30-Something Working Group, 1/24/07

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank you, Mr. Meek.

It is an honor to be standing in the traditional place of Mr. Ryan today, and I will attempt to equal at least half of his eloquence on this floor.

You are right, I think there are a lot of missing pieces from that speech last night. It was my first opportunity to sit and listen to a Presidential State of the Union, and you couldn't help but leave disappointed. There were a lot of promises that I think the American people were looking to be fulfilled in that speech.

Mr. Meek, I think you were exactly right when you talked about a sense of bipartisanship, which I think is infectious in this building right now due to the first 100-hours agenda that, as we know, drew bipartisan support, on average 60 Members of the other aisle supporting each piece of that 100-hours agenda. That bipartisanship seems to be lost when it comes to the issue of Iraq.

It doesn't go without note that since the President had unveiled his plan to escalate this war, to put another 21,000 brave men and women in harm's way to do a job that Colin Powell and others will tell you 100,000 people can't do.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, you are very right. And I am glad those quotes are going to be on the 30-Something Web site because it really is a cross-section of this Chamber, the people who have been really speaking out and asking the President to revisit this plan to escalate the war. You have dozens of Republicans, more every day, that are coming out and suggesting that there has got to be a plan C, right? Plan A we know didn't work; we are now debating plan B, which everyone from foreign policy experts to the President's own military advisors suggest won't work.

And we hope that some of the folks watching us on C-SPAN right now caught some of the hearings, Mr. Meek, before the Armed Services Committees and other relevant committees because you have heard some remarkable testimony from the President's own military leaders expressing grave doubts about this plan to put new troops into Iraq and into Baghdad.

So we have got both sides of the aisle coming together and saying, listen, let's sit down and talk about plan C, because that is what this is about. This is not about just standing up here in front of TV cameras and telling people the President's plan doesn't work; it has got to be about setting another way. And there are other ways. We can talk about the redeployment of troops. We can talk about starting to rebuild our credibility in the world.

The President talked last night, Mr. Meek, about the unification of the world's communities around the President's strategy. Well, that certainty doesn't comport with reality, it doesn't comport with what we are seeing; but it doesn't mean that the opportunity is lost, it doesn't mean that we still can't go back to the world community and say, let's together build a new strategy to get ourselves out of Iraq in a way that leaves that country as stable as we can.

And, Mr. Meek, I don't know about you, but I think we can still do that. And I am actually interested. The President is going to speak to our issues conference in a week and a half, and I know there is some grumbling about that, but I am actually looking forward to him coming to us so that we might be able to have another chance to persuade him to work with both sides of the aisle here on this floor to come up with a new strategy that will allow us to lend stability to that country and rebuild the world community, and do it in a way that doesn't put more and more troops of ours in harm's way. And I know, Mr. Meek, of other Members who have been here much longer than I believe that we can do that together.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Meek is very right. It is going to be in a bipartisan way. And there are moments when maybe public opinion and things you hear back in the district don't always match up with maybe the things that you hear from the experts on that particular issue. That is inevitable in public service. And there are choices to be made, and inevitably your obligation in the end is to side with the people that you represent.

But on this issue there is a growing hegemony of opinion that backs up public opinion within the military community. Mr. Meek quoted some of the leaders of both parties who have come out against this plan for escalation, but the military has come out against this plan as well.

Let me just give a quick quote of Colonel Paul Hughes, who was the first person that was put in charge of strategic planning of the U.S. occupation in Baghdad, the first person on the ground to start planning on how we were going to keep Baghdad stable. We obviously failed pretty miserably in that mission, but here is what he said about the President's plan to escalate this war. He said: ``Just sending more troops to Baghdad is like pouring more water in the sands of Al Anbar. It's going to disappear without accomplishing anything.'

And that is what we have heard over and over again. There may be a number of troops that you could put into Baghdad or, lest we forget, the 12 other, 11 other major areas of conflict in Iraq. There might be a number, but it certainly isn't 21,000. And the President in his speech talked about not only using those troops to secure Baghdad but also using them to secure Al Anbar Province, also trying to do increased training, also trying to better secure the borders around Iraq to prevent the insurgents from coming in. Twenty-one thousand troops can't do that, and what ends up happening, as many of our military experts have told us over and over again, is it just puts those men and women in even graver danger. That is an opinion shared not just by Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle but by the military community as well.

And Mr. Meek talked about the oversight that is going to happen here in terms of our strategy going forward. And I think that these hearings have been so valuable because I think they educate the American public and educate all of us about our options going forward. But the oversight also has to be about how we conduct ourselves so far, because if there was any faith in our ability to manage this war and manage the reconstruction, then maybe we would look a little bit differently upon the President's proposal.

But the fact is, and this number startled me, we have $8.8 billion of money, Mr. Meek, of money that is unaccounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority, $8.8 billion that we can't even explain where it went. That is about enough money to run the State of Connecticut for an entire year. And that is not the money we spent; that is the money we can't find anymore.

