30-Something Working Group

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - March 08, 2006)

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. If the gentleman would yield for a question, I am sort of the least senior of the four of us here this evening. I am a freshman. I have just gotten here a year ago. I am wondering, you are talking about the four letters that you have shown that Secretary Snow has sent to the Congress asking us, begging us, to increase the debt limit. Would this be the first time under this administration, Mr. Ryan, that that was necessary?

Is it unprecedented? If we raise the debt limit this year, is it something that was an anomaly, was it something that had not occurred before?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, it is an excellent question. I think what Mr. Meek was saying was that we are going into the government retirement program in order to not have to increase the debt limit.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I just want to share with you, because that is billion with a B.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And trillion with a T.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And trillion with a T.

When I am home and you all are home, we talk to our constituents, and they ask me, sometimes they ask me questions that makes it clear that it is hard for anyone to get their mind around what a billion is. So we spent some time, we did some research to try to help put what a billion is in terms that people can understand better.

So let us just translate it into some things that maybe people can think about, you know, more in the way they deal with things on a day-to-day basis. A billion. How much is a billion dollars? Well, a billion hours ago, humans were making their first tools in the stone age. That was if we were talking about what happened a billion hours ago.

If you are going on to a billion seconds ago, let us start with seconds, a billion seconds ago, it was 1975, and we had just pulled the last troops from America out of Vietnam. That was a billion seconds ago.

Let us try to break it down a little bit more. A billion minutes ago, it was A.D. 104, and the Chinese first invented paper.

Well, so now let us talk about what a billion dollars ago was. Under this administration, a billion dollars ago was only 3 hours and 32 minutes at the rate that our government spends money.

A.D. 104, 1975, the stone age, and 3 hours and 32 minutes ago.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Because the third-party validators that we use on this floor is for the purpose of showing that others who have fact-checked, experts who have fact-checked what is going on internally in this institution report on what they see.

And so if we are going to talk about accuracy and clarity, it is the third-party validators who the American people are going to listen to. You know, quite honestly, although I really feel privileged to be able to come and join you on this floor every night, a lot of people would just chalk up what they say and what we say on the floor as noise, you know, as partisan noise.

And so third-party validators are important. And so let us talk about what USA Today said about who is in charge and what they are responsible for and what they could have done about it. This is just last week, February 21, about 10 days ago.

USA Today editorial. The title of the editorial was Who is Spending Big Now: The Party of Small Government. Tax cuts, they say, force hard decisions and restrain reckless spending.

The last time we looked, according to USA Today, 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 1/2 percent, 7 1/2 percent a year, more than double the rate in the last 5 years of Clinton-era budgets.

I mean, the truth hurts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You cannot make it up.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. That is factually accurate information by an outside source.

This is not by people who have D and R's next to their name in this Chamber. There is a better way.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. You have picture after picture and week after week of new revelations about the shocking aftermath of the response of this administration to Katrina.

Last week it was the videotape evidence that when Max Mayfield, who is based in Miami at the National Hurricane Center, clearly warned the President and the Secretary and those assembled from the administration's team, that it was quite possible that the levees in New Orleans would breach, and then on Tuesday, 2 days later, you have the President declaring that there was no way that anyone could have anticipated a breach of the levees.

I mean, how do they look at themselves in the mirror? How does he look at himself in the mirror and go on each day?

Mr. DELAHUNT. How do you say, if I can interrupt, how can you say we were fully prepared? We were fully prepared? The President said that to the American people in the aftermath of the hurricanes and in the disasters that befell the Gulf States.

This is just a closeup of the picture of the chart that I showed earlier of those trailers that are crumbling someplace, somewhere, at the tune of $300 million. Well, if we were fully prepared, God save this Republic in the event of another natural disaster or a terrorist attack. I would suggest to the American people and to you, my friends, that we are ill-prepared. We are not fully prepared. We are unprepared. We are fully unprepared because of the incompetence and mismanagement that we witness on a daily basis near Washington.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I know the gentleman from Florida wants to go back to PAYGO, but what I heard today in a meeting earlier in the afternoon, I heard the feeling and the sentiment that you described this way: Whether you are talking about the aftermath of Katrina, and quite honestly in my community the aftermath of Wilma, or you are talking about this port deal, the bottom line is that the homeland is not secure. The homeland is not secure.

We have port security that has been essentially undermined by the Republican leadership here, and I know we will talk about that in a little bit, but the American people's confidence in their government has been shaken. We continually have to increase the debt limit and we have a solution, Mr. Meek, that we have been pushing over and over and over again repeatedly. Yet, it falls on deaf ears.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. What we advocate is going back to the PAYGO rule, and again, to translate that into terms that most people understand and deal with every day, you do not spend more than you have. You make sure you have the revenue coming in for the money that you are going to put out.

Listen, there are people in everyday life in America that struggle with that every single day, but most people think it is totally irresponsible. Even if they are engaging in it in their own house, they think it is the wrong thing to do, to spend what they do not have. I do not know in America that anyone has the ability on their own to raise their debt limit in their household. Can you imagine, you reach a point in your day-to-day life and you are going along and you have a certain amount of money that you earn. You have a certain amount of credit. Let us say you have a couple of credit cards. When you reach the debt limit on your credit card, the maximum that the credit card company will allow you to put on that card, unless you ask permission from the credit card company, you cannot do that usually, depending on your track record.

