Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. That is right.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you. Because with everything that we have laid out here over the last 20 or so minutes, what is clear is that we are moving in the wrong direction. The priorities of the Republican leadership here are completely out of step with the priorities of the American people. So, instead, what the Republicans here have attempted to do is to shift the focus and attention away from what is really going on and engaging in the politics of distraction. Now this that I have in my hand is about to become a scarcity. It is a social studies textbook, an American history textbook, which, Mr. Speaker, I would argue that in our high schools will soon be obsolete. We won't have any reason to use these any more, particularly the section on how a bill becomes a law. Because last week we actually brought a bill to the floor that was defeated in the Judiciary Committee, a bill that related to court stripping, stripping the courts of the right to review cases related to the Pledge of Allegiance and whether under God was constitutional or not. Now that question can be debated all day, and there are varying degrees of opinions on that subject. But we teach our children in public schools the concept of how a bill becomes a law, as created by our Founding Fathers, this system of checks and balances and the separation of powers. And because the Republicans are moving this country in the wrong direction and don't share the priorities of the American people, they have had to deflect attention away from what is really going on here and focus on things like the Pledge of Allegiance, gay marriage, and flag burning. Today in Judiciary we literally spent, Mr. Meek, 6\1/2\ hours on one bill and one amendment related to the separation of church and state. Now, Mr. Meek, when you go home, do your constituents, does the father of four who leaves for work in the morning, when you see him on the street, does he stop you and say, Kendrick, I really want you to go to the Congress and focus on the Pledge of Allegiance? Or do you think it is more likely, and in your experience, do they tell you, you know, I just wasn't sure how I was going to fill my gas tank today? Or how about the parents of kids who are fighting over in Iraq? Do you think they are really worried about whether we amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage? Is that at the top of those parents' list, or is it more likely that at the top of their list that their baby comes home to them? What is going on here?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Will the gentleman yield?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Four months, Mr. Meek. Less than 4 months. This may be the last evening that we spend as the 30-something Working Group until we come back from the August recess. The 30-something Working Group has an opportunity each night to talk about the direction we want to move this country on behalf of Democrats and the next generation. All of the charts and information that we have talked about tonight are available on our Web site, www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. We appreciate the privilege that the leader gives us each night to talk about the priorities of the Democratic caucus and the American people, and it is a privilege to be here with you once again.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We had over a thousand.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Meek, from what I have seen here, that is impossible for these people.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you. How about this? I mean, let us go beyond just the mom or dad of a young man or woman fighting in Iraq. How about the father of four who leaves for work every day, and do you think he is worrying about whether someone who is gay is going to be able to get married or not, or is my Member of Congress voting to amend the Constitution to deal with that, or do you think that it is more likely that he is pissed that he is having to pay $3.01 a gallon to fill up his tank and it is going to cost him like $55 and he is wondering whether he is going to be able to get to work in the morning? Where on the list of priorities, Mr. Delahunt, do you think that is for the Joe and Jane average constituents that we represent?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And instead, Mr. Ryan, we are focusing on the Pledge of Allegiance and gay marriage. And what it really comes down to, do you think that the mom whose baby is in Iraq fighting on behalf of our country is worrying about whether one of her children is going to be able to say ``under God'' in the pledge at school, or is she more worried that her baby over in Iraq is going to come back to her? What do you think is a higher priority for her?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you very much. Because the Prime Minister of Iraq is here in Washington, today met with the President, and the whole notion of stubbornness and refusal to acknowledge that they are wrong and refusal to change course is so evident in the decision-making that goes on with this administration as far as the direction that we are going in Iraq. June 13, when the President went on that surprise visit to Iraq and praised up and down the Prime Minister's plan for ending the bloody violence in Baghdad, came back and said, The Prime Minister of Iraq has a plan and I am supportive of it. Well, today they finally acknowledged that it is not working and it is not effective and not that, yes, we are going to change course. It is ``changing the plan is under consideration.'' Well, because we have had a shift in focus, in terms of the media's attention, to the crisis in the Middle East as it relates to Hezbollah, its attacks on Israel, it has deflected attention away from the fact that the actual number of deaths and bombings have increased in Iraq in the last month.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We talked about trying to override, unsuccessfully, a veto on stem cell research. We did that and the Pledge of Allegiance bill, and we did gay marriage. We engaged in the politics of distraction, because the only way that the Republican leadership here can take the focus off of all the horrendously bad things that they are doing on the priorities of the American people is by focusing on that. I had a social studies text book with me last week, I am not sure if we still have it, but last week I really wanted to bring a social studies textbook to the floor because essentially there is no point in using it any more in our public high schools. At the end of the day, the Republican leadership here has thrown out the concept of how a bill becomes a law. That Pledge of Allegiance bill we brought here last week? I sit on the House Judiciary Committee. That bill was defeated in committee, and yet we still saw it on this floor. When we teach high school civics, we teach that a bill has to go through the committee process, it has to garner a majority of the committee members to move on then to either the next committee or to the next point of reference in the legislative process.