30-Something Working Group

Floor Speech

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, it is good to see you in the Chair this evening.

This has been a pretty amazing first 3 months for a new Member such as myself, who just joined this Chamber after having watched it from afar for a number of years. As our majority leader said at an engagement earlier tonight, this has really been one of the most remarkably productive Congresses in as long as he can remember being here. That is important. That is important to me.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to be joined later tonight by Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who is just beginning her second term. I think she shares a lot of the same frustration that the new Members do, that for all of the important policy changes that this Congress has started, whether you want to talk about raising the minimum wage, starting to repeal some of these massive tax breaks we have given to the oil industry, the very important action that we took on Friday that we will talk about in terms of Iraq and the new direction that this Democratic Congress is beginning to set on what we do in Iraq, maybe the most important thing was that we started getting this place to work again and starting to give our constituents out there faith that Congress is back to work for the people of this country. Instead of sort of waiting for the special interests and the lobbyists to line up and come into the offices of the prior leadership to tell them what they wanted, now actually we have got the American people, middle-class families, working class families, their priorities are back in charge here again. That is what makes me proud to be part of this group.

This is the hour that the 30-Something Working Group gets to spend on the floor of the House. I am proud to be a member of that group, a new member, proud that Speaker Pelosi has allowed us this opportunity.

We are going to cover I think a couple of subjects tonight. We will certainly talk about what happened here on Friday.

But I want to first just rewind for a second, to rewind to what happened when we first got here in January. Because it is interesting. I watched C-SPAN occasionally when I got home from the campaign trail, I got home from the State capital where I served in Connecticut for a few years, so I have some familiarity with some of the talk that goes on in this place.

But now I get to sort of listen it to with new ears, because now I listen to a lot of the revisionist history that gets thrown around this place late at night, listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle, and they are friends.

It is important to put up this chart, Mr. Speaker, to remind the American people that we actually can be friends when it actually comes to putting on the floor of the House of Representatives up or down votes on issues that matter to regular, middle-class families out there.

We can talk about 68 Republican votes along with the Democrats voting to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. When we raised the minimum wage, set that bill on a path forward in this House, we got 82 Republican votes for that. Stem cell research, passed 253-174, 37 Republicans. Better prescription drug programs for our elderly, 24 Republicans. And on and on and on.

When it matters, where you put up-or-down votes in front of this House for things that make lives better for regular people out there, you are going to have Republicans and Democrats agreeing. So we are friends. We are friends when we put things before us we can all agree on.

But there has been some revisionist history. There has been some interesting 20-20 hindsight happening on this floor often. We heard just a little bit of it before. A lot the decrying about the situation that our Federal budget has gotten into is pretty curious, seeing that the reason that I am here in large part is because a whole bunch of people out in northwestern Connecticut who voted for one person for 24 years decided that the budget priorities, along with the priorities on our foreign policy, were gravely out of whack.

A $9 trillion deficit, Mr. Speaker. A President that inherited a budget surplus, who ran on very fiscally conservative principles, managed to turn that into a record deficit in his first 6 years in office. A Republican Congress, I am sure there were some Democrats that were at the trough as well, but a Republican-led Congress that was complicit in racking up record amounts of debt that we know are not owned in large part by domestic banks but are increasingly owned by foreign banks, Asian banks and, in fact, it will put us in a very difficult position with when we are sitting down at a table to negotiate foreign policy with a lot of these foreign debt holders that have fairly decent leverage over us.

So we hear a lot about how we need to do something about this deficit. How it is our children, our children are going to be crippled under the weight of this deficit. They absolutely are. They absolutely are.

We had 6 years with a Republican President, 6 years with a Republican House, a Republican Senate for much of that time. Could have fixed it during that time; didn't get the job done.

Let's take a look at this chart for just one second. Let's make this clear, when we borrow money, all of this debt that we have racked up over the past several years, it is owned by Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Caribbean nations, Taiwan, OPEC nations, right down the line. That is who owns our foreign debt. That is what places us in incredibly compromising positions when we try to bring them to the table to be a multilateral player in actions throughout this world.

