Legislative Program

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, on Tuesday, the House will meet at noon for morning- hour debate and 2 p.m. for legislative business, with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate and noon for legislative business.

On Friday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business, and last votes of the week would be expected no later than 3 p.m.

We will consider several bills, Madam Speaker, under suspension of the rules. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by close of business tomorrow.

The House will also consider H.R. 397, the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act, commonly referred to as the Butch Lewis Act.

The 10 million Americans who have paid into multiemployer pensions deserve to know they will receive the benefits they have earned when they retire. The bill will help ensure a secure retirement for these workers and retirees.

In addition, Madam Speaker, the House will consider H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act. This legislation introduced by Congresswoman Escobar will ensure that the Department of Homeland Security addresses border issues in a responsible and humane manner. The bill fosters greater accountability when it comes to the handling of children and migrant families at all levels within the Department of Homeland Security.

The House is also expected to consider additional legislation, Madam Speaker, related to the current humanitarian crisis on the southern border.

Members are advised that additional legislative items are expected. As we know, it is the last week before we adjourn, and there is an effort to try to get things done that can, in fact, be done within the timeframe we have available to us.

It is my sincere hope that an agreement is reached to raise budget caps and the debt limit. The Speaker and Secretary Mnuchin and others have been working very hard on this objective, and I am hopeful that they will reach an agreement that we can agree on as a House and as a Senate. Assuming an agreement is reached, we will consider that as soon as they reach it, and hopefully, that will be next week.

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Mr. HOYER. In response to my friend, Madam Speaker, I will tell him that the committee did, in fact, mark up bills this past Wednesday, yesterday, and those bills are being looked at to possibly move to the floor.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, again, I will tell my friend, as he has articulated, that bill has not been marked up in committee. There are two bills that were marked up in committee, and there is a possibility that we will consider those, but the other bill was not marked up.

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's comments. Unfortunately, of course, three of the component parts of the bill, to which the gentleman refers, we are strongly for. Unfortunately, they were held up in the Senate, as the gentleman may know.

We want to see the MOU for Israel assistance package, which we strongly support, which was negotiated by the Obama administration and which we strongly support in terms of the amount of money, available not only on a general basis, but also a specific basis, for support of Israel's defense against rockets and other munitions that would be sent into Israel.

We also support the Syria sanctions and the Jordan MOU, so we hope, at some point, they will move. I will reiterate, however, there have been two bills marked up, and the possibility of considering those for next week is there.

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

First of all, let me say two things:

We are confronting, in my view, an unprecedented refusal of an administration to cooperate with the Congress in the exercise of its constitutional duties. I refer specifically to the issuance of subpoenas, either for testimony or for documentary evidence, so the Congress can properly exercise its oversight responsibilities under the Constitution.

I have been here for some almost four decades, and I have never seen any administration, essentially, direct across the board no response to the Congress of the United States or to its committees. So, yes, we are pursuing.

The gentleman referred to the contempt citation dealing with Mr. Barr and Mr. Ross. Now, the issue at the center of that, as the gentleman knows, is the administration ultimately decided it would not pursue the policies that were the subject of that investigation. However, it is not about the specific, but it is about the general constitutional responsibility that this Congress has to the American people.

We ask for information not on behalf of ourselves individually, but on behalf of the American people, so they will know what their government is doing, there will be a transparency to the operations of government, and they will be able to determine whether or not any administrative official, or the administration generally, is acting on its behalf personally or whether it is acting on behalf of the American people.

So, from that perspective, I think the resolutions that we have offered, of which there, essentially, have been two dealing with this issue, and maybe more, the refusal to cooperate with subpoenas has continued.

I hope the gentleman will understand that we are trying to protect the responsibilities and authority of the Congress of the United States, the people's body, the article I body, to do its duty properly.

Secondly, yes, we did have a very difficult day yesterday. But I will tell my friend from Louisiana that I think it is the absolute responsibility of this body to respond if it sees things that are being done by the administration or by others that it perceives to be contrary to the ideas of this country, contrary to the declaration that we believe that all men and, yes, all women are created equal; contrary to the extraordinary wrenching war that we had among the States to determine that all were equal. And a construction period.

And then, as I grew up in the 1950s and the 1960s, looking racism in the face and saying, we reject it, that we reject racism, we reject prejudices, we reject simplifying if people are a certain color, a certain race, a certain nationality, or a certain gender, that somehow, they are less than other Americans. I think it is our responsibility to confront that.

That is what we did yesterday. It was difficult, I understand. I was sorry that it was not a bipartisan vote, because I don't believe that Members on your side of the aisle want to tolerate racism any more than we want to tolerate racism. And if we see it, I think we have a responsibility to speak out, to stand up, and to say this is not right in America, this is not America.

So, yes, we had a resolution yesterday that the gentlemen refers to in response to a tweet. It was not the tweet, it was what the tweet said, what it implied, what it diminished in terms of America's sense of decency and equality and tolerance and inclusion for our people.

