Mel Watt

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. In that case, I offer the amendment as the designee of the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. WATT. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume solely to say that this is a straightforward amendment that provides that if one part of the bill is determined to be unconstitutional, it can be severable from the rest of the bill and it doesn't bring the rest of the provisions down. That's a standard policy to put in most legislation. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT. Madam Chair, I have just been advised that we were mistaken in the desire of Ms. Waters to offer the amendment. She didn't want me to offer it in her stead, and that's why she didn't show up. I would just ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment, unless the chairman has an objection.

Mr. WATT. Madam Chair, we were expecting Congresswoman Waters. I would ask unanimous consent that this amendment be delayed until we can determine whether she is still planning to offer it.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time. As the gentlewoman has indicated, I am the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property of Judiciary, and I too supported reporting the bill favorably to the House floor. The problem is that the bill we may end up debating is not the bill that we reported favorably from the Judiciary Committee, and there are reasons for that. I understand what those reasons are, but if the amendment that is being offered as the manager's amendment passes, it will put us in a position where substantial people who supported the bill will be unable to do so. Here is the equation. One of the primary purposes for which there was a strong alliance of people and groups and interests supporting patent reform was that in the past fees that have been paid to the Patent and Trademark Office have gone through the appropriations process, and over the last 10 years almost $800,000 of those fees have been diverted to other purposes, other than the use of the Patent and Trademark Office. The effect of that is that there has been a hidden tax on innovation in our country. The United States Senate passed a bill that would end that diversion. They passed it by a vote of 85-4. We passed a bill out of our Judiciary Committee that would end that diversion, and all of a sudden we come to the floor and a manager's amendment is being offered that, if it is not defeated, will undermine that unifying thing that has held the groups together and allowed people to support the bill. So I have to be in a position where I am strongly opposing the manager's amendment to this bill. I don't think the groups out there support it. It is not often that I come to the floor and say I am speaking for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce would like for the diversion of fees to stop. It's not often that I come to the floor and say that I'm speaking, I think, for the United States Senate. They've already passed a bill that would stop the diversion of fees. It's not often that I come to the floor standing up for the bill that came out of our committee against forces that have taken it over and are putting forward a manager's amendment that we simply cannot support. Now, I understand how we got here. The appropriators would like to continue to control the process. They said, Well, we are going to object to this, and we will raise a point of order. And they came up with language that professes to solve the problem. The problem is that that raised another point of order because the Congressional Budget Office said, Well, if you do it that way, you are going to put yourself in a situation where we have to score this bill in a different way. So then the leadership on the chairman's side said, Okay, well, we can waive that rule. And I'm saying, Well, if you can waive the rule, you are the people who have been so much worried about the deficit, if you can waive the rule that gets around worrying about the deficit, why couldn't you waive the rule that allows us to take up the bill that we passed out of committee? So I need to be addressing my Republican colleagues here. If they want to start this process over, the way to start the process over is to vote against the manager's amendment. That's the simple way to do it. At that point we can get back, hopefully, to a bill that does clearly not divert fees and that the whole population of supporters has said we would support. That's where I am, Mr. Chairman. I don't want to belabor this. I don't want to take away time from other people who want to speak. But it's not the bill itself that came out of committee that's the problem. If we pass the manager's amendment, we've got a problem here. We could tinker around the edges of the bill that came out of the committee, and we could solve the minor concerns that we've got there. But there's no way to tinker around the edges of this diversion issue. Either you support diversion of money, or you don't support diversion of money. I think it's time for us to stop this hidden tax that we have imposed on innovation in this country. The only way to do that is to defeat the manager's amendment.

Mr. WATT. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. WATT. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner).