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you so much to my good friend, Mr. Delahunt, and I am glad to be here with my three good friends from the 30-something Working Group. You know, the answer to the question that is on everybody's mind, which is why do they keep moving us in this direction? Well, if you actually shine a light or a magnifying glass on what is really going on here, then it would be clear that their priorities are all wrong. So instead, what they do is they engage in the politics of distraction, like they did all during last week. If you recall last week, let us take a walk down memory lane here, did we focus on the priorities of the American people, like gas prices and health care and the true direction that we should be going in in the war in Iraq? Were those at the top of the Republican agenda last week?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Will the gentleman from Ohio yield?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Exactly. Let us focus on what the bill itself actually did, which also throws out the whole system of checks and balances and who is responsible for what according to the way the Founding Fathers set it up. That bill actually said, like you said, Mr. Ryan, that specifically because the Republican leadership here does not agree with a specific court decision, they decided to pass a bill stripping the courts of the ability to decide that question. Now, whether or not you agree that ``under God'' as part of the Pledge of Allegiance is or is not constitutional, that is not relevant. We certainly shouldn't be passing legislation here that was defeated in committee; that couldn't even garner enough support on the Republican side to pass out of committee, and they stack the committees in their favor, to strip the courts of the ability to decide a question that the Republicans don't agree with. But, you know, the rubber stamps, the rubber stamps in this body just went ahead and approved it anyway. Break it out, Mr. Meek.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I would be glad to. In fact, what is really interesting about these comments from Speaker Gingrich was that he was sitting on a panel of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, with former Speaker Foley, the Democratic Speaker who Gingrich succeeded, and they were literally trading head nods back and forth from what one another was saying. And one of the things that Speaker Gingrich commented on was as follows: ``Congress has to think about how fundamentally wrong the current system is. When facing crises at home and abroad,'' he said, ``it's important to have an informed, independent legislative branch coming to grips with this reality, and not sitting around waiting for presidential leadership.'' And he said so much more than that. Mr. Delahunt, I would yield to you. And he went on, on the same day and in the same panel discussion.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, before you yield to Mr. Ryan, he actually went on and I have the rest of his comments from that point. He actually went on and suggested that Congress rediscover its power to supervise the administration. And he said, ``The failure to do effective aggressive oversight disserves the country and disserves the President.'' I mean, disserves the country and disserves the President. We are not talking about the namby pamby liberals that the Republican leadership always refers to. We are talking about the former Speaker of this House and the leader of the Republican Revolution. This is damning criticism. Damning criticism. Mr. Ryan.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. A 231 difference. That is a big difference. Maybe that is an anomaly. Maybe that is just isolated. No, keep going. Let's look at another indicator of who is for border security and who is just kidding. The INS fines for immigration enforcement, making sure that we actually crack down on illegal immigrants: 1999, 417. The actual statistic is in 1999 the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it initiated fines against three companies. Who was President in 1999? President Clinton. A Democrat was President. Who was President in 2004? President Bush. We are talking about going after the firms, the businesses, that aggressively hire illegal immigrants. But maybe that was an isolated incident. Maybe it was just those two indicators that were off the charts, different than the policy that the Republicans talk about. Keep going. Let's look at the Bush administration's record on pursuing immigration fraud cases. In 1995, under President Clinton's administration, 6,455 immigration fraud cases were prosecuted. In 2003, under President Bush, 1,389 cases were prosecuted. At the end of the day, I think the American people will want to examine the facts, and not just listen to the words.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. There is just no accountability. There are just words. There is no action to back up the words. You know, if you listen to the Republicans on immigration, as Mr. Meek referenced, you would think that they were the hardest line, the hardest core, that border security was the highest priority to them. But if you closely examine the facts, you don't have to even closely examine the facts, you just scratch the surface a little bit. Take a look at what the real record of this hard line Republican congressional leadership is when it comes to border security. Let's show the American people who is for immigration reform and who is just kidding. These are third-party validators here. Here is border security by the numbers. We took a look and found that as it relates to the average number of new Border Patrol agents that are added each year, because the Republicans talk a good game about how many Border Patrol agents they want to add, well, under the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 2000, the average number per year added was 642. You take a look how many were added, Border Patrol agents per year, under the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005, it was 411. That is not just a couple, that is not a handful, that is a big difference. 