John Yarmuth

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4926) to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to establish a grant program for automated external defibrillators in schools, as amended.

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, I request 5 legislative days during which Members may revise and extend and insert extraneous material on H.R. 5524 into the Record.

Mr. YARMUTH. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Reconnecting Homeless Youth Act, which I introduced earlier this year. This legislation will reauthorize the sole source of Federal funding for at least 1 million young people who find themselves homeless or unaccompanied each year. Some of those children are born homeless, but most run away to escape mental, emotional or physical abuse. More than a third of them are victims of sexual abuse in the home. Although they escape terrible conditions at home, for most, what is waiting for them on the street is no better. These youths are raped or assaulted at rates two to three times the national average, they are seven more times likely to contract HIV, and a third of them attempt suicide. For these young people, hope is a distant concept and the future is little more than a dead end. The situation is bleak, but the solutions are within our grasp. My hometown of Louisville, thanks to organizations like Safe Place and Boys Haven, has set the standard for helping homeless youth find a home, get an education and rediscover their futures. I invited Rusty Booker to testify before the Education and Labor Committee last year. Rusty, a fellow Louisvillian, ran away from an abusive home at the age of 12 and went through five different foster homes before finding his path at Safe Place. Rusty showed us that we have the answers, we have the tools to eliminate childhood homelessness and disconnection, but only if we choose to use them. That is the opportunity we have before us today, because despite the tremendous work of our service organizations, the funds and personnel to accommodate the basic needs of our Nation's runaway and homeless youth are far short of meeting the demand and the required infrastructure is simply not in place. We need to do more than just contain these children while we have them. We must set them on a path to adulthood, prepared for the workplace and ready for the world, without dragging the dead weight of a history of neglect. The Reconnecting Homeless Youth Act will refocus our resources and give America a real shot at eradicating youth homelessness forever. Thanks to the groundwork laid in Louisville, the Reconnecting Homeless Youth Act won't simply extend the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act until 2013. It will provide significant improvements and much-needed expansions. Addressing the critical funding shortfall, this legislation will dramatically increase the reauthorization for Runaway and Homeless Youth Act funding to $150 million per year, ensuring that the resources are in place for community-serving organizations to reach every child in need. The bill will also increase the basic center program allotments for small States, make public entities eligible for street outreach program funds, establish grantee performance standards, and finally create a process for developing a national runaway and homeless youth research and evaluation agenda. The progress that we have made in the past year is significant. In fiscal year 2007, 740,000 young people were helped by our HYA programs. But more significant will be the advances down the road. As we work to restore faith in this Nation's future, we must build an America where every child has a chance to learn, succeed, and at the very least have a place to call home. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation, which will offer a chance and a childhood to millions of our most vulnerable citizens. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. YARMUTH. We are prepared to close if you are prepared to close.

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, with that, I strongly urge my colleagues to pass this important legislation that for more than 1 million young people each year could mean the difference between continuing to live on the streets without hope and finding a path to independent adulthood that begins with a place to call home. I want to thank Chairman Miller, Chairwoman McCarthy, and especially Representative Biggert for her hard work and dedication to this issue.

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, as the price of gasoline continues to hit record prices almost every week, congressional Democrats continue to pass legislation to help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil and lower prices at the pump. Unfortunately, the only solution President Bush and congressional Republicans come up with is more drilling. They ignore the fact that drilling in the U.S. has recently exploded. Since 2000, the number of wells that have been drilled in this country has increased by about 66 percent, while the price at the pump for the consumer has more than doubled. President Bush and congressional Republicans also continue to push drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Again, they ignore experts who say that opening the refuge for drilling would produce only about 6-months' worth of oil and it wouldn't be available for another 10 years. How is that a strategy for lower prices today? Mr. Speaker, House Democrats know that American families are feeling squeezed every time they head to the gas station. That is why we continue to pass legislation that should help ease the pain at the pump. It would be nice if the President would support these efforts.