Mr. WATT. I yield myself the balance of my time. Let me first say I agree with Mr. Sensenbrenner. The Rules Committee says that this is a technical amendment, that it would make technical edits and a few necessary changes to more substantive issues. This is a very substantive manager's amendment; there is no question about that. There are many good parts to this bill, and a broad coalition of people supported the bill which was reported out of committee. But the one and only necessary part of the bill is the ability to give the Patent and Trademark Office its full funding. That was the whole purpose for which we started off this process. This whole reform process was conceived to address poor-quality patents and to reduce the backlog of patent applications, which now exceeds a 700,000 backlog of patent applications. And the reason it exceeds 700,000 is because the Patent and Trademark Office has not had the money because their fees that they have been charging have been diverted to the general fund. Without a clear path to access its own collection of fees, the PTO cannot properly plan or implement the other changes in the bill and fulfill its primary function of reducing the backlog and examining patent applications. The compromise that this manager's amendment proposes has been described by a patent news blog as, it says, It's still Lucy--that's the appropriators--holding the football that it will never let Charlie Brown have. That's really what we see here. This is a mirage, a promise that they are going to do something that, if they just did it in the bill the way we reported the bill out of the committee, you wouldn't need this subterfuge. There is no reason to be doing this. The Senate reported it out clean, no diversion, 95-4 they voted it out of the Senate. I don't even know why we're here debating this at this point. If we believe that the one primary purpose of patent reform is to deal with the fee diversion, then we need to deal with that first, and that's exactly what we did in the Judiciary Committee. I don't know why I'm here defending what we, on a broad, bipartisan basis, reported out of our committee. It ought to be the chairman of the committee that's defending what we reported out of the committee. Yet we are here, instead of defending what we reported out of the committee, the manager's amendment waters it down and makes it ineffective, and that's not what we should be doing here. Now they said they got these letters of support, but the letters came supporting what came out of the committee, not the manager's amendment. The manager's amendment is going to destroy what came out of the committee. It is inconsistent with what came out of the committee. So we've got to defeat the manager's amendment and go back to the bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee, and that's what I'm advocating.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I don't come to the floor very often anymore to debate. I have kind of changed my pattern. Eighteen years ago, 19 years ago, when I saw egregious things, I would be right here in the heart of the debate, ranting and raving, some people would say. When my colleagues and sometimes my constituents now ask me, Have you lost your passion, I tell them that there are some reasons that I don't come to the floor anymore. One is that I find that most of the time, my colleagues on the opposite side are tone deaf. They are not really listening to what anybody is saying to them. They are off on some radical right undertaking, falling off the right edge of the Earth, and they are not listening to anything I say. They don't share my values, and they don't really care about this debate that we had, 3 hours of talking about women, infants, and children going hungry. They really don't much care about that, I say to my constituents. And, third, they just make up stuff. You know, they have this--you know, if we repeat it enough, it's got to be true, and we will convince the American people of about anything if we just keep saying it over and over again. Or they . . . have convenient memories that forget that it was President Bush----

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, in the interest of time, some people have said that I called somebody a liar and, obviously, that would be in violation of the rules. I am aware of that. So if I did, I ask unanimous consent that those words be removed from the Record.

Mr. WATT. Can the Chair tell me how much time remains in my 5 minutes? The Acting Chair. The gentleman from North Carolina has 3 minutes remaining of his 5 minutes.

