Louise Slaughter

Ms. SLAUGHTER

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentlewoman from California an additional 1 minute.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Reclaiming my time, I don't want to see that anymore. It is an embarrassment when I have to even get up to do my half of the rule and talk about what awful things have happened to us. There are more things that I need to talk about than that. I think we should cut out the games and the cuteness and all the rest of it and do our job. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Richmond).

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. I am really very fond of my colleague over there, and I appreciate his wonderful sunshine attitude. The fact is we have never seen anything like what we are going through now. Twice, in just the last few months, one amendment by Ms. Lee, to finally get an AUMF so that we could authorize the wars that seem to be going on forever in the name of the United States of America was voted on in committee, passed in committee, and should have been in the bill. Lo and behold, it disappeared. I don't think we ever did anything like that to my knowledge, and if we did, shame on us. In this very bill today, there was, again, an amendment presented in committee for the DACA people to be able to get jobs while they are waiting with the Federal Government. I am paraphrasing that because I never saw it, but that is my understanding of what that did. Once again, it was presented at the committee, voted, passed, and should have been in this bill. But before it got to Rules, just like Ms. Lee's amendment, it just disappeared. How can you run the Government of the United States by saying that the people do their will through us? We are not sitting here to represent ourselves and do what we want to do and take one from column A and one from column B. We follow rules. That is what we are supposed to do. We have to answer for that. I want the people of the United States to know that what we are talking about here today is probably not going anywhere. As far as we know, it will not get past the Senate. Now, some miracle may happen. Who knows? Or maybe the whole thing will disappear--I don't know--with no explanation, by the way. But we haven't really done anything here yet except what I would call a crazy amalgamation of what the rules of the House wouldn't even come close to allowing us to do. Any body, any Congress, any House of Representatives, any legislature anywhere can do what they have to do to get their budget ready if they throw it all in one mix and let one committee, the Appropriations Committee, do it. The other committees had no right to talk about it. As I pointed out, again, the majority has really cut out the minority completely. Do you think we knew before it got to Rules that those two amendments that I talked about that were terribly important had disappeared? We didn't know that until it was given to us. Many times what we get at Rules are emergency meetings, which means one thing: no committee action. We have decided we would like to do this one this week, so let's call it an emergency. Enough. Enough already. This is the premier legislative body in the world. The hopes, the dreams, and the aspirations of all Americans lie in this House. We do or we do not do what is in the best interests of the people who sent us here. I promise you it is not in the best interests to cut out all of the population of the United States--about half, almost half. In fact, I believe numerically we got more votes than the other side--just cut us out of the process. I have already talked about no open rules. If you can't have an open rule whereby you can talk about amendments, there is nothing else for you to do. We are out of it because Democrats get very few amendments. I don't think the Rules Committee people get hardly any at all, and then we beg for some of the best ones we would like to be made into order--never happens. We are pretty discouraged. As a matter of fact, we were talking about maybe we should stage a coup, but I know that is illegal and would not work in the United States of America. So it was kind of a fleeting thought brought about by pure frustration. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Scott had a wonderful amendment. He is the ranking member on the Education and the Workforce Committee and is known throughout the United States for the work that he does, as is Barbara Lee, who is probably more well known than almost any other Member of this House. To be treated that way, to have to go back to her district and say, ``Well, we tried to do these amendments''--enough already. We can do it the right way. We used to. When I got here, it was entirely different. The bipartisanship was strong. We all liked each other. It was a pretty wonderful thing. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), whose amendments should have been allowed.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we are really getting somewhere here. What my colleague failed to say is, as far as I know and I imagine as far as he knows, that no committee has ever sent a bill to the Rules Committee completely taking away amendments that had passed in that committee and were legitimately a part of that bill. In just the last, let's say, 2 or 3 months, two amendments legitimately passed by Democratic members in the proper committee disappeared between that committee and the Rules Committee. If that is not a violation of rules, I don't know how in the world you would ever describe it. Sure, we had a lot of open rules--I mentioned Paul Ryan has never had one--which gave everybody an opportunity to do an amendment, all 435 us, if we chose to, but we don't. When you talk about something coming to us from a committee, large bills sometimes don't come to us from committees, but oftentimes they are written somewhere--we are not sure where--but they come to us in an emergency procedure because they have to get to the floor that week. I am not just talking about improving. I am talking about following the rules of procedure laid down by history, by circumstance, and by geniuses. I am talking about not appropriating those in ways that say: We just don't want that amendment on the list. Pretend it never happened. Throw it in the garbage and maybe nobody will remember it. We remember. We think that some amendments are a few things that would really move the country forward, and we don't have a chance to get them put in place simply because we are the minority. That is absolutely wrong. It is undemocratic. It is hurtful to the institution and hurtful to America. We can do better. You and I should pledge right now to work on that. I am game if you are.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. These bills don't have the support they need to pass the Senate. It takes 60 votes to even bring them to the floor. That means that this entire exercise this week has been an exercise in futility. All the while, the clock is ticking and Congress has so much to do, as I have elaborated several times this afternoon, over the next 9 legislative days. If this process has been good for anything, it is revealing just how broken the legislative process has become under the majority's rule. Legislation regularly comes to the House floor without any committee consideration. It just goes to rules. The majority even rammed through a healthcare repeal bill not long ago--I am sure everybody remembers that--that would impact one-sixth of our entire economy without first-- what we need to do again in regular order--getting a score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. They are very important. They tell us what cost and what impact it would have on the budget and on the country. So that means we had no idea of the impact of that bill on our markets or what it would cost when voting for it. The minority is routinely shut out of the process, often unable to get so much as a vote on an amendment on the House floor. When Speaker Ryan assumed the gavel, he promised to return to regular order and an open process. We have been waiting a mighty long time. Every time we offered an amendment to the bill before us in the Rules Committee, we asked that the rule be open; again, giving all Members a chance to affect that bill. Unanimously, we are voted against and we lose all those votes 9-4. That means that both sides will not be able to affect that bill and it means that regular order is as far away as it ever was. Here we are, less than a month away from the end of the fiscal year, and we haven't passed a budget resolution through the House. We were supposed to have a budget through the House, the Senate, and the conference--the conference is necessary to reconcile the House and Senate bills--by April 15. We blew through the debt limit in March and still have not dealt with that. We have yet to have a single open rule in the Rules Committee under the Speaker's leadership. Believe me, I am sure that an awful lot of Members of this House have something to say about what is going on. It is no wonder that, according to the latest figures from Gallup, 79 percent of the public disapproves of how Congress is doing its job. No wonder. CBS News highlighted that it costs the taxpayers an estimated $24 million a week to operate the House of Representatives. They know that they are not getting their money's worth. They needed 60 votes to repeal and replace healthcare, when there was no replacement in sight. I am not sure how to describe that as a legislative proposal, but what it sounds like to me is a hoax. We are going to fool you that we have really got a replacement here. Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote on the previous question, the rule, and the bill. I hope that my good colleague, Mr. Woodall, and I can help fix this place to do a little better. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Will the gentleman yield?

