focus on the rising costs of health care, the trouble that middle-class families are finding in trying to find insurance. It is about time on the issue of health care that this administration starts to meet words with action. We have seen a lot of verbal compassion, but we haven't seen a lot of meaningful reform from this administration, as the profits being made by those who would make money off of this health care system are in record numbers today. We are seeing on the other side record numbers of families falling into the ranks the uninsured. Tonight we are going to hear a proposal that will essentially lop off families who are receiving good insurance and put them into the ranks of those families that have very bad insurance or are underinsured. Essentially the President is going to propose tonight to make health care cheaper and worse, whereas the Democrats, we know we can find a way to make health care cheaper and better. I simply look forward, Mr. Ryan, to engaging the President on that debate and trying to convert he and his administration to the new-found wisdom we found in this Chamber to put middle-class families rather than those lobbyists and corporate interests first.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank Mr. Meek. There are already reports that the words we may get tonight are going to give a little short shrift to the issue of Iraq. If the President wants to put forth a plan that is so unpopular that it is not backed by his own military leaders, it is not backed by our civilian foreign policy expert, it is not backed by the American public, well, then he should also have the courage to talk about it, to defend it, to put it before us. But knowing that it is unpopular, we may not hear too much about it tonight. To get back to, Mr. Meek, your point on health care, let us be honest about what is going to be proposed tonight, how we are going to save money on health care. It is not by investing more in prevention; it is not by moving people out of emergency rooms and putting them into real programs and care. It is taking people who have good insurance and making their good insurance bad insurance. It is going out and taking folks who have had the great benefit of working for an employer that provides a comprehensive package of benefits, and it is becoming less and less likely these days that even good employers out there can afford to give a robust package of benefits. What the President is going to propose today is that for families that have had the good fortune to find a good insurance plan, they are going to tax that employer. They are going to make it less likely that you are going to get good insurance anymore. So we are going to get a proposal today which is going to actually result in worse health care for a lot of families. I guess the point here is that, you know, again, if we are going to listen to the words that come from this administration, we heard in last year's State of the Union that we need to confront the rising cost of care, strengthen the doctor/patient relationship and help people afford the insurance coverage we need, if we want to talk about that, then we need to do something about that. And how we do something about that is not by taking the haves and putting them into the column of the have-nots. It is by keeping the haves where they are on health care and taking the have-nots and giving them that same level of health care. We can absolutely do that without adding cost to the system, because those have-nots, as Mr. Ryan said, end up getting care. They just end up getting the most expensive, the most unfortunate type of care, that being crisis care. We can do a better job on that. And, Mr. Meek, as you said, we can make sure that we continue to have that discussion on Iraq, which may be missing tonight.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Ryan, thank you for yielding, and I think you are right, this is kitchen-table type of stuff we are doing now, and I think you are absolutely right, this is going to affect the lives of all the people in our districts. I would go one step further. Before I came down here, I had the chance to go to my friend Adam Garner's elementary class at Highland Elementary in Cheshire, Connecticut, in my home town. And I looked at those kids, and we had about 50 kids in that place, and I thought about what their impression is of Congress, what they think happens in this place. And all they see and all they have read about for the last 10 or 12 years is bickering between the two sides. All they have seen is special interests and lobbyists giving untold millions to campaigns and having their business be brought before the House of Representatives. So I thought, what kind of world are they going to grow up in, in which they think their government is for sale, where they think their leaders care more about arguing with each other than getting work done. And you are exactly right, Mr. Ryan, this is going to mean money on the table for people who have very little to work with. This is going to mean a better quality of life for families. I think of my little friend, Adam Garner, and his friends in Cheshire, Connecticut, and what this says to them about their faith in government. That is what, in the end, is our greatest legacy. Not just the fact we raised the minimum wage and not just the fact a few more kids get to go to college, but what we are doing here, and I think you are very right in this historic moment, is in some small way about restoring faith in the process of government. The hundred hours is so brilliant because not only does it mean real, tangible results for people, but it means, I think, as Ms. Clarke said, a paradigm shift, a paradigm shift that will be noticed by people who pay attention and watch C-SPAN late at night, but might also be noticed by those little kids who haven't thought much of their government over time. I think the 30 Somethings being on this floor trying to expose what has become of this place, Mr. Meek, has been part of that healing process.