Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. This reminds me of when a football team or a basketball team hires a new coach. They get a coach and usually give him a 5-year contract and give the coach a chance to go out and get their recruits and get them into the system. If you are not winning by the time you have your system in place and your players on your team or your draft picks on your team, by the fifth year, done. You go. Right? You had your chance. That is exactly what my friend from Massachusetts was saying: This Republican Congress has been in charge since 1994. The President has been in since 2000. The Senate is controlled by Republicans and has been for at least 10 years, with a brief period of Democratic control, barely. They have had a chance to make their implementations, put their policies into place, energy, immigration, taxes, whatever the case may be. It hasn't worked. It is time to get new coaches, time to get new players, time for a new draft. In November of 2006, we have a draft. What we are saying is here is our agenda. Here are the plays we are going to run, the innovation agenda, the energy agenda, the real security agenda. I can guarantee you, there is going to be nobody on the Democratic side when we take over this House in November of 2006 that you are going to be able to put in place of the President here holding hands with one of the most powerful oil leaders in the entire world, Mr. Meek.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And that will cost $10 billion just to pay for it.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Talk about a picture speaking a thousand words. Why do we have high gas prices? Why do we have the problems?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If I can make a comment, thinking about the war and where we are right now with the whole war situation, that was all done in secrecy. No one knew what was going on. The intelligence was screwed up. Look where we are now. The energy plan, secrecy, closed doors. You are not allowed in, and people even from these big companies were denying that they were even there, and then we find out from a White House document a week or so ago that they were there. All done in secrecy, the success of our democracy over the years.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. To the point where we did not know what the total cost was going to be.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Dr. Carol A. Cartwright, President of Kent State University. President Cartwright will be leaving from her position after serving the Kent State University for 15 notable years. President Cartwright's commitment to community outreach and economic development extends throughout northeastern Ohio. President Cartwright has a vision to work cooperatively with the surrounding communities to unite academic, public health, business, and community groups for common goals and betterment. One of the most impressive and lasting achievements of President Cartwright is Kent State's leadership in pulling together The North East Ohio Consortium for Biopreparedness, focusing on public health preparedness. The facility addresses health and safety issues through education, research and workforce development. Part of the center's overall mission is to educate the community on issues regarding public health hazards, infection control and bioterrorism preparedness. The Northeast Ohio Consortium for Biopreparedness is one of only two bio- safety laboratory training facilities in the United States recognized by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. President Cartwright's perseverance to advance biotechnology research has enabled the facility to address public health and protection concerns on a local, State and National scale. I would also like to commend President Cartwright for including the 910th Airlift Wing Command, University of Akron, Youngstown State University, Case Western Reserve, Summa Health Care System, North Eastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and various other organizations in the Consortium. President Cartwright has also strongly supported the Washington Program in National Issues, WPNI, which gives Kent State students a real-world appreciation for life and work in the Nation's capital. Each spring semester, Kent State sends 20 of its top students to intern on Capitol Hill, Federal agencies, associations and other organizations. In its 33rd year, the WPNI program is one to be envied by any other university in the country. Kent State University and all of northeastern Ohio has benefited enormously from President Cartwright's vision, commitment and leadership--and she will be greatly missed. In closing, I would like to congratulate President Cartwright on all of her astounding achievements during her 15 year tenure as President of Kent State University. I wish her the very best in all of her future endeavors.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. So many of our constituents rely on travel to make a living. And I was talking to a gentleman last night who worked for a lab, who was doing a lot of traveling between the labs. And he is charging 30, 40 bucks a day, and that is just the cost of doing business. And trucking, you know, people in the trucking industry are having a difficult time. But average people, as you said, just trying to make a living and get to work, are having a difficult time. I think this comes down to a couple of different issues, Madam Speaker. This comes down to leadership. And this comes down to, again, and I hate to say it, but the secretive way in which this administration and this Congress do business. And the leadership, the President, here we are talking about alternative energies. How long have we been talking about figuring out how we are going to find alternative energy sources and what we are going to do and everything else? But yet this Republican majority has not been able to come up with any kind of vision. And the really terrible part was when the President was here for the State of the Union and he said we are going to come up with an alternative energy program that will cut in half by 2025.