Jared Polis

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to allow for the consideration of legislation that would reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for 7 years. To discuss our proposal, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Maxine Waters), the distinguished ranking member on the Committee on Financial Services.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, today, I rise in opposition to the rule which, once again, deprives Members of this body the opportunity to debate amendments that will improve the underlying legislation. I rise in opposition to this body's misguided priorities. Again, the American people are seeing Congress rehash the same tired debates. How many references were there to people that were Speakers of this House, that were Senate majority leaders, to healthcare reform, which has already withstood several elections and is the law of the land? What we have before us today are two more bills that repeal part of the Affordable Care Act. We have now considered over 60 bills to repeal, defund, or dismantle the Affordable Care Act, rather than improve and build upon it. With all the work that remains to be done, we could be debating legislation to renew our expiring highway trust fund and repair our crumbling roads and bridges. We could take up legislation to renew the charter of the Import- Export Bank, and we will be offering that soon on the previous question. We could consider a bill to repair our broken immigration system or help the millions of Americans who are living below the poverty line, even though they work two jobs and it is increasingly hard to support their families; or we could take on the critical matter of climate change and confront the fact that it has contributed to one of the worst droughts in our Nation's history. But, oh, no, it is more important to have the 61st and 62nd repeal of parts of the Affordable Care Act, rather than move forward with a future-oriented agenda for the American people. Now, let's get into some of the specifics of the underlying legislation. The most recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office found that a total of 27 million people will gain access to healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act over the next 10 years, who otherwise would not have had coverage. That is to say nothing of the additional millions of Americans who benefit from the Affordable Care Act by having coverage for preexisting conditions for the first time in their lives, are no longer subject to lifetime caps that could leave them bankrupt if they get a serious illness, or people that are able to stay as young adults up to age 26 on their parents' plan. Constituents from all areas of my district have shared stories of their success using our State's health exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, and described how the Affordable Care Act's coverage provided by the ACA has improved their lives. I have heard from constituents like Morgan, from Nederland, Colorado, who used the exchange to enroll in the exact same plan she had before the Affordable Care Act, but her premiums decreased, and the services that were covered expanded--more value for her money. Or Donna, who recently moved to Boulder, Colorado--Donna is an outdoor enthusiast, like so many in my district, but was afraid to make her way to the mountains until she had secured healthcare coverage. Through Connect for Health Colorado and the premium tax credits she has access to under the Affordable Care Act, she is now enrolled in a comprehensive medical and dental plan that ensures she won't become bankrupt if she sustains an injury. These are far from isolated cases. In my home State of Colorado, 16.5 percent of people lacked health insurance before ACA. According to a recent study of the Kaiser Family Foundation, that figure has dropped to 9 percent by last year. The success is not limited to my State. According to a Gallup poll released in April, the percentage of Americans lacking health care nationwide has dropped by more than a third since the marketplace opened at the end of 2013, from 18 percent to under 12 percent. The Affordable Care Act is working; instead of continuing in that vein, once again, the Republican Congress is seeking to repeal various parts of that law, rather than move forward and improve it. The first of today's two bills, the so-called Protecting Seniors' Access to Medicare Act, doesn't protect anyone's access to anything. The Advisory Board it seeks to repeal, which has been vilified and completely mischaracterized in the past, is actually something far more mundane and important to the processes of Medicare. It is a board of advisers who make nonbinding recommendations to Congress about how we can reduce healthcare costs and strengthen Medicare solvency over the long term, without sacrificing the quality of care, something that all of us, as cost-conscious Members of Congress, should be interested in seeing. Now, we can debate all day the exact composition of the Board or which committees in Congress should have jurisdiction over its recommendations. Those are valid considerations--or, instead, we can discuss repealing the Board in its entirety, which is what we are talking about here today. This Advisory Board will provide critical advice to help Congress reduce the cost of providing health care. Now, interestingly enough, this amendment pays for the $7 billion cost of eliminating this Board by slashing nearly $9 billion in funding from the prevention and public health fund. This fund is used for vital preventative health programs, like childhood vaccines, helping people quit smoking, stroke prevention, and maternal wellness. The cornerstone of health savings is preventative medicine. In fact, I cosponsor a bill with my friend, Mr. Burgess, who is managing the bill on the other side, that would allow the Congressional Budget Office to account for the long-term savings of preventative health initiatives when it scores legislation. If Mr. Burgess' own bill were to become law, and I hope it does, it would show that the so-called way that we are paying for this repeal is illusory. Eliminating the preventative healthcare program actually can cost money in the long run. Under the congressional scoring model that we both support, it would likely not even register as a cost saving, or if it did, it would be much less than the $9 billion. The second bill being considered, the Protect Medical Innovation Act, aims to do something that many of us on both sides support, repealing the Affordable Care Act's excise tax on medical devices. The medical device tax is one of the measures originally included by the Senate in the Affordable Care Act to fund the badly needed consumer protections and benefits that form the core of the bill. Now, again, it is easy to support tax cuts. This body has put before us many, tax cut after tax cut after tax cut that are unfunded. The whole discussion about how you can afford to cut taxes is how you pay for it. What government waste do you cut? What other taxes or income do you use to offset the cost of these tax cuts? Of course, we don't want to slow the pace of progress with unnecessary costs and burdens, and we want to make sure that medical device manufacturers have every incentive to increase their research and development and not pass these costs along to consumers. Unfortunately, even though I, along with Alma Adams from North Carolina and Matt Cartwright from Pennsylvania, offered an amendment in the Rules Committee that would have paid for repealing the medical device tax using a commonsense approach that wouldn't suppress economic growth, our amendment was not allowed to even be discussed here on the floor of the House. Not only would our amendment to pay for the medical device repeal have avoided adding nearly $30 billion to our deficit, as this bill would do before us today, but it also would have helped bring balance to our Nation's energy sector by stopping the government from choosing winners and losers in energy and lessen our dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, under this rule, we don't get a vote or debate on the floor. We are left with two bad choices. We can, of course, leave in place a tax that many of us want to remove; or we can add $25 billion to our deficit. Neither of those are the right answers for the American people or for medical device companies or the consumers who use medical device products. The American people deserve better. If we defeat this rule, an open process will allow Republicans and Democrats to offer real, constructive, better ideas of how to improve upon these two pieces of legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to mark the 3-year anniversary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also called DACA. Roughly 800,000 DREAMers across the country are able to work and go to school because of DACA. All these aspiring Americans want is to be able to contribute meaningfully to our society, and DACA has given them a lifeline to do that. I want to mark this occasion by sharing two stories of DREAMers in my district whose lives DACA has transformed. Johana Mejias is a young woman who came to the U.S. from Venezuela. She grew up in Boulder and attended CU, where she was an exceptional student. During high school, she wasn't able to participate in leadership conferences because of difficulty traveling within the U.S., and after college her lack of status initially prevented her from sitting for the medical school exam and participating in medical internships. Luckily DACA provided relief for Johana, and I am proud to say that she is currently in medical school. Marco Dorado is another young man in my district who attended CU. Marco came to the U.S. when he was 2 years old. DACA has provided a lifeline to Marco, enabling him to attend college and earn a degree in finance. He also served in student government as a tri-executive and president of external affairs. DACA has been a catalyst for so many aspiring Americans, but only Congress can fix our broken immigration system. I call on us to do so.

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Did the gentleman invoke his point of order or reserve a point of order?

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, on behalf of a number of Western Representatives, I am proud to offer this bipartisan amendment, along with Mr. Coffman, Mr. Perlmutter, Mr. Schweikert, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Ms. McSally, and Ms. DeGette. As we know and as has often been mentioned here on the floor, transportation is the lifeblood of this country. It moves people, goods, ideas, and information. Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, and Broomfield, in my district, are some of the fastest growing cities in the country. The majority of our tourists--over 46 million in 2014--make their way through the Denver Metro area; but the very things that make our State a popular home as well as a popular tourist destination--including hiking, biking, hunting, fishing, skiing--challenge growth and infrastructure as well. Despite that fact that these cities are growing at significant rates and tourism is heavily congesting space, many of the major thoroughfares intersecting the region have not been expanded in decades. Highway 70 West, our major tourism artery to our world-class ski resorts, stretches from the Denver Metro area out to our 14,000-foot peaks. I-25 North takes our visitors north of Denver and through Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins, all the way to Wyoming. These two highways are effectively the only major arteries traveling north and west of Denver and the only option for residents and visitors to my district to even get out of Vail, Breckenridge, or Fort Collins; and in some places, these highways narrow to as little as two lanes, meaning hard-working constituents who commute every day across my district might wait for hours every day just to go back and forth. Tourists, likewise, spend long times waiting to get out of their destination towns or to their our attractions. Worse yet, Mr. Chairman, is a lack of a clear solution. You cannot simply expand a road that winds up some of the steepest peaks in the United States, and it is very costly to expand a tunnel under a large mountain. One of the only good options that we have for quick, reliable, and affordable mass public transportation is bus rapid transit systems. On Highway 36, our main artery from Boulder to Denver, we recently began operating a BRT system with huge success. This system shares a HOT lane with high-occupancy vehicles that allows for expedited and assured arrive times. It is used by hundreds of people every day for their commutes. That tool, however, was recently taken out of the toolbox for States across the West. A hugely problematic change to our surface transportation and authorization MAP-21 bill 3 years ago was the heavy restrictions placed on project eligibility for capital investment grants that build BRT systems nationwide. Unfortunately, for the first time in history, Congress required that BRT systems have access to an exclusive lane and operate as regularly during nonpeak weekday hours and weekends as they do during peak hours. That simply doesn't match the reality on the ground in places like Colorado and Arizona. Mr. Chairman, we need access to these grants. The ability to create and innovate in transportation should be encouraged by Congress; yet we are removing the very critical area of investment for BRTs under the current MAP-21 rule, barring them from BRT eligibility because we don't have the capacity to add additional lanes, nor does it make any sense to reserve a lane solely for bus traffic, nor does it make any sense in our commuter and tourism corridors to have buses every couple of minutes on, let's say, a Tuesday at 2 p.m. or on a Sunday at 9 p.m. Ridership and data should drive these decisions, not Washington bureaucrats and not Congress. My amendment would allow our States and localities the flexibility we need to create the best possible surface transportation system in our area. There simply isn't a one size fits all when it comes to growth and infrastructure. I encourage this body to take into account the needs of States like Colorado and Arizona. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, instead of giving top-down directives from Washington, we should be allowing for the equity of Federal resources and take into account local needs. What works for some transportation corridors might not work for others. We simply have different needs with regard to our computing patterns and tourism patterns in other areas of the country. I am proud to bring up this amendment with a strong bipartisan coalition of Members, which includes Representatives Coffman, Perlmutter, Schweikert, DeGette, McSally, and Kirkpatrick, because we can't effectively discuss funding levels like those in the underlying bill without first putting in place equitable policies that encourage innovation for their disbursement. I ask that my colleagues work with me and the coalition of Members I have named to find and enact a fix as we move forward with the transportation reauthorization later this summer. I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart) to see if he will be willing to work with us with regard to finding a fix on this policy issue.

