John Olver

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, the Comptroller of the Currency's regulations, preemption regulations, are a huge expansion of that office's power. They exceed the OCC's congressionally-granted preemption authority. The rules effectively deny citizens the protections of their State's predatory lending and other consumer protection laws. The OCC claims that it can provide the consumers protection equal to that currently provided by State consumer protection agencies. However, replicating the functions of 50 State consumer protection agencies will require an enormous increase in their budget and power. Congress did not grant, in any understanding of mine, the OCC unlimited preemption authority so the OCC could preempt all State consumer laws applicable to the national banks and, thus, become a national consumer protection agency. Even supporters of this expansion should be concerned when such changes in policy are undertaken without the explicit consent of Congress. Expanding OCC's preemption authority should come only after a full debate and a vote by the people's representatives in this Congress, not by the agency's unilateral action. This amendment, which is a limitation amendment, a limitation on funds, is the only opportunity to have this debate. Since stand-alone legislation is not likely to be considered by Congress this year, despite the efforts of the opponents of OCC's preemption to work with the Committee on Financial Services to advance legislation dealing with this issue. Because it is a limitation amendment, while I agree with the chairman of my subcommittee that the issue ought to be taken up at the authorizing level, it is entirely appropriate to be brought up here as a limitation amendment by the gentleman from Illinois, and I support the amendment as a limitation amendment as entirely legitimate in controlling this abuse of power and this grab of power that, it seems to me, is not authorized by the legislation as it sits.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I think we now have reached a second level of ignominy at this point because here we are now into a whole second bill which has not been authorized. It has not been authorized. It is not a bill that is only 9 months or 11 months late of authorization, but rather the bill for the Federal Rail Administration and Amtrak is one that is a year and 11 months late at least, if not 2 years and 11 months late. So while earlier items which have been stricken by the points of order dealt with highway administration programs and obviously will also apply to FTA, Federal Transit Administration programs, and have already stricken the two major safety programs that I mentioned earlier in my opening remarks which had been already cut by the Committee on Appropriations to only 75 percent, cut from the President's request, a dollar figure had been cut 25 percent or giving them only 75 percent of the President's request, those highway safety programs have already been stricken from this legislation. That is also carried with the general highway administration T&I authorization. But here we are now in the Amtrak and highway administration bill. I just want to point out that this is an area where I intended to offer two different versions of an amendment to add funding.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I will defer my comments to a striking of the last word immediately after the Chair sustains this point of order.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I am going to express some of my frustration, and maybe then the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) will do the same. We have now stricken what was already an appropriation of $900 million which was the President's request, true, but which was already low by $300 million, lower than what each of the last 2 years had appropriated after the final operation of the Committee on Appropriations and the conference committee reports for the operation of Amtrak. It is silly to think they even could have operated within $900 million in this year without ending up in a shutdown situation, or without leaving us with an ever-worsening deferred maintenance problem. I want to use this time to point out that Amtrak is a hybrid program. It runs on 600 miles of the Northeast Corridor roughly, which is owned by Amtrak and is the direct responsibility of that governmental agency. That 600 miles of trackage takes more than half of all of the passengers that are being dealt with by Amtrak. Now that is the part that we have direct responsibility for. The rest of the Amtrak lines operate on some 20,000 other miles of trackage that is run by private freight carriers and Amtrak has contracts with them and has priority to use that trackage. But we do not have specific direct maintenance of those. We have the responsibility of making certain that on the 600 miles the use of that track and that commutation that is involved will be safe, and we have some responsibility to make certain that the maintenance of that trackage does provide safety for the people who are using it. Now Congress has said several times by appropriating, has said, keep the national rail system open; and Congress has not suggested that any particular lines are supposed to be cut out even though they are not profitable or ever may be profitable. We are waiting for an authorization; there is no authorization. But the use of Amtrak remains, and it is an exceptionally important use which moves a very large number of people, 20 million people or thereabouts, on the northeast line itself. Furthermore, we have now eliminated by points of order that one thing that many people think is a wonderful idea for the future, namely high- speed rail. High-speed rail was already reduced by two-thirds from last year's appropriation, more than two-thirds; but it also now has been stricken and is not authorized either. So high-speed rail, which is a process used in various parts of the world, in Japan, Europe, running 120 to 150 miles an hour, where one moves large numbers of people for relatively short distances between large metropolitan areas, manages to move people that otherwise would have to be in the air, and it is done that way much more efficiently. Now we take out that possibility as well in the motions that have occurred. Mr. Chairman, the Congress has appropriated $1.3 billion in the year 2003, $1.2 billion in the year 2004, an average of $1.1 billion over each of the last 5 years, some of which came under authorizations that were in effect, but the last two of which apparently occurred after there was no authorization, but we managed to get the job done; and the important thing is that we managed to get the job done. Even at the level of funding that Amtrak was appropriated for over the last couple of years, they cannot provide for the critical capital investments that are particularly needed on the Northeast Corridor where we are directly responsible for the maintenance and for the safety of the people who are using that program. Mr. Chairman, I think it is well understood at this point that we should be appropriating at least what has been out there for the last couple of years, or we are not doing the duty that we have to the passengers who are using that system at the present time.