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan, and let me just add my thanks not only for allowing us to come down and join you this evening, but for everything you have done over the past 4 years, in particular over the past 2 years, to help us get here and be part of this healing process, which I think this week and a half has been. You will hear some acrimony from the other side, but when you look at the votes, as Mr. Meek ran through, in the end, there is a lot of healing that happens here because we are working on things that benefit both sides. I tell you, all of us new Members, and there are 50-some odd new Members, we all may have certain different issues that were accentuated to a greater or lesser degree in our races, but we have found in talking to each other these first few days that what binds us is the sense our constituents sent us here to get this place working again, get it working again for the right people. I know from our side of the aisle we will do that with whoever it is. If you are liberal, conservative, Democrat, or Republican, we want to make this a place where we work together again. That is maybe why that sense of euphoria in my district that I talked about in the beginning is maybe due in part to the issues, to the substance that has happened here; but in part it is due to the sense they have that this place is back at work in a way that it hasn't been. So I am just so grateful for what Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek have been able to do for everyone, us and all of our constituents, over the past 4 years, and grateful to have a few moments. I yield to my friend from New York.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I am coming off of my first weekend back in the district after having spent a glorious first 1\1/2\ weeks down here getting sworn in and starting to work the 100-hour agenda. And people back in Connecticut are just so enraptured by the idea they have their House back, they have their House back in their hands. You talk about the bill we are going to vote on tomorrow. Last summer, as those oil prices and gas prices rose through the roof and people started to make those terrible decisions about whether they were going to afford to pay for their family's basic needs or they were going to fill up their tank, they looked at their government which was giving away more and more tax breaks to oil companies, allowing these excessive royalties to go on in the Gulf Coast, and they just wondered who was in charge down here. They wondered who was in charge. And that went for student loans as well, as they were crying out, clamoring for more assistance to try to get their kids to school, as students were asking, ``I need just a little more help to finish this degree.'' Congress said the opposite. In fact made it harder for them to get that degree by raising student loan interest rates. There was just this sense out there, almost a sense of disbelief, and you all felt it I know as well that we had lost control of the people's House here. And what I felt when I was back in the district this week was just a sense of euphoria, that the people's agenda, just regular middle class families' agenda was finally being heard in this place. And you are very right, Mr. Ryan, when you said that it certainly doesn't end with the 100 hours agenda. This is just a preview of whose priorities are going to be heard here, and it is an exciting place to be.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I think one of the things that makes a lot of what we are doing attractive, we are not just talking about pay-as- you-go, as Mr. Meek stated, we are doing it in almost every piece of legislation that has been brought forward. Today, for example, the reason we saw such support for the student loan interest rate is because that program was paid for with efficiencies within that program. That is at no cost to the American taxpayers. Tomorrow, when we go forward on our new energy policy, that is not even going to be PAYGO, that is going to be pay-it-forward. We are actually going to take the savings from all of the programmatic changes that Mr. Ryan talked about and we are going to put it into a fund, a strategic investment fund, that we are going to be able to use down the line as we start to change our energy policy towards renewable and alternative energy. We are exercising on a daily basis that kind of fiscal restraint that was lost for so long here, and I think that is why you see a real coming together of people in this Chamber, and why people were so excited back in our districts. Not only do they see things that are helping average families, on education, on energy policy, but they are seeing it done in a really fiscally sound way. And tomorrow we will continue to do that by taking that money that we are going to save through repealing those tax breaks and repealing those very bad royalty policies and putting it into a fund that we can then use to promote clean energy and use to promote conservation, all of the things that have been so dearly lacking in this country for a very long time. We are doing the right things, and we are doing them in a way that, as Mr. Meek has talked about so often, are true to the fiscal restraint that really should be the hallmark of this Congress.