Ms. SLAUGHTER. The Rules Committee did not get together. The majority of the Rules Committee got together. We had no action in that game whatsoever.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, just to speak on accuracy: don't say the Rules Committee got together and went over those. Say the Rules Committee majority got together and went over those. You know, that is all I ask.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Ms. SLAUGHTER

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank Chairman Calvert and Chairman Frelinghuysen for their commitment to the arts. I greatly appreciate the subcommittee's efforts to fund the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEA's mission is to strengthen the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation. Of critical importance, the NEA has expanded their reach to help servicemembers who have been diagnosed with TBI, traumatic brain injury, and other psychological conditions. This new partnership is critically important. The NEA Creative Forces Military Healing Arts Network is a collaboration with the Department of Defense which supports music, writing, and visual art therapy at military care facilities. They are finding that the best treatment for PTSD is yoga, which doesn't cost us anything. The Creative Forces program places the creative arts therapies at the core of patient-centered care in military medical facilities and invests in research on the impacts and benefits of these innovative treatment methods. The cost-effective, noninvasive arts therapy of those programs rank consistently in the top five ``helpful'' and ``wish to continue'' programs on patient satisfaction surveys of the men and women who have gone through the programs, and over 85 percent of military patients said art therapy was helpful to their healing. We may even be learning here that this might be the best thing, as Mr. Lance was pointing out, for autistic children. But throughout the art therapy programs and the work that they are doing, our servicemen and -women are being able to transition away from the basketful of prescription drugs that they carry around with them and lived on and are rejoining their families and life. So when they wheel out of that healing, that psychological skill-building, self- expression, and self-esteem that comes from these programs, that obviously is certainly something that we need to continue. As part of the NEA's mission to increase access to the arts for all Americans, Creative Forces enables more servicemembers, veterans, and military families to benefit from creative art therapies and community arts activities. NEA is so cheap it is surprising. For the small amount of money we put into it, we would get about $9 billion back and many people who have been employed. We don't do anything with a better return than the money we spend for the arts.

