30-Something Working Group

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the 30-Something Working Group which the Speaker is a member of and I know will join us down here for an hour in the future, we hope to be joined later this evening by one of the senior members of the 30-Something Working Group, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek).

We come down to the House floor as some of the younger Members of the Democratic Caucus, and we try to do it every week to really focus in on how the issues affecting this Congress are specifically challenging younger families in this country. How the neglect of the past 12 years trying to be remedied by the new Democratic majority here are affecting those families that are just starting out, those issues maybe can be best talked about and best addressed by those of us who are the younger members of the House represented by the 30-Something Working Group.

We thank the Speaker for constituting the working group and allowing us to come down and share our thoughts.

It is remarkable as a first-term Member, Mr. Speaker, to see the transition of views and transformation of priorities and issues that you hear about as a first-term Member, going out and holding office hours as I do at supermarkets throughout my district, holding town hall meetings every week or 2 weeks throughout the district.

I remember back in February of 2007 when I held my first big, large town hall. It was a nerve-racking occasion as a first-term Member of Congress, and I remember thinking there was only one subject to hold that town hall meeting on, and that was the war in Iraq, dominating the conversation as it seemed to here on the floor of the House and in the halls of the United States Congress.

The President had proposed his new strategy to introduce 35,000 to 40,000 new troops into Iraq, clearly working against the will of the majority of the American people who had said all across this Nation in November 2006 that they wanted a new direction in Iraq.

And now fast forward a year later to town halls that I am holding, as well as other members of the 30-Something Working Group and Members on both sides of the aisle, and you hear a very different tune.

People are still talking about Iraq. The situation hasn't gotten any better, and you can make the very plausible argument that things have gotten worse in Iraq over the last year. Even as the surge has moved forward, the political willingness of the Iraqis to take control of their own country has moved backwards.

But what we are hearing very clearly from the mouths of our constituents in town hall meetings and office hours across this Nation is that there is economic trouble. There is trepidation on behalf of families throughout this country as to the economic future that they face as families and that our communities face going forward.

And it's real. The numbers are getting worse. The amount of homes facing foreclosures, the number of workers being laid off, even those people who have jobs finding that the salary increases they thought were coming are being postponed, the amount of overtime hours that they used to rely on, cut back, many more part time workers, more temporary workers.

I don't know, Mr. Speaker, whether we're in a recession or not. I'm not an economist. But I know that people are facing real trouble back in Connecticut, as they are throughout the rest of this country.

And I don't think it takes a rocket scientist on this floor or anywhere else in the country to figure out how we got here. You know, this isn't just about the jobs that are being lost. This isn't just about the themes are being foreclosed upon. This is about the fact that thousands of families, millions of families around this country and in the Fifth District of Connecticut have no more room in their budget to take any more hits.

Energy costs going up at a pace that families and seniors can't sustain; health care costs going up to the point where businesses celebrate when they hear that their premiums are only going to increase by 10 percent in a given year. You add that all together with an economic slowdown, and you put millions of families at risk throughout this country.

And it should be no surprise that we've gotten to the place that we are today because for 12 years, while our friends on the other side of the aisle controlled this House, while President Bush staked his claim to the White House, we have had absolute neglect when it comes to energy policy.

So the families throughout this country today are hurting, while oil companies are making record profits, record profits; not just for the oil industry, but for any company in the history of capitalism in this country, record profits for the oil companies, while we have families hurting, paying more at the pump, paying more to heat their homes.

Health care policy is the same story. I mean, how long has it been that this Congress has been listening to the cries, to the pleas of families and businesses throughout this Nation to do something about the rising cost of health care?

And for 12 years of this Republican Congress, for 8 years now, almost 8 years of this Bush presidency, no relief on health care costs. While yet, at the same time, those that are making profits off the health care system, the insurance companies, the drug companies, continue to make enormous profits. Salaries for the CEOs of these companies spiral to new heights.

So people are doing pretty well when it comes to energy prices, people are doing pretty well when it comes to health care prices. It's just not consumers. It's just not our neighbors and our friends and our relatives. It's that lucky few who got to run the oil company, who got to run the drug company, who got to run the insurance company.

And we're trying to change things. But we're finding that it isn't easy without partners. It isn't easy without a Republican minority who actually wants to actually do something to change our economy. It's not so easy without a President who wants to come to the table and help us with health care policy.

And so we are in difficult economic times today. But we need a Congress working together. We need a President who's willing to come to the table.