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. To end our addiction to oil by 2025, if we get around to it, and it will only be in half. And there is not the urgency that I think our constituents are feeling right now. Let us do something. You have the ability as President, especially after 9/11. He could have marshaled our country and put us in another direction to say we want to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, we want to reduce the cost of gas, and we want to move in another direction. He could have done that because we were all ready to do whatever he wanted us to do. We would have walked to work. We would have rode bikes. We would have done whatever the President asked us to do. But he did not challenge us to do anything.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I have a Pontiac Vibe. You could not handle your kids in the little Vibe because I barely fit in the thing myself. I have to sit in the back seat and drive from the back seat so my legs fit all right. But, yes, exactly. It is that kind of lack of compassion, lack of understanding of what average people go through, a total disconnect; kind of like when the Vice President said a few years ago, conservation, that is a good personal virtue to have, but as a Nation it is not really a good policy. Wait a minute. It is not maybe the be-all, end-all, but it is a piece of this puzzle that we need to put together to figure out how we are going to do this. And I think it is important for us to share not only the costs that you have there, and I will let you show that, but then I want to talk a little bit about back to 2001 when this whole thing was concocted and all this was happening. So go ahead.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. ``Mission accomplished.''

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. When the average person hears that their tax dollars that they work hard to make and they send the Republican Congress down here to spend on Medicare and defense and all the other things, when they hear that $16 billion of that went to subsidize the oil companies when they have the highest profits that they have ever had, that is the outrage. And I think the American people are outraged. The Republican bobble-head Congress here who will say yes to whatever President Bush wants, I do not feel the outrage yet from them. And I think this is what our friend, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, said about the Republican Congress, that they are seen by the country as being in charge of a government that cannot function. This is what is happening here. When you have the leader of the Republican revolution that has turned into a devolution saying the government just cannot function, they do not know how to run the government, you are facing it every day at the pumps, Madam Speaker, and the American people are facing this every single day at the pumps. I want to talk just for a second, because I thought it was interesting that the President said with great enthusiasm that he wants to hold the oil companies accountable. So, Madam Speaker, I have a suggestion. Now, let me share some information with our colleagues here. We have heard a lot about this too. When they were trying to decide what they were going to do for the energy bills years ago in 2001, the Vice President was having meetings that no one knew about, and he was having them with the oil executives, which should not surprise anybody, figuring out that the President and the Vice President both came out of the oil industry. So what has recently happened is that a White House document came out that showed that executives, and this is a third-party validator, this is the Washingtonpost.com, a great newspaper here in town. The White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with the Vice President's energy task force in 2001, something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials. Now, here is what the document says, just so we can get into it. Because this sounds just like Katrina, this sounds just like the war, this sounds just like the Medicare bill, this sounds just like every piece of legislation that has come out of this Congress that the President has pushed. It has been done under a cloud of deceit, Madam Speaker, misleading statements to not only the United States Congress and Members of the United States Congress, but to the American people, Mr. Delahunt. But to the American people. And let me share, as recently as just last week, this document that came from the White House, obtained by the Washington Post, shows that officials from ExxonMobil, Conoco before its merger with Phillips, Shell Oil Company, and BP America, Incorporated, met in the White House complex with Cheney's aides who were developing a national energy policy, part of which became law. So you would think, well, the Vice President's staff is meeting with BP Oil executives. Last week in