The Budget Reconciliation
Floor Speech
THE BUDGET RECONCILIATION -- (House of Representatives - October 19, 2005)
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio. I feel a little odd over here. But, Mr. Speaker, if more of the people on this side of the chamber thought like me, then we would be improving things really significantly here. So I think maybe if I stand here long enough, maybe the philosophical brain waves will travel over here.
It is wonderful to have our colleague from Ohio join us in the 30-Something group. We have been trying to encourage our fellow 30-Something Members to join us down here to talk about the things that resonate universally across this country. The gentleman is absolutely right, both gentlemen are. It does not matter whether you are in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Idaho, California, the things that we talk about on this floor during our hour are resonating and run deep in terms of their impact on Americans, whether you are from the right wing of the spectrum or the left wing of the spectrum.
Let us take the cost of college. Obviously, people in our generation, whether they are raising children that are about to go to college, or whether they, in the case of people who are maybe closer to the ages of the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), who are closer to having been in college than perhaps the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I are, the rising costs of college are just really getting out of control. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I just turned 39 a couple of weeks ago, so we are in our last year of eligibility here. So listen, I am a woman, and I am acknowledging that.
But there was an article in my paper today in the South Florida Sun Sentinel that talked about the cost of college having risen by one-third over the last 5 years. One-third. Parents have been preparing every year for yet another hit in their pocketbook. The average college costs today at a private college are $21,000, and almost $5,500 at a public university. It does not matter whether you are in a red State or a blue State, and I am going to claim Florida as a purple State. We are 50-50 right down the line when it comes to those elections, so I am not willing to cede that we are a red State just yet.
We cannot have our college students face the double-digit tuition increases that have been rained down upon them, coupled with the deep financial aid cuts that have been proposed. That is what is coming out of this Congress right now.
One of the things that we mentioned last night was that while we are very critical of the actions that are being proposed here by this Republican leadership, we do have our own set of plans, particularly in terms of how we would approach higher education and making college less expensive.
We would make college more affordable in several ways. Our proposal would guarantee a $500 boost to the maximum Pell grant scholarship. We would give students the choice between either a fixed or a variable interest rate when they consolidate their student loans, and we would do so without raising costs for students. We would keep Congress's promise that was made in 2002 on the Republican watch, which still has not been fulfilled, to lower the interest rate cap on student loans at 6.8 percent. The Republican bill reverses that bipartisan agreement and raises student interest rate caps to 8.25 percent.
We absolutely have to do not just right by our students, but we have to at least do what we say we are going to do. You cannot just talk about lowering the cost and expanding access to higher education; you actually have to follow up with action on it. And this Republican Congress and their leadership has been dropping themselves into a full-scale reversal and literally closing off access do higher education to Americans across this country.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. The gentleman just mentioned that if we are going to make sure that we are ready for the next natural disaster, often when you talk about events like epic proportions like natural disasters, you think of them in terms of their rarity. Since myself and Mr. Meek are both from Florida, and in the next 2 days we will face what is no longer considered a rarity in our State in the name of Hurricane Wilma that has now reached the point in history that it is the strongest storm on record with the lowest barometric pressure ever to be recorded in the Atlantic Basin and is expected to make landfall in our home State, possibly crossing over either mine or Mr. Meek's district over the weekend.
One of the things that we have been emphasizing over the last several days and weeks is that the confidence of the American people in their government has been badly shaken. The gentleman from Oklahoma mentioned that we are not sure how people are expected to be able to have that confidence restored and know that the next natural disaster, or man-made disaster for that matter, that their government is going to be prepared both in terms of getting them ready to deal with that disaster or in the aftermath of that disaster.
If you look at the results of Katrina and the aftermath of Katrina, certainly their confidence was not restored. If you look at the revelations that have come from the independent 9/11 Commission's Report, and now yet another report is about to come out from the independent 9/11 Commission that through their private educational foundation they are about to release a report that blasts the FBI for not implementing much of their recommendations.
When is this administration, this Republican administration and the leadership here going to listen to the priorities of the American people and make sure that, in terms of disaster preparedness, whether it is man-made or natural, that we not add insult to injury in the aftermath of those disasters by cutting services and badly needed health care and badly needed higher education and assistance for the very people that were victims? And when are they going to make sure that they have adequate preparation to deal with those, the aftermath of those disasters? Right now we have not seen anything other than the development of a partisan committee in this institution to supposedly investigate what happened. Well, if you cannot even know that the FBI and that the administration is going to respond to the report that was issued from the independent 9/11 Commission, then certainly we would have little to no confidence that anything is going to come from a partisan investigation like the one that is going on here.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Do you know what else we are for? We are for honesty. We are for honesty in government. We are for ridding this institution of the culture of corruption that has consumed it in recent weeks and months.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Do not forget cronyism, please.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I was getting to cronyism, because there are a lot of Cs that are flying around this Chamber, including the first letter of the word Chamber. The gentleman from Oklahoma and I are freshmen, we just got here, we have been here 10 months. We have conversations on the floor all the time about how astonishing it is that this institution has a pall cast over it, that there is a shadow cast over this place by the culture of corruption, the cronyism, the ethical challenges that some of our Members face, the cronyism in the administration, the appointments of people who are not qualified for the job that they were hired to do.
It is time to return this government back to the honest people, back to the people who are in it for right reasons, back to the people who went into public service to make the world a better place, not to line their supporters' pockets, with all due respect. That is literally what I have watched this place become both as an outsider and now as someone who has become a Member of this body.
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