Mr. Speaker, the facts speak for themselves here. On January 22, 2001, when the President was sworn into office, the price of a gallon of gasoline was about $1.47. Today, 7 years later that price stands at $3.53.

In Connecticut you might be lucky today to find a gallon of gasoline at $3.53. I think when I filled up my car this weekend, if I remember, it was up around the $3.70 mark.

This is what you get, this is what you get when you give away $16 billion of tax breaks to the oil companies. This is what you get when you refuse to make any investments in the types of alternative renewable energy sources that could wean this country off of gasoline. And this is what you get when, year after year after year, you perpetuate a foreign policy that destabilizes international oil markets in the Middle East and elsewhere.

It's no secret, it's no surprise that we're standing where we are today. This Democratic majority has inherited an utterly bankrupt national energy policy, and it is leading to the trouble that we have seen in American families today.

And the same thing goes for health care policy, Mr. Speaker. Again, I find it painfully humorous that 10 percent increases in premiums are to be celebrated around this country in our business community. And what it has led to is too many businesses who want to do the right thing, who want to give health care to their employees, cutting them off, or forcing more of the cost on those employees; putting yet another economic burden on families all around this country.

This economic slowdown, once again, is not just about the subprime crisis. It's also about energy prices, it's also about health care costs. And for 12 years of this Congress, for 7 years of this presidency, no action on health care.

With one minor exception, right? You remember the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. Well, it did a couple of things. First, it foisted a Medicare prescription drug benefit seniors, which drove millions of seniors around this country through the roof trying to figure out, amongst 40 or 60 or 80 different plans, which one they should sign up for; drove them through the roof even more once they got to the end of the year and realized that their coverage was going to run out on them when they entered that dreaded donut hole; and all the while, made another nice health profit for the insurance companies and drug companies that were in the room writing the bill with the Republican majority at the time.

That was our approach to health care, was to give a little bit to people in an utterly confusing and cruel program, which gives a lot to the folks that didn't need any more. That's pretty much the sum total of health care reform in this Congress before the Democrats took control.

And as we've tried to extend out health care, we have been met with almost uniform resistance from the Republicans and from the President, most significantly in our effort to try to extend health care to poor kids. Four million kids we could have covered with the health care State insurance bill that we tried to pass. We came, you know, depending on anybody's estimates, about six votes short here in the House of Representatives, to overturn the President's repeated vetoes.

That kind of health care coverage, reaching out and extending to a lot of working families out there. Remember, you're talking about 3/4 , maybe more of the 46 million uninsured out there are members of families in which you have a full-time worker. People are playing by the rules. They're doing everything we ask them to do, trying to make do in a tough economy, and yet they don't have any health care insurance. And that children's health care insurance bill that we tried to pass here as Democrats, and couldn't get cooperation from our friends across the aisle, that would have extended out benefits to four million more kids and, more importantly, four million more families, families that are doing everything we ask, playing by the rules, trying to survive and simply can't get health care to their kids.

Now, we know that they do get health care to their kids, because if their child is sick, they might postpone getting them to the doctor, but compassionate parents all across this country will end up bringing their child down to the emergency room, will end up finding a doctor that will treat them. But they pay for all of that out of their pocket.

More bankruptcies in this country are caused by health care costs than any other cause that you can dream up. And so this economic slowdown is exacerbated by the increasing amount of health care costs that are pushed and burdened on families across this country.

Doing something about health care is doing something about the economy, just like doing something about energy prices is also about doing something for this economy.

But the other thing that I'm finding out, Mr. Speaker, as I'm walking around talking to constituents in the northwest section of Connecticut, is that the gig is up on the Republican and the President's ability to separate the war from the economy, because people are figuring out that they are totally linked together.

The fact that we are spending $339 million a day, let me say that again, $339 million a day on this war is taking food right out of the mouths of families here in this country, taking jobs effectively right out of the hands of American families.

Why is that? Imagine what we could have done if we could have taken the nearly $1 trillion that we have spent on this war over the past 5 years, and invested it in growing new economies in this country, invested it in building new worker training programs so that individuals being phased out of old economy jobs could be transitioned into new economy jobs.

What if we took that money that we've been spending, $330 million a day, and put that into new tax incentives for small businesses to grow their operations?

All of the things that we could have done with that money could have prevented the economic slowdown that we face today. They are absolutely linked together, the spending on this war, and the economic slowdown that we see today.

And part of this whole puzzle, and now you're getting into sort of high-minded economics that a non economist like me probably shouldn't be talking about.

But we know also that the dollar is falling fast across this world, and is jeopardizing even further the soundness of our economy as our dollar gets weaker and weaker and weaker.

And part of that equation is the fact that every dollar of this war, virtually every dollar for this war has been borrowed from foreign countries, countries that we're trying to sit across the table from and negotiate better trade deals, trying to negotiate on foreign policy. We can't do that on a fair and level playing field because we owe them money; not just a little bit of money, but billions upon billions of dollars that we owe foreign countries. Because for this war, we haven't paid for it ourselves. We put it on somebody else's tab, our kids' tab, our grandkids' tab. And for now that money is being held, those promissory notes are being held by foreign governments, further undermining the American economy.

So the chickens are coming home to roost here on energy policy, on health care policy and on the policy of the war that has sucked money out of this country that could have gone to sustain our economy.

Well, we can do things about it. We can do things about it. We can make strides, we can take steps to strengthen our economy, once again.

I want to talk for just a brief moment, Mr. Speaker, about one small bill that we passed today that'll start to get us on the road to fiscal and economic sanity once again.

Regardless of what you think about this war, we have spent wildly and out of control. Now, I'm talking about the $340 million that we spend every day in Iraq.

Now, I think that had we not gone into Iraq in the first place, had we not stepped foot into this quagmire, we could have spent all of that money here at home to educate our own kids, to build our own schools, to retain our own workers.

But even if we had gone into Iraq, if we had just been paying more attention, as a Congress, as to how money was being spent, we could have had a lot more money to do those things that is now being wasted on the battlefield of Iraq and the battlefield of Afghanistan.

One of the ways in which we are wasting money was that we were making and still are, Mr. Speaker, making people rich off of this war. War profiteering is what it's called, people making their fortunes off of the misery of others. That's happening right here and now in the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

In the Government Oversight Committee that I sit on as a freshman member, we had one of the most egregious examples of this practice, Blackwater Security before us back in the fall. The CEO of Blackwater Security who's got a billion dollar contract to basically do the work that the U.S. military should be doing in Iraq, Blackwater is basically a paramilitary citizen army setting up camp in Iraq.

They got a huge contract with the United States Government. 90 percent of Blackwater's profits, excuse me. 90 percent of Blackwater's revenue comes from U.S. taxpayers. I mean, they are, essentially, a quasi-government agency. 90 percent of their money comes from the U.S. taxpayers.

So I asked what I thought was a commonsense question at this hearing. I asked Eric Prince, the CEO of Blackwater, I said, listen. You know what? I think it'd be useful for us to know as a Congress, and for the American public to know how much profit you make, how much salary do you take as a quasi-public government employee?

Mr. Prince said to us, very clearly, it's none of your business. I'm a private company. It seemed outrageous to me. It seemed outrageous to many of my colleagues on the committee.

We pay your salary. We pay 90 percent of all the money that your company takes in, and you're not going to tell us whether you make $1 million?

Well, he did tell us that; he did tell us that he made over $1 million, but he wouldn't tell us how much more.

$2 million? $3 million? $10 million? $20 million?

So I put in a bill, a really simple bill that passed on the floor of the House of Representatives today that said for those private companies that are out there making 80 percent or more of their money from the Federal Government, that have $25 million or more in contracts, you need to tell the American public how much you are taking out in profit. Tell us how much your most highly compensated officials make. Put some sunlight on how much profit you are making off of this war. Seems like a commonsense measure. In fact, it passed unanimously on the House floor this afternoon.

But it says something about how important the change was that was made in control of this House that it took 5 years of this war for that commonsense, simple bill to make it to the House floor, because when it got here, it resulted in a unanimous vote. But it took Democrats taking control of the House in order for these types of bills, cracking down on war profiteering, to even find the light of day here.

And so, yes, so many of us believe that part of bringing us out of this economic mess, this downturn, this recession, whatever you want to call it, is getting us out of this mess that we have gotten ourselves into in Iraq, turning that money around and spending it right here in the United States of America. But until we do that, one of the most important things we can do for our economy is to make sure that to the extent that we are spending money in Iraq that we're spending it wisely, the right way.

That's part of our responsibility as a Congress. At least when I grew up reading the Constitution, learning about the three branches of government, I was told that the House of Representatives was supposed to be a place that oversaw the executive branch, that made sure that the money of the people that they represented was being spent in the right way. Well, that didn't happen here for a long time.