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. Madam Chairman, I rise on behalf of Mr. Klein of Florida and myself to offer an amendment to the fiscal year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, requiring Iraq to help support our troops stationed in their country. Oil revenues have helped generate a multibillion-dollar surplus in Iraq that is expected to reach $180 billion within 3 years. Still, American taxpayers send $339 million to Iraq each day, money that can be invested here, as gas prices are soaring, education is lagging, health care is increasingly out of reach, and everywhere American families are struggling. When the administration negotiates a Status of Forces Agreement this year, this amendment will require them to negotiate commonsense terms for Iraq to provide support for our military operations on their soil. This arrangement could be similar to the plan we have with South Korea, where they pay our security costs, or in Japan, which pays for 75 percent of the cost of maintaining troops and grants U.S. base rights. Whatever the arrangement, this amendment would ensure that Americans no longer have to shoulder the burden alone. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment.

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. LIHEAP, which provides crucial heating and cooling assistance to millions of hardworking, low-income families all across America, grows more important as fuel prices continue to skyrocket and we head toward another hot summer. Already families who qualify for LIHEAP spend, on average, a fifth of their income on energy costs. For hundreds of thousands of Americans, that figure will continue to rise until the electricity is simply shut off. Still, rather than rising to the occasion, this government has backed away from our responsibilities to those families. Even as prices soar and LIHEAP applicants have increased by 20 percent, the average LIHEAP grant has dropped by 20 percent, leaving millions without the full assistance to which they are entitled and millions more without any help at all. In my hometown of Louisville, I hear from people who work hard every day with less to show for it. Seniors, who deserve to live out their golden years comfortably, now face the choice of paying for medicine, food, or energy. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting full funding for this crucial program so that millions of LIHEAP-qualifying Americans won't be left alone to face potentially life-threatening heat this summer.