a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConcocoPhillips said their firms did not participate, Mr. Delahunt, in the 2001 task force. We have got somebody telling us a falsehood, someone misleading us. So if the President wants to hold the oil companies accountable, let me recommend, Madam Speaker, that people can be fined or imprisoned for up to 5 years for making ``any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to Congress.'' So everyone denied they had anything to do with this meeting in front of a Senate panel of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and they were there, and we have got all these gas prices and we are wondering about price gouging and everything else, Madam Speaker, and the oil companies are saying, well, we are not price gouging. Well, you know what? Maybe we just do not believe you, because you have a track record here of misleading statements, secrecy. And it hurts me to say that people in Youngstown, Ohio are forced to foot the bill here.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The constitutional amendment in 1994 was a part of the Contract with America.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I want to say that this government run by the Republican majority is in complete disarray.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Inexcusable incompetence, my friend. Inexcusable. If you look, and I do not want to dwell on this, but if you look at Katrina, if you look at the lack of preparedness in FEMA, if you see a storm coming 5 days in advance, and you have the complete lack of competency to deal with the problem, that is an issue that this Congress needs to look at and needs to fix. If you look at all the promises before the war, day in and day out, we are going to use the money for reconstruction, we are going to be greeted as liberators, this is going to reduce the costs of oil. All of these things that were promised never came to be. The Medicare prescription drug bill, the costs never came to be. It ended up being almost half a trillion dollars more than what the Republican Congress told us it was going to be. Time and time and time again, the tax cuts were going to create all these jobs. None of this has happened. And now when you look at what is going on here with the gas prices, if you take what has happened since 2001, and you see that there has been no comprehensive energy policy in this country, and you see the end result 4, 5 or 6 years later, that is higher gas prices, reduced supply, which increases the cost for the average American consumer, when you add all this together, you see that the Republican Congress, as stated by former Speaker Newt Gingrich, is incapable of governing the United States of America. They are too ideological, they are too tied to the special interests. They have the country going in the wrong direction, and it makes it more and more difficult for us to fix the problem. Now, I think it comes down to one thing, my friend, and I appreciate your help. I think it comes down to one thing. It comes down to leadership. The Republican Party controls the House of Representatives. The Republican Party controls the United States Senate. The Republican Party controls the White House. They have been in charge of this government, this House, since 1994. Their leader, who led the revolution for them to come into power, is now saying they, calling them ``they,'' as my colleagues stated, they don't know how to run the government. It is total incompetence. But, and I agree with you, I am excited too, Madam Speaker. I am excited because the American people are beginning to understand. Like you said, they got it that this country needs to go in another direction. We are borrowing money from foreign interests left and right, selling off pieces of the American dream, piece by piece. And average people in Youngstown, Ohio; Warren, Ohio; Akron, Ohio; and in Miami, Florida, it is harder now for them to go to work. Their budgets are getting squeezed. Their health care costs are up. Their gas costs are up, their fuel costs are up. Natural gas, whatever it may be, up, up, up, up, up; tuition costs, up. Everything is making it more difficult for families to make ends meet. So the Democratic Party, we have a bushel full of plans now. I have noticed that we have got so many plans in our caucus that we have a bushel now, full of them, on homeland security, on education, on technology, and energy. You can go to our Web site that we will show later and find all of those charts, Madam Speaker. Members can look at all of the plans that we have. I want to make one final point before I kick it back to my friend. This comes down to leadership. After September 11, and I am sure we all remember those difficult days, after September 11th, this country was united and the world was united behind the United States of America. Even in Europe, at that point, there were European op-eds saying that even in Europe, my friends, they were saying that today we are all Americans. Today we are all Americans. We are such a far cry from that. But the important part was that our President at that point, Madam Speaker, had an enormous amount of political power, and the world was looking at our President. If he would have asked us to walk to work, if that President, if our President would have asked us to ride a bike to work because we have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we would have all done it. We were sending checks to every nonprofit organization because we wanted to give money. We were giving blood until the Red Cross said we do not need any more blood. The American people wanted to give, Madam Speaker. We needed at that point leadership. The best our President could come up with at that critical juncture, the most important moment in the history of the United States of America, was go shopping, Madam Speaker, go shopping. That is leadership? Give me a break.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Buy duct tape, get your plastic. Go shopping. That moment, if there was leadership in this country, that moment, Mr. Meek, we could have converted our economy over into all kinds of different alternative energy sources, and we could have done it in the next decade. But we lacked the leadership at that critical moment in this country's history, and that is a shame. That is something that you look back on and you regret that we didn't have the proper leadership at that time, and this Republican Congress was a bobble-head. Yes, Mr. President, yes, yes, whatever you say, yes, yes, yes. No leadership. I am saying, Kendrick, that 5 years later when we see these increased gas prices, and the President stood here just a few weeks ago and said to the American people, we are going to reduce our American dependency on foreign oil by 50 percent by 2025. Now, let me just suggest that if we can go to the Moon in a decade that we can certainly convert our economy over and become energy independent in a decade. It is not going to take 20 years. We can do it in 10 years. We need the leadership of this Congress, Mr. President, to do it. And it is obvious that you are offended, and I call them our friends, because they are on the other side of the aisle, are so tied to the special interests in the oil industry, the most profitable industry, that they are even giving them billions of dollars of corporate welfare, that they refuse to put significant resources and a significant commitment into alternative energy.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it was another example of lack of focus, lack of leadership, lack of priorities. And look what our friend says again, our guy, Mr. Gingrich, who I like.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Where is the oversight?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. What you are saying is it is an issue of priorities, and why do we continue to focus down in Washington, D.C., Potomac fever, the Republican majority continues to focus on how do we get corporate welfare to the oil companies? How do we subsidize the health care industry, all our friends who donate us billions of dollars? How do we give tax cuts to the wealthiest people? If you made $10 million in 2003, Mr. Meek, you got a million-dollar tax break. That is where the focus is. And what we are trying to say here is that we need to focus on port security. So instead of giving a man or a woman who made $10 million in 2003 a million-dollar tax break, we want to spend that money protecting our ports.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And the Democrats time and time again have tried to put provisions in place that we call PAYGO to try to limit the spending of the Republican Congress. They run away. They spend. They charge on the credit card. Many, many instances over the past few years. Mr. Stenholm from Texas tried to put provisions in as we were raising, as the Republicans were raising the debt limit. He tried to put these PAYGO provisions in saying if you spend any more money, saying you have either got to raise taxes for somebody to pay for it or cut a program so we can balance the budget. Representative Moore from Kansas tried to put this provision in through an amendment to try to limit the spending. We have Members on the Democratic side who time and time again have tried to limit spending in the Congress so we do not keep borrowing from the Chinese, so we do not keep borrowing from the Japanese, the Arab countries who we are also buying our oil from, oil- producing countries. We are trying to limit spending, but it is the Republican side who continue, Madam Speaker, time and time again to waste our money. The tax money that comes into this country time and time again goes out as corporate welfare for the oil companies, corporate welfare for the HMOs and the health care industry, time and time again. And I want to share with the Members, Madam Speaker, a chart here that is based on the 2007 budget of how much interest, net interest, we are going to pay on the national debt. So all the money that Mr. Meek was talking about, all the money we are borrowing, we have got to pay interest on this money, Madam Speaker. This is not a free ride. This is like a bank. You go to the bank, you buy a house, you borrow money. Then you have got to pay interest on it. You buy a house for $200,000. Well, you end up paying $300,000 for the house over the course of the years. It is the same thing that we are doing. If you look at this chart, the big red tower that we have here is the interest, the net interest that we are paying on the debt. Almost $240 billion of the 2007 budget will be spent on interest on the debt. We are not paying it down. This is just interest payments. And when you compare that to what we are spending on education or what we are spending on homeland security or what we are spending on veterans benefits, it pales in comparison. So, Madam Speaker, the folks at home, Members of Congress have to ask themselves, would you rather have your tax money going to pay interest, which makes its way back to the Communist Chinese Government, the Japanese Government, OPEC countries, or would you