Billy Tauzin

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky. Let me also thank you as the newest member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce not simply for taking the lead to literally organize our efforts here on the floor to make sure that this bill is not just successful through the committees but that we actually pass it through the floor of this House and give the Senate time and a chance to work on their version of this bill so we might accomplish it before the November elections instead of just talking about it interminably. I want to thank you for all the great work you have already done on health care issues in the past and again what a great asset you have become to the Committee on Energy and Commerce and our work on health care. Let me perhaps sum up the major components of what we have negotiated with the Committee on Ways and Means and which we will hopefully bring to the floor in good shape next week as we go through our committee process this week. The major components of what we are suggesting is that it is time to quit talking and to put in place a real and sustainable entitlement program within Medicare that will provide access to drugs at more affordable cost to the seniors of America who must depend upon drugs today for their daily and annual health care needs. The same way seniors in the 1960s depended upon hospitals and clinics, seniors now depend upon drugs to maintain their lives in successful quality time. Those of us who still enjoy parents and grandparents, I still have a mother whom I love dearly, know that were it not for the Medicare system being there for her and the amazing advances of drug therapies and the capacities of modern pharmaceuticals to continue to make her life not only comfortable and enjoyable but vibrant and alive, understand how critical it is we change Medicare to create this new benefit. Unlike the Senate bill, which they can outbid us on the dollars they can spend because they are not bound by any budget, they have never passed a budget, and I should say the other body, just as the other body can outbid us, so can our colleagues in the House outbid us if they do not want to abide by the budget numbers. But the budget numbers provide us with $350 billion. We were charged with crafting an entitlement program, a program that would last forever, that would not be sunsetted, that would be available to seniors and they would know it is available for the rest of their lives. That is the first thing we did. We crafted a drug benefit within Medicare that was truly an entitlement. The second thing we did was to make it voluntary, just as part B is, just to make sure that seniors know that if they like it, they can sign up and accept the benefits of it or they can decide they would rather not have it, they would rather have a private insurance plan that they are enrolled in or perhaps not invest in this plan at all. What we know from those who have looked at our plan is that we expect, from the managers of Social Security and from CBO estimates, that as many as 93 to 97 percent of the seniors of America will likely take advantage of this new drug benefit. Why? First of all, because if any senior lives under 175 percent of poverty, the plan provides total subsidy of the premium, in other words, total subsidy support, total support within this $350 billion that we are going to spend over 10 years toward the purchasing of this drug coverage for them. Secondly, we know that seniors are going to like this. Even though they may not get all of the drug cost covered in the first $1,000 and $2,000 under the plan, we know they are going to like it for one very important reason, because it includes catastrophic coverage. Because it says at some point, whatever number we eventually agree upon in our markup, at some point the medical drug expenses will not bankrupt a senior, that at some point the costs get covered by this program and they will not have to suffer the loss of their home or their pension or their savings as a result. When I talked to my mom about our plan and I explained to her that for $35 a month, she would have a plan that covers 80 percent less a deductible of the first $1,000 of expenses, 50 percent of the second $1,000, but, more important, I said, Mom, at some point once you have reached the out-of-pocket limit of the bill, whatever we decide it may be and we think it is going to be under $4,000, at that point you have no more drug expenses, that this plan will cover you and you won't lose the savings account that Dad left for you and you won't lose the house that he built for you and you won't lose your security, you won't have to spend yourself into poverty to get drug coverage. Mom said, Sign me up today. Sign me up now, son. Get me in this program. The bottom line is we know that seniors are going to want to look for something that is permanent, voluntary and gives them these kinds of benefits. The other thing I want to point out is that in this bill we also repair a lot of the reimbursements to Medicare, hospitals and doctors and nurses and teaching facilities, not 100 percent yet because we still have some work to do to do total repair, but we repair some of those reimbursement concerns and we make sure that the doctors in fact get a positive reimbursement in the years ahead and that nurses and hospitals get positive reimbursements to make sure that Medicare is always available in all the communities of America. The last thing we want to see is some community lose its Medicare providers because we failed to take care of some of the reimbursement concerns and the cliffs and the walls that some of these providers are about to hit. And so this bill addresses, within the confines of the dollars available to us in the budget, this drug benefit program but also the needs of the provider community to make sure that, in fact, doctors and nurses and hospitals are still available to carry out ordinary Medicare services to folks like my mom and to folks like your seniors in your community. Last of all, in the bill we obviously want to make sure that the Medicare+Choice