[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 167 (Wednesday, October 31, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H12370-H12377]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank the Speaker and I thank the 
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for once again allowing the 30-
Something Working Group to come to the floor tonight and share with the 
American people and share with you, Mr. Speaker, some of the most 
important and pressing issues that are before this Congress right now, 
and to do that in part from a perspective of some of the hardworking 
individuals across this country who are looking for help from this 
Congress, who are looking for a Congress for the first time in a long 
time to start standing up for average, hardworking, everyday men and 
women who have been getting the short shrift from this government for a 
very long time.
  I am soon to be joined by some of my colleagues, potentially Mr. Ryan 
and Mr. Meek and Mr. Altmire to discuss some of the issues confronting 
us today.
  We will try, on behalf of Mr. Altmire and Mr. Meek, and certainly Mr. 
Ryan, to make as few Halloween analogies as potentially positive. We 
have exhausted that already this evening, and we are guilty on both 
sides of the aisle, so we won't talk about things being frightening or 
scary, at least until Mr. Ryan gets here. He may not be able to resist.
  It always amuses me when we are down here for one of these 30-
Something Working Group hours, and a lot of times we are preceded by 
The Truth Squad or some of our friends on the Republican side of the 
aisle. Often their mantra is to preach to the Democratic side of the 
aisle and preach to the American people the values of fiscal 
responsibility.
  Tonight we heard a little bit about it from our friends from the 
other side of the aisle chastising Chairman Rangel and his new very 
progressive tax cut which will bring tax relief to millions of working-
class families. We heard them talk about how it is time this Congress 
got spending under control as well.
  Mr. Speaker, there are short memories on the other side of the aisle, 
short memories which seems to only go back 10 months. They do not go 
back 3, or 6 or 12 years ago when Republicans took control of this 
Congress. If they did, they may have some recollection of the fact that 
they had 12 years of control. The Republicans had 12 years of 
responsibility over the Federal budget to get some fiscal sense and 
some fiscal discipline in the Federal budget.
  I stand here as a representative from a pretty fiscally conservative 
district. I represent northwestern Connecticut which is filled with 
Democrats and Republicans and Independents alike who care about the 
management of their Federal budget. They care about what this 
government does with their Federal dollars.
  They may be sort of a more socially liberal or moderate district, but 
when it comes to dollars and cents, people in my district care about 
fiscal responsibility. So I think one of the reasons I replaced a 24-
year incumbent is because after a while, people in my little corner of 
Connecticut and from across this country woke up to the fact that while 
on the floor of the House of Representatives or back in their districts 
or on the talk shows or the cable news networks, the Republicans said 
over and over again that they valued fiscal responsibility, but when 
they had a chance to pass budgets to back up that talk, when they had a 
chance to get the deficit under control, not only did they not do it, 
they made it worse.
  This President with a Republican-controlled Congress in the House and 
the Senate, with a Republican-controlled administration inherited a 
budget surplus and turned that in just a few years into a record budget 
deficit. A chart that Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan have shown on this House 
floor year after year after year says it pretty well. President Bush 
during the time he has been in office, all of that,

[[Page H12371]]

all of those budgets passed with Republican Houses and Republican 
Senates, in the time he has been in Congress, he has doubled the amount 
of foreign-held debt, doubled the amount of borrowing we have done 
which has been bought up by countries other than the United States.
  It took 42 Presidents 224 years to build up $1 trillion of foreign 
debt. And it has taken this President 6 years to go to $1.19 trillion. 
And this chart is a little old, too. It's even worse than that now. So 
it amuses me, Mr. Speaker, and a lot amuses me in Washington. As a 
freshman Member, I find a lot of things to sort of step back and laugh 
about. But to get lectured by a Republican, now in the minority, about 
fiscal responsibility, when it was their party in control of this House 
and in control of the Senate and running the administration that put us 
in the situation we are in today. So now it is our job to try to clean 
it up.
  When I go back to my district, Mr. Speaker, I have a hard time 
explaining why some of the simple, commonsense measures that we have 
undertaken in this Congress weren't done years, decades ago. I use for 
an example what is called the pay-as-you-go rule. It is kind of the 
rule that most families and businesses use every day, which is we are 
only going to spend money that we have. We are going to put money out 
at the same rate money is coming in.
  For some reason when the Republicans were running this House for the 
last 12 years, that wasn't the rule of the day. In fact, regularly they 
were spending American taxpayer dollars that they didn't have, that 
weren't in the bank. That is what rolled up these deficits that were 
rolling in at about $300 billion a year. It's spending more money than 
we were taking in that is now responsible for a Federal deficit that 
balloons over $1.2 trillion.
  The majority, I am not sure the majority but a large amount of that 
deficit, that debt, those notes, those obligations being held by China 
and Japan and OPEC nations, all of these countries that we are sitting 
across the negotiating table from, being largely compromised by the 
fact that we owe a large amount of money that we are asking for policy 
considerations from.
  So we decided, let's do something simple. When Speaker Pelosi came to 
the Speaker's chair, to the dais you sit on right now, Mr. Speaker, she 
decided in the first 100 hours we are here, let's say that every 
obligation that we decide to commit ourselves to, every new spending 
bill that may come before this House, let's within that bill explain 
exactly how we are going to pay for it. When I explain that back home, 
when I go to my Rotary groups or my Chamber of Commerce meetings and I 
explain that Congress now has decided to only spend what we have, and 
if we spend anything more in that bill we are going to tell you how we 
are going to spend it, people look at me with these blank stares saying 
on the inside and on the outside: Why didn't you do this before?
  This Republican Party that told us for years they were the party of 
fiscal responsibility in fact was running this budget into the ground; 
and could have, just by adopting a pretty simple pay-as-you-go rule, 
could have exerted some discipline on this House which was lacking 
almost completely for 12 years, now finally here.
  I am pretty proud of Chairman Rangel for his frankness as he was sort 
of mockingly given credit for earlier today, because the bill that he 
has put before us, the bill that fixes the alternative minimum tax, and 
I know we will spend some time talking about some really important 
topics as we head into the holidays regarding food safety and toy 
safety and drug safety, but first I want to talk about the alternative 
minimum tax because you didn't hear a word about it, you didn't hear 
anybody talking about it, at least when I was listening to the other 
side of the aisle, you didn't hear anybody talking about the very 
reason Chairman Rangel and the Ways and Means Committee have dedicated 
themselves to tax relief because we are on the verge of the biggest tax 
increase on the middle class in perhaps the history of American tax 
policy courtesy of President Bush and the previous Republican majority 
here.