If you compare the track record of the United States of America recently, you know, we are not doing so good because we are not getting a handle on this. Most credit card companies would say, no, we are going to stop you at a certain point and not let you raise your debt limit.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And, Mr. Ryan, if you would yield, this is also the party that tries to represent themselves as the party of less government and more personal freedom. And in my time here, just in the year that I have been here, we don't even talk about the Terry Schiavo case last year anymore because so much else has happened that is disturbing in terms of their leadership that that seems like a distant memory, but that was not even a year ago. We are coming up on the year anniversary of that.

The beginning of my first year in Congress you have the bookends of Terry Schiavo's tragic case, where this Congress, this Republican leadership inserted itself into one family's private angst-ridden tragedy. Then you have Katrina, you have the debt limit increase, you have the largest deficit in history, you have the refusal to go back to the PAYGO rules, and you have the port deal. This is the party of less government and more personal freedom? No, it is not. The evidence does not lie.

The funny thing, and I have heard Mr. Meek say this at home in Florida a lot. Just because you say it over and over again does not make it so. Things do not come true just because you say them a lot. The facts do not lie.

Mr. DELAHUNT. You know, the three of us were watching you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, lead the first hour, and it was very informative and we want to congratulate you on a great presentation.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Many of our female colleagues on the Democratic side participated, and you talked about the role of government, particularly as it impacts women. You know, the truth is, and we have seen it just recently in South Dakota, that if the Republican majority has their way, they will see to it that the woman's right to choose will be ended in this country. They will do everything that they can to effectively repeal Roe v. Wade.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is not only the woman's right to choose. We have a variety of things. It is about throwing people in prison. Throwing people in prison, Mr. Delahunt.

Mr. DELAHUNT. If you are familiar with that South Dakota law.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Even in the case of rape or incest.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Exactly. In case of rape or incest. This is a dramatic change in terms of the role of government as reflected in the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade and all of the advances that have been made in terms of civil rights and other issues.

But I know we all want to get back to discuss the issues that impact every American.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. But your point is, and the point we have to make here is, there is a radicalism in this Republican leadership; that they have reached new heights. Schiavo, South Dakota, the Alito confirmation.

There is just a growing list.

And now this port deal, where the President literally saw nothing wrong with allowing a foreign government-owned corporation to take over the port terminal operations at six major ports. No alarm bells were set off to trigger a national security review, a 45-day national security review that can be triggered under the law. It defies logic.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. He didn't even know about it.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Right. Not the least of it was that he did not even know about it.

Mr. MEEK of Florida. I am sorry, Mr. Ryan, you are going to have to yield to me.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. He said he didn't know about it, and I believe him.

Mr. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Ryan, you have to yield to me. The President has said that he has not known about a lot of things and then we found out later.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. No, if he said it, it is true.

Mr. MEEK of Florida. He thinks someone might have said something to him about it.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Six White House offices were part of the committee that reviewed this port deal. I asked in Financial Services. I am on the committee. I am on the subcommittee where we had a hearing last week, and the President still didn't know.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, can you share with the Members this chart?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Oh, most definitely, just to take off from where you have launched. Really, the facts are laid bare.

It is evident who is for security and who is just kidding. And if you look at this chart here, this pie chart, the source is Fox News, that is our third-party validator, so we are not talking about a liberal bastion, who is for security and who is just kidding? Less than 6 percent of our U.S. cargo at our Nation's ports is physically inspected. That is 95 percent not inspected. We will say 94 percent not inspected and 6 percent inspected, but I think actually the number is just a little lower than that.

The difference between the increase in security at airports and the increase in security at ports since the 2001 9/11 attack is $18 billion, Mr. Ryan, increased airport security, compared to a $700 million increase in port security.

Now, I heard one of our colleagues bragging about the $700 million increase and trying to detail how much of an increase the six ports received that the port deal, the DPW port deal, was involved in, as if that was some fantastic accomplishment.

There is a $6 billion difference between what the Coast Guard has said they need, a $6 billion difference. The Republican Congress has shortchanged port security by $6 billion, according to the Coast Guard. They have requested $7.2 billion.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Third-party validator, the U.S. Coast Guard.

Mr. MEEK. The U.S. Coast Guard.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. So if someone would say we are not telling the truth, they are saying the Coast Guard is not telling the truth.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Not Mr. Meek, not Mr. Ryan, but the Coast Guard has requested $7.2 billion and gotten $910 million in congressional appropriations. That is a commitment right there to national security.

Mr. DELAHUNT. I think we ought to inform our colleagues here and those that are observing our conversation what the Democratic policy is in terms of inspection of goods coming into this country is not 5 percent, but 100 percent. We have what I would call a zero tolerance policy, and it can be done, and it can be done in a very cost-efficient way, in a way that not only will prevent a terrorist attack coming in via our maritime shipping, but will be efficient in terms of taxpayer dollars.

Do you know in Hong Kong every single container ship that comes in, every piece of cargo, goes through a high-technology review? Every single piece is inspected. I guess what my point would be is that if they can do it in Hong Kong, we can do it in the United States of America. We can do it. We should have a zero tolerance policy, period.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, the point is the issue is so much bigger than this one port deal. This is emblematic of the tremendously significant problem. You cannot say even if this problem gets addressed, this port deal gets addressed, which it should, you cannot say, okay, we are done. It is so much deeper than that. Democrats have been constantly fighting for increased port security, and Republicans have not, plain and simple.

http://thomas.loc.gov/