programs that have been available and are still available as an option to seniors in this great country are still available. So we help make sure we stabilize those programs within this bill. In other words, we want to make sure that seniors have as many options as possible, options in Medicare+Choice, where it is available, and hopefully stabilize it so it continues to be available; secondly, options to continue to receive health care through Medicare at the hospitals and clinics, through the nurses and doctors and providers of our Medicare system; and, most importantly, to add this important new drug benefit option to seniors. Now, can we get it done? You betcha. Can we get it done this year, pass it into law this year? Yes, we can. This is doable. This is not a program that ends in 5 years, as the other body would provide. It is not a program that goes over our budget. It is within our budget, and it is doable. We pass it on this floor next week, and the other body has all the time in the world to get their act together and meet us in a conference and make it happen this year for the seniors of America. Listen, this is not a benefit that can wait. Seniors are desperate for some help in their drug coverage. Seniors are desperate for us to pass this into law, and we have got our chance next week. I want to thank the gentleman and all the Members of the Committee on Energy and Commerce who began the markup process today and are going to work with me through the next 3 days to make sure we produce a product that this House can act on next week, one we can get done and finished so the Senate can move and we can eventually sign this important new addition to Medicare into law. I thank the gentleman for his sterling work on the Committee on Energy and Commerce and for calling this special order tonight.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 4560) to eliminate the deadlines for spectrum auctions of spectrum previously allocated to television broadcasting, with a Senate amendment thereto, and concur in the Senate amendment.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Come on.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the distinguished chairman of the House Committee on the Budget.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the vice chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time. Let me say again to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) we will certainly accept his motion to instruct and we will ask Members to vote for it. More importantly, I will ask the gentleman and the other members of the conference committee in the House to join with us in a cooperative spirit to make sure we finish the job that we started here on August 1 in this House, and that we complete a good package for the President to sign before we leave here. I want to correct the record. It was not just two committees which produced this bill. It was the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Committee on Science, the Committee on Financial Services, and the Committee on Natural Resources. This was a collaborative effort of not just Democrats and Republicans, but of many committees of this House; and this represented the best of this House's ability to come together and do something good for this country in a time of need. Little did we know on August 1 just how much we would need this bill, but we know today. This is not about the surpluses and the deficit issues that the country faces; we will get into those great debates when we get to them, and there will be time for that. This is truly about whether we can now close this deal with the Senate, the other body, to make sure that we pass an energy bill that really protects this country into the years ahead with predictable, affordable sources of energy to keep this economy strong and to keep our Nation secure so that we do not have to depend upon people we cannot depend upon. That is going to be a good debate with the other body, but it is a debate worth winning. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues from both sides of the aisle who joined with us in an overwhelming vote of support for H.R. 4 when it left the House, and I ask them to join us in another big vote when we return from the conference committee with a successful product. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as we begin the final steps toward enacting a comprehensive national energy policy for our country, I want to remind the Nation and this House of two important facts. The first was that this House passed H.R. 4, the SAFE Act, Securing America's Future Energy on or about August 1 of last year. We passed it by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. In fact, it passed out of the subcommittee by a vote of 29 to 1, and I want to thank the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), for the great work the gentleman did in perfecting the core of this bill in subcommittee. It passed out of the full committee by a vote of 50 to 5, and I particularly want to thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) for his extraordinary cooperation and bipartisan support for us to produce this energy policy for the House and the Nation. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) for the work he did, and the gentleman knows that we worked out quite a number of important features in the bill that he was interested in regarding conservation, alternative fuels and other areas. The bottom line is we produced this bill for the House on August 1, 2001, before September 11. We produced this bill for the House when after years of sort of benign neglect, we came to a conclusion that this Nation needed as a matter of national security a cohesive energy policy which was not written in fits and starts, but balanced things and brought into play conservation and alternative fuels and new technologies and potential new sources of energy for our country. We did it out of concern that we were becoming more and more dependent upon foreign sources that were not as reliable as they once were. At a time when we were facing about 57 percent of imports to satisfy this Nation's energy demands, we decided we had better do something. We better talk about conservation. We better talk about alternative fuels and new technologies and new means by which we could move about this country. We better tell the automobile industry that we wanted some fuel savings in the SUV fleet, and we wanted to make sure that there was in fact new and available sources of energy to power the electric grids of this country so the rest of America did not experience what California went through. We did it on August 1, 2001. Then on September 11, 9-11, we witnessed the awful effect of this new age we have entered, this new age where this country is at war against terror; and it has dawned on us what we did on August 1 has even more relevance after 9-11. Here are some numbers. I want Members to think about the fact that we are now buying a million barrels of oil a day from Iraq. It costs this country $21 billion a year. That $21 billion is money we send to the Iraqi Government, to that country. What do they use it for? They use it to build weapons of mass destruction after they have thrown the U.N. inspectors out. They use it to send money to the families of suicide bombers. They use it to build radar sites that lock onto the American planes that are patrolling the no-fly zones, and build missiles to try to knock down American airmen as we try to live up to and complete the terms of that peace agreement following the Persian Gulf War, planes that are carrying jet fuel that is made in part from Iraqi oil. How crazy is this? How insensible is this? We have watched as one of our dearest energy commercial friends, Venezuela, has come under a regime that thinks Castro is a pretty nice guy. Fidel Castro, if you remember, was a guy that Nikita Khrushchev's son wrote about in the memoirs, who acknowledged that Castro asked and advised Nikita Khrushchev to launch a full scale preemptive nuclear strike against America during the Cuban missile crisis. That is the guy Mr. Chavez loves, and we depend upon Venezuela for so much of our energy supplies in this country. In fact, we depend upon Venezuela for lot of the reformulated gasoline that completes our clean air program in America. Think about that. Think about the fact that this country depends every day, every one of us that gets in an automobile, every one of us that gets in an airplane, depends every day on people who are on the other side in this war on terror to make fuel available to us and that the money we spend to buy fuel from them helps to underwrite the terrorists who are attacking this country. And then I think you begin to realize how important this conference on energy is going to be and how critical it is that the work of this House on H.R. 4 be, as much as we can, sustained in the conference with the Senate. The Senate has added some important features to the bill we passed. They have built a good electricity title that we are going to work on. Chairman Barton has done a good job in building a House position. We are going to have a chance, with our Democratic colleagues, to hopefully add an electricity title to the bill that is going to better ensure transmission lines work, that they are there to move energy from areas of surplus to areas of demand, that we have enough electricity in the grid that nobody has to go through what California went through. We are going to continue to work with the Senate on the provisions it has added to make sure that we have other blends in the mix, like ethanol in the mix of our reformulated gasolines. And we are going to try to make sure that when we produce a bill, that it is well balanced, that it contains not just conservation and new technologies and alternative fuels, but it also contains some incentives to make sure we produce here at home gas and oil and fuel and coal and other electric supplies that we can depend upon because they are made in America, instead of being produced by people that we cannot trust in this world anymore. We are going to try to produce a balanced bill. I am going to ask all our colleagues to stand with us as we go into conference with the Senate to make sure we have that. If I could make just a point. That 1 million barrels a day we buy from Iraq, that is what we could produce in ANWR if we could include an ANWR provision in the conference. We are going to fight for one as we go to conference with the Senate. So today as we begin this process, as the conferees are named, as we begin the process to produce a comprehensive energy policy for America, we ought to be reminded every day of that conference of 9/11 and how much more critical it is that this House and the Senate succeed in putting a bill in front of the President to sign before we leave here to go face the voters in November. This may be the most important national security work we do. We ought to do it well. We ought to do it right. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. (Mr. BARTON of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle).

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I offer an amendment to the text.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I offer an amendment to the text.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. As the gentleman knows, at this time, more than 1 million Americans have type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a disease which strikes children suddenly. It makes them insulin-dependent for life, and it carries a constant threat of life-threatening complications. Someone is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes every hour. This devastating disease also afflicts adult populations. Madam Speaker, I want to applaud the efforts of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green) to raise awareness about juvenile (type 1) diabetes and the need to find a cure for this disease. I ask my colleagues to support this very worthwhile resolution. (Mr. GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I offer an amendment to the preamble.

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I offer an amendment to the text.