rather have your tax dollars that come down here? Nobody likes to pay them, but it is like, well, if you are going to pay them, where do you want them to go? Would you not rather have that money invested into the educational systems in the United States of America? Would you not rather have that money focused for Pell Grants? Would you not rather have that money for Head Start? We are not saying that we do not need reforms in the education system. We do. We admit that. But if you are spending money, and you are asking an American taxpayer, Madam Speaker, you make the decision. Mr. Meek, you make the decision. Would you rather have your tax dollars go to pay interest on the debt that will make its way back to the Communist Chinese Government, or would you rather have that money invested for educational opportunities for your kids, for you to pay less in tuition costs because we are able to fully fund the Pell Grants? I remember going to school. I remember looking and seeing what my mom got back or got grant money that we got from the Ohio Instructional Grant, from the Pell Grant. That was a good deal of money to defer the costs of my college education. And because of that, Mr. Meek, we, my brother and I, we were able to go to college.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Meek, it is their money. It is the American people's money. They do not want it sent to Communist China to pay down the interest on the debt. They want it invested in the United States of America. They want this money put into our country, not put off and sent to the Communist Chinese Government so that they can start state- owned companies and basically take work from the American people.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. All of the charts that you have seen here or have seen in the past will be available on the Web site. But it is important, Mr. Meek, and I appreciate your vigorous defense of what the Democrats have done and what we want to do because we do have an agenda. We have a bushelful of ideas over there that we want to implement, and we need to state this pretty clearly. Article I, section 1 of the United States Constitution creates the House of Representatives. We are directly elected. You cannot be appointed to this body by anybody. So the American people speak here. When we get in, we will balance the budget. We will get rid of the deficits over time by restricting spending in certain areas, eliminating the corporate welfare, and asking someone who made $10 million in 2003 to actually pay their fair share. We don't believe that profit is a dirty word, but we also don't believe that we should go borrow money from China to give the wealthiest people in our country a tax credit. We will invest this money into reducing the cost of higher education. We will make sure that the least among us have health care and have a roof over their head and have food, which is a pretty basic necessity. And let me just say, before I kick it to you for one last comment, if we are going to be able to compete with 1.3 billion people in Communist China and over a billion people in India and billions of people around the world, we have to have all 300 million of the citizens in our country on the field playing. Right now we are going on with about a quarter of the team, and they have got the referees and 1.3 billion and 1 billion. We need to make investments in America. We need to put America first. And we need to make sure at the end of the day that we are guardians of the public tax dollar, and so we need to invest that money back into the United States of America that will yield us value for generations to come, just like the GI bill did. The greatest investment we ever made was the GI bill. Let us do it again and get the country on the right track. I yield to my friend.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And the father of the Republican revolution. He said, on March 31, ``He noted that a congressional watchdog agency recently smuggled a truck carrying nuclear material into the country to test security. Mr. Gingrich says, `Why isn't the President pounding on the table? Why isn't he sending up 16 reform bills?' '' This is the father of the Republican revolution asking the President, why are you not a good leader? That is what he is saying. Why aren't you leading the country? Focused on oil subsidies? Focused on corporate welfare? Focused on subsidizing the energy companies? Not focused on Katrina. Not focused on the war. This administration has attention deficit disorder of immense proportions, Madam Speaker. They can't focus. Get this country on the right track. Let's focus and let's get the country moving in the right direction.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You have Japan.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is right.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to praise the passage of H.R. 3127, The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006. As I was regretfully absent at the time of this vote, I now take the opportunity to affirm my resolute support of this act. ``The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.'' These words, spoken by Thomas Jefferson, come to mind as I consider the current situation in Darfur, Sudan. In a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced and left millions hungry, the United States can remain idle no longer. I stand with my colleagues in the House in support of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act and would have voted for the resolution if I had been present.