                              {time}  2030

  So guess what? Yet again, it's left to this Democratic Congress, the 
New Direction Congress, to clean up yet another mess that was created 
by this prior Congress.
  We're already trying to do it when it comes to children's health 
care. We're trying to reorder our energy policy. We're trying to clean 
up the ethical malaise that has settled on this town. So now we are 
also going to do it when it comes to this issue as well, to the 
alternative minimum tax.
  In 1969, when the alternative minimum tax was passed by Congress it 
was pretty simple. They said, listen, with of the different tax 
loopholes and deductions and credits and offsets that people can take, 
there's going to be some people who make a lot of money who may be 
able, through creative tax planning, to avoid paying taxes to the 
United States Government. That's not right. That's not right.
  And so in 1969, they passed a complicated formula called the 
alternative minimum tax, and in 1970, about 20,000 of the richest 
Americans paid the alternative minimum tax. Makes sense. Makes sense. 
Make sure that everybody pays some minimum level of taxation, 
especially those folks up at the top of the income stratosphere who 
have creative ways to avoid that tax situation.
  Okay. So 20,000 people pay it in 1970, but guess what? Because 
Congress, after Congress fails to index the alternative minimum tax, in 
2006, 3.5 million people end up paying it, and all of the sudden it's 
not just the tax paid by the really, really rich people. It's a tax 
that starts to get paid for by people that look and sound and make 
incomes like you and I, and as we look at what happens in the next 
couple of years, it gets even worse.
  By 2010, if we don't fix the alternative minimum tax, the AMT as 
people call it around here. I figured out in my short time here that 
everything has got an acronym, everything; even things where the word 
itself is shorter than the acronym, that's got an acronym. So this has 
got an acronym. The alternative minimum tax is called the AMT.
  By 2010, just 2\1/2\ short years away, if we don't fix this, if we 
don't clean up the mess that this last Congress created on the AMT, 80 
percent of people that make $100,000, in Connecticut that's a middle-
income family, 80 percent of people that make $100,000 are going to be 
paying the alternative minimum tax, and it just gets worse from there.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield on that?
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I would.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. And this is something that's critical to understanding 
the tax policies that we're going to be considering in the remaining 
time that we have in the 110th Congress.
  The alternative minimum tax, as the gentleman is pointing out, is 
something that has to be addressed. We simply cannot afford to ignore 
this issue any longer. We've been in a position where we have been 
giving 1-year fixes year after year. For 1 year we hold harmless the 
folks that should qualify for the AMT as it's currently written with 
that flawed formula, and we push it off another year, and it gets more 
expensive to fix every time we do that.
  And what the gentleman from Connecticut is talking about is it was a 
flaw. In 1969, they created the alternative minimum tax to prevent 
people from escaping their tax obligations. They couldn't use 
deductions and loopholes and whatnot, and they didn't index it for 
inflation. So now we're 38 years later, and the income of 1969 that was 
considered rich at that point, due to 38 years of inflation, we have a 
different outlook on that.
  So we have a situation where the alternative minimum tax is spiraling 
out of control. And you gave numbers, 4 million people affected by it 
this year. If we do nothing, it is going to be 23 million next year. So 
we can't ignore the problem, and our friends on the other side of the 
aisle can pretend like that's not part of the equation and this is not 
something that we have to deal with or this isn't going to have a cost. 
And I know this is something you're going to address later in your 
remarks and we can discuss that, but to say, well, we should just do 
nothing about this or we should pretend like this isn't going to have a 
budget impact is just not consistent with the facts.

[[Page H12372]]

  So the alternative minimum tax is there. It's the reality. It's 
existed for 38 years. It's spiraling out of control, and we're very 
close to being in position where if we were to scrap the entire income 
tax system, that would cost less than to do away with the alternative 
minimum tax. We're only a few years away from meeting that threshold.
  So what do we do? Well, Chairman Rangel has put forward a plan that 
is not the only plan that's going to be discussed. It's not the only 
plan that's going to be offered, but it's the starting point for the 
discussion, and he has said that this needs to be a permanent fix. And 
I know in the other body they're having the same discussion, that it 
needs to be a permanent fix. We can't continue to do this year after 
year after year, and it just gets more expensive.
  So this is the starting point. We have to think about that when we 
talk about tax policy, that this is unmistakable that we have to deal 
with the AMT.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We've got to decide how we're going to fix 
it. Everybody on this side of the aisle and some of our friends in the 
Senate can sort of live in this.
  Fantasyland where we're just going to do more of the same; let's fix 
this alternative minimum tax for middle-class taxpayers, and guess 
what, let's just do it by borrowing more money. That's the way I think 
a lot of people in the place would like to do, more of the same, borrow 
money in order to cut taxes.
  You can't do that anymore. You can't do that for the next generation 
is going to end up paying all that money back. You can't do that 
because you can't exacerbate the existing trend, which has countries 
like Japan and China and OPEC nations, and Taiwan and Korea and Hong 
Kong and Germany owning all this American currency.
  You've got to stop this. You've got to stop the madness of borrowing. 
So the way you do that is to be honest about how you pay for the 
alternative minimum tax, and we're going to have to deal with some 
choices here.
  The Republican Congress for years made this choice. They could have 
fixed the alternative minimum tax. Instead, they gave away more and 
more and more tax breaks to their super, ultrarich friends and their 
oil companies and drug companies and everybody else who did well here. 
We're going to make some different choices.
  We're going to actually balance the Federal budget in 5 years. We're 
going to give some tax relief, badly needed, to the middle class, and 
you know what? We're going to stop that policy of giving away tax 
breaks to folks that don't need it.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if I can intervene here, I mean, you 
look at the money that we're borrowing and then we're giving tax cuts. 
So it's not that we have the money laying around here and say, boy, 
we've got a lot of money laying around here, why don't we just give the 
wealthiest people in our country the money back. We're actually going 
out to China and OPEC countries and borrowing the money to give tax 
cuts, and then we borrow the money from OPEC countries to fund the war 
to get oil from the Middle East.

  This is the most convoluted scenario that you almost think you've got 
to read a Tom Clancy novel to drum it up. And then when you look at the 
priorities that aren't getting funded here that we're now trying to 
fund, and on the House floor today we had the minority leader, we had 
the minority whip, we had all the leadership of the Republican Party 
tell us how somehow funding education, lowering tuition costs, reducing 
the amount of student debt that our students are going to have to 
incur, funding community health clinics is somehow not an important 
priority, that somehow if we put all these bills together with the 
defense bill and the veterans bill and education bill and health bill, 
that somehow those aren't all American priorities, that somehow when 
these vets get back, that because all these bills are somehow put 
together in a process that's going to speed this whole thing up, that 
somehow when those vets get back, they don't need health care, their 
kids don't need health care. Somehow when the vets get back that they 
don't need education, they don't need increased Pell Grants to send 
their kids to school.
  Am I missing something here? Like these vets are out fighting for our 
freedom here, just for a defense bill, or just for a vets bill, that 
they're somehow not fighting for some of these basic, fundamental 
American values that we have. And look what's going on back at the 
ranch when our friends are playing around with the budget, not wanting 
to pass legislation, passing tax cuts for the top 1 percent, look at 
the hole we've gotten into.
  Now, this is something that is very important to me, and I remember a 
few weeks ago I was at my brother's house who has two young kids, 
Dominic and Nicky. One's 1 and one's 2. And my sister-in-law said it's 
scary about these toys. I remember her saying that.
  Here's from 2001, and it goes up as the years come, the amount of 
imported toys coming from China. Okay. Over here, the yellow line that 
drops off, that is the number of Consumer Product Safety Commission 
employees going down. So we only have 400. As the number of imports 
from China and toys come into our country goes up, the Bush 
administration has reduced the number of Consumer Product Safety 
employees to actually monitor these toys. Same thing's going on with 
food.
  So when you look at these mixed priorities, you know, sometimes we 
think, well, the war's going on in a far-off place or it doesn't affect 
me. If you've got kids and you've got toys, this irresponsible behavior 
that we saw in Katrina, we saw with the government contracts in Iraq, 
comes right into your household because of a lack of investment into 
the United States.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. Just to clarify, as the gentleman from Ohio understands, 
this was not the reduction that you see there in that chart. This was 
not a governmentwide reduction in costs where we were tightening our 
belts and doing the right thing and being fiscally responsible and we 
happen to lower the costs in the consumer safety section by reducing 
some payroll over there. This was the biggest spending administration 
and the biggest spending Congress in the history of the country.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Right.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. As the gentleman points out, it's a matter of setting 
priorities. It's not as though they were lowering the cost of 
government across the board. They picked and chose what they wanted to 
lower, and one of the issues they thought wasn't important and we 
didn't need to deal with was consumer safety.
  Now, I think we would all agree that consumer safety is incredibly 
important and especially what's happening with the Chinese imported 
toys, and to have dramatically less people working in that department 
this year than we did last year, than we did 5 and 6 and 7 years ago is 
outrageous.
  But I did want to put it in perspective that we are raising the debt 
incredibly, $3 trillion and counting in the last 7 years of this 
administration.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We haven't borrowed money to make sure that we can 
hire enough people in the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make 
sure our toys are safe coming in from China. We're borrowing money to 
give the top percent a tax break, people making millions and millions 
and millions of dollars a year, and hey, if you make millions, God 
bless you, but now we're in a position where we don't have enough 
employees to monitor the toys coming into the country and we're giving 
multimillionaires a tax break. We're borrowing the money from China, 
which is pretty interesting when you think about all these toys coming 
in from China, that we're borrowing the money to fund the war and the 
tax breaks from China. So China's now our bank. So now they, of course, 
want their products coming into the country.
  So, now all of the sudden, things like the reduction in employees at 
the Consumer Product Safety Commission happens because the Republican 
House and Senate and the White House have got us so dependent.
  You mind if I go through here? I don't even know what these toys are. 
I see them on my brother and sister-in-law's floor. You'll know soon. 
You're newly wed.
  The football bobblehead cake decoration. Okay. These are toys that 
have been recalled due to lead. This has a Patriots bobblehead.

[[Page H12373]]

  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That was not me. I'm a Giants fan. That's 
hard to explain.
  Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. We've got a Rudy Guiliani situation here.
  Purple Halloween pails with witch decorations. We've got the Sponge 
Bob Square Pants Address Book and Journal. We've got the Thomas and 
Friends Wooden Railway toys. We've got the Go Diego Go Animal Rescue 
Boats. Very Cute Expressions. Children's toys gardening tools and the 
Robbie Ducky Kids watering can.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I have two little girls, 8 and 6, Natalie and Grace, and 
I have in my home some of those toys. I can tell you as a parent these 
are not toys that are fringe. You talk about Sponge Bob Square Pants 
and Dora and Thomas the Tank Engine, those are mainstream toys. Those 
are in families and houses all across this country. And to think that 
the Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn't have the resources to 
adequately monitor these toys coming in with exaggerated levels of 
lead, dangerous levels of lead from the Chinese, as a parent it makes 
me very angry, but as an American it makes me angry because I know all 
across the country there's kids right now that are playing with those 
very toys.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I really appreciate the analogy Mr. Ryan 
makes about the choices we're making. We don't want to borrow any 
money. We want to actually be honest about how you spend. I think it's 
a great point to make again that this administration and the Congress 
that used to control this body was making this choice.

                              {time}  2045

  You sort of put it to the average American living in Ohio or suburban 
Pennsylvania or Connecticut that if you had a choice to spend money and 
give an extra $100,000 to that really rich guy who lives up on the hill 
or you could spend that money to make sure that the Sponge Bob toys 
that your kid is playing with don't have levels of lead 100 times over 
the Federal standard, I mean, that's kind of a laughable question, like 
the premise, you know, you would be laughed out of the room by most 
parents for that. Of course you should put more testers and more 
product safety employees in the Federal Government.
  What we find out, when the head of this organization, when the 
director of the Consumer Product Safety Commission comes and testifies 
about what's going on, why do we have 20 million toys manufactured in 
China that were recalled this summer? Why do we have that long list 
that Mr. Ryan puts up? Why do we have just recently a press release 
dated today from the Consumer Product Safety Commission calling for a 
recall of these fake teeth that kids use, and a lot of them use on 
Halloween. Well, it turns out that about 43,000 of these fake teeth 
that kids are using out there have levels of lead that might be as much 
as 100 times over the Federal standard.
  I mean, this is dangerous stuff.
  So Ms. Nord comes before the Congress to be held accountable, first 
time that's ever happened on this issue, I mean, finally we are 
bringing these bureaucrats in front of Congress to ask these questions, 
and she says that she doesn't have the resources to do her job and that 
there is one, quote, lonely toy tester in her office, one lonely toy 
tester who is responsible for the flood of millions, probably hundreds 
of millions of toys coming in from China.
  When you think of the choices that have been made to give these 
massive tax breaks to the wealthy, to oil companies, to put our troops 
in harm's way in Iraq for a policy that's making this country less 
safe, not more safe, and what we got for all of that was one person who 
is charged with making sure that our kids don't get poisoned by toys 
over here, it boggles the mind.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. When you think about hundreds of millions of 
dollars worth of trailers sitting in the gulf coast that never got used 
for Katrina, when you think about all the wasted, unbid contracts 
through FEMA, to Halliburton, and in the war, I mean, hundreds, 
hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars.
  Then all of a sudden we find that we have these regulatory issues, 
this is security, this is economic security. This is family security, 
when you hear Democrats talking about securing the country, it doesn't 
mean we want to start a war, it means we want to protect the homeland, 
and border security, family security, food safety, toy safety, product 
safety, these are things that it is our responsibility, as Members of 
Congress, to take care of. You have people sitting in towns and cities 
and counties all over the United States that are very, very concerned 
with this issue.
  To have a person who is in charge of these kinds of things say we 
only have one person who is in charge of toy inspection, and we don't 
need any more money to do it is a complete dereliction of duty, of our 
responsibility here. When you look at what we are trying to do at every 
single turn, from raising the minimum wage to reducing college costs, 
to ensuring product safety, to ensuring food safety, this is about 
economic security. This is about homeland security. You know, 50,000 
new cops on the beat, first responder funding. I mean, these are all 
things that we have been pushing and our friends, many of them on the 
other side, are obstructing this from getting done.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I wanted to do a couple of things. I wanted to talk 
about that one lonely toy inspector.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Do it.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I know the gentleman didn't have the number in front of 
him when he was talking about it, the number of toys just from China 
that were recalled last year. This is this year, the number of toys 
that we imported, this is the number of toys that were recalled, is 20 
million, 20 million toys just from China that were recalled this year, 
and we have one employee at the Consumer Product Safety Commission 
that's reviewing those toys.
  But we may have people out there that are watching us tonight that 
say, well, I don't have kids, I don't have toys. It doesn't affect me. 
Let me tell you, it does affect you. Let's talk about food safety and 
let's talk about what's happening right now with regard to that.
  Just with China, recalls this past year ranged from bag spinach and 
peanut butter to contaminated wheat flour, all from China. That has 
brought fear to the Nation's kitchen tables. We have tainted food 
coming in from China as well.
  I am not going to test my friends from Ohio and Connecticut, but I 
will tell you up front, less than 1 percent of our food imports are 
inspected. That is a shocking number. That surprised me.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. How about the President the other day? This drove 
me crazy. He says, Congress is wasting their time with all these 
hearings. It ceases to amaze me anymore that we try to pass children's 
health care, and the President says, well, they can go to the emergency 
room. We are trying to have oversight so that we can have real product 
safety, safeguards up for food, and you are having all these hearings. 
We are trying to oversee what's going on in Iraq so we can, A, fix the 
problems we are having, but, B, finding all of these billions of 
dollars that have been going to these nonbid contracts and the jobs are 
not actually getting done. Then he said, oh, you are having all these 
hearings.
  Then he said today, about the SCHIP bill, I don't know if you heard 
this, but he said, Congress is trying to pass this health care bill for 
kids, but it's really a trick. He said it was a trick. This is not a 
trick. This is us trying to pass health care for kids. He thinks it is 
somehow cute to say that on Halloween that this is somehow a trick.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I appreciate that. I want to talk about one of those 
hearings that we are talking about, the oversight hearings the 
President says is a waste of time.
  Well, I would ask the American people if they think that the House 
Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats has a hearing to 
investigate the Federal Government's efforts to protect our food supply 
chain, and the issue that I talked about where 1 percent of our food 
imports are inspected, I don't think that's a waste of our time. I 
don't think the gentleman thinks that's a waste of our time.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me give you a quote that comes out in 
one of these oversight hearings.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut, the New York 
Giants fan.

[[Page H12374]]

  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I will explain this to you later. It's 
very complicated. I reject the notion that just because a team calls 
itself after a big geographical area that I have to reform. I live in 
Connecticut, just because they call themselves the New England 
Patriots, but that's for another time.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We should have a hearing on that.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me give you a quote that comes from 
one of these hearings and you decide, we will let the public decide and 
our colleagues decide whether or not this is good information that 
maybe we should have out there.

  David Kessler, who is the former FDA official and one of the 
acknowledged experts on food safety in this country, Kessler says, ``We 
have no structure,'' in this country, ``for preventing food-borne 
illness. The reality is that there is currently no mandate, no 
leadership, no resources, nor scientific research base for prevention 
of food safety problems.''
  I think that's probably information that we should know, that one of 
the leading officials, one of the leading experts on food safety and 
food regulation in this country believes that we have absolutely no 
ability to control the quality of food coming into this country.
  He knows what we know, the amount of inspections has dropped 
precipitously. We did about 50,000 food inspections in 1972. We do 
5,000 now in 2000. We have dropped by 90 percent over the last 30 years 
the amount of food inspections we do.
  We have these experts out there who had these opinions that they 
couldn't share because Congress wasn't doing oversight. Congress wasn't 
bringing before it the people who knew what was going on out there, 
knew the risk that the American public was being put at, they weren't 
being asked to come here and express those opinions to Congress. We are 
getting them now.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are getting them now, and, of course, it's 
important to recognize that you probably can't monitor every piece of 
corn that's coming into the country or every product that's coming into 
the country. But what happens is if you do have a significant presence, 
one is in random inspections, there will be a general consensus among 
people shipping food into your country that there will be inspections, 
and they may get caught if they do not keep meeting the standards.
  But at the same exact time, what this does here is if people are 
getting busted for sending food in from China, then all of a sudden you 
are going to see production increases here in the United States, 
whether it's toys being manufactured or maybe something else. So it's 
very important.
  This is about safety. This is about protecting our kids. This is 
about making sure that our families have, when they are having 
Thanksgiving dinner, have a lot of knowledge and confidence in how the 
government is administering these programs.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Now that we are starting to shed some 
light on what's going on out there, the charts that you put up about 
the amount of imports into this country for unsafe toys and the 
incredibly quick decline and the amount of people that are charged with 
inspecting those toys, I mean, that's out there now. You would think 
that now that we finally shed some sunlight on the issue of unsafe toys 
and unsafe food and the number of people that are at risk and the 
problems with our current regulatory processes, that we could all come 
together and work on this now.
  But what happens? Yet more obstinacy from this administration, yet 
more closing of their eyes and their ears to this problem. The Senate 
and the House are both working on reform pieces of legislation that 
will give new powers, new duties and new resources to these 
commissions, in particular to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
  That same director that we are talking about, the person that runs 
the Consumer Product Safety Commission, came and testified before 
Congress that she doesn't want any more powers. She doesn't want any 
more protection that she can afford the consumers, that she would 
rather see the status quo, effectively, is what her testimony is. Even 
now that the American public has awoken to this problem, that this 
Congress finally is talking about it, we still have an administration 
that says, I don't want to do anything more. I don't want any more 
power. I don't want any more resources. I just want things to be as 
they are. I want to close my eyes and my ears and hope the problem goes 
away. That can't be how we do things going forward.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I want to put this in perspective. I would like to bring 
this down to the level of the average family and what they are 
consuming when we are talking about some of these recalls with regard 
to food safety, and so people can understand at home what we are 
talking about.
  I have a list in front of me, and I won't read through it all, 
because it's an incredibly long list, unfortunately, the recalls that 
have taken place just this year. Just this year. We are at the end of 
October, the last day of October, today.
  But a couple of the big ones that stand out, I am sure everybody 
remembers back in February the peanut butter recall due to salmonella 
contamination, huge issue, people were sickened all across the country. 
The level of that recall, 326 million pounds of peanut butter across 
the country, and that, primarily, would affect children, children 
eating their peanut butter.
  We had a 55,000 cantaloupe recall. Now, that came from Costa Rica, 
because of salmonella, just to show you how across the board this is. 
We had 9.5 million bottles of Listerine that were recalled due to a 
microbial contamination, and that was in April.
  Throughout this list, month after month, there are multiple recalls 
involving millions of pounds of ground beef for a variety of illnesses 
that it caused, so ground beef, and from a number of different 
countries that we are talking about importing.
  We have food recalls involving apple juice, 113,000 units of apple 
juice were recalled in August.
  Then, lastly, everything up through pot pies, we just had this month, 
they were recalling pot pies due to salmonella contamination. So when 
we talk about 1 percent of the food imports into this country are 
inspected, it affects our entire food supply. Yes, this is a health 
issue, but this is also a national security issue. That's why we are 
having some of these hearings that we are talking about.

                              {time}  2100

  And I'm very grateful that we have been joined by the distinguished 
colleague of ours from Florida, Miami, Mr. Kendrick Meek; and I would, 
at this time, yield to him.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. Thank you so very much, Mr. Altmire. I was very 
pleased to have had the first half of this hour to trick-or-treat with 
my kids. We had a great time. And my daughter was some very scary--I 
don't know what her, she couldn't quite explain to me what she was, but 
I asked what, I mean, What are you? She said, I'm your daughter. So 
that was like, okay, I won't ask any more questions. My son was a 
Secret Service Agent, so I was well protected.
  Let me just say, gentlemen, and I think it's important for the 
Members to pay very close attention to what we've shared with them, and 
I'm so glad that we are heading towards safer toys, safer food, safer 
medicine. Too many times in the news we hear about how loose we are 
with other countries being able to not have standards and quality 
control in place, and it ends up affecting everyday Americans, and it 
disrupts business. We have rumors about things being unsafe, and it's 
making Americans feel more uneasy about it. And Mr. Altmire, I'm not 
one to make a, you know, start fire alarms and carrying on and scaring 
people, but it is pretty scary, the fact that we do have, in some 
cases, as it relates to those that certify the toys that can come in 
and out the United States of America as relates to safety and setting 
requirements for children, it's just one person running that office. 
And we're the biggest democracy or one of the superpowers of the world, 
one of the biggest democracies. And I think it's important that we shed 
light on this. The people count on this Congress to govern. I think the 
reason why it hasn't happened to this point, of the cozy relationship 
that the previous

[[Page H12375]]

Congress has had with the business community, even when those that are 
in the business community will fare far better if we were to have the 
kind of standards and controls as it relates to the importation of toys 
and food and medicine. I look forward to the debate.
  It's very unfortunate, and let me just say something, because I know 
Mr. Murphy said something a little earlier about, you know, now we're 
moving in this direction, we're hearing some push back from the 
administration. I'm not a black man with a conspiracy theory, but I 
will say that there's, I think there's a push out of the administration 
to see the Democratic Congress not be as successful and not heading in 
a new direction as the American people voted for. I think some politics 
has something to do with this. It's very unfortunate, especially when 
we're looking at this kind of legislation, Mr. Altmire and Mr. Ryan. I 
think it's important that everyone pay very close attention to the new 
direction agenda, that this card continues to get more and more on it 
as it relates to accomplishment. And, Mr. Speaker, it's a bipartisan 
accomplishment. That's the good thing about it. We have Republicans 
voting for Democratic bills. They would have voted for it all along if 
the Republican leadership allowed that legislation to come to the 
floor.
  So I think it's important, Members, that we continue to push on, that 
we continue to encourage our colleagues on the other side of the aisle 
to join us in accomplishing what the American people wanted us to 
accomplish. Independent voters, Republican voters, Democratic voters, 
reform party, what have you, they're looking for results. They're not 
looking for back-and-forth on my idea is better than yours and nothing 
ever happens. So I'm just honored to be down on the floor with you 
Members here.
  Mr. Ryan, I'm honored always to be here with you, sir. I mean, a very 
important member of the Appropriations Committee, he had a couple of 
bills pass off the floor today. It's great.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, you know, one of the things we talked about 
while you were out trick-or-treating was the connection between the 
money that has been borrowed by the past three Congresses and the 
administration from China, that's now our bank, and how their exports 
have been facilitated into this country, in this instance, the toys. So 
it's very difficult, I think, from a perspective of someone who's 
borrowing money from a country to say, hey, wait a minute; we've got 
some real issues with doing business with you. It becomes very 
difficult. And so I think our position with China, borrowing the money, 
the OPEC countries and many, many others, has put us at a significant 
position of weakness in dealing with a variety of foreign policy 
issues, but also dealing with issues like this.
  Now, I showed this chart earlier, Mr. Meek, and I know, I think this 
was your idea to get it. But this is the chart of the number of toys 
being imported into the country and the number of employees that are 
assigned to protect the consumer. And so, much of this, much of these 
imports have been from China, and I don't think it's a coincidence that 
we want to somehow facilitate business with this country, which is 
fine. We know we have to do business in a global economy. But you don't 
do it at the expense of the health, safety and welfare of your own 
citizens.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. I'm sorry. Will the gentleman yield real quick?
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I would be happy to yield.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. You know, Mr. Ryan, again, I don't have a 
conspiracy theory, but, hold that chart. Don't do away with that chart. 
You can pass it over here. I just want to make a point here.
  It's interesting that everything seems to have happened in 2000. Look 
where it was in 2000 and look what happened since then. I wonder who's 
been in charge of the country starting in 2000. I mean, we're not 
speaking, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to say anything. I'm not 
talking about anybody. I'm just talking about what I'm talking about. 
And the real issue here is the fact that, I said that, it made as much 
sense as this chart is making sense right now, but the real issue is 
that it's been an ongoing issue. A lack of regulation, a lack of, I 
mean, more freedom as it relates to China doing what it wants, what it 
would like to do.
  The TAA bill passed off the floor today to give U.S. workers an 
opportunity to be retrained, which was very, very important. It was 
important to the States, and it's important that we bring some sort of 
balance back to this. It's nothing wrong with a global economy. But 
it's everything wrong when we allow other countries to have the upper 
hand on U.S. companies and also U.S. workers, and we have to have the 
standards in place.
  But thank you, sir. This wasn't my idea to do this chart. I will not 
take credit for it. But I just wanted to let you know.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, I know you have a lot of good ideas.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. I have a lot of great ideas.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me read, Mr. Meek, to you from a, you 
guys all say third-party verifiers, right? Validators. Kind of means 
the same thing. Half a dozen, six. So this is from a report called 
Toxic Trade done by the Campaign for America's Future, and we'll go 
back to this problem that we have at the CPSC regarding toy testers. It 
says this: The agency's toy testing department, it's lab hasn't been 
modernized since 1975, and the department consists of one man who drops 
toys on the floor in his office to see if they'll break. I mean, that's 
it. There you go. I mean, that's the toy testing regimen of the United 
States Government is a guy, and I'm sure he's a wonderfully nice guy. 
But he sits in his office at his desk and he takes toys and he drops 
them on the floor to see if they'll break. I mean, that's what we got 
now. That's what you got for these record deficits, for all the 
spending in Iraq, for breaks for oil companies and drugs companies. 
You've got one guy who drops toys from his desk and sees if they'll 
break.

  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We just need to, I think, look back, and I say this 
with the utmost respect, Mr. Speaker, because the President basically, 
yesterday, in his press conference, I think it was yesterday or maybe 
today, in his press conference basically was making fun of Congress for 
holding hearings, making fun of us. But when you look at what we're 
holding hearings on, we're trying to fix problems that we have in the 
country. So we're having hearings on FEMA and the disaster that we all 
saw on TV at the gulf coast. We're having hearings on Iraq, the unbid 
contracts, the problems that we're having there, the wasteful spending, 
the billions of dollars that the Pentagon doesn't know where it is. 
We're trying to have hearings to find out what's going on. Hearings on 
toys. I mean, we're trying to figure out how do we fund this, how do we 
have enough consumer product safety workers here in the country to make 
sure that our people are safe when you're dealing with products or 
food. I mean, when the administration then continues to make light of 
these very serious concerns, it's troubling to us to somehow say that 
we're holding hearings, which is our constitutional duty. Article I, 
section 1 of the Constitution created this body.
  So, again, we have Katrina, we have the war, we have toys, we have 
passports, FEMA, we have all of these issues that we're dealing with in 
this country. I'm sorry if we're trying to solve these problems.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I thank the gentleman from Ohio. I have people all the 
time in my district, Mr. Speaker, that come up to me and talk about 
that passport issue that Mr. Ryan mentioned. We had hundreds and 
hundreds of travelers over the summer months that needed the help 
through our office, and I'm sure you had the same experience because of 
that 500,000-case backlog at the State Department. They were unable to 
deal with it. They put forward this regulation. They didn't have the 
resources to deal with it, very similar to what we're talking about 
with the Product Safety Commission. These are the types of things that 
we are holding hearings on. We're trying to get to the bottom of it. 
And when the President talks about, well, we're wasting our time by 
holding our hearings, I'm not sure what his inference is. I'm not sure 
what he would have us be doing, because it's not as though we haven't 
been doing our work here in this Chamber, because tomorrow, we begin 
the 11th month of the year, and

[[Page H12376]]

through the first 10 months, as the gentleman knows, this Congress, the 
110th Congress, compared to any other Congress in the history of the 
country, the 109 that came before us, through this date and time, this 
Congress has met more often and taken more votes than any Congress in 
the history of the country, bar none. So for the President to insinuate 
that we're holding these hearings and doing nothing else, again, it's 
inconsistent with the facts.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman would yield, it's, I mean, we're 
obviously in a very complicated world. We're trying to solve some very 
complicated problems. And the frustrating part is when you have the 
President of the United States have a series of comments throughout his 
administration that have basically, you know, simplified all of these 
issues. You know, after 9/11 the big great challenge he gave us, Mr. 
Speaker, was to go shopping. You know, we try to pass children's health 
care and he says, well, you can get health care at the emergency room. 
And then, Mr. Meek, at his press conference today, he said that our 
whole children, SCHIP, trying to cover 10 million people program was a 
trick on the American people. These are, you know, we're wasting time 
holding hearings.
  There are very serious issues that our families are dealing with, and 
to have the President of the United States, the most powerful man in 
the free world, someone who is able to stop children's health care from 
being administered in this country to 10 million kids, someone who's 
able to veto bills, and you need to rally, you know, a lot more Members 
of Congress in order to pass something, to try to simplify and make 
light, and I like to have as much fun as anybody else and we have our 
share of fun here, but we're dealing with some pretty serious issues. 
That the President's behavior and tone and temperament and comments on 
these issues becomes very frustrating.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. Personally, I'm just kind 
of glad that the President's criticizing the Congress for doing what we 
should do. The American people voted for a new direction. We have the 
fruits of the new direction here in these very new Members of Congress 
as it relates to the majority makers giving us, empowering those of us 
that have been here, and they're bringing ideas to the table as it 
relates to moving in a new direction. If I was the President, I would 
try to, you know, shut off the light bill over here at the Capitol so 
that we can stop working so that we can stop uncovering half of what's 
going on.
  I mean, Mr. Ryan, you gave one, you have one of the best clips on 
YouTube saying this is the same administration, and he goes down the 
line because someone on the floor, I think, last year or the year 
before last criticized Democrats for questioning the President. And Mr. 
Ryan said, I'm sorry, but this is the same administration that told us 
that we had to go to war, weapons of mass destruction. This is the same 
administration that outed a CIA agent. I mean, this is proven stuff. 
This is not fiction. This is fact. And I always say, gentlemen and 
ladies, that when people look back on this period, they're going to see 
who was actually about the solution and who was actually validating 
what the administration has been doing. And I think that it's important 
for us to have this balance. And I think it's important for us because 
we, the four of us here on this floor right now, we're just like every 
other Joe and Sue out there. I mean, I was a skycap once upon a time 
and a State trooper. And you know, I carried luggage, ``Yes, sir,'' 
``No, sir.'' I went out and patrolled the highways and byways in the 
State of Florida and offered myself to be a State Representative.

                              {time}  2115

  I had a district office right there and went to Tallahassee and did 
what I had to do. Many of you, the same track as it relates to the 
State legislature or local elected officials, and we heard this. So now 
we're the same old Joe that left our local districts. Now we are in 
Congress, and we are going to ask the questions that the people that we 
represent will ask us. When I go home and I go to the grocery store, 
people ask me, What is going on? What do you mean? The President 
doesn't want it to happen. I said, it's not about the President's 
standing against children's health care insurance; it's about enough 
Republicans on the other side of the aisle that are standing with him, 
and that's what it's about.
  And so I think it's important, gentlemen, that we look at it from 
that standpoint. The President is not running for reelection, but there 
are Members of Congress that are running for reelection. And it should 
not be a secret that come next November on a Tuesday morning or before 
as it relates to early voting, absentee voting, people will be able to 
stand in judgment of the individuals that are validating what the 
President is saying.
  So it's really like which side of the ball are you on? Are you on the 
side of fiction or are you on the side of fact? The fact is about 
accomplishing things with the Democratic majority and some Republicans 
joining us in that effort, which I enjoy because we talk about 
bipartisanship and we are actually doing it, or those that are saying 
we have to stand in the way because we can't allow the American people 
to see a Congress that's functioning and questioning the executive 
branch.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Can I make a point too? And I want to say this 
because we all have a lot of good friends who are on the other side who 
have voted for the Labor-Health-Education appropriations bill, voted 
for defense, voted for the vets; and the argument being made today was 
that somehow this was unique that we are putting several appropriations 
bills together. If you ask people in our districts, the whole process 
is foreign to them anyway. It's just get the job done. And when we look 
back at our Republicans friends, Mr. Speaker, when they were in charge, 
on 59 different occasions, had put bills together like we're trying to 
do. And so I think it's important. We are trying to get the job done. 
But this is not every Republican. This is, in my estimation, some very 
fringe, extreme members of the Republican Party who are basically 
backing the President on these things, and he has just enough Members 
on the Republican side to sustain a veto.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. In the House.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. In the House.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I know we're very short on time; so we'll turn it over 
to Mr. Murphy shortly to close out.
  But you talked about combining these appropriations bills and the 
criticism that we received from the other side. I wanted to remind my 
colleagues of the last time that this happened. It was very recently. 
We shouldn't need to remind them. It was just in February. And the 
reason we had to combine nine appropriations bills from last year in 
this session of Congress was because, after the outcome of the 
elections in 2006, the Republican Congress said, I'm done, I'm going 
home. I don't care about these nine appropriations bills. We'll leave 
it for the next group to fix. And that is what we had to deal with when 
we came in, nine appropriations bills that were not completed from the 
previous fiscal year. We were in the current fiscal year doing last 
year's work. So I couldn't believe what I was hearing today on the 
floor when we were being criticized for combining three appropriations 
bills in the current fiscal year when they left us with nine bills 
incomplete that we had to deal with.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It's the same disjointed kind of argument that the 
President, Mr. Speaker, has given us on the SCHIP bill. This is 10 
million kids, $35 billion over 5 years. We could pay for these 10 
million kids to get health care for a whole year for 40 days in Iraq. 
And the President, who has run up $3 trillion in debt, borrowed it from 
China, raised the debt limit five times, is now going to draw the line 
in the sand on fiscal responsibility on 40 days in Iraq to provide 
health care for 10 million kids. I mean, there are so many disjointed 
arguments and floating pieces that are going around here that just 
don't make a whole lot of sense to many of us.
  I hope that we can try to continue to push to get more Members on the 
other side of the aisle to join with us to do some pretty basic things 
that the American people want us to do.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan.
  I have to say, Mr. Speaker, it has been an honor to stand in the 
shoes of Mr. Meek and get to anchor this hour today. I feel like a 
better person, a better man for it.

[[Page H12377]]

  Mr. MEEK of Florida. If the gentleman will yield, I wear a size 15. I 
don't think that you probably can stand in my shoes with your shoes on.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. It would be pretty tight.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, we thank Speaker Pelosi for allowing us this 
time. We can always be found at 30-Something Working Group on the 
Speaker's Web site, www.speaker.gov.

 ____________________