Fred Upton

Mr. UPTON

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from the great State of Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg).

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey).

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds just to respond. Madam Speaker, I appreciated the leadership of both the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Boucher). They were terrific as we moved H.R. 45, as well as were other members of the committee. But the major change between the two bills is the interim storage facility. It was the administration that sent us that letter and said, we will veto the bill unless you take that provision out. We took their word for it, and yet they still were not there. It really was Lucy and the football. We did what they asked. The Democratic administration refused to play ball. And here we are today. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood), a member of the Committee on Commerce and a viable Member on this issue.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. Gibbons), my good friend and, on this issue, a very good adversary.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, in my remaining minute I would just again urge my colleagues to support this bill. This bill will go to the President's desk. It has bipartisan support in the Senate. It should have bipartisan support today. In the next administration I will work with the gentleman from Ohio and other Republicans and Democrats to rightfully craft even a better bill. This bill goes two steps in the right direction. I will be glad to take it the remaining half step to get it to be a good bill eventually with the President. Again, I urge my colleagues to vote no on this motion to commit, and vote yes on final passage. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. UPTON. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 444, I call up the Senate bill (S. 1287) to provide for the storage of spent nuclear fuel pending completion of the nuclear waste repository, and for other purposes.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of S. 1287, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2000. Why are we here? We are here today because the Government broke its promise to the American people that it would begin storing the Nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain by 1998, 2 years ago. The administration has still refused to deal in good faith with a bipartisan majority of both Houses of Congress to fix this problem. Madam Speaker, there are few in this House who have worked as long to find a bipartisan solution to the problem of nuclear waste storage than I. For three consecutive Congresses, I have introduced bipartisan legislation to implement a safe solution to the problem of nuclear waste storage. Yet, despite the overwhelming bipartisan support for these measures throughout the years, we still cannot get the administration to stop saying no, no, no. Let us review what has happened. In the 105th Congress, the bipartisan majority in the House overwhelmingly approved our nuclear waste bill, but the promise of a veto killed any further consideration in that Congress. In this Congress, the House Committee on Commerce, by a vote of 40 to 6 reported out my bill, H.R. 45. Yet the administration continues to say, no, we will still veto it. Just this past month, the Senate with a bipartisan majority passed the bill that we are considering today, S. 1287, bending over backwards to address each and every concern by this administration. Yet the administration still said no. One of the big issues was interim storage. That cannot be part of the bill. We took it out over there in the Senate. Yet it seems like this legislation is like Charlie Brown and Lucy with a football. No matter what they did, the football kept going up, and they missed the kick. Sadly, it is the American people who continue to fall on their backs because it is they who are at risk with nuclear waste continuing to pile up in their communities. So why do I come to the floor today in support of S. 1287 instead of my bill, H.R. 45? Well, the hour is late in this legislative year, and I believe it is better to move forward with the Senate bill today rather than face yet another filibuster in the other body and send it to the President in hopes that perhaps he will sign it. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of this bill, which, if passed today and signed by the President, will in fact remove dangerous nuclear waste from communities all across America and deposit this material at Yucca Mountain, a safe and stable storage facility. But, Madam Speaker, as I stand here today, I want to be clear about what our failure to pass this legislation will mean. By failing to pass this common sense, reasonable, scientifically sound bill, we are allowing the continuous pileup of nuclear waste in our communities, and we are abdicating our stewardship for future generations. Right now across America, nuclear power plants are being forced to construct temporary facilities to hold nuclear waste, and they are filling up fast. Many of them are just a baseball throw away from your lakes, rivers, schools, and neighborhoods. This bill moves high-level nuclear waste into one safe place rather than keep it in environmentally sensitive areas. Clearly, there is a need for a permanent facility to store this material. But in the middle of the Nevada desert, far away from a populated ecosystem, sits Yucca Mountain, which by scientific accounts is a good place to start, a place, by the way, where we have spent $10 billion