Mr. YARMUTH

Mr. YARMUTH. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. YARMUTH. Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here once again speaking on behalf of the majority makers, the freshmen Democrats elected in 2006 to bring change to Washington and who have worked very diligently over the last 16 months to begin to reverse the damage done to this country over the last 7\1/2\ years. It is interesting, I was planning to talk about what I saw as a very encouraging sign over the last few days, the encouraging sign that we had actually solid bipartisan participation in trying to come up with solutions to some of the very daunting challenges that face this country today, including energy prices. We had a bipartisan vote, an overwhelming bipartisan vote, to restrict additions to the strategic petroleum reserve, something which the President opposes but which overwhelming numbers of both bodies of Congress supported. And I was going to talk about the farm bill in which we had significant Republican participation in coming to grips with a new solution to our farm policy in this country. And I was going to talk about our housing initiatives, how we had significant Republican support last week in trying to craft policies that would help alleviate the serious housing situation we have and to try to keep things from getting worse. But after listening to the partisan attack that I just heard, I have to respond because what we have heard is something that is almost in a parallel universe. It is interesting that my colleagues from the other side speak as if the last 7 or 8 years didn't exist, as if the Republicans weren't in charge of the entire government from 2001 until 2007, as if the national debt did not increase by $5 trillion during their stewardship of this government, as if earmarks had not been developed into an art form under Republican leadership. It is almost as if there is no history that they choose to remember. I can understand why they don't want to remember what went on from 2001 to 2006, and before that many of the policies that were developed under Republican leadership in this Congress prior to George Bush's presidency because they don't want the American people to be reminded. But we know from all of the polls and the voter turnout that we have seen in the last few months, we know that the American people remember what has gone on in these last few years. We know because, as we have seen in a poll over the weekend, when asked which party does the American people trust to deal with the challenges we face as a country, the American people prefer the Democratic policies by a margin of 20 percent, one of the largest margins ever recorded. It is not hard to understand why. What we have seen are failed policies from people well meaning, no question about it, but people who do not believe that government has a role in solving our problems. We see it when people come to the government, when the average citizen comes to the government for help. We see them in our offices every day, and we talk to them at home on weekends. We know that the American people are hurting. They come to us for help. We know that nurses come to us for help. Teachers come to us for help. Social workers come to us for help. They are dealing with the pain of average American citizens every day, and we are trying to do what we can to help them. We know that the other side does want to come to the help of American citizens from time to time if they happen to be the CEO of ExxonMobil, if they happen to be the CEO of Chevron, if they happen to be the insurance executives. Those people can always find assistance from the Republicans. But when the average citizen comes for help, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. Government is not in that business. Well, that's why the American people turned to the Democratic Party in 2006 and said, We have had enough, it is time for a change. We believe that the Democratic Party can help working Americans solve some of the problems that face them. I think we have made a very, very good start. From the very beginning of our leadership in the 110th Congress last January, we took steps immediately to raise the minimum wage which had not been raised in 10 years. We took steps to change the rules under which drug companies dealt with Medicare. We took steps to end the subsidy of oil companies with huge tax breaks when they are making more money than they had ever made in their history. We worked very diligently, and we talked about earmarks. My colleagues on the other side want to make it sound like we invented earmarks, which we certainly didn't. We actually provided for the first time some transparency in earmarks. We said if you are going to put an earmark into a bill, then you have to identify that you sponsor that earmark and you have to attest and swear that you did not reap any personal benefit. You had no personal connection with the recipient of that earmark. Those were not the policies under the Republican Congress when they had in their last budget year 16,000 earmarks. No, you could slip them in there. Nobody knew you got the earmark. You could take credit for it if you wanted to, but if you tried to find out who gave money for XYZ, you couldn't find that unless the person actually took credit for it. We changed that. We required accountability in the earmark process. So it is interesting to listen to my colleagues talk about the horrible leadership that they contend of this Democratic Congress as if the last decade had not occurred. I think the American people have seen through that. I think there is no question that the recent results, not just in polls but in special elections for Congress, reflect the fact that the American people understand that the Republicans are out of ideas. They just are out of ideas. The idea that government will play no role in solving some of the challenges that we have has proven to be a bankrupt idea. They persist in that philosophy, and they persist as of earlier today, and we have to call the attention of the American people that these are not the facts and that there is a very distinct difference between our policies, the Democratic majority, in which we are trying to use government to help the American people while maintaining fiscal responsibility, while maintaining our PAYGO rules so we make sure that we don't add to the Federal deficit and the national debt and that we pay for what we do when we do it. Now, there is a huge exception to that policy, as we all know. We are going to see it on the House, on this floor in the next few days. We are being asked once again to allocate billions and billions of dollars to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are being asked by the President, who now has the lowest job approval in modern history, we are being asked by him to give him a blank check, once again no constraints on his activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, no restrictions on his troops, no new regulations regarding the deployment of troops, just give him the money and let him try to accomplish the mission which he said was accomplished 5 years ago but which has not only not been accomplished in 2008 but which is something, a mission which we still can't define. I would like to ask the administration, and we have on many occasions, if you want our support, if you want us to continue to fund this failed policy in Iraq, tell us what the mission is. Tell us once and for all what the clear objectives are, and we will listen and we will use our judgment and see if that is the type of thing that the American people will support. But as always, we still don't have a clear idea what the mission in Iraq is. It changes on a day-to-day basis. We are being asked once again to spend billions and billions of American taxpayer dollars for a policy which no one really can explain. I think my colleagues, and several have joined me here now, are in the same situation as I am. On a daily basis I speak to people from my district, Louisville, Kentucky, and they say, we need money for this. We have been cut this way. We are going to have to cut services, why can't we just spend a little less in Iraq. Every day I get that question. I probably got it six times today. Why can't we take some of that money we are flushing down the toilet in Iraq and spend it on the American people who are in desperate need of the things that government needs to do. These are some of the issues we are confronted with today. It is my great pleasure to be joined by two of my colleagues from the class of 2006, the majority makers, Mr. Keith Ellison from Minnesota and Dr. Steve Kagen from Wisconsin, and I am going to yield to Mr. Ellison and have him continue this discussion about what we in the majority makers and we in the Democratic majority are trying to do on behalf of the American people.