Mr. Meek served on the Armed Services Committee. I am going to get the opportunity to serve on the Government Reform Committee under Mr. Waxman of California, and our focus there is going to be on that waste, fraud, and abuse that has happened within our military spending in Iraq. And it is important not just because of taxpayer dollars and because we were all sent here to make sure that every hard-earned dollar that our taxpayers send to Washington gets spent effectively, but it is important because it educates us on the inefficiency and the blundering in a lot of places that has happened in the conduct of this war and the conduct of the reconstruction. And there are a myriad of reasons why we should start listening to people like Mr. Murtha and others who are counseling us to redeploy our forces and to significantly draw down the number of troops we have there very soon. There are a number of reasons why we should take those arguments seriously and why many of us support bringing a large number of our troops home very soon.

But at the top of that list is the fact that the money we are spending there, even beyond the philosophy, just when you are talking about the money, the money isn't being spent to make that country safer, to rebuild that country. That money is being lost, and as you said, Mr. Meek, through the Speaker, much of that money we are now finding out actually finds its way into the hands of the very people that we are fighting in Iraq. We can't account for it, and thus it finds its way into the hands of the insurgents who are attacking the convoys, who are taking the oil that is being produced there, and are, in fact, using our own money to fight our own efforts there. So it is our obligation, Mr. Meek, as you have said, not only to investigate, not only to hold hearings into the strategy and the conduct of our military operations but also to ask some questions about how all of our taxpayer dollars are being spent there, because I think we are going to find some very interesting things as we go forward in the next few weeks.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you for yielding, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I think that was the feeling that a lot of us here for our first State of the Union felt as well. I was able to sit with a lot of the first-term Members to listen to the speech, and we all left shaking our heads, because when we went out and campaigned to come to this body, and when we go back to our districts to talk to people, I mean, it is very clear that they don't want patchwork solutions when it comes to health care; they don't want a little tinkering around the edges when it comes to energy reform. They want bold leadership from Washington.

It is no small thing for a bunch of people across this country to go out and cast out long-term incumbents, which is what happened in a lot of these districts. It takes a lot of courage in order to make that decision for change. And, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I think you are exactly right that they are looking to us to have that same type of courage. They are requiring us to take that same type of bold action that they took by turning over this body into new hands, into new leadership. And the President's suggestions last night when it came to health care and when it came to energy policy simply don't measure up.

Let's think about it; 6.8 million people in this country have lost their health care insurance in the last 6 years. Premiums during that time have risen 81 percent in the last 6 years while wages stayed flat. Now, if the President, as you said, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, listened to counsel besides his own, he would know that a tax deduction doesn't help the people that don't have insurance because about 50 percent of the uninsured aren't paying income taxes right now. So the people that we need to help, the people that right now are clogging up our emergency rooms, and, as you know, this is not just a matter of doing the right thing for the uninsured, this is doing the right thing for all of us who are subsidizing the people who walk into the emergency rooms, get this extravagantly expensive care simply because they didn't have the insurance to get them in to have preventative care. The proposal he unveiled yesterday really, I think, does grave injustice to those people out there who were struggling with a system that is fundamentally broken, and it simply isn't going to be fixed around the edges.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are exactly right. I remember standing at a supermarket in my district during the campaign or maybe a few years before, and a woman who was, I think, 59, 58 years old, who had been laid off, and who understandably was having trouble finding new employment. It is difficult for older Americans to find a new job, especially one that has a comprehensive package of benefits. And she looked at me with this blank face and said, ``Why am I in this position? Why can I not get health care when I know the Medicare program is right there? I am willing to pay for it. I am willing to contribute to it. And yet I can't get access to this program simply because I have been put into a situation where I can't find a job or I can't find a job with benefits, and I don't qualify for the program.'

So there are ways that we can help, as you said, those older Americans who are on the cusp of being able to qualify for Medicare, and certainly the millions of children around this country who have no health care insurance and end up getting sick. I mean, they get sick, and they come into our emergency rooms to get the care they need. Mr. Ryan said here the other night, we do have a system of universal coverage in this country; unfortunately, it is in our emergency rooms rather than in our doctors' offices and our primary care doctors' offices.

And maybe just to tie this back to what we were talking about before when it comes to the war in Iraq. You know, we have an obligation to our veterans when they come back, and what we have done here over the past 10 years to the health care system for veterans is a travesty of justice to the brave men and women who have fought for this country.

I absolutely support moving towards universal coverage. I think you are right, it doesn't have to be done all at once. In fact, I think the best proposals before this body are to really take some commonsense approaches to it. But maybe the first thing we should do is start to repair some of the damage that we did to the veterans health care system to make sure that when you volunteer to serve this country abroad, that when you come back, you are going to get the mental health care that you need, that you are going to not have to wait in line for a surgery that you badly need. Maybe that is our first obligation is to take care of those folks, because in the end we are here to serve everyone, but we are certainly here to make sure that those people that fight for us, Mr. Meek, are taken care of. And I would yield to you.

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