Collin Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I want to say to my good friend, Mr. Goodlatte, that I appreciate his support for this measure. And what we're trying to do in our committee is to develop a consensus as we move through this issue. And there are a lot of ideas, a lot of different opinions out there, a lot of bills that have been introduced. This is a step that we can make today I think on a basis where we can come together and make sure that the CFTC is using the powers that they have to examine this market and make sure that the speculation, the extra money that's coming in is being done properly and is not affecting these markets in a way that is not appropriate. And I trust that they will do that job. But moving forward, what we intend to do, as I said earlier, as soon as we come back here from the July recess, our committee will convene on Wednesday after we come back and we will examine all of the bills that have been introduced or are introduced in the meantime. And we will have a debate on all the different aspects and all the different positions. And what we will try to do on that committee is to sort through all of this and hopefully come to a consensus about what is the appropriate way for us to move ahead. These are very complicated markets and issues, and I want to make sure that whatever we do is the appropriate response, and as somebody said earlier, we don't have unintended consequences because of the actions that we take here. So I look forward to working with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle with my colleagues on this side of the aisle to find a consensus that can have bipartisan support like we achieved on the farm bill to move something ahead that makes sense for the American people and gets the right answer. With that, I urge adoption of the bill.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I'm now pleased to yield 1 minute to my good friend from Vermont (Mr. Welch).

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6377) to direct the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to utilize all its authority, including its emergency powers, to curb immediately the role of excessive speculation in any contract market within the jurisdiction and control of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on or through which energy futures or swaps are traded, and to eliminate excessive speculation, price distortion, sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in prices, or other unlawful activity that is causing major market disturbances that prevent the market from accurately reflecting the forces of supply and demand for energy commodities.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I am pleased now to yield to the chairman of the subcommittee that has jurisdiction over this issue and has done outstanding work in leading his subcommittee to make sure we are on top of this issue, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), for 2 minutes. (Mr. ETHERIDGE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 6377 directs the CFTC to utilize all of its authority, including its emergency powers, to immediately curb the role of excessive speculation, if any, in the energy and swaps futures market within its jurisdiction, and to eliminate any unlawful activity causing major market disturbances that prevent the market from accurately reflecting the forces of supply and demand of energy commodities. Mr. Speaker, I don't think I would be covering any new ground in this Chamber if I were to speak about high prices of gasoline. Everybody in this chamber understands that problem. But, Mr. Speaker, a growing number of people believe a flood of speculative money into the energies futures is driving the increase in prices. The weak dollar and increased worldwide demand has led to a greater number of well capitalized investors into the commodities futures market, including the crude oil market, as these investors seek greater returns than they traditionally found in cash and securities. It is undeniable that this group of institutional investors has a greater presence in futures markets than ever before. So what we are doing here is asking the CFTC to look into this and use the powers that they have to look at this situation and determine and give us a report which they have done in the past. We are asking them to take one more look and make sure that these additional moneys that are coming into the futures market are not having any undo effect on prices that people are concerned about. The CFTC is the chief regulator of the commodities futures and options market. It is their responsibility to identify, pursue and prosecute fraud in this area. I believe they are doing a good job in that regard. Chairman Lukken and his staff have testified repeatedly before our committee and others that at this point they can see no evidence of speculation causing problems in these markets. But there are a lot of folks who are concerned this is going on, and so we are asking them to take one more look. Under current law, U.S. traders can execute transactions in West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which is the benchmark oil contract on NYMEX, a CFTC-regulated exchange, and on London's ICE exchange that is regulated by the United Kingdom's FSA. The CFTC, however, has information on the positions of traders on the NYMEX that they don't have on the traders on ICE, and this is part of the issue that has caused us to be concerned because we don't have complete information on exactly what is going on in all of these markets. Mr. Speaker, CFTC right now is taking steps to gain more information. They have gone into an agreement with the FSA to expand trader data, and that is all good and we welcome these steps, but we believe more should be done. CFTC should immediately take these steps to utilize their authority to make sure that, as I said before, there is not excessive speculation in these markets. We on the Agriculture Committee are going to work with the CFTC to try to acquire more information, and we will thoroughly examine all of the bills in July that have been introduced in this area in a methodical way, we will listen to all sides, and we are going to try to move ahead with a consensus bill if we can come to a consensus about what, if anything, should be done to move on this situation. Mr. Speaker, I am here today to, we hope, provide a reasonable and useful voice to come to the right conclusion and get the right answers about what is going on in the futures market and what is going on with oil prices in this country. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. At this moment we have no additional speakers, so I probably can move to close.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I would just take one additional small amount of time to thank my colleague and friend, Mr. Goodlatte, for the work that he did with me on this bill. As he said, this has been a bipartisan effort; had it not been, we wouldn't be here today. So I very much want to thank him and the other Members on his side of the aisle as well as the Members on our side of the aisle for all their hard work through this process. And also, I want to mention our staff, both my staff and the minority staff. The amount of time that they put into this bill has been extraordinary, the patience that they showed, having to sit in meetings and not make much progress for a lot of time is what you really want to see in public service. Our staff went above and beyond the call of duty. So, again, I thank all of my colleagues and urge my colleagues to vote to override the President's veto. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, for purposes of debate only, I yield 30 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte). Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I'm not going to take a lot of time because I think people have heard enough about this issue, and we apologize. I guess we have to be in this position, but what we're doing here today is overriding the veto hopefully for the final time on the farm bill because of the enrolling error that was made on the initial override or veto that happened a few weeks ago. At the time, we made a decision to move ahead. Even though the wrong bill was vetoed, we moved ahead to override that veto, which we prevailed on the floor here by a substantial margin. I think in retrospect that was a good idea because 14 titles of the farm bill have been law since then. We had a meeting this morning with the Secretary to talk about implementation. So the work has been going on within the department to get ready for implementation. We have gained a couple or 3 weeks in that process. Just a couple of days ago, the administration Secretary put out the loan rates and target prices for this crop year. So that process is moving along. What this bill does, the 14 titles are now law. The trade title was left out. What this bill does is reenact the entire 15 titles as they were passed by the original conference report and does it all as one complete whole. And in the bill, what it does, it vitiates the 14 titles that have been law for the last 3 weeks I guess, or so. It cleans up the technical problem that we had created by the enrolling office and puts into law what was intended by the conference committee. This is a good bill. It has wide support in the Congress, as we have seen by the number of votes that we've had here on the floor. It is not perfect, but it does address all of the issues that have been brought to the Agriculture Committee by the various different groups that have been interested in this piece of legislation, and I encourage my colleagues to override the veto. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Reclaiming my time, we made a decision at the time that we thought was appropriate, and that is that we had the 14 titles. They were passed in the same way between the House and the Senate.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, I rise to correct the record. This bill has had a long and tortuous path, and now, unfortunately, is the victim of an unintended clerical error, and I just need to set the record straight about what happened here. I notified Mr. Goodlatte, who I worked on this bill with on a bipartisan basis, as soon as I found him after I found out about this. We also talked to Mr. Blunt before the vote. So we had discussions on a bipartisan basis. This error, apparently what happened here is that there was a procedure that used to be in place where people would initial each page after they had done the enrollment on the parchment, but that was eliminated apparently 10 years ago when the Republicans were in charge, for whatever reason. So a mistake was made on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House vetoed a bill that was missing this title. We sent a bill down there that was missing this title. So that was the reality of what happened. I notified everybody before the override immediately about what the situation was. So that is what happened. Now, the way we came to the conclusion to move ahead with this was discussions with the Parliamentarian and others that this in fact was a bill that was vetoed that was passed in the identical form in both the House and the Senate. We had passed all 14 of those titles in the House that were vetoed. They passed them in the Senate in identical form. It was vetoed by the White House. There is a case from 1892, Field v. Clark, that was the exact same similar situation. It is very clear that they do not look beyond the parchment when they look at this veto. So the decision to move ahead was made on a bipartisan basis between Mr. Goodlatte and me.