Mr. YARMUTH. I thank the gentleman. And now it's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Kagen from Wisconsin, someone who has been a steadfast advocate for not just the veterans of this country, but for working families everywhere, and has been a champion in trying to bring attention to the serious flaws and opportunities in our health care delivery system. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. YARMUTH. Absolutely.

Mr. YARMUTH. That didn't make since in 2006 when they made $38- or $39 billion. It didn't make sense last year when they made $40 billion. It doesn't make sense when they made over $40 billion. Record profits every year since we gave them this huge tax subsidy.

Mr. YARMUTH. Well, ironically, in a way, this President did say that because in 2004, when he was campaigning for reelection, he said once oil passes $55 a barrel, the oil companies will not need any incentive to drill. That was his campaign statement in 2004.

Mr. YARMUTH. Well, the gentleman makes a wonderful point, and I'm reminded in a very kind of maybe indirect way of a movie that came out back in the early seventies, and it was called ``Rollerball.'' It was remade several years ago in a very different way. But the movie early in the 1970s was a science fiction movie, futuristic, looking to an era in which geopolitical boundaries had ceased to exist. And the world, instead of being divided into countries, was divided into economic entities. So James Caan, who starred in that movie, played Rollerball, a futuristic game, for the Energy Corporation, and they played against the Communications Corporation. And then there was the Food Corporation, and that's the way the world was divided. And sometimes when you see ExxonMobil with its volume of revenue and profits and some of these other enormous corporations, you say maybe we're not too far from that. So we have to decide, as a Nation, it's one thing to say the world is flat, but that doesn't mean the world has lost its distinctions yet and its delineations into Nations that have souls and have people who believe in their commonness, their common mission, their common ambitions. And that's something that I think every American wants to retain. We don't want to lose that. And I think when we essentially wash our hands in Washington and say corporate America, corporate world just go at it, do what you want to do and we'll take whatever you give us, we're not too far from that unfortunate scenario in ``Rollerball.''

Mr. YARMUTH. And so we have to start thinking I think in that long- term, let's invest money now. You're right, you can't spend your way to solve these problems, but you can invest your way. And I think there's sound, solid, predictable results that we can get from these types of investments.

Mr. YARMUTH. There's another element to the philosophy that I think we need to talk about now, and I see it in discussions that we have in our caucus meetings, and I think it's a growing realization that we have to embrace as a philosophy in this body that we can't think just to the next election cycle. We have to start thinking very long-term, and we have to start thinking about investment and investments that will pay off over the long run but will not get us any immediate gratification or recognition so that we can get votes at the next election. And you mentioned health care, and that's certainly an area in which we have to start investing because every dollar we spend on early childhood health care we know pays off 10, 20 times down the road. You can't see it today. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, won't score it and say, okay, you can take credit for that, but we know that it happens. If children are tended to early on, preventive care, diagnostic work, we catch a hearing problem, a sight problem, you catch them before they get obese, we know how much that returns in savings down the road. The same way with infrastructure. We've neglected infrastructure in this country for far too long. We know we have to make investments in infrastructure, but those are the types of investments that do pay off. It's not like Iraq where every dollar, once you shoot a bullet, once you shoot a rocket, that's money gone. There's no investment there, no return on investment. But infrastructure, health care, medical research, if we could spend, let's say we spent $100 billion over the next 10 years and we were to cure cancer and diabetes, you're the doctor, it would save trillions of dollars long-term.

