Legislative Program
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Scalise for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for morning hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed, as usual, to 6:30 p.m.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. I reiterate that because that's 2 hours earlier than the usual meeting, but we have a lot of business to do. So the House on Wednesday and Thursday will meet at 10 a.m. for legislative business.
On Friday, the scheduled last day of the session before the August break, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.
Next week, pending action of the Senate, hopefully, the House will consider the CHIPS Plus legislation to combat inflation by easing supply chain bottlenecks and semiconductors that are critical components in everything from cars to dishwashers to small electronics.
Essentially, all of that, so many things that we use, rely on having chip presence. That will help lower costs for Americans and increase supplies.
This bill also will authorize a generational shift in research and innovation in America, helping ensure the next big ideas will start here, and, importantly, stay here.
The House will also consider H.R. 5118, the Wildfire Response and Drought Resiliency Act. All of us have seen the awful drought and wildfires that are occurring in the West and in other parts of the country, actually.
A package of bills aimed at helping those living in Western States meet the challenges of fire and drought exacerbated by the climate crisis will be in that legislation. It would save lives, property, farms, and businesses from damage and destruction from fire and extreme drought.
The House will also consider, Mr. Speaker, Representative Kildee's bill, the Susan Muffley Act, to restore retirement benefits for over 20,000 hardworking Delphi salaried employees. That is a bipartisan bill.
We will also consider Representative Quigley's H.R. 263, the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which would ban the private ownership of big cats and bring an end to the harmful cub petting industry in an effort to enhance the safety of our communities.
You may not think about this, but law enforcement has indicated this is a significant issue for them because they are the ones that are called in to handle it. This is an effort to enhance the safety of our communities and protect first responders and safeguard these wild animals.
The other reason it is on is because the Senate has asked, and I think there is a possibility that they will pass this through their unanimous consent process.
Representative Jayapal's bill, H.R. 3771, the South Asian Heart Health Awareness and Research Act, will also be on the floor to raise awareness regarding the alarming rate of heart disease in the South Asian community and invest in reversing this trend.
Lastly, I would say that we are going to have Representative Liz Cheney's H.R. 4040, the advancing telehealth beyond COVID-19 Act, which would further extend critical telehealth policies implemented during the pandemic, while also making it easier for seniors, especially those in rural areas, to access emergency healthcare technology.
Additionally, Mr. Speaker, the House may consider public safety legislation, including legislation marked up yesterday by the House Judiciary Committee with a focus, as well, on accountability in terms of enforcement.
The House will consider bills under suspension of the rules, of course. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by the close of business today. As always, additional legislative items are possible, particularly in this last week for us of our planned session prior to the August break.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the Republican whip for yielding the time.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen for his question.
Of course, we are hearing rumors all the time and press reports all the time about what may happen. I think most of us don't know actually what will happen. But to speculate, we clearly on our side of the aisle, and, obviously, there is discussion that continues in the Senate about taking some parts of the reconciliation bill that can be agreed upon by sufficient numbers to pass it through reconciliation.
If something does happen, and it doesn't happen next week and it happens the following week when we will not be here, then we may well have to come back.
I tell the gentleman the reason for that is it may well deal with the Affordable Care Act and the premium subsidies that were included in the American Recovery Plan and then further extended in the Build Back Better Act.
The reason that is important is because the insurance companies will be setting prices in September and maybe as late as October. In order to price their product properly, they will need to know what we are going to do.
Now, with respect to the gentleman's--and everybody's interested in this, of course. The gentleman asked the question, I think, that everybody wants to know: Are we going to come back in August?
I don't know the answer to that, but I will tell you this--and you and I have discussed this before--one of the reasons we are leaving next week and the week thereafter is because we have a lot of people with young children. We see them on the floor all the time.
Of course, schools now are going back earlier than they used to. When I was in school in the 1800s, schools went back after Labor Day. Now, as you know, we have schools going back as early as the middle of August. Therefore, what we have tried to do is have 2 weeks that Members will have to be with their families on vacation.
So my expectation is if we have to come back that we will not come back during the first 2 weeks. That would be from my perspective, and I don't want to guarantee that, but I feel pretty strongly about that.
I am telling our Members that, and I want to respond publicly, but we may have to come back in August, again, because if the Senate passes language, if it has an impact on ACA, then we need to let the insurance companies know, not as a favor to them but as a favor to our constituents, so the pricing of their product will be more affordable.
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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. We are all very concerned about inflation, and one of the things that I talked about in the Affordable Care Act, a significant cost for Americans is their health insurance, and that bill is designed specifically to help them with the costs that they are incurring.
But I would point out to the gentleman: Gas prices, which are a significant part of inflation, have come down 36 days in a row, have come down over half a dollar in most areas of the country, and so we are making some progress, but not enough.
We passed a bill, of course, through this House which talked about price gouging. I don't know that anybody is for price gouging. Obviously, how to define price gouging is not simple, but having said that, I think certainly Americans want to make sure that they aren't gouged because they have to have a product.
We have also passed the act related to food and fuel to help with supply lines, to help with competition and help consumers bring their food prices down and gasoline prices by, for instance, helping out in the Midwest with E-15 being available, which is a cheaper price.