Mr. WATT. All right. Well, let me try to pick up essentially where I was without offending anybody else. There's some conveniently forgotten items that I think we need to be reminded of. Number 1, that it was President Bush who requested the government bailouts. That occurred on his watch. It was President Bush that was responsible for the tax cuts for the rich that got us out of surpluses as far as the eye could see and into this deficit spending. And it was rampant speculation and abuse of derivatives on Wall Street that resulted in a meltdown that made Dodd-Frank and the CFTC regulation that we're here debating necessary. Those are the three important things that I think we need to take note of. It also resulted in a tremendous economic downturn that resulted in more people needing food stamps and the benefit of the WIC program. So these two things are really not disconnected from each other, the 3 hours of debate that we had previously and the debate on whether we are going to adequately fund the CFTC, which has been given authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to rein in the speculation that is taking place that's driving up food prices, oil prices, and if we're not careful, will result in the same kind of economic meltdown that we experienced that got us into this in the first place. So this whole process of being in denial about this and ignoring the facts is something that I think we should not countenance on this floor. We need the CFTC to regulate derivatives and speculation. And to the extent that we cut the staff and the funding of the CFTC, we could be replicating exactly what led President Bush to say we needed a bailout in the first place. So, that's what this debate is all about. I think it's terrible that we are cutting funds under this bill for women, infants, and children, the most vulnerable in our society. But it's even more terrible that we are going to run the risk of allowing the same kind of rampant speculation, unregulated, to get us back into another meltdown that will result in our being back here trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this ditch. A year from now, 18 months from now, 2 years from now we'll be right back here again. Now, this is not rocket science. It's all just connected to each other. And my colleagues can deny it all they want. They can say that this is about drilling for oil in the United States. That's not what it's about. All of the science I've seen says there's more supply of oil now than there is demand, and if we were operating in a regular domestic market on regular economics, the price of gas would be going down. We need to regulate the CFTC. We need to have them regulating derivatives and speculation. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Reverend Howard Allen Chubbs for his 45 years of service as pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dr. Chubbs, an excellent leader, has led the church from a small congregation without a building to a six million dollar edifice with a membership of approximately 1300. In addition to his important religious role as the leader of a dynamic congregation, he is recognized as a leader in race and interfaith missions. The members of Dr. Chubbs' congregation always share their expertise with those in need without having to be asked and Dr. Chubbs spends substantial time mentoring young ministers in the community. Under Dr. Chubbs' leadership, Providence Baptist Church has provided opportunities for young people to prepare themselves to become the best that they can be through SAT preparation, Girl Scouts, exercise and other programs. And he has provided adults continuous opportunities to reinforce all the positive attributes needed to be assets to the church, the community, the State of North Carolina and the nation. Dr. Chubbs is also recognized as an outstanding husband and father and was honored by the National Diabetes Association as a ``Father of the Year'' recently. Dr. Chubbs has also been an active force internationally. He has worked diligently with the National Conference of Community and Justice, NCCJ, and the Jewish Federation to promote peace and mutual respect among ethnic groups, cultures and religious groups and travelled to Israel in 1994, 1997, 2000, and 2010. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in wishing Reverend Dr. Howard Allen Chubbs and the Providence Baptist Church congregation a great pastoral 45th anniversary and best wishes in the years to come.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate a credit union located in my Congressional District, First Legacy Community Credit Union, on 70 years of service to its members. First Legacy, originally named School Workers Federal Credit Union, was founded in Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 14, 1941, by a group of educators in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. At its beginning, First Legacy offered a simple savings and loan program; today, it offers a broad range of financial services to its members. First Legacy Community Credit Union's continued dedication to serving the community, as well as efforts to increase financial literacy in North Carolina, is worthy of special recognition. I commend the work that First Legacy Community Credit Union continues to do and wish this outstanding community credit union another 70 years of success.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. As best I can discern, the argument about the HAMP program is we should terminate it because it's run inefficiently. That seems a fairly strange argument for most of us around here because we know that there are inefficiencies in every department of the government. If you use that as the touchstone for terminating programs, we would close down the entire Defense Department; we would close down the Department of Commerce; we would close down the Department of Health and Human Services. We would go right down the list and close them all because every one of the departments and every program has some inefficiencies in them. You don't solve the problem by closing a program. You solve the problem by trying to correct the problems that exists. This is a whole new philosophy for this group of people, because when the Securities and Exchange Commission was not equipped to fine the Bernie Madoff episode, their answer to it was let's cut out the SEC or let's reduce this budget, not make it more efficient so that it can stop the kind of fraud and abuse that was taking place, let's just starve it to death. That's the same philosophy that's being applied in this context, Mr. Chairman. Because the program is inefficient, which all of us agree it has been, their answer is let's close it down. Ours is to make the program more efficient and work for the purposes for which it was intended; and that's what we ought to be devoting our attention to today, not terminating the program.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. I don't understand the rationale of my colleagues. And it would be something else if this bill were going to see the light of day in the Senate. It's not going anywhere. This is a message bill, Mr. Chairman. That's all this is about. Let's send a message to the American people that we can cut. Whether we're cutting money that's taxpayer money or cutting money that's going to be paid out of the top fund that the law requires the biggest financial institutions in America to make the taxpayers whole, if, at the end of the day there is a deficit in repaying this money, it doesn't matter. Let's just stand up and beat on our chest and say to the American people and think that they will believe that we are doing something to save them tax dollars. This bill saves no tax dollars, and it's an abomination.