Mr. OLVER. Page 70, line 3?

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to point out to the chairman that in every place, in every metropolitan area, at least that I know of in this country, that has commuter rail, those commuter rail systems are subsidized. None of them operate on a profitable basis. So the real unreality here has been always the concept that Amtrak, that our passenger rail system could operate and would operate on a profitable basis. There has been no passenger rail system that has been run in any industrialized country anywhere in the world that has operated on a profitable basis. The rest of the unreality here is that at the same time that we are saying they should do that while leaving Amtrak with the mandate of providing a national rail system with routes which have been designated and mandated by the Congress and then blaming them for not being able to do this in a profitable way, the ultimate unreality, it seems to me, is what we started in the direction of high speed rail where we have created 10 corridors, hopefully in the belief that there may be some way of providing high-speed rail, which is extremely costly in its infrastructure development in the first place, in its capital cost, that that can possibly be done; and I do not disagree with the chairman that there are things that probably ought to be done in dealing with a rail system and in trying to make them more efficient. We are being totally unrealistic, but we still have a very large number of commuters who are using the system as we have it, and this Congress has not managed to pass an authorization suggesting how it is otherwise to be done. So we still have the problem; we still have people who are operating every day in an ever less safe manner because we are funding as low as we are and here we have stricken the money from the legislation. The unreality here is monumental.

Mr. OLVER. I yield to the gentleman from Oregon.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and to the Members of this body, we had a request from the President for $64.5 million for FinCEN. In the chairman's mark at the subcommittee level, the number that the chairman gave for this agency was $59 or $60 million, exactly $60 million. I urged, and persuaded actually, I think, the chairman to raise that to the President's request, to $64.5 million, because I felt this was a very important agency. It is a front-line agency of the Department of the Treasury for fighting financial crimes and getting at terrorist networks. Now, the President has never been very shy about asking for large sums of money increases if he really thought that those were necessary. He has asked for some other agencies within this legislation for at least a 50 percent increase in the monies. The amendment that the gentlewoman from New York has now offered has grown since I first heard about it earlier this evening from about $8 million, which I probably would not have bothered to stand up for, but now it is $25 million, on top of what is already the President's full request for this agency. There has been no information given to me, as the ranking member, from any of the people who are saying this is an important thing to do that we need this kind of an increase. I am not quite sure that any agency is able to take a 60 percent increase all at once in an effective kind of a way. I would think it would be much better that we try to work this out in conference and see whether in fact the President's Office of Budget, and so forth, thinks that this is what we ought to be doing at this time. So at this point, Mr. Chairman, I am going to oppose and vote against the amendment as it has been proposed, as best I understand it, because I have heard no real evidence for how this would be done. No one has come to me as the ranking member to defend this kind of an increase in the amount for this agency.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I want to point out, as I did in my earlier comments in the opening statement, that the IRS tax enforcement program has been underfunded by $286 million compared with the President's recommendation. Mr. Chairman, the tax law enforcement program is an exceedingly important program. The President has requested $286 million more than the bill before us provides, and the Commissioner of the IRS has given us sworn testimony that the proper use of that money would afford us at least a 6-to-1 margin on revenue gained for the use of the $286 million. Now, in fact, in my discussion with the IRS Commissioner, he has made it clear to me that that is an average over all of the administrative uses of the tax law enforcement program; and that, at least, if one were to use that in some areas of enforcement, that one might be able to get as much as a 15- or 20-to-1 return for the amount of money; but that in the process of trying to organize an orderly program for the enforcement, that you try to balance that program, as we have been talking about a balanced transportation program, and only enforce very hard in one area or another; but that it is possible in some areas to mix what would be enforcement gains of as much as 15- or 20-to-1 with other places, so that we really ought to put some effort into where the gain may be only 2- or 3- or 4-to-1 and end up with an average in the range of approximately 6-to-1. Now, with that money, the revenue gained by the use of such enforcement monies, which the President requested, of just under $300 million, then we have an opportunity to gain $2 billion of revenue, which can be used in a variety of ways: to cut the debt; to take care of problems such as we have in this bill even before the charade of all of the points of order that have been added here or have been taken here; or for what I originally called the most serious problems of lack of funding for things like transit new-starts for Amtrak and other things in the Highway Safety Administration. Besides that, one has to think of exactly where this money is coming from. The Commissioner of the IRS points out that there is at least $300 billion every year of money which is owed under the law to the Government, which is not collected, which is evaded, in essence, evaded. And every time there is that kind of evasion, since that is roughly $1 of $6 or $7 of tax revenue that the whole Government raises, that when that happens, that people, honest people who have paid their taxes, as they ought to, in what is basically a voluntary system that we have, when those people pay their taxes, then the six out of seven or so that do pay the taxes that are owed under the law end up subsidizing the one out of seven that is evading the taxes and not paying any. So those people, that six out of seven, have to put in a sum of money which is 10 percent higher or 15 percent higher by the rate in order to make up for those who are not paying taxes at all.