Ms. SLAUGHTER

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. For me, this morning, July 28, could be the beginning of a new spirit in the House of Representatives because of what happened last night in the Senate. Since we are talking about healthcare for veterans, I want to just take a moment to talk about healthcare for all Americans. Last night, we saw a remarkable thing happen. We have had a poisonous atmosphere around healthcare in the United States for the past 7 years. We are the last industrial country on the planet to provide healthcare for the people who count on us for that kind of help and support. We can now give that up. I hope we can take the majority leader at his word that he sees no further use in trying to beat this bill to death and that we can work together to improve it and get on to other things which we are so in need of. But I do want to say that I appreciate very much the votes last night. I think Senator McCain showed, once again, that he is America's hero. And Senators Murkowski and Collins certainly are heroines of mine and I think let us know that women in positions of power can be counted on. So, yesterday, in the Rules Committee, the majority passed a martial law rule granting themselves fast-track authority so they could get anything through, which I think scared even the Senate. I read some news reports claiming this was a major victory. It was not a victory for either side fighting viciously over how we want healthcare to be given to our citizens, but it was certainly a victory for the American people, hundreds of whom stood last night here on the Capitol Grounds outside of the Senate begging to be able to continue their healthcare. Imagine somebody with cancer, going through all of the pain and agony they have to go through, and wondering every day what in the world we are going to do here. Are they going to be left without healthcare, left without care that they can afford? So I think, without a doubt, this is a good morning for all of us who are in the Congress of the United States to get together and to do better work. And I know of no agency, frankly, that needs more attention than the Veterans Administration. My personal experience with them has been somewhat like Whack-a-Mole: we think we have something settled and then suddenly we don't. We have to be advocates for every veteran in our district, directly to the VA, personally, oftentimes simply to get the most simple kind of treatment done for our veterans. It is my wholehearted wish, and has been for some time, that we will get the Veterans Administration out of the building business, where they are abysmal failures, and let them concentrate on healthcare for veterans, which is their number one issue. I am very pleased--and let me echo what my colleague, Mr. Collins, said--with leadership both in the House and the Senate running the Veterans' Affairs Committees now. Dr. Roe has been an exemplary friend to all of us and understands exactly what we are doing. So I think this is important, as Mr. Collins has pointed out. Veterans Choice has not been very popular in my district. It is so complicated and so complex that it takes a lot of hand-holding even to use it. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to support the underlying bill we will be voting on today. I wish I were able to say that more often. The bill will fund the Department of Veterans Affairs Choice Program for 6 months and authorize a number of leases for major medical facilities throughout the country, and I echo its major importance. The next rule we will be considering contains martial law authority that will allow the majority to bring up any bill they want with hardly any notice at all, and I hope we will not use that. It has been a long week. Let's end it on a bipartisan note with a strong vote in support of this bill before us to help veterans across America. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. SLAUGHTER