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, to Mr. Meek and to Mr. Ryan, I am very pleased to be standing in the normal place of Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I know that because as a candidate for office and as a student of American politics I have had the honor of watching you stand here and really speak for the American people, for the last 4 years in your case, Mr. Meek, and for the three of you, for the last 2 years. I have been able to serve in the State legislature and now obviously have just a unique opportunity to be here and advocate on behalf of those people with all of you. If I could start by saying a tremendous and unconditional thank-you to what you have been able to do. Those of us in the political world and nonpolitical world sometimes do not get to turn on the TV until late at night. I will tell you, and speaking especially for a lot of the younger people in the State that I am from, Connecticut, who are interested in this process either as their profession or simply as an interested American, the work that you have done in talking about the agenda that was so badly needed, that was reaffirmed by the American people this November, made a difference, made a difference for me. I think I stole a lot of your lines over the course of my work this last fall. So let me just say, by means of introduction, that it is a privilege to be able the stand here with you as a new member of the 30 Something Caucus. There are a few of us that came down here, and I think that speaks to the agenda that you have put forth that said the American people need change. We need change. We especially heard it in our generation those of us who are looking at not just the next 10 years, but the next 20, 30, 40 years and want to make sure that things are happening here in Washington, D.C., whether they be on the 100-hours agenda or whatever we do for the next 2 years is looking to the future of our children and grandchildren, and that's what the 30 Somethings have been all about.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank my good friend from California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 4. The average guy out there doesn't ordinarily pay much attention to the minute details of Federal prescription drug law. You have to screw up pretty bad to create a grassroots movement centered around a one- line sentence buried deep in the depths of the Medicare Act, but that is exactly what happened here. For those of us who are coming here anew, we have spent the last 2 years talking to our seniors and our taxpayers about the horrors of this bill. As the cost of this program skyrocketed, as premiums increased, as the donut hole expanded, seniors suffered and drug companies prospered. And guess what? The American people started to notice that little sentence buried deep in that Medicare Act that seemed so out of place and so unnecessary. My presence here today is a living example of this popular discontent which those on the other side of the aisle seem so eager to ignore. And even if this bill doesn't fix that Medicare drug program overnight, it is an unmistakable signal to the people that I represent back home that this House is no longer a place where industry can profit off of a desperately needed social program; it is a place now where common sense comes first.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank the gentlewoman from Colorado. Mr. Speaker, if I could just tell one story about a small State in the northeast, Connecticut, a place where we made 2 years ago a historic $100 million investment in stem cell research. And there will be others that will speak much more ably about the moral and ethical and scientific rationales for the bill before us; let me talk about the practical rationales from our standpoint in Connecticut. Our success investing $10 million a year in stem cell research was a bittersweet one, because it was only made necessary by the failure of the Federal Government to act on this question. We responded to the cries of thousands of families throughout Connecticut that wanted us to give them not only hope but tangible support when it came to researching cures and treatments for the diseases that afflicted their family members. The problem being that, because of the Federal prohibition on the use of Federal funds for scientific research, Connecticut is now having to do back flips to find ways to invest our money. We are having to invest in bricks and mortar, invest in stealing sciences from other of the few remaining States that allow for State funding of stem cell research. This is a highly inefficient means to spend the State of Connecticut's money, and one of the reasons that I was sent down to this august body was to make stem cell research, to make investment in scientific research, not a 50-State strategy, but to make it a national priority. We hear from people on the other side of the aisle, I think, a very wise caution that we shouldn't make promises today or throughout the debate that embryonic stem cell research will definitely lead to a cure of this disease or a treatment for that disease. But the point being here is that there are no promises, there are no guarantees, but that what our families wants is a removal of the ceiling that we have placed on scientific research in our States and our Federal institutions so that that hope may become a reality. From the citizens of Connecticut who have made great strides on this, as the author of that bill in the State of Connecticut, I am very proud, ten times prouder than I was to vote for it in the State of Connecticut, to vote for it today.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, today, we will have the chance to grant relief to millions of Americans toiling under an unjust minimum wage, but later this week we will also have the opportunity to grant relief to the millions of Americans who are suffering from debilitating and life-threatening diseases by passing the bipartisan Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. In Connecticut, I was proud to have overseen passage of the Nation's first law investing State funds in life-saving stem cell research. But our $100 million success story in Connecticut was a bittersweet one, since our effort was made necessary only by the Federal Government's failure to act. Mr. Speaker, I will be even prouder to join my colleagues on both sides of the aisle this week to support legislation that will buttress the hopes of millions of Americans with the tangible support and resources of their Federal Government, and I hope that this unprecedented show of support here in the people's House will give our President cause to reconsider his unfounded and unpopular decision to oppose this life-saving initiative.