The gentleman is correct. We have and we are dealing with inflationary issues. In fact, hopefully, the CHIPS bill is going to pass the Senate. Hopefully, we are going to pass it here, and it will have other items involved in it, hopefully dealing with manufacturing.
I have an agenda that I think the gentleman has heard me talk about probably ad nauseam, Make It In America. I believe we ought to make things in America, and in doing so, help bring prices down because we will have supply availability here. I don't know if the gentleman has heard me use a phrase, we need to stop relying on the unreliable. I think the gentleman has made some of those comments himself.
I also want to say that there is a lot of, in my opinion, political assertion of the fact that this administration has caused inflation, which I think is completely without any factual support. In fact, although clearly inflation is unacceptably high at 9.1 percent in June, the OECD average of economically developed countries in the world is 9.6 percent, so this is not something unique to America.
It is a global inflation. It is not Biden policy inflation. It is global, largely caused by the pandemic, largely caused by the reduction in supply of goods and the reduction in demand for a period of time. And then with the American Rescue Plan we saw, not only in our country, but all over the world, there came a surge of demand, but because you had had the pandemic and you had sent workers home and they hadn't come in to produce goods, the supply was down, the demand went up, and unfortunately, inflation followed, which is very harmful to our people.
As I say, the average OECD, however, is higher than we are. We are not an outlier. The G20 average is 8.8 percent, just about exactly what we are, and our closest peers--Germany, Canada, and the U.K.--are all around 8 percent inflation, so we are all in that place where inflation is causing our people a lot of pain, and we need to deal with it.
The President has been trying to deal with it, and I think we have been trying to deal with it. As I said, we passed a lot of legislation. I think the CHIPS bill is going to have a really big impact.
The car industry and related industries are one-third of inflation.
Why is that? Because the chips shortage has caused literally millions of cars to be sitting on docks or sitting in parking lots somewhere unable to be sold because we can't get the chips. Used car prices have gone up because they are in greater demand. Again, when you have greater demand, prices go up.
So I would say to my friend, you and I agree 100 percent that inflation needs to be dealt with. The Fed, obviously, is trying to do that as well because one way you deal with inflation is to increase interest rates and try to slow down the economy. When you slow down the economy what you are trying to do is reduce demand to meet supply and stabilize prices.
So I say to my friend, we have been doing a lot of things to try to deal with inflation. I mentioned a number of those bills that we passed. A number of them are still in the Senate. But let us hope that gasoline prices keep coming down. There are some who expect they may go back up.
They are not set by us. They are set on the international market, and clearly there is no doubt that the war has had an impact on those prices, a significant impact on those prices. That is not the only reason because, as I said in our colloquy a couple weeks ago, the oil companies reduced production by 800,000 barrels per day.
Why? Because demand was down.
Why? Not for a bad reason. The pandemic kept people in their homes, and they weren't driving, so demand went down, so the normal reaction of the supplier was to reduce their supply.
This President believes that inflation is one of the top problems confronting the American people and the administration, and he is going to continue to work to try to bring that down.
I am hoping the CHIPS bill comes over soon, the Senate gets that done. In whatever form it comes, I hope it is more robust than less robust. I think it will have a positive impact on bringing down inflation.
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Mr. HOYER. And it would surprise him.
Mr. Speaker, we have had this discussion for over a month now about these bills, but also every time we have it, there is the plea that we produce, and if we would only produce. I bring this statistic up.
As the gentleman knows, as a result of our going back and forth, my staff has prepared a paper--and they have done an excellent job--as to what actually is the fact. Fact one, U.S. rig count--that is what drills for oil--is at current levels of 733. That is up 272 from 1 year ago. That is a 59 percent increase from a year ago, so that there is no doubt that we are producing more.
Now, as a practical matter, those of us who believe in the private sector and the capitalist system understand that the reason production goes up is because demand goes up and, therefore, companies want to sell more. But there are also companies that have not chosen to produce more for reasons of their own business judgment as to whether they think producing more will cause them to have better profits or lower profits or stay even.
This administration has presided over greater production in their first year than was true in the first 3 years individually--2017, 2018, and 2019, each one of those 3 years--under the Trump administration.
We are producing oil, and we are producing product. We are going to continue to do that. I can give you statistic after statistic of how many applications have been approved, are ready to go, and are not being used.
Rather than just rehash that, I will simply say, back to the issue of the gas prices, gas prices are lower today in real terms than they were at the end of the Bush administration in 2008. I pause for emphasis. In real dollars, the cost of gasoline at the pump at the end of 2008 was higher than it is today, and it is way too high today.
I was out in Virginia, in a rural area, and I saw gas for $4.36. At home, it had been almost $4.95, and that was an extraordinary decrease. I said: Boy, look at that. Then I caught myself because it is still a burden on our consumers, middle-class, working families, when, as the whip says, they confront a price of two or three times what they were used to when filling up their car. So, we need to continue to work on that.
I disagree with the whip in the sense, Mr. Speaker, that I think the President's visit overseas--there was some controversy to it. I get that. I think it was very positive vis-a-vis our close ally Israel, and Israel said it was a very productive visit. I am glad the President did that. I also think that it gave additional stability indicating that this President, although we are focused like a laser on Ukraine and focused like a laser on the Far East, we are still focused on the Middle East and trying to make that region of the world a stable region of the world.
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