Mr. OLVER. Well, Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to return to page 68, line 16.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the gentleman from Oklahoma (Chairman Istook) for working so hard to get this bill to the floor. I suspect from the comments the gentleman has made and what I know about what is likely to go forward today, he is going to be working even harder to keep this bill moving in the days ahead. I would also like to thank the staff on both sides of the aisle for their work on the bill: On the minority side, Mike Malone and Bob Bonner from our appropriations staff; and on the majority side, Rich Efford, Cheryle Tucker, Leigha Shaw, and Kurt Dodd. I may be missing somebody, but at least those for the majority. This bill has become more complex than any of us thought it would, and I appreciate all of their efforts and all of the efforts that they will be asked to make. As Members know, the Congress has not adopted a budget resolution for fiscal year 2005. Instead, the deemed resolution under which the House is operating and which placed tax cuts number one among all priorities, resulted in a severely constrained 302(b) allocation for this subcommittee, along with several other subcommittees of the Committee on Appropriations. I give credit to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Istook) to distribute the pain broadly, if not totally evenly, and for making significant adjustments during the subcommittee and full committee deliberations, particularly in regard to hiring additional air traffic controllers in anticipation of the impending wave of controller retirements which everyone except the Department of Transportation seems to know is coming, and in regard to better funding the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, one of the Treasury Department's front lines against terrorism, yet the subcommittee's abysmal allocation precluded us from fixing several more serious problems with the bill. On the transportation side, Mr. Chairman, every major account in the Department of Transportation is underfunded. The bill only provides $900 million for Amtrak, which I would say parenthetically, to parse the chairman's words, is another program of which he is not particularly fond. At this level there should be no surprise next spring when Amtrak must curtail services. And furthermore, as critical maintenance is further deferred, we risk serious to catastrophic accidents on the very trackage for which Congress has direct responsibility in our budgetary process. Transit programs are also underfunded. The new starts transit account is $300 million below the President's request. There are so many new urban areas growing in this country, areas that are rising in population at substantially larger than the average population increase year by year in this country where it is becoming totally unthinkable to simply add additional lanes of highways and where more and more of them are thinking about how to use bus transit, rail transit, various kinds of programs, under the transit administration; and the new starts transit account is $300 million below the President's request to deal with those needs. The FAA's operations account is well below the President's fiscal year 2005 request and the FAA facilities and equipment account is nearly $400 million below the fiscal year 2004 enacted level. The two highway safety agencies, the Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, taken together, are cut by 25 percent below the President's request. Those are two major highway safety programs. They are not terribly large, but they are cut from the President's request by 25 percent, one much higher than the other. Even the Federal Highway Administration, which is up 1.5 percent from the enacted fiscal year 2004 budget, is underfunded because 1.5 percent is well below the standard overall inflation rate. Fifteen percent of our whole economy comes from the transportation industry, broadly taken, and the chairman has already pointed out that construction in transportation infrastructure produces, he used the number 40,000 jobs per $1 billion. My understanding is that the Department of Transportation typically uses 45,000 jobs per $1 billion of construction, but we do not need to quibble about that. I will accept his number and he probably would accept my number as being in the ballpark. So that moneys in the transportation budget and in the Federal highway budget, particularly vitally important for infrastructure improvements all over the country, construction in every mode of transportation costs more every year as the population and congestion increase. I do not understand what the benefit is to us as individuals in our districts and to the people of America in general cutting below inflation, at least below inflation and in some cases far beyond below inflation, of programs in the transportation area. On the Treasury portion of this budget, the IRS tax law enforcement account is $286 million below the President's request and nearly half a billion dollars below what the IRS oversight board says is needed to properly enforce tax laws in fiscal year 2005. Since we have had sworn testimony that moneys expended properly on tax law enforcement brings in on average a six-to-one return, thereby the proper use of $286 million would bring in nearly $2 billion of additional revenue. In effect, we are giving tax cuts to tax cheaters by not fully funding the tax law enforcement request that the President made. Secondly, on the Treasury portion, language is included that bars the use of matricula consular identification cards, language which is harmful to homeland security and the Department of Treasury's fight against terrorist financing. I am hopeful that that language will be taken out of this bill before it becomes law. On the floor today and in conference, I hope we will be able to rectify these problems and have strong bipartisan support for the end product that we hope to produce as expeditiously as possible. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt).

