Ensuring Veterans' Smooth Transition Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Takano for moving this very important legislation.
In this polarized and angry time, one of the lights of this institution is that we have always come together to better serve our veterans, to better serve those men and women who took the ultimate risk and were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of all of us and the system that this room embodies.
And this is a real problem. As I go around my district and I talk to young veterans, they face any number of transitional issues; with housing, with healthcare. And let's face it, the change from being on active duty to being a veteran is a challenging one, one that all too often results in the kind of tragedy that we have acknowledged here in this Chamber today.
And so I rise in strong support of the EVEST Act. It is consistent with something that I am very proud to have accomplished many years ago when we passed the SERVE Act, which made it easier for veterans to show that they had an income so that they could get the housing which they were entitled to. It was a small thing, but it just eased the passage for those young men and women who have so well served this country.
This is important, and it is not a big deal, but it is going to affect tens of thousands of veterans. My Republican friends know that I respect and value their input and their objections to our ideas. It makes us better when you pose objections to our ideas. But I am a little puzzled by the objections that I am hearing today.
I have heard sitting here that this is not paid for. Okay. It is $3 billion that I think is well spent on perhaps the most valuable population that we have. But the notion that it is not paid for, let's remember it was just a couple years ago that my friends on the Republican side passed $2 trillion in tax cuts, 83 percent of which benefited the top 1 percent of this country's citizens. I have to believe that if we can do $2 trillion in tax cuts that largely benefits the richest Americans, that we can find $3 billion to ease the passage for our veterans.
I have heard the ranking member say that the VA maybe can't handle it. Let's remember that the VA supports this idea and that we are just asking them to do a little bit more of what they already do. This is not some new and fanciful program. No, it is making a program that is well-established available to more.
Mr. Speaker, this is a good bill. I am particularly proud of my friend and neighbor-- Joe Courtney will talk about this shortly--that my neighbor, Jahana Hayes, is proposing an amendment that will increase the notification that goes to veterans about what is available to them.
This bill needs to pass because, at the end of the day, we are answering the question: Do we want more veterans to have access to what we have promised them, or do we want fewer veterans to have access to what we have promised them? That is what is at stake here.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member and urge him to rethink his objections to this bill because this will be a proud moment when this bill passes.
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