Now, let me go to legislation. As the gentleman knows, we have passed substantial pieces of legislation.

We passed H.R. 1. No Republicans voted for that, but it seeks to make it easier for people to vote in America, make sure their vote is protected and counted.

It made sure that we have transparency in the financing of campaigns.

It made sure that our redistricting was fair to our citizens and that we politicians were not drawing the districts, but that the districts are drawn in fairness to the American people.

It also demanded ethics performance.

But then we passed an anti-hate resolution. It was just words, but it said no to hate: 173 Republicans voted for that. It overwhelming passed bipartisan.

We passed a Land and Water Conservation Fund that made that fund permanent, a very important bill for a State like Louisiana and, quite frankly, my own State of Maryland, who are all surrounded by water, have a lot of water. That bill got 133 Republicans. It languishes still in the Senate.

We passed the SECURE Act, which makes it easier for people to get retirement security. That was supported by 187 Republicans.

We passed the violence against women reauthorization. Unfortunately, it didn't get overwhelming votes, but it got 33 Republicans voting for it. It languishes in the Senate.

We passed a provision that said we want to protect preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act. We got 8 Republicans. I would have wished we had gotten more.

We passed disaster relief. The gentleman knows a lot about disaster relief, important to his State. Unfortunately, we only got 34 Republicans, but it was a bipartisan bill.

We have also passed background checks, which are supported by 90 percent of the American people, to try to make gun violence lessened in the United States of America. For that bill, we only got 8 Republicans.

But those two bills, supported by 90 percent of the American people, languishes in the United States Senate, the majority leader not bringing up that legislation.

We passed a national emergency resolution, which said, Mr. President, you can't take money that we appropriated for X and just send it over to Y. That was, I thought, a protection of our constitutional authority. The Constitution says we raise, and we spend money and we direct the executive--we direct the executive--how to do that. That got 13 Republicans supporting it, a major piece of legislation.

We passed a Dreamer legislation. We have been asking for that legislation for almost a decade, or at least 6 years, I should say. And that legislation got no vote over the last 5 years. It got a vote this year. We got a number of Republicans--7 to be exact--to vote for that.

Now, I could go through a number of other pieces of legislation, including, lastly, the minimum wage bill. This was about capitalism, not socialism. We are capitalists over here. We believe in the free market system over here. And any assertion to the contrary, Madam Speaker, is absolutely false.

It is a good political tactic, it is a scare tactic, Madam Speaker, but I reject it out of hand. We believe in the free market system. We believe the free market system has been the system that has provided the most benefits for the broadest number of people.

We believe that is one of the great facets of our democracy, our free market system. And I will tell my friend, Madam Speaker, that it was Democrats in the 1930s that saved the free market system. It was Democrats in December of 2007 that came in and made sure that the free market system did not crash after 8 years of Republican leadership.

I would hope that the gentleman would not make the assertion that surely he knows is not true, Madam Speaker, that we on this side are looking to support a socialist agenda. We are promoting and continue to promote a socially sensitive agenda for the American people to make sure that they have healthcare.

Medicare was called a socialist program, Madam Speaker, when it was adopted. That is a program that millions and millions of Americans rely on and have been brought out of poverty. Medicare was a called a socialist program when it was adopted. That program, combined with Social Security, has millions of Americans having a sense of security, a sense of independence, a sense that they are not going to fall through the cracks.

So we ought not to be debating, I say, Madam Speaker, this phony shibboleth of socialism.

The minimum wage is simply saying, in America, we value people who work, and we want to ensure that people who work are not living in poverty and have some ability to support themselves and their families in a decent way. We passed that bill today. We are proud of passing that bill.

Very frankly, for 10 years of Republican control of the House of Representatives, we pleaded with them to bring a minimum wage bill of whatever number to the floor, and they didn't bring a single cent raise in a decade, the longest time since the minimum wage was adopted in the 1930s, to make sure that Americans were lifted out of the deepest recession that this country has ever had.

So I say to my friend, we have done a lot. I wish the Senate would move it.

Let me close in terms of this response. I am very proud of this. We have passed 10 appropriations bills out of 12, the most since 2006.

Now, in 2006, the Republicans were in charge. I don't refer to the gentleman personally, but the Republicans were in charge, and they didn't bring the Labor-Health bill to the floor. I am not sure why, but I had offered a minimum wage increase in that bill, in the Labor-Health Subcommittee, and they never brought it to the floor.

It passed in committee, even though the Republicans were in charge and the majority of Members in the committee were Republicans. That minimum wage increase passed, but they refused to bring it to the floor. I can only conclude that they are not for increasing the minimum wage.

We disagree with that position. We believe that in America, if you are working, playing by the rules, and making our economy grow, then you ought to be paid a wage that you can survive on and, better than that, live on.

And so I am proud of the legislation that we passed, and I am proud of the 10 appropriations bills, which, by the way, fund 96 percent of the government.

Our colleagues in the Senate, Madam Speaker, have not passed a single appropriations bill through committee, not one.

So we are doing our job, Madam Speaker, and we are addressing the issues of the American people.

I agree 100 percent with the minority, with the Republican whip that we need to deal with drug pricing. We have pledged to do that. We are working together. The President says he wants to do that. Hopefully, we can get to a consensus.

I agree with the gentleman from Louisiana, Madam Speaker, we haven't gotten there yet. Hopefully, we can get there. Hopefully, we can strengthen the Affordable Care Act so that people will have the confidence that it will be available to them.

I know that was a relatively--maybe not relatively--a long answer, but I think we have done a lot of work. I am very proud of the 6 months that we have had.

We spent the first 35 days trying to open up the government. This is the first Congress in the history of the United States in which the government was shut down when the new Congress started. It has been shut down before, but this was the first time when we started. It took us 35 days to get it open. And when we did get it open, we started on an agenda of which I am proud.

Do we have more work to do? We do. Madam Speaker, we intend to continue on an agenda that does that work.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I want to go back to this free market and the minimum wage.

The gentleman, Madam Speaker, projects that: Let the free market operate.

We do not allow employers to hire people under a certain age because we want to protect children. I suppose that is interfering with the free market because we know that, throughout the world, we have 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old children being asked to work 10-, 12-, 14-hour days at rudimentary tasks.

Perhaps he believes that we ought to have people work 80, 90 hours a week trying to manage their families and their lives and not have a 40- hour week because of the free market. After all, individuals can decide whether they are going to work 80 or 90 hours a week. We have known that in our history.

Perhaps we ought to have a free market that doesn't worry about whether workers are safe on the job. Whether it is in a mine or a factory, we require places to be safe so that we can protect workers.

We don't believe that undermines the free market system. We think that improves the free market system. So there are rules.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, my point to the gentleman is, yes, we think people ought to be paid a decent wage, and we know there are people in our workplace and in our community who have no bargaining power whatsoever. They don't have fancy college educations, and they don't have fancy skills, but they are needed in our economy. They are needed to do things that the community needs done. When you go to a hotel, you hope that bed is made up. You hope the bathrooms are clean. When you go to the grocery store, you hope that the peas and corn have been picked.

We believe that those folks are necessary for our community and need to be paid a decent wage, just as we think they need to be safe. I am glad the gentleman agrees on that. I thought he did.

But my point, Madam Speaker, is that there is an analogy here to safety, to hours, to working conditions, and yes, to wages.

I don't know that the party that the gentleman represents has ever offered an increase in the minimum wage. I am going to check on that. I don't know. Since I have been here, they have not. It has always been us offering the increase.

President George Bush, to his credit, signed the Fair Minimum Wage Act in 2007, which was still less than it was in 1968. As a matter of fact, it is 40 percent less today than it was in 1968. Workers are being paid 40 percent less.

Lastly, I will say, Madam Speaker, one thing our party agrees with is that men and women have a right to come together and bargain collectively for their wages, their working conditions, and their benefits. They need to be on some degree of parity because we know that with big employers, and even small employers, individuals are not on parity. They either do this or don't, and if there are no rules, then people are subjected, in my view and in my observation, to unfair tactics that they have no defense against other than us.

I say to my friend, I think he and I agree on hours, hopefully, the age at which people can work certain hours, and on safety conditions in workplaces. I am not sure about bargaining collectively in unions. I think they are critical to the creation of a middle class and the maintenance of a strong middle class. We also very strongly believe in the free market system.

I could pick out one or two of your Members who may have some differences of agreement. I won't mention any names, but I can think of some names on the gentleman's side of the aisle. I am sure the gentleman can as well and, in fact, does disagree, from his perspective, with some people on my side of the aisle. But we intend to continue to be very supportive of building jobs.

My friend knows that I have an agenda. I call it Make It In America. It is about growing jobs, growing enterprises, helping entrepreneurs, and making sure that people have good wages and a good future through the free enterprise system.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, we could go another many minutes, but I am going to comment on one of the things the gentleman said about the person who wanted to go to work for a company but didn't want to join the union and right-to-work. The probability is the reason you wanted to work for that company was because the wages were good, the benefits were good, and safety conditions were good, which the union got, but he or she doesn't want to pay dues to the union. They don't have to join the union; they have to pay dues to the union.

I think it is somewhat ironic but demonstrative that when the gentleman speaks of safety regulations, very frankly, Republicans spent a lot of time, when they were in charge, passing reductions of regulations that we think undermine the safety of consumers, workers, and individuals.

We have a disagreement on that, Madam Speaker, but that is what we believe, and that is the tension here. We represent, I think, an attitude that we need to make sure that everybody plays by the rules so that people are safe.

In any event, we will discuss that further, I am sure, in the coming days, weeks, and maybe years.

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