Mr. WATT. I thank our ranking member for yielding time. I'm here today because this is a series of actions, all of which I oppose, that are in sequence. And I think we need to put this in perspective. Yesterday, my colleagues were proposing to terminate the FHA Refinance Program that helps people refinance mortgages under FHA. Next week, we'll be back on the floor out of our committee with a proposal that they have made to do away with the Community Stabilization Program, which is designed really to stabilize communities and keep people who own properties and are trying to pay their mortgages from seeing the values of their properties go down even further. And next week they'll be offering a proposal to do away with the mortgage refinance assistance program called HAMP. Of all of the four proposals, including the one we're here debating today, this, I think, is the most mean spirited and most duplicitous one and I think the one that most vigorously deserves to be opposed by my colleagues here in the House; because this proposes to do away with a program that assists people who were employed, got a mortgage, were paying their mortgage, then lost their jobs to the downturn in the economy and found themselves in a position where they could no longer afford to pay their mortgage. These are not people who were out getting second homes. These are working people who had jobs, fell on bad times, and lost their jobs and getting unemployment benefits. And all we're saying is give them a break for 12 months and give them the opportunity to go back into the marketplace and find a job, and then they can resume paying their mortgages. It is absolutely mean spirited to say to somebody who has complied with all the rules and lost their job by no fault of their own and then find themselves unable to pay their mortgages that we won't try to give you some measure of relief. It's further complicated--made even more duplicitous, really--by a provision that has been inserted into this bill that directs the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to conduct a study and, based on that study, issue a report on the best practices that could be used to implement this program--a program which they are proposing to terminate. Why would you spend taxpayer money to have a study on the best practices to implement a program that the bill itself says is going to be terminated? A waste of taxpayer money. Yet my colleagues are here representing to the Members of this House and to the American public that their whole objective is to save the taxpayers money.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. WATT. Madam Chair, let me just first be clear that we are not expanding anything in this amendment. The statute says exactly what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to do. This amendment just allows the funding to enable them to do it. This is an appropriations bill. We are not supposed to be expanding or contracting anything in appropriations bill. That is what I thought. The Appropriations Committee is about money, not about authority, not about expanding or contracting authority. So I don't know what my colleague was talking about when he said we are expanding something if we pass this amendment. Second, there is some debate from some of my colleagues, and I could understand the first-term Member who got up and says I don't know why we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What I can't understand is why the subsequent colleague who serves on Financial Services got up and said the same thing, because he was on the Financial Services Committee and served with me when we created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So let me just give a little history here about why we have it. We had theoretically consumer protection as one of the objectives of the Federal Reserve and other Federal regulators. We had in that same Federal Reserve the responsibility for the safety and soundness of our financial institutions. Those two things obviously were in conflict with each other because the Federal Reserve, instead of looking out for the interests of consumers and protecting consumers, allowed consumers to get into mortgages and financial transactions that ended up destroying our financial system; and they did it saying, well, you know, this is going to add to the safety and soundness of financial institutions because our definition of safety and soundness is a financial institution which can make more and more and more money. So what is the solution to that? You don't do away with safety and soundness. We didn't do away with safety and soundness. It is important to protect the safety and soundness of our financial institutions. We continued to give that responsibility to the Federal Reserve and the regulators. But if you are going to protect consumers, you don't give the authority to the same entity that has disregarded the interests of consumers and led us to a financial services meltdown. So we took those consumer protection responsibilities and put them into a separate entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Now, the gentleman who was a freshman here, I don't expect that he would have been around to understand that. You know, he just got here. But for my colleagues who served on the Financial Services Committee to get up and say, well, I don't know why we have a separate Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they must not have been paying attention. Now, to go