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule. I certainly thank the gentleman from Washington, my friend, for his kindness. I think he is one of the best Members we have, but I am going to have to disagree with Mr. Newhouse today. When Speaker Ryan assumed the gavel, he told the American people that he wanted to have ``a process that is more open, more inclusive, more deliberative, more participatory.'' When the majority took control of both the Congress and the White House, they again promised to abide by standard congressional procedure. But we are here, 3 months from the end of the fiscal year. The majority hasn't passed a budget resolution, and legislation moves at a glacial pace. The majority working to rush through a massive minibus before any individual appropriations bills have been considered on the floor is also a mistake. This may sound pedantic, but we do have rules. Every one of us wants to improve our security, but this bill, I am afraid, is a little more than smoke and mirrors. The increase in defense spending under this bill will never see the light of day. That is because we operate under the Budget Control Act, and that mandates that any breach of the defense cap, which this bill does, will trigger an across-the-board sequestration cut of all defense accounts, making what we do here a useless exercise, I am afraid. The majority has also inserted an amendment to provide $1.6 billion President Trump requested to begin construction of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. This is surely just the beginning of making taxpayers pay for the entire wall, which experts have estimated could cost as much as $21 billion, with nary a peso from Mexico. If we are investing $1.6 billion now, I see no reason why they do not plan to go on to reach the $21 billion expenditure. Let me put that in some perspective: $21 billion could be used to double the Federal investments in public schools. Think of that. Just the money to build that wall, it could provide 6 million people with healthcare under Medicaid, it could buy school lunches for tens of millions of low-income children. But these investments are not a priority for this majority. President Trump's own budget director famously said that it isn't worth feeding hungry children if the nutrition does not improve their school performance, and that Meals on Wheels ``sounds great,'' but doesn't work. I never thought I would hear either of those things come from the mouth of a Federal official. The idea that we should not feed hungry children unless their school work improves, frankly, I am baffled by that, let me say it that way. The opposition to the wall is bipartisan. Republican Representative Hurd from Texas, a former CIA officer, sits on the Homeland Security Committee and represents the largest border district in the State of Texas. He testified before the Rules Committee late Monday night against it, saying, ``having a one-size-fits-all solution to border security makes no sense.'' Yet this amendment was included without debating the merits on the floor and without giving Members an up-or- down vote. Let me explain that a little bit. This amendment is in the bill, but there will be no vote on it. It has been what we call self-executed to keep people from being recorded in any way, whether they are for or against the wall. The last statistic that I saw from the American public is that 68 percent of them oppose it. They will never know whether their Representatives did or not. It is a sort of a bait-and-switch idea. Mr. Speaker, immigration has enriched our country beyond measure. It is what has allowed our country to shape the world, rather than to fear it. A wall will lock the United States away from the rest of the world. The President's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, wrote online: ``Walls don't work. Never have. Never will.'' We don't know whether he is going to change his mind about that or not, but that is what he said. One of our famous Republican Presidents that everybody knew and loved, Ronald Reagan, 30 years ago last month stood in West Berlin and demanded that another wall be torn down. I said in the Rules Committee yesterday and I will say it again here this afternoon: if the President and the majority build this wall, it, too, will be torn down, not by someone crossing the border or by an outside force. It will crumble because the public understands in a way that this President and majority do not, that our Nation does not barricade itself away from the rest of the world. We will not build walls to keep us in. What kind of superpower would we be if we built a wall around the outside of our Nation and crumbled from the inside because the money we put on the wall kept us from updating our infrastructure, which is in such terrible shape, and a shredded social safety net? None of us want to find that out, but the majority is putting us on such a path. Just yesterday, President Trump announced a ban on transgender servicemembers serving in the military. It appears today that he made that announcement all on his own and that neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Pentagon had any idea that he was going to do that. The announcement came 69 years to the day that President Truman desegregated our military. Think about that for a minute. Sixty-nine years ago, on the very day that President Trump said transgender people couldn't serve, was the day President Truman integrated the military services. This is an insult to the approximately 15,000 transgender soldiers who sacrifice for our country every day. Transgender servicemembers are being attacked from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Just days ago, Republicans joined Democrats to defeat an amendment that would bar transgender servicemembers from receiving the necessary healthcare that they deserve. I will note that these same treatments would have been available to other servicemembers under this amendment. Apparently to the majority, it is not about the treatment, but the person who receives it. The amendment is especially cruel when you consider that a Pentagon report has found that gender transition-related treatment costs between $2.4 and $8.4 million a year. That is the cost of just four of the President's trips to Mar-a-Lago. Think about that: several millions dollars to go to Mar-a-Lago would have paid for operations for transgender persons. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record an article from USA Today that details this fact. [From USA Today, July 26, 2017] OnPolitics Today: Trump's Mar-a-Lago Trips Cost More Than Trans Soldiers' Health Care (By Josh Hafner) President Trump tweeted this morning that the U.S. military wouldn't allow transgender troops ``in any capacity,'' an apparent rejection of the military's roughly 6,000 trans troops and the Obama-era policy that embraced them. The U.S. ``cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,'' Trump said. Except trans troops don't really cost that much, as many soon pointed out. A report for the Pentagon last year found that transition- related care would cost between about $2.4 and $8.4 million per year--less than 0.14% of the military's medical budget. That's roughly the cost of four of Trump's trips to Mar-A- Lago, GQ noted, even using a conservative estimate of $2 million per trip. And it's way less than the $84 million spent on Viagra and similar meds by the Department of Defense in 2014, as others also said. It was, as Sen. John McCain noted, ``yet another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter.''

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price), the distinguished ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the Democratic whip.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maryland.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to allow the House to consider Representative Lee's AUMF amendment--authority to use military force. This will provide all Members the chance for an up-or-down vote, which we have, thus far, been denied. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) to discuss our proposal.

Ms. SLAUGHTER. I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman.