Congressional Record, Volume 153 Issue 167 (Wednesday, October 31, 2007)

[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.

____________________