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent for the immediate consideration of the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 36) urging increased Federal funding for juvenile (type 1) diabetes research.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the Senate concurrent resolution just concurred in.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have five legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H. Con. Res. 36.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the Senate concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 117) to correct technical errors in the enrollment of the bill H.R. 3448, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), a distinguished and valued member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds simply to commend the gentleman for his statement. Mr. Speaker, those provisions were agreed upon in a bipartisan fashion in the regulatory relief bill, which earlier passed this House, and I believe are in the interests of the beneficiaries of the Medicare system. I thank the gentleman for his similar conclusion. They were signed off on by all the committees of jurisdiction as well. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts) for a colloquy.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, first, let me acknowledge the hard work the gentleman has already put forth on this issue. I agree with the gentleman, frankly, and applaud his efforts. Plasma lot release times have varied greatly over the last few years. Predictability is important. I think the industry and FDA should sit down and begin a dialogue which will lead to greater cooperation and predictability in lot release, and I intend to help the gentleman make sure that dialogue occurs.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Committee on Rules for bringing this rule to the floor today. After 9-11, the Committee on Energy and Commerce began a series of roundtables with the agencies under our jurisdiction and members of both sides of our committee. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), leading the minority, and myself representing the majority, had meetings with the agency officials under our jurisdiction to ask several questions, the most of important of which was: tell us a little bit about where your vulnerabilities are; tell us a little bit about where you are not prepared; and tell us a little bit about how Congress might enact new laws and new authorities to make you better prepared for the things we might now expect, that indeed might now threaten our country in ways we were never before threatened. 9-11 taught us a lesson, in effect. It taught us that we have to be willing to think like evil people. And that is not our custom. We think like good people in America. We do not think like evil people, designing ways and means to kill and destroy and to disrupt the lives of citizens who are innocent and have nothing to do with our cause. We think literally so totally different from the kind of enemy we now face in this terrorist situation that it was difficult for agency heads and even Members of Congress to think about all the things that someone with an evil mind might want to do to our citizens and our constituents; what they might want to do to this country and to the people that live here. So as we began to have those discussions with agencies under our jurisdictions, we suddenly realized how necessary it was to put together a bioterrorism package. And here, Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) for the excellent work he did in bringing to our committee ideas about how to make the CDC a much more functional and a much more effective agency for our country, in not only just studying the prevention and treatment of diseases that are normal in our society, but now making sure we have the vaccines and the research going forward to protect us against the artificial insertion of biochemical and biological threats to our people, as we have now learned is possible. I want to thank him for bringing to our committee and to this bill the great ideas he had about beefing up the capacity of the CDC to do that for our country. But as we began to hear from these agency heads, we began to learn that, indeed, we had a lot of vulnerabilities in our country; that we did not have enough vaccine, for example, to make sure if anthrax were introduced into our society to harm us we could vaccinate enough people in our country. So we set to work immediately to make sure our health department not only got the right amount of vaccine available for us, but that our health agencies were all preparing to make sure that other vaccines and other treatments were available to first responders in case we had such an evil attack on our people. We learned, for example, that we had to organize better the laws that protected against people owning and transferring biological agents to one another so that we might find the owner or the possessor of an agent that enters our mail, for example, and begins to kill our people, whether it is a domestic threat or a foreign threat; that we had to make it illegal for someone to transfer the possession of some of these agents, if in fact they were legally in their possession, to make it criminally wrong for them to transfer it without authority, without a permit. We learned, for example, that our first responders were woefully unprepared in the case of a biological or chemical threat to our country to deal with the kind of casualties we might expect if something like that happened. We learned that we needed, for example, to beef up the capacity of our ambulance services and our nurses and our hospitals to deal with those kinds of problems, if, God forbid, they should happen in our country. This bill, for example, will provide another $520 million to the hospitals of America, a special help in grants, to make sure they are prepared for those kinds of emergencies. We learned also that our drinking water supplies needed to be better protected and safeguarded. We learned that, indeed, the incredible ability of someone to damage our country, who thinks as evilly as some of these people do, might find its way into threats against our water supplies. Just recently, I think last month, people were caught filming a water reservoir, I think in Connecticut. And we began to think, well, maybe people might indeed want to threaten the safe drinking water of our citizens, if they have such evil minds. I was reminded in all these meetings of that aircraft that took off from New York City, I think it was Egyptian Air; and instead of landing somewhere at its final destination, some pilot dove that plane into the ocean. I was reminded of when that happened and