Mr. POLIS. In reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw this amendment.

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, one of the areas we would love to work with you on is Cooperative Institutes funding, the partnerships that NOAA has with our institutions of higher education to better leverage our taxpayer dollars. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. I wanted to inquire with regard to how the funding cuts would impact the development of the unmanned atmospheric assessment aircrafts that are critical to foreseeing changes in weather pattern.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Brendan F. Boyle).

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, very specifically, this amendment would restore the $30 million of cuts--namely, a 20 percent cut--a disproportionate cut to climate science activities, including unmanned atmospheric assessment aircrafts and including creating raw data streams that can be used by those who predict weather, as well as by farmers and businesses, because you can't separate out weather and climate. I think, perhaps because of political reasons--I don't know why-- there is a disproportionate cut, 20 percent, to the climate science piece of NOAA. Now, that climate science piece of NOAA, just because it has the word ``climate'' in it, that doesn't mean it is something where they are out there doing things that are political. What they are doing is they are trying to research the macro effects of climate on weather, on population and patterns, on dangers on ships. If the gentleman would simply allow that discretion within NOAA, undo the 20 percent cut, we fund that within NOAA. We are not, nor can we, under the budget, seek new money. We are simply taking the $30 million and putting it back into the climate science program.

Mr. POLIS. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to several of the critical accounts in the bill that have been cut, which my amendment would address. The CJS Appropriations Act specifically targets funding for NOAA's climate research programs by $30 million over currently enacted levels, a program so important for farmers, for businesses, for air safety, for so many different reasons. That is a 20 percent cut to programs that are imperative to our Nation's ability and resilience in the face of climate threats. Twenty-five people were killed in the floods that saturated Texas last month. Damage from Hurricane Sandy was estimated at $700 billion back in 2012, and at least six people died in Boulder and Larimer County during the flooding that overtook my region in 2013. None of these places had ever seen storms like the ones they encountered over the last 5 years, and each were unprepared to handle it. NOAA and its partner institutions have made a huge dent in preventing disasters like these by keeping first responders, weather forecasters, businesses, communities, and families on the cutting edge of data predictability and resilience, providing quality raw data, as well as helping to develop new algorithms for interpreting existing data. Two of our partner institutions, CU and CSU, are located in my district in Colorado. Together with NOAA, these institutions are developing unmanned atmospheric assessment aircraft that allow us to foresee changes in weather patterns, incoming storms, days before we could otherwise, saving lives and saving property damage. These are very real tangible benefits that benefit all and protect Americans, regardless of whether one believes in climate change or what is causing it. I urge my colleagues to consider a world without these capabilities and what that would look like. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. POLIS. I would like to emphasize the importance of climate science with regard to predicting weather. The more we know about climate and climate patterns, the more it enhances our ability to predict short-term weather phenomena; therefore, a disproportionate cut to the climate science piece hampers our ability to anticipate weather patterns as well.

Mr. POLIS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), the coauthor of the amendment.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, by the way it has been talked about by some on the other side, to be clear, this amendment does not legalize marijuana. It simply ensures that the Federal Government doesn't waste its limited resources in prosecuting men and women who are acting in compliance with State and medical marijuana laws. That is all it does. It is very reasonable that States have enforcement priorities in this area, and we want our Federal resources geared towards crime that we view as more important. Have them go after the meth lab. Have them go after the heroin ring. Colorado has had legal medical marijuana for nearly a decade. Some in our State are for it; some are against it. It is our right as a State to determine that. That is why I support this amendment.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to inquire of the gentleman from Louisiana if he wants us to send Federal troops to Louisiana to stop them from eating fried crayfish. I am happy to yield for an answer.

Mr. POLIS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, I am from Colorado. I know Colorado inside and out, and we have been tremendously successful in reducing the abuse of marijuana among minors. Again, it shouldn't be up to us to convince him, just as I don't have to eat their darn fried crayfish--I don't want it. I don't want it. Get the Federal law enforcement apparatus to leave our State alone. That is all this amendment does, is respect the sovereign will of the people of my great State of Colorado to have innovative policies to reduce the abuse of marijuana.