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I would like to clarify on the point that the gentleman just made and the example that you just used, that the authorization bill on T&I highway programs has an extension. As of the moment, it is an extension to September 24. If there is not a full bill, authorization bill that has passed by then, there will be another extension into the next fiscal year. And the irony is that we would then be operating within the authorization of the extension into the next fiscal year in what we would be doing.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I am sorry to raise this, but there are apparently different versions, different copies floating around, and I would like to know, if I could, what is it that has now been stricken?

Mr. OLVER. All right. I thank the Chair very much, because my recollection was that one of the Members on the other side was reading from a different section at one point, and the words did not correspond to what is in that section, so I got a little confused.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. If I understand, Mr. Chairman, the argument that was used, the reasoning that was used by the chairman and then the correction that was made by the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson), it would appear to me that using the gentleman from Oklahoma's (Mr. Istook) argument, that this language should be stricken from the bill because the area involved is in the district of the member from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson). So I would support the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) in his position.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Vermont for bringing forth this very, very important amendment. Tens of millions of families in America are in for bad news this winter when they get their heating bills in the mail. According to the Energy Information Administration, the prices of heating oil and natural gas are expected to skyrocket. The EIA predicts that compared to the winter of just 4 years ago, the price of natural gas will be 55 percent higher and the price of heating oil will be 45 percent higher this winter. Now, these increased costs could not come at a worse time. According to our Census Bureau, since 2001, when President Bush took office, the number of people living in poverty has increased by 4.3 million, and the median family income has dropped by over $1,500. The median family is the exact mid-point among our roughly 100 million American families, and all families with income below that median family's income have lost income. Families are already struggling to pay high and rising gasoline and health care costs. So the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the LIHEAP program, is the primary program that provides assistance to help lower-income families pay their energy bills. There has been no time when more people are going to need LIHEAP assistance than now. This amendment would provide modest, but important, relief to thousands of these families by increasing funding for the LIHEAP and Weatherization Assistance Program by about $22 million. The increase proposed by this amendment would still leave that LIHEAP account $42 million below the President's request. Mr. Chairman, not one family should go without heat this winter, and not one senior citizen should have to choose between heating their home and purchasing their prescription drugs. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this important amendment when it comes up later.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support H. Con. Res. 467. We have a moral and ethical responsibility to stand up today and declare the situation in Darfur genocide. At the very time that an historic peace was being brokered to settle the north-south civil war in the Sudan, the Sudanese Government was financing and arming a Muslim Arab militia, the Janjaweed, who used those funds and arms to terrorize the Muslim, but not Arab, population of Darfur. Recently, humanitarian groups have uncovered documents which showed the Sudanese Government supplied the militia with soldiers who were promised government impunity. By aligning with the government, the Janjaweed has managed to avoid widespread condemnation. Whether by direct slaughter or starvation, the Janjaweed will have caused the death of 300,000 people by the end of this year without effective counteraction. Sudanese leaders have restricted international media access to Darfur, thus allowing the Janjaweed to carry out