So here is why I am here: I am here because people in northwestern Connecticut wanted us to finally challenge this President on his disastrous policy in Iraq. I am here because they were sick and tired of the programs that make communities strong, the health care programs, education programs, job training programs, we are getting slashed and burned and cut to the bone by this Congress, while they gave away more and more massive tax breaks to their friends in the upper .1 percent of income earners in this Nation.

But they are also upset because the party that I think they thought was, you know, you see it in the polls, people for years and years and years thought that the Republicans were the ones that could manage their money and the Democrats they weren't so sure on. Well, they finally wised up after a while to realize that this place wasn't so responsible even under Republican rule; that in fact after budget after budget that got put before here, that President Bush put before this Congress was rubber-stamped over and over and over again and led to some of the most fiscally irresponsible policies that this Congress has ever seen, that this Nation, in fact, has ever seen. Largest Federal debt in the history of this country, growing by the day.

Now, here is the good news: it's changing. Now, as many times as folks on the other side of the aisle want to talk and use the term ``biggest tax increase in the history of the Federal Government,'' well, I'm still searching through that budget resolution, I'm still searching through what I am going to vote on this week and I don't see it. I don't see it because it's not there because we are actually going to do the responsible thing. Because what happened to create this Federal budget deficit was not just these massive tax breaks that they gave away to the folks way at the top, top, top of the income bracket, but they also spent money in a way that would have your eyes spin to the back of your head if you dug into some of the things they were doing here.

A Medicare prescription drug program that deliberately ties the hands of the Federal Government, doesn't allow the Federal Government to negotiate lower prices with the drug industry, Mr. Speaker, making millions, hundreds of millions, in dollars in profit for the drug industry at the expense of American taxpayers.

A defense policy which asks virtually no questions of how we spend our money in Iraq. We find out that there was $9 billion sent over to Iraq on pallets, thrown out of SUVs in duffel bags, unaccounted for; disappeared in that country. Stories of these pork barrel projects that would make your head spin, the ``bridge to nowhere'' in Alaska, simply the tip of the iceberg when it comes to some of the frivolous spending that happens from this supposedly fiscally conservative Congress.

You could run through the examples over and over and over again. Mr. Speaker, we just had a hearing in the Government Oversight Committee that I sit on where we found out that the government does audits, each Department does an audit every year to try to make sure that we are spending money in a fiscally sound manner, just like any business would, that government should act like a business. Well, the analogy isn't particularly apt in a lot of facets. But when you are talking about at least having generally accepted accounting principles to make sure that money comes in and goes out in an efficient manner, well, yes, we should start acting like a business does.

The only agency in the Federal Government that can't give a clean audit year after year after year, the Department of Defense. Nobody here is putting pressure on them to account for how they spend money, to make sure that the billions of dollars that we hand to the Department of Defense in order to protect this country is being spent in the means that make sure that we are not saddling our children or grandchildren with the enormous amount of debt that we have racked up in this Congress.

I mean, you want to talk about spending money wisely, our friends on the other side of the aisle have to look themselves in the mirror, have to wonder why this election happened. I know that this war was a major factor in people's choice at the polls. I also know that were a lot of people in my district, and I have got the run of the economic spectrum in the Fifth Congressional District, from people living in places like New Britain and Waterbury that used to have good, solid middle-class jobs who are still struggling to get back to that level of sustenance, to folks that are doing pretty well with their lives that have made a buck in this economy. Those folks at the upper end of the economic spectrum are wondering how this government is spending their money.

So this week we are going to put a budget before this House. And Mr. Meek, who has joined us and Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, can talk more intelligently than I can about this. We are going to finally put a budget before this House that is going to start to reflect the priorities of the American people; we are going to get our financial ship in order. All the things that folks over there talk about are actually going to be reality in this budget.

We are going to make sure that we invest in the programs that make America strong. We are going to make sure that we end this disastrous policy of unbalanced budgets. We can do it in the next 5 years. That budget says that we can and we will. And it is going to continue at a pretty important precedent that we have set in this Congress, which is to change course on some of the most disastrous policies of this administration, particularly the vote that we took on Friday on the war in Iraq, and I know that we will talk about that, but also start to get our fiscal ship in order, to put our money where our mouth is.

It is one thing for people to come up to this dais day after day after day and talk about fiscal responsibility. It is another thing to actually do it and put it into practice.