reminded that most of us in America thought how awful it was that if this pilot did indeed want to commit suicide, if that was really his purpose, why did he have to take all these innocent people along with him. It dawned on us, that is the way good people see an incident like that. The way evil people saw that incident was, perhaps in a desert somewhere or a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, he could have taken out more people had he taken that plane into a building. That is the way evil people think, how much more destruction he could have rendered had he done something different instead of just crashing the plane into the ocean. So through these meetings, through all this work we have done on the bioterrorism legislation, we have tried the awful exercise of thinking as evilly as we could. What would the most evil person try to do to us with biological threats, with chemical threats, with agents of destruction? What would the most evil person do to disrupt our health supply system or to disrupt our clean water system, to make sure we did not have enough clean drinking water perhaps, to poison that system or cause people death and injury? What would the most evil mind try to do if they learned how to fly a crop duster or a mosquito spraying plane and take that equipment somewhere and spread biological or chemical agents upon our people? We went through that awful exercise of trying to think like the most evil person on Earth and then tried to write a bill to make sure the agents of our government, those who are in charge of our health care system, those in charge of building our vaccine supplies, those in charge of testing biological agents, the first responders and those in charge of our incredibly sensitive clean drinking water supplies, what would we do in a bill to bolster our ability to meet those kinds of threats? So, last December, our committee presented to this body our bioterrorism package, and this body approved it overwhelmingly, I think 430-some odd votes to 2, and sent that package on to the Senate. The Senate, similarly, passed a bill that mirrored in many aspects the House-passed version. It was passed unanimously in the Senate, and Senator Ted Kennedy and I have worked since that date in December to bring the best of those two packages together into a single package that we might present to the House and get signed by the President so that this country might be just a little safer from those evil minds who threaten, or would try to threaten, our country. This week we have learned about new threats. This week we have learned that the level of communications among al Qaeda operatives around the world is beginning to rise again, and that there are conversations about hitting this country again. We have heard testimony in the last few days that maybe it is not if, it is when. Maybe, indeed, we have to think about the inevitability of some strike against our people again. So we better have our first responders ready. We had better have enough vaccines ready. We had better have enough treatment facilities available. We had better make sure we protect the drinking water of our people as much as we can. We had better make sure our hospitals and our nurses and our ambulances, and all our firefighters, all those heroes of 9-11, are as well equipped as we can make them to respond as quickly as possible to the next set of threats that are leveled against our country. And so we have brought together in this conference the best of the Senate bill and the best of the House bill. And I want to compliment Senator Ted Kennedy and the Senate team for working so well with our team on the House side. In the end, I think we present an excellent package for the consideration of both bodies for the President to sign. And I cannot think of a better week than this week, when everybody's attention is riveted again on the new threats that are being talked about in conversations around the world against our people, that we pass this bioterrorism package and put it on the President's desk for his signature. We have included one extra thing of significant importance that I also want to mention. Up this year for renewal is something called PDUFA. It is an acronym for a policy that has allowed this country to collect user fees from the drug companies, the big pharmaceutical companies of America, and those user fees pay the salaries of people who work at the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. That Food and Drug Administration set of personnel then do the testing, the analysis, all the research, all the professional analysis that goes into making sure that the pharmaceutical drugs that are patented in this country are tested first before a pharmaceutical company is allowed to sell them to your mom and your dad and your relatives, and even to those of us who need those drugs to survive or treat an illness. The importance of that program, that prescription drug user fee program, is critical in America, and it is about to expire. It expires in September. If we do not reauthorize it this year, immediately, we begin laying off people at the Food and Drug Administration. So we have included in this package the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act which funds the work that goes forward to make sure that new prescription drugs are properly tested before the Food and Drug Administration authorizes any pharmaceutical company to allow a doctor to prescribe them to the citizens of this country. And so we have brought you a good package that we think draws from the best of the House and the Senate versions of bioterrorism and we have added to it the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. This package again represents this Nation's first line of defense against bioterrorism at a day and at a time when all of us know now that there are people who would love to disrupt this society by attacking us with one of those forms. When you think about 9/11 again and the awful consequences of 9/11 and you sit in a cave now in Afghanistan and think about how much more damage you might do to this country than you did on 9/11, bioterrorism is one of those areas we have to be concerned about. This bill gives this country many more tools to work with to defend and protect our people. It adds a whole new arsenal of first responder capabilities to in fact respond if we do get hit again, and it gives us the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, a critically important act for the continuation of prescription drug protections for our country. I again want to thank the Committee on Rules for doing such an expeditious job last night late in bringing this rule to the floor so we can pass it before the Memorial Day recess.