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. The idea at the time was that we would ask unanimous consent to move title III after the veto override so we could marry the bill back up. There was objection raised on that regard. So what we are doing now is a process to try to fix this. This is a clerical error. This is not anything that anybody has tried to cover up. I made this clear to everybody at the beginning of the process. Looking at this the next day, I think we made the right decision, because clearly the Senate is going to override the veto and the 14 titles that are overridden will become the law of the land. This is backed up by Field v. Clark. We have still got the issue to deal with on the trade title. We have a process set up to get that resolved. It is not a partisan issue. We are just trying to get this fixed. So you can disagree with the decision we made, and if you have a problem with it, I will take the blame. But at the time, we talked to the Parliamentarian, we discussed it among ourselves, and we decided this is the way to proceed.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I have a copy of the House- passed bill, and in our bill we had a countercyclical revenue assurance program that was a national trigger, as I said earlier. This is an idea that came about from the White House, and it is not something that is going to be given to people just automatically. This is reviewed as a reform and it was sold as a reform by the White House, and I was skeptical of it. But you have to give up 20 percent of your direct payments in order to get into this program. You have to lower your loan rate 30 percent. And this works not only going up, it works going down. So people are taking a risk by getting involved in this program as well as opportunity on the other side. So you can have your arguments about it, but this is something that we are trying out as an option. It is something we are going to see how it works between now and 2012. There are a lot of people, including the administration, that think that this is a better way to go than the current target priced countercyclical marketing loan situation that we have. We will see. I have been skeptical of it. But there are people in the Senate and other places that were thinking that this is a good reform. Now this idea that was just put forward by the minority leader that somehow or another this $287 billion goes to farmers, we have editorial writers saying the same thing around this country. The reality is that what actually goes to farmers under this bill is less than 9 percent of the bill, the traditional crop supports. 73.5 percent of the 10-year bill goes to nutrition. And if you add in crop insurance and the new disaster program, which is paid for, for the first time, you are up to about 15 percent of the total bill going to farmers. So this idea that $287 billion is going to farmers is not true. All of the new money in this bill is going to nutrition, going to conservation, going to fruits and vegetables, going to energy. The reality is that what is in this bill for farmers is less than it was in the old law. This bill is less than the total cost of the 2002 bill. This bill is less than what passed the House and the Senate. And this bill is exactly what we passed in the House, exactly what we passed in the Senate, and was sent to the President. What we are trying to do here today is fix this problem. I encourage my colleagues to support this bill, and let us get this farm bill finally resolved.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Okay. We will give the minority leader the opportunity to close. I will just make some brief comments, and then yield back my time. At this point I will reserve my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Does the gentleman have further speakers?

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, this is, as I said earlier, the exact bill that was voted on and passed by the House and the Senate. The gentleman is wrong. The provision that he is referring to was in both the House bill and the Senate bill, and it was also an original idea from the White House that was in their original farm proposal. So this is not some new program that came about in the conference committee. It was in the bill that passed the House, it was in the bill that passed the Senate, and it was in the President's bill that they proposed. In fact, this was a reform that was suggested by the White House and the administration. So you can make all kinds of outrageous assumptions and come up with outrageous charges, which has been done for some time on this bill. The idea that there is going to be anybody in this country that has $2.5 million of adjusted gross income and is going to be able to collect farm payments is complete lunacy. That is not true. And whatever people they have been able to get to score this to come up with these numbers, nobody can verify that. These are more charges that we have dealt with. This bill was filed on May 13. It has been available for everybody to read since May 13. It is exactly the same bill that has been out there all of this time. The error that was made was made by the Enrolling Clerk, not by this committee, and it is unfortunate. What we are trying to do here is fix the situation. I am not sure that we need to do what we are doing here. But to try to accommodate some concerns on the part of the minority and others that have raised issues, what we are doing here is re-passing the bill exactly the way that it passed the House and the Senate, the way that it should have gone to the President, so that we can move this bill out of the House, the Senate can deal with it, the President can veto it, we can override it, and in the provisions we will vitiate the work that has been done with the House and Senate overriding the veto of the current bill. It is a messy process. It is something we would just as soon not go through. But it is where we are at. We are trying to deal with fixing a clerical error that was caused by the Enrolling Clerk, and we think this is an appropriate way to do that. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. My staff worked through this and assured me this is the exact same bill that passed the House and Senate and was sent to the President.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6124) to provide for the continuation of agricultural and other programs of the Department of Agriculture through fiscal year 2012, and for other purposes.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. If the gentleman will yield, we had an optional ACRE in our bill that passed the House.