That oversight role that the Congress was supposed to have on the war, on the policies of the President, kind of vanished for about 7 years. Conveniently, they were there for the years in which there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic President; a record number of subpoenas were flying out of this place when there was a Democratic President. But when there was a Republican Congress and a Republican President, it wasn't happening so much. I would like to think it was a coincidence, but it probably wasn't.

Now we've got oversight again. And a reasonable amount of oversight. Not overreaching. Not politicizing, not grandstanding. The right amount of oversight. And we passed a bill that was part of that process today.

I couldn't be more pleased, tickled, frankly, to be joined on the House floor by one of the originators of the 30-Something Working Group, Representative Meek.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well said, Mr. Meek. And if we can get the legislation that we passed through the House today through the Senate, what will make those numbers even starker is to partner them with the numbers reflecting the millions of dollars that some people out there are making off this war. Or those numbers of troops that don't come home, or come home with their lives altered permanently, for many of us, I think for all of us, it doesn't seem right that off of that misery someone is making their fortune out there. And that's what the legislation today on the floor sought to do.

Mr. Meek, you talked about the fact that on a lot of the pieces of legislation that we've been talking about, especially with respect to our efforts here in this New Direction Congress to try to do something about the legacy of rising oil prices that the President has left us, we've had folks on the other side of the aisle join us. I'm just looking at a couple of bills here on our legislation to finally go after these multinational oil cartels that have been price fixing, have been immune from the actions of prosecutors and U.S. courts. Well, we've decided to put them under the jurisdiction of the United States court system and try to go after them for price fixing. And you know what? We did. It looks like we got about 125 Members of the Republican side of the aisle to join us.

When we went after price gougers, we said, let's make it a Federal crime, let's give the Federal Trade Commission the ability to go after those people who would take advantage of rising prices to gouge consumers, to try to get much more than the market would command. We had over 50 Republicans who joined us on that legislation; we wish we had more. We wish we had a greater bipartisan majority for these pieces of legislation that are going forward. But the fact is is that we are working together as much as we can. It's not easy to take on these big interests that are making record profits in the oil industry.

The real problem is down the street. The real problem is that we have empowered and entrusted with the reins of the White House and the entire executive branch two oil company executives, two people who made their own fortunes taking profits off of oil prices, taking money out of the pockets of consumers. And those relationships in this administration with the oil industry, I think more so than the relationships that certain Members of this House might have, have really led us to the point where we have trouble advancing good consumer legislation through the full process because the President's threatened vetoes on the anti-oil cartel bill. The President's threatened veto of the price gouging legislation is what holds it up from moving further through the process.

So Mr. Meek, this is, I think, a building bipartisan majority here in the House. I think we are having some success convincing some of our friends on the other side of the aisle, despite their procedural tricks and maneuvers, that, you know what, these prices don't discriminate based on what party you went down and registered at the town hall and you're getting killed by gas prices and home heating oil prices whether you're a Republican or whether you're a Democrat. So I think that may account for why we have been able to build some collective support here for these pieces of legislation.

It's really down the road, as you ended your remarks, Mr. Meek, by suggesting that we've still got time left, right? I mean, everybody's looking at this presidential election saying, you know what, that's where our focus is. Everybody's concerned about this primary and that primary, and the cable news networks don't cover what we do here, they just cover what's said on the campaign trail. Come on, we've got 9 months left of this administration. We've got 9 months more, potentially, of $3.53 gasoline prices, of similarly high prices to heat your home in the northeast as the winter starts to come around again. We've still got time to do something if we've got a President to come and join us here and make some of the changes we need to make, Mr. Meek.

There is still time left. We say to our colleagues, don't pay attention to this presidential election at the detriment of the good work that we still can do. Now that the people have got back control of their House, taking it back from the oil companies that have controlled this agenda for so long, we can still make progress. We can still do something about these prices between now and the end of the year, Mr. Meek.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, when you stand on behalf of the people, you can't lose.

Mr. MEEK of Florida. Absolutely.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. You can't lose. And I wish it was more complicated. I wish legislating involved a little bit more mystery, but it doesn't. When you've got a choice to stand with regular, average, everyday folks who go to work every day trying to make a living and are playing by the rules or you stand with oil companies who make more money than they ever have, it's not a hard choice. You stand with regular, average, everyday people and the troubles they're going through. If you do that every time, you'll win every time.

Mr. Meek, it has been a pleasure to share the floor with you today on behalf of the 30-Something Working Group. We thank Speaker Pelosi for giving us once again the opportunity to share some of our thoughts with our colleagues.

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