Mr. YARMUTH. Exactly. I would say you made the right statement. We will never drill our way out of the energy crisis, but we can invent our way out of the energy crisis; and the private sector is in the process of doing that. We need to give them the boost. We need to give them the incentives. We need to provide the tax credits, and in fact, we have tried to do that. And if anything, I think, represents a clear distinction--there is probably nothing that represents a clear distinction between the President's party and ours than the way we have handled the ideas of incentives. The Republican Congress in 2005 voted a 15--well, the number is vague--but it's around $15 billion a year in tax incentives to the oil companies to drill. We've tried to take that tax incentive away, that subsidy, and put it into the types of innovative technologies that will be the answer to our energy crisis, will make us independent of imported oil, and oil totally, and will stimulate and create new economies and new economic opportunity in this country.

Mr. YARMUTH. The gentleman makes some very good points, and one of the things I just mentioned before you arrived was that over the past few days, we've actually done three things in a bipartisan way; and you mentioned one of them. We passed a farm bill with substantial Republican support. The housing bill, we had a number of Republicans join us; and when we dealt with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in which we said we don't need to be adding any more fuel to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, taking it off the market, decreasing supply when we're at 98 percent capacity; we've never been, in recent history, below 600 million gallons of our 727-gallon capacity; and the bill, the freshman class, we asked the President to do it by himself. The President refused. So what happened? The Senate yesterday voted 97-1; the House voted 385-25. I think it shows it was a pretty solid idea. There can't be that many people who have bad judgment. Maybe there are. But 97-1, 385- 25 are pretty good odds. So we spoke to the President in a bipartisan way. So there are situations in which we have found ways to work together, and as you said, that's the way it should be; and I think that's a very encouraging sign. Unfortunately, we have a President who doesn't recognize this body as having any say in policy in this country. He believes he is the decider, and despite provisions in the Constitution in article 1 to the contrary which says the American people are the deciders of policy and the laws through their representatives of Congress. I think we are doing the people's business, and we're doing it in a very responsible way. And I agree totally that it will be wonderful to have a new chief executive in the White House who maybe understands that government is a partnership and the Constitution was written so that it would be--we would have three branches who are not constantly in conflict but who are working together for the American people.

Mr. YARMUTH. It's a reasonable question which we are addressing in legislation. And I think the American people are totally justified in demanding that the Iraqi people pick up some of the tab when they're running a $70 billion surplus per year. And I was actually encouraged to hear one of the representatives of the government over the weekend talk about the fact that they intend to do that. But just their intentions don't seem to be much because, again, as you said, there is no accountability method in place. But I want to reference one other thing. And it's getting off on a little tangent, but you talked about the merger between Delta and Northwest, and that's being examined by the Transportation Committee now, and I'm glad it is. One of the things that I've been talking about more and more when I'm talking to the good people of Louisville, Kentucky is, you know, we've allowed, over the last couple of decades, maybe 3 decades, companies to get bigger and bigger and bigger in this country. We really haven't enforced the anti-trust laws in this country in 30 years. And we did it because they said, oh, you know, it's a global economy. We need to be able to get big so we can compete. Well, unfortunately, what they generally mean when they say they want to get big is they want to get big in revenues. They don't want to get big in job creation. They don't want to get big in many things that are the goals that we hold for this country. And when they want to get big, it generally means they want to save money. So they merge, and then they eliminate jobs, and they close facilities, and they destabilize communities, all in the name of being able to compete in the global economy. And what concerns me is--and we had a hearing not too long ago in the Oversight Committee in which we talked to several of the CEOs of very large corporations, and this was about corporate executive compensation. And I asked three of the executives, When you have these compensation committee meetings when you're deciding what your CEO is going to be paid and what your top management is going to be paid, do you ever talk about the impact of these huge salaries and compensation packages on the morale of your employees? Do you ever talk about how you could make life better for your working people, your employees? Do you ever talk about how you can improve the communities that you occupy, that you serve? And the answer was very candid, and they said, No. It's always about just how we get the stock price up and how we compensate our executives. So the question I ask, and it's one that I hope we continue to ask in this Congress, if you want to get big, we need to make sure that your goals are the same as the American people's goals; and I think people on both sides of the aisle would say we have the same goals for the American people. We want good jobs, we want stable communities, and we want secure families. And if we have a corporate world that has goals that are antithetical to that, then we need to revise our policy on anti-trust allowing these mergers and try to say if you want permission from us to get big and you want to operate in a certain way, we want you to operate in a way that benefits the American people and not just your CEOs and your stockholders.

Mr. YARMUTH. Of course.

Mr. YARMUTH. Well, certainly. And again, I referenced the fact that not only are we being allowed to, or being asked to write a blank check for hundreds of billions of dollars, as we've been writing for some time now, somewhere over $500 billion total in direct appropriations for the war in Iraq, but we're also being asked to give the Iraqi government a blank check; do whatever you want, no accountability, you get to it when you get to it, you'll decide when things are right for us to be able to leave. It's all up to you. We're helpless. It's a very uncomfortable position for us to be in.

Mr. YARMUTH. I thank the gentleman. I want to pick up on two of the things that he mentioned because I think these are fascinating contrasts and put into perspective some of the challenges that we face. First, on the subject of oil prices and gasoline prices, he mentioned that 300, the price of gasoline has gone up 300 percent since 2001. What's interesting is, when you look at what we're now paying in Iraq for gasoline, this is one of the truly astounding and very disturbing aspects of our involvement there. And again, as my colleague, our colleague, Mr. Ellison said, we're going to be voting on more funding for the Iraq war tomorrow. The American people need to know that right now we are spending $153 million a month on gasoline in Iraq, $153 million a month. And we're paying $3.23 a gallon for that gasoline. It's probably up since then, but the time that we have the statistics, $3.23 we're paying for gasoline in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Iraqi people, and Iraq is sitting on one of the largest oil reserves in the world, the Iraqi people are paying a subsidized cost of $1.30 a gallon. Now, wouldn't we all love to pay $1.30 a gallon? Now, that's unrealistic, but it's interesting that we're paying for the entire reconstruction cost of Iraq, we have up to this point; we're spending all this money to try and stabilize their country, and we're paying $2 more per gallon for gasoline than the Iraqi people are. That's just one of the strange quirks of our involvement there.

Mr. YARMUTH. Thank you, Dr. Kagen. It's wonderful to be here with you tonight, and also with Mr. Ellison. And one of the things, I guess if I could capsulize what we've said tonight and what the majority makers feel more than anything else, that in this country every person matters. Every individual matters, and every individual deserves our attention, our concern, and our action. And that's what we've been doing for 16 months and pledge to be doing for the rest of our tenure in office. So with that, once again, thank you for joining me tonight.

Mr. YARMUTH. That will be a nice day. And, you know, just following up a little bit on that thought, the image that I get in my mind when I look out over the economic landscape sometimes is that we have a lot of very wealthy, very powerful people who are just playing Monopoly with America, that this is just a game for them. And there are the little houses and the little trains and all the little pieces that are on the Monopoly board, and it's funny money. Unfortunately, it's funny money that many people are being deprived of because of the great concentrations of wealth in this country. And I don't want to sound like somebody who's saying, oh, we've got to redistribute the wealth, we've got to make sure everybody has the same thing. That's not what any of us are talking about. But as Mr. Ellison pointed out before, we have seen the greatest separation of wealth, disparity in wealth in this country than we've seen in almost 100 years. And we've let the pendulum swing much too far to one side so that we've allowed the very wealthiest people to become incredibly wealthy, and almost everybody else has been treading water. As we said, we have not been floating everybody's boat; in fact, we've been drowning a lot of people. And we've got to make sure that everybody has a boat. And I think that's one of the things that this Congress is committed to. So I would like to yield to my friend, Dr. Kagen, for some closing remarks as we wind down this version of the majority makers.