further over the objections of some of us, we didn't want to necessarily put this in the Federal Reserve; but to get it funded appropriately, the Federal Reserve set some fees and charged the industry for this agency, not the taxpayer. This is not taxpayer money, at least not tax dollar money. I guess at some point everything is taxpayer money. But this is not appropriated money. So this would come out of the Federal Reserve's budget, which I thought my colleagues, they don't like the Federal Reserve anyway, at least that is what they have been telling us all this time. They want to do away with the Federal Reserve. You would think they would want to take some of their money and put it into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. All this amendment does is try to restore the funding to a level so that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can do what it is charged with doing. Let's not understate or overstate that. This is an important amendment. Let's support the amendment and pass it.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I came in in the middle of this debate, and I have been trying to figure out if the American people who may be watching this, and even my colleagues here on the floor, may even understand what this debate is about. The original resolution talks about inventorying and looking at and evaluating regulations. I think that's a substitute for trying to figure out how to cut back on various agencies and their authority and what they are doing, and we don't want to lose sight of that. I think that is an honorable objective. The problem is that this debate has wandered off into a discussion about whether the SEC effectively did what it was supposed to do with respect to Bernie Madoff. And when I hear my colleague, Mr. Miller, say, well, this is about holding the SEC accountable for what they did not do, I don't know how you hold the SEC accountable for what they did not do by decreasing their ability to regulate an industry and by decreasing their budget. Those two things don't compute with me. I just am having a big problem internalizing this. You have an agency here that has a $1 billion annual budget. It has responsibility for policing and monitoring all of the things that Mr. Green talked about in his debate. But on a gross level, 8.5 billion shares of stock are transferred every day, so $1 billion a year. We are supposed to monitor and control 8.5 billion shares a day transferred and transacted, and here we are talking about, well, let's take authority from the SEC and let's take money away from the SEC to do what it's supposed to do. Friends, that does not compute, and the American people know that it does not compute. Now, the underlying resolution says that you are supposed to find ways to identify how these regulations impact and limit access to credit and capital. Well, imagine what is going to happen with investors in this country if the SEC isn't available to regulate the transactions, 8.5 billion transactions a day. And you are going to say, Okay, we want your capital, but we are not going to do anything to protect you as an investor. We are going to let Bernie Madoff do whatever he wants to do, because we are getting ready to limit the number of regulations the SEC can impose on Bernie Madoff, and we are getting ready to limit their budget to enforce the regulations that they have. Friends, that does not compute. It does not compute with Members of this House, and, I will tell you, it will not compute with the American public. This is a simple debate: Do you allow the private sector to do whatever they want to whenever they want to in whatever circumstances they want to so that we can be back in another economic chaos like we had for the last 2 or 3 years, or do we have some reasonable regulations and reasonably fund the ability of the regulators to enforce those regulations? That's what this debate is about. I don't know what Mr. Miller was talking about. I don't know how this relates to Fannie and Freddie. It doesn't. Everything in our committee seems to relate to Fannie and Freddie. But this is about how we are going to regulate these stock transactions. And if you reduce their budget and reduce their ability to regulate, I guarantee you, we will be out of control. It does not compute.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. ``Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.''

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I oppose the estate tax provisions in this bill, and I'm thankful that the rule would allow us to vote against this estate tax. But I also oppose the extension of the high income tax cuts, and I oppose the way we are doing the Social Security situation because I think it will result in damage to Social Security. And this rule does not give me the opportunity to vote against those two things. And therefore, it's my intention to vote against the rule. I've tried to make it clear to my leadership that I think it's important for me to have that vote on those two issues, and they haven't seen fit to make that in order. So I feel like I must, under those circumstances, vote against the rule.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Financial Services be discharged from further consideration of the bill (H.R. 6166) to authorize the production of palladium bullion coins to provide affordable opportunities for investments in precious metals, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.