their scorched earth tactics undeterred. While crops are destroyed and villages are razed, the non-Arab Muslim population has been forced to abandon the countryside which sustained them and gather in internment camps near the large towns to live in squalor, or flee to refugee camps in neighboring Chad, which is too poor to provide assistance. Survivors of the Janjaweed's campaign paint a horrifying picture. Women and girls are systematically raped and left to die, and thousands are marched to their deaths, while the Sudanese Government denies the survivors humanitarian aid, shelter, drinking water, and food. The Sudanese Government is culpable in crimes against humanity in Darfur. With this resolution, Congress declares genocide in Sudan and demands that the Sudanese Government, the United Nations, and all concerned stop the genocide in Darfur before the crisis there worsens and engulfs the entire region in conflict. I urge Members to support the legislation.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Flake, Davis, Emerson, Delahunt amendment. The Bush Administration recently announced a series of measures that tighten restrictions on travel to Cuba, and further limit the items that Cuban-Americans can send to their relatives on the island. Mr. Chairman, it is inhumane and un-American to prevent Cuban- Americans from sending clothing and personal hygiene items to their relatives in Cuba. These restrictions deny the rights of Americans to help their families in Cuba who rely on packages from the United States to provide things that they cannot get at home. Ironically, like the ongoing travel ban and embarge, these restrictions will do little to harm the Castro regime. Our Cuba policy should not be built on punishing families and limiting the rights of Americans. We should support more family contact between Cubans and Americans and endorse a strategy of engagement. These latest restrictions may have some electoral impact in Florida, but 40 years of failure prove they will not loosen Fidel Castro's grip on power. We should reject these new restrictions and vote for this amendment.

Mr. OLVER

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me, and Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this bipartisan amendment which the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) has offered to restore funding for the Small Business Administration's microloan program, and I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia (Chairman Wolf) and the gentleman from New York (Ranking Member Serrano) and both of their staffs for their good work in bringing the amendment to the floor. The SBA microloan program began as a 5-year pilot in 1991; and throughout its existence, the program has had strong bipartisan support in both Chambers. The Small Business Programs Reauthorization Amendments Act of 1997 made the microloan pilot a permanent program, and the accompanying House report in 1997 stated: ``Begun in 1991, this program has served the smallest and often least noticed section of the small business community. The committee has recognized the efficacy of this program and changed it from demonstration to permanent program status.'' Today, 170 microloan intermediary lenders nationwide provide loans to our smallest businesses whose financial needs can often not be met by traditional lenders. Since its creation, the program has provided $213 million in loans, as well as technical assistance to 19,000 microenterprises; and in the process, it has created 60,000 jobs. We should remember that the average loan here is about $12,000, well below other SBA programs and far below conventional business loans by banks. Most importantly, microloans have assisted large numbers of women- and minority-owned businesses, rural businesses and start-up businesses. The microloan program is the only SBA program to offer both loans and technical assistance to small businesses, a combination that enables an entrepreneur with a good idea to become a businessperson with a good bottom line. In my district, one intermediary, the Western Massachusetts Enterprise Fund, has made 113 loans totaling over $1.4 million, and that program has made a difference for many entrepreneurs, providing the financing and technical assistance necessary to launch or expand their businesses. If we fail to restore funding for the microloan program, we will hamper the efforts of small entrepreneurs nationwide. Small businesses bring innovative ideas to market and create much-needed jobs. I urge a ``yea'' vote on the Wolf-Serrano amendment.