preparing it for this day. Independent analysis in government agencies have shown that we are on the right track to have the Yucca Mountain site be safe, and I am here today to urge my colleagues to look at the sound science behind this proposal. In addition, emotional pleas, mine, others today, some of our colleagues will say that transporting nuclear waste out of our communities is more dangerous than leaving it there. That makes no sense. Again, I urge my friends to look at the scientific studies. In fact, over the past 30 years, we have had thousands of these shipments. Not a single release of radioactivity in any of those shipments. Asking consumers, through a tax in our utility bills, every single one of our constituents has contributed more than $17 billion to pay for this project. By asking them to pay their utility bills to take care of this problem at the local level is unfair. Building temporary storage sites at our Nation's nuclear reactors have put taxpayers in double jeopardy. We are already paying the bill to build the storage site in Nevada, and now we are starting to foot the bill for storage sites in our communities. With each passing day, we are one day closer to a nuclear power plant running out of storage room; we are one day closer to another cement cask being built in one of our constituents' back yards; and, my colleagues, it is yet another day that the Federal Government has not lived up to its responsibilities. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this measure. Let us get the stuff into one safe place. This bill begins that process. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I still have 1 minute remaining.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman's request that we hold hearings on the Senate bill. I might say, though, as a member of the committee, we have had days and days and nights on this issue, some would say 40 days and 40 nights, a lot of weeks over the last couple of years, including debate, lengthy debate, on this House floor. The problem is not hearings; the problem is the administration. The administration has refused to negotiate in good faith on an issue of terrific importance to the entire country on this issue. Detractors, many of the detractors of this bill were against nuclear power from the get-go. I have to say that I think I was still in grade school when the decision was made, maybe even before that, to go with nuclear power; and we are now 30 or 40 years later, and when the decision was made, the Federal Government promised that it would take care of the long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste. As the gentleman from Louisiana pointed out earlier, we have more than 80 sites across this country that are storing now high-level nuclear waste. A number of them, including some in my district, but about a dozen sites around the country in fact ran out of room a long time ago. In my district we have cement silos literally a baseball throw away, a Sammy Sosa relay throw, from Lake Michigan, where it is being stored, probably for at least another decade. I do not want it there. I want it in one safe place. We transported that material to these sites around the country for the last couple of decades. Not a single case of radioactivity was released in those transfers. I believe that with the standards that we impose, that we will in fact see that waste transported safely again without a single release to one safe site. I have been to the Nevada site. I have seen some of the $10 billion of Federal money that was used to finally store this for thousands of years, and I think it is going to be safe. The scientists are going to decide that. Our problem has been an administration that has refused to negotiate with us. Yes, they have given us conditions they wanted. But do you know what? This bill we are taking up this afternoon, many of those conditions were met. We heard the other side talk about the interim storage facilities, this does not have an interim storage facility. Well, I can show you the letter signed by the President, not only this year but last year and the year before that, he is going to veto the bill if that provision is in there. The Senate leadership in good faith negotiations said okay, we are going to have a new President next year, one way or another. We will take that out if that gets you to sign the bill. Guess what? The veto signal still stayed on. In my State we have a Republican Senator and we have a Democratic Senator. Both of them voted for this bill that we are now debating today. It is time to get a bill to the President's desk. That is all we are asking. It is not perfect. Our bill, the House Commerce bill, yes, it is better. It is better in a lot of respects. But in negotiations with this administration the Senate felt they had to make some changes that they thought that was the best, to hopefully get the administration on board; and, at the end of the day, Lucy took the football away again, and we are left with what we have got. We are left with the hand that we are dealt. Madam Speaker, I would urge my colleagues to vote down this motion. We have had a lot of hearings. We spent a lot of time on this issue for the right reasons. It has been bipartisan virtually every which way. I would hope that we could turn down this motion to commit and vote for the bill.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of a point of order. Madam Speaker, I claim the 5 minutes in opposition to the motion to commit.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I reserve a point of order. I do not think we have seen a copy of the motion.