The budget that we are going to vote on will be, as I have learned, this place calls a pay-as-you-go budget. It is simply this, what every family lives with every day. You want to spend some new money, show how you are going to pay for it. You want to cut some taxes, show how you are going to account for it. Pretty simple budget rule, Mr. Speaker. But not to be too partisan here, it took a Democratic Congress in order to start playing by those very simple rules.

So, Mr. Speaker, I want to want to hand it over to Mr. Meek for some words, who normally gets to kick off this hour. But let me say that it has been a proud first three months. Probably the proudest day I have had was on Friday, when we came together to stand up to the President's policy in Iraq. It is going to be another proud week this week when we set the budget policies of this country straight and we finally stand up to the President and don't do what every other Congress has done, which is take this massive document, throwing our deficit into an increasingly upward spiral, throwing our families into turmoil. We are going to finally take this very weighted document and hold it up to the light, not just rubber-stamp it.

It is going to be another good week here, Mr. Speaker. And with that, I yield to Mr. Meek.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, just as a transition to Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I would just say, elections matter; and there is probably no better example of that in recent history than the election in November. Things have just changed here. The air is different, the priorities are different, the rate of action is different.

And, Mr. Meek, I get why we had to have an election in order to change course in Iraq. I understand that this is a very difficult subject that has divided people for a number of years. Over the past several years, people, large numbers of people came to the conclusion that we needed to change course from the President's policy, that we needed to put a Congress here that is going to start standing up to this guy and insisting that there are some other fights that matter in this world, and that we need to invest back in Afghanistan, that we need to make sure that our borders here are protected and that we needed to start redeploying our forces.

So I get that we had to go to a national referendum in order to set a new course. That is an important issue that has divided people.

Now, people have come down pretty firmly in the past 12 or 18 months on the side of a new direction. That is why Friday, to me, was maybe the most gratifying day in the short number that I have been here. But, Mr. Meek, I don't get why we had to have an election to decide to support veterans.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I know that some of this administration are supposedly not great students of history; but if you read of recent Presidencies, you might find out if you tell the truth right off the bat, you get yourself in a lot less trouble than if you try to place the blame.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, there is going to be a lot of stuff over the next couple months about Executive privilege and who said what, and there may be a lot of terms that may not seem like it matters to regular people.

The heart of the matter is the difference between America and some Third World nations out there is we have a system of blind justice which holds people accountable for their actions based on whether they were right or wrong, whether they broke the law or didn't break the law; not whether they have some powerful friend sitting in the halls and corridors of power in Washington, D.C. or their State legislature. That is what separates this country from a lot of other places in the world where you can get hauled off to jail simply because you have fallen in disfavor with someone who is in a high political position. That is the essence of the genius of this country, that we have made sure that our legal system operates separate from our political system.

There is going to be a lot of commotion about Executive privilege. What it comes down to is what may have happened is that this administration violated one of the basic principles of American democracy: don't mix justice with politics.

And you are very right, maybe people wouldn't have found out about this if we did have Democrats in the majority.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. What we have gotten ourselves into, this is a religious war.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. This is a religious war that we helped to create in part. It did not exist until the bull sort of rushed into the China shop, but I think we all find it appalling, some of us, this simplistic terminology that gets rolled out here that we cannot leave until victory has been achieved. Explain to me what victory is because if we have to stay there until we have completely eliminated a civil/religious conflict, well, it was not raging for the decades before we got there and is one that has almost no historical bounds. That is a difficult victory to ask our brave men and women to achieve, to try to somehow remediate a dispute between Shia and Sunni that cannot be resolved through the military actions of our men and women.

Victory is much broader than that. Victory is about going after the fight that really mattered in the first place which is in Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. Victory is about making sure that we secure our borders here at home; that every container that comes into American ports gets checked; that every airport has the proper screening technology to make sure that the ports of entry who brought in the terrorists who harmed this country have all the technology they need to make sure that it never happens again.

That's victory in the end. So it's frustrating as a new Member to come down here and to listen to this new terminology get thrown out there that doesn't have any basis in reality. That is part of what we did on Friday as well, to start to broaden that definition of what victory means and try to challenge the people to rise to that.

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