642 minus 411, I am not a mathematician, whatever it is, someone subtract it for me.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Twenty-two thousand in Afghanistan versus 130,000 in Iraq.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, do you know how many troops we have in Afghanistan versus how many we have in Iraq?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Of course.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And just so we can segue into how we would do it differently, what we would do is we would go back to the days of PAYGO rules. We would make sure that we have some fiscal discipline that we impose on ourselves, just like the State legislatures that we came from, just like they do, which is that we are not going to deficit spend. Just like families who struggle every day to not spend more money than they take in; to not put all their wants and desires on a credit card and live on credit card debt. We need to operate this budget like families feel compelled to operate their family budgets. We are simply not doing that. What we would do, and we have offered amendments time and again, Mr. Ryan, through Mr. Spratt, our lead Democrat on the House Budget Committee. He has offered amendment after amendment that has been rejected unanimously by the Republicans again and again opposing reestablishing PAYGO. PAYGO is tough. It forces some difficult choices. But it would make sure that we could really cut the deficit and go back to the surpluses that we had under the Clinton administration. I mean, that is the direction that we need to move in. If we continue down this path, if we continue in the direction that the Republicans have taken us, we will continue to spiral downward and pass the deficit and the debt onto future generations. Really, we only have a couple of minutes, and what I didn't get to mention at the end of our last hour was what Speaker Gingrich had said. So if you would just before we end yield back to me, I kind of want to throw that out there for everyone's final thoughts. Be happy to yield.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Well, just to throw this out, I want to end by telling you what Speaker Gingrich said at the end of that panel. He said, ``While waiting for voter backlash to clean up Congress, he had some pithy advice for lawmakers, who in the current wave of scandal and personal enrichment on Capitol Hill have confused the public interest with their personal interest, said the former Speaker, my answer to them is: Go home.'' Good advice.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I am so glad that you highlighted that because the fiscal irresponsibility is startling, and so often it is difficult for us to quantify or physically represent what the impact is of the fiscally irresponsible decisions that are going on here, and we are not just making this stuff up ourselves. Mr. Meek is absolutely right. The three of us were State legislators. We worked every day to balance our State budgets. States cannot operate in the red like the Federal Government can. The Federal Government can deficit spend. That is not possible at the State level. So, when we pass down a tax cut, it means that there is less revenue available at the State level in the programs that they are counting on those Federal dollars to fund, and so they have the devolution of the tax cuts. Look, it is so often the Republicans talk about how they make these references to tax-and-spend liberals. Well, not only as you have talked about are they borrow-and-spend Republicans, but they also have refused to acknowledge that tax cuts are another form of spending. I mean, they are adopting irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthiest few. It would be one thing if they were passing tax cuts on to middle class working families. They are passing tax cuts that add to the deficit for the wealthiest few. Let us just go over some opinions and some reality that is being offered out there as far as what third party validators have to say about their irresponsible spending. Here is a USA Today editorial from February 21, 2006, of this year. The title of it is, ``Who's spending big now? The party of small government,'' and USA Today said, ``Tax cuts, they say, force hard decisions and restrain reckless spending. The last time we looked, though, Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House. They are the spenders. In fact, since they took control in 2001, they have increased spending by an average of nearly 7.5 percent a year, more than double the rate in the last 5 years of Clinton-era budgets.'' Now, what kind of an impact are we talking about on real people? The tax cut reconciliation package that we passed out of this Chamber a couple of months ago, let us see who that helps because one would think that the purpose of a tax cut is to just give tax dollars back to the average person. Does the tax cut bill do that? Well, let us take a look at the evidence because the average amount that an American would get back, based on income from the 2006 tax cut bill passed by the Republicans, looks like this. If you make between $10,000 and $20,000 a year, you get enough back from that tax cut bill to buy a Slurpee. If you make between $40,000 and let us say $50,000 a year, you get enough back just about, because it is continuing to increase, to buy a gallon of gas, not a tank, mind you, a gallon of gas, which is about three bucks. And if you make more than $1 million, you did okay in the tax cut bill. You get enough to buy a Hummer. There is a slight discrepancy here. It is really pretty startling. Now, when we are talking about the billions, with a B, that the tax cut bill cost, again, it is hard to illustrate for folks what the kind of numbers and immensity, enormity of what we deal with here every day really means. So how much is a billion just so people can wrap their minds around it? Well, a billion hours ago, humans were making their first tools in the Stone Age. To quantify it further, a billion seconds ago, it was 1975 and the last American troops had pulled out of Vietnam. A billion minutes ago, it was 104 A.D., and the Chinese had first invented paper. But under the Republicans, $1 billion ago was only 3 hours and 32 minutes at the rate that the government spends money under this Republican leadership. That is just to help people understand what is really going on here, who is for fiscal responsibility and who is just a lot of talk.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And who has a record of it.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. It is Charles Barkley.