Mr. UPTON

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks, and to insert extraneous material on S. 1287, the Senate bill just passed.

Mr. UPTON

Mr. UPTON. Mr. Chairman, let me tell Members what this bill does, and I read: ``It shall be the policy of the United States to consider the extent to which major net oil exporting countries engage in oil price- fixing to be an important determinant in the overall political, economic and security relationship between the United States and these countries.'' This bill requires a report. It requires a study. And in fact if it does what I think it will do, it will label these OPEC nations as price-fixing. They have raised this price of oil at over $30 a barrel, and that has increased the price at the gas pump from 98 cents a year ago to, in my district, $1.55 this weekend. That is not acceptable. As I have told my constituents and as they have told me, we need to respond to this. What we ought to be doing if we can label these folks, any sixth, seventh grade economic individual can tell you, they have cut off our oil, which has raised the price. They have turned off the spigot not only to the United States but to the rest of the world as well and we ought to turn off the spigot on them. Economic aid, foreign military aid, it ought to go until they open up the spigot back on us. Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.

Mr. UPTON

Mr. UPTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for taking this Special Order. I certainly welcome the opportunity to work with my colleagues on developing a plan that makes sense. As we go back home, particularly this next week and a half with Congress out of session, as we look at our mail that comes in virtually every day, there is a real human cry for us to do something about pharmaceutical drugs and to try and work together to allow this to happen for today's seniors. I am sorry that I was a little bit late when this Special Order started. We all have a number of hearings that have been going on, so I missed the beginning. I saw some of the charts just briefly before I left my office to come over. But we are part of a group that is working on a comprehensive plan that tries to do a number of things. Obviously, we have been the leader in terms of the pharmaceutical industry looking for drugs that are going to save lives and in effect save big time in costs. We heard today, the three of us, in our committee a woman from Pennsylvania with osteoporosis, or from Florida, or maybe California. Anyway, she was a wonderful lady.

Mr. UPTON. Yes, she could have been from anywhere. But these drugs, particularly for osteoporosis, have saved her life. We are looking at some of these advances that are just around the corner with diseases before that have been so crippling, and again, we are almost there in lots of cases. That medical research money is so necessary, not only that we provide to the National Institutes of Health, but also the research and development money that pharmaceutical companies use as well, to try and develop drugs in major ways.

Mr. UPTON. Mr. Speaker, I would just note, if the gentleman will yield, that a number of States, Michigan being one, have just embarked on a program that in fact will help how many HMO seniors, those as high as 150 percent of poverty. But again, it is not a very high dollar figure, as the gentleman suggested. But what do we do with those States that already have something in place? We have to be very careful not to undo what they have done, and yet try to encourage other States to follow the same lead that States like Michigan have already taken.

Mr. UPTON

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I see no other Member asking for time. I just would like again to encourage all of my colleagues to vote for and support this bill. It does save lives. We all know so many different personal tales. I urge that we adopt it quickly. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, the gentlewoman raised the point about the stamp. I was there when the stamp was unveiled over in the Senate a couple of years ago. I only wish they had enough foresight to have made it 33 cents. Of course it is 32 cents, so they are not as handy as they once were. We had a gentleman in my home county in Michigan, a guy by the name of Mr. Hein and he went out for every parade for years. He was out there with his little petition drive, signing people up; I was one of his early people. Sadly, he has now passed away, in need, I think, of an organ transplant. That certainly gave him a number of years that he did not have, and his family's work and really all folks across the country that helped bring that beautiful stamp into play was pretty marvelous.

Mr. UPTON. I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First of all, I want to thank the gentlewoman from Florida for her important remarks during this debate. We had some terrific hearings in the Subcommittee on Oversight this last fall, a whole series of hearings, talking about the need for blood and how, in fact, it looks very much that the whole country could face some real shortages this year, particularly in certain regions of the country. At that point, we decided, as we saw back in Michigan, my home State, a number of efforts were taken up by service clubs and universities challenging each other, particularly at Western Michigan University challenging Central Michigan University, and I thought we would have that same type of challenge here on Capitol Hill. So about 2 weeks ago was the date that Republicans and Democrats, staff and Members, House and Senate, challenged each other; I wish we had the trophy over here. The Republicans did win, but we all won. We helped certainly the shortage where it exists. Madam Speaker, we have a real need for donors to give blood. Because even though the number of donors in fact is increasing each and every year, the need for blood is increasing at an even greater pace, and because of that, I think all of us, particularly in positions as Members often are, where we can use ourselves to help generate other donors to contribute blood across the country. I want to also spend a little bit of time talking about our good friend, the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). A couple of years ago, probably 6 or 7, maybe even more than that, his daughter was in desperate straits needing a bone marrow transplant. He single-handedly, I think, signed up a good number of us on the House Floor, Republicans and Democrats, the gentlewoman's home State, and I was one of those that was tested. My donation was made, I guess it is in a bank. I pray for the day that someone is going to call me and say Fred, we want you to come down and donate bone marrow to save the life of someone in this country or elsewhere around the world. In fact, one of our colleagues, because of the actions that he took, actually it was a Member no longer a Member from Florida, in fact, did donate bone marrow tissue and in fact did save the life of someone because of the work of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). All of us, particularly those that are able to donate to this bank so that we may be called on to save someone at some point down the road I think is very necessary, and this bill recognizes those people that can do that. I would also like to praise our States. I know in my State of Michigan it is now a normal thing, and I think maybe it is for most States. I know Virginia, talking to my staff over here, I know has that, and I know Florida has that same thing, but of course on the back of our driver's license in Michigan, there is a provision I would like to make a gift effective on my death, all organs specific, et cetera, all tissues.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of H. Con. Res. 247, a resolution supporting National Donor Day and recognizing the importance of organ, tissue, bone marrow, and blood donation. Americans who donate their organs, tissue, bone marrow, or blood to save another's life are indeed heroes; and I am delighted that the House today has taken time to recognize them as such. But despite the generosity of the American people and improvements in medical treatments for transplant patients, the supply of organs continues to be tragically short of the need for transplantation among patients with end-stage organ disease and organ failure. Every year the number of patients who die while waiting for a transplant increases, and so does the national waiting list, which now exceeds 65,000 patients waiting for kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas and intestine transplants. We must do more. Our Nation may also be facing an increasingly severe shortage of blood. As Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, I have held a series of hearings over the last couple of months on this issue and the alternatives for addressing it. We have learned that virtually every 3 seconds someone in our country needs blood. Supplies need to be replenished daily to meet the demand. An estimated 32,000 units of blood are used in the country every day. As many as 95 percent of Americans are going to need a blood transfusion some time in their life, but yet only 5 percent of Americans donate blood. We are quickly heading to a point where blood demand is going to exceed our supply. Several weeks ago Washington was down to less than a 1-day supply, and a critical need for blood remains evident throughout the country even this week. As many may know, our committee, the Committee on Commerce, has spent a great deal of time and effort this last year working to develop good solutions to the difficult problem of increasing the supply of donated organs while safeguarding the system from unintended bureaucratic interference that would dramatically harm efforts to increase donations. Many of those ideas are embodied in H.R. 2418, The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Amendments of 1999, which was reported out of the committee at the end of last session. H.R. 2418 ensures that decision-making with regard to organ transplantation remains in the transplant community, and not in the hands of the Federal Government. This bill includes a provision to provide living and travel expenses for individuals who travel across State lines in order to donate an organ to a person requiring such. After many hearings on this important issue, our committee found there are willing donors who would like to save the life of another American but also find themselves in financial circumstances that would make donation of a life-saving organ even more of a hardship. H.R. 2418 would ease that burden, and I would urge this body to take up that bill and pass legislation that would make organ donation easier for every American. I am also proud to say that due to the Committee on Commerce's efforts, H.R. 3075, the Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP Balanced Budget Refinement Act of 1999 added $200 million to pay for additional immunosuppressive drug therapy. Medicare presently only covers these drugs for 36 months. This bill takes a first step at addressing that issue and allows us to provide more coverage for needy organ transplant patients. Access to these life-saving drugs prevents the organ rejection that places so much strain on the organ supply network. We should all be grateful to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Canady) and those who cosponsored the legislation for bringing this issue to the attention of the committee. While we in Congress continue to safeguard the organ allocation system from harmful bureaucratic interference and work to address financial problems living donors face, as well as those recipients who need affordable immunosuppressive drug therapy, let us take the time this afternoon to applaud the ordinary American, every American, who has given the gift of life to their neighbors and families by donating organs, tissue, bone marrow, or blood. That is what this resolution calls for. We salute you for your sacrifice and your charity. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H. Con. Res. 247.

Mr. UPTON. Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 247) expressing the sense of Congress regarding the importance of organ, tissue, bone marrow, and blood donation and supporting National Donor Day.