[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 31 (Monday, February 23, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H1642-H1647]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE STIMULUS BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, as we left town right before the 
Presidents' Day recess, many of us spoke on the floor of this House 
about the issue of what was then the issue of the day, the issue before 
the House, the stimulus bill, the spending bill, the ``jobs bill,'' as 
it was described, but a bill that unfortunately contained much more 
Federal spending than anything else.
  This bill was posted on a Web site late in the night. It was not 
posted in a forum that was searchable by any Member of Congress. And 
you heard over and over again on the floor of this House a little over 
a week ago how no one in this House had been able to adequately peruse 
the bill--indeed, read the bill--before it came to a vote that Friday 
before last.
  The bill came to us late in the night. There seemed to be a great 
rush about getting it done--after all, the country is in dire trouble, 
people are needing this legislation to be passed--and then we all took 
a 3-day weekend; the Speaker took off to points unknown in Italy; the 
President took a vacation back home. And then finally, the day after 
Presidents' Day, the following Tuesday, the 17th, the bill was signed 
into law.
  We were then informed by several of the Federal agencies charged with 
dispensing this money and getting it out quickly into the economy to 
quickly have that stimulative effect that it is purported to have on 
the economy, well, we're told that many of those Federal agencies, it 
will take some time for them to promulgate the rules and set forth the 
rules under which this money is to be distributed amongst the Federal 
agencies. And it, indeed, may be the early part of the summer before 
some of this stimulus money actually makes it into the economy.
  I noticed in my home paper, the Dallas Morning News, today a 
gentleman wrote in--I assume it was tongue in cheek--he said, being in 
his advanced stage, he felt that he might be one of those shovel-ready 
projects that was mentioned in the stimulus bill. I am going to assume 
that that was a light-hearted remark on his part. But it brings to mind 
a more serious nature of what we are facing.
  And we've heard it so many times over the past month's time, the 
amount of money, $787 billion contained in this bill--more if you 
factor in the cost of capital, the cost of financing this bill, then 
the cost goes up to $1.1 or $1.2 trillion. The bill has built-in 
funding cliffs where if you really were honest about the amount of 
funding it would require to continue this stimulus bill over the actual 
life of the bill, we're probably talking about a bill that's closer to 
$3 trillion. And $3 trillion is $3 trillion that we don't have sitting 
in the Federal Treasury waiting to be dispensed. This is, in fact, 
money that will have to come from somewhere.
  Where is it going to come from? Well, it's going to come from the 
United States selling public debt. And the good news is that debt is 
still a saleable commodity on the world market, that people are still 
willing to purchase our debt. The good news is that they are still 
willing to purchase our debt and the interest rate has not risen 
significantly. But those days will only last so long because consider 
what is just right around the corner. You heard

[[Page H1643]]

the gentleman from Arizona talk about an omnibus bill that will be on 
the floor of this House in less than 48 hours. The omnibus bill will 
spend roughly $410 billion on top of the $787 billion that we just 
spent toward the end of last week. Bear in mind once again, we're not 
figuring in the cost of borrowing that money in that figure of $410 
billion.
  And a little more than 24 hours from now the President will stand in 
this House and address a joint session of the House and Senate--all 
will be assembled here--and he will lay out his plan, his budget for 
the next year of the United States of America. At the present time, I 
do not know what the top number is, but I suspect it will be in excess 
of $3 trillion. In fact, I expect it to be in excess of $3.3 trillion 
because that would be a little bit above the number that was approved 
the last year that President Bush submitted his budget.
  So we all know it takes a lot of money to run the country over a 
year's time, and yet we've had TARP I and TARP II, and now stimulus 
one, we're going to have the omnibus or minibus bill in a few day's 
time, and then we have our regular spending--our regular spending that 
we've yet to take on for the next fiscal year; truly an absolute 
explosive growth in the Federal deficit that is going to be seen 
between now and the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
  Mr. Speaker, I had an interesting time at home over the Presidents' 
Day week when we weren't in session. I talked to a number of my schools 
throughout my district in north Texas. I talked to the high schoolers 
in Gainesville, Texas; I talked to a group of home schoolers in rural 
north Texas; I talked to a group of middle school students in my home 
of Lewisville; and I talked to a group of students at an early 
childhood learning center down on the southeast side of Fort Worth. At 
every location I felt obligated to explain what had just transpired in 
the United States Congress because I know what it's like when you're a 
kid, you're not really paying attention to what's going on in these 
hallowed halls of Congress. And yet every statement we made 2 weeks 
ago, every dollar we spent 2 weeks ago, every interest obligation we 
incurred 2 weeks ago is not going to be borne by people my age, it's 
going to be borne by those youngsters that I was talking to; in fact, 
likely their children as well.
  So we have handed off to the next generation an amount of debt, the 
likes of which no one has ever seen before. And bear in mind, these are 
some of the best of times that we've just been through, and yet we are 
handing off levels of debt that have previously been unseen in this 
country.
  Now, as I went to the high schools, I did feel obligated to explain 
the mechanisms that created the need for the stimulus bill, the 
problems I saw with the bill, perhaps some alternative strategies that 
were suggested, some by Members of the minority here on the House side, 
alternatives that were suggested by Members of the other body on the 
other side of the Capitol. There were alternative strategies out there. 
There really wasn't any strong chorus of individuals who said we just 
need to do absolutely nothing. Many of us thought that perhaps by 
dealing with problems in the Tax Code would be a quicker and more 
efficient way of returning money to the productive segment of society. 
But nevertheless, we were cut out of most of those debates because, in 
the name of speed, in the name of getting this done rapidly, quickly, 
and getting that money out there--remember, for those shovel-ready 
projects that are sitting there waiting to go. In the name of getting 
that money out there quickly we had to forego all meaningful debate 
and, in fact, just simply had a very short period of time--between a 
little after midnight eastern standard time on Thursday night until we 
voted on the bill some 11, 12 hours later here on the floor of the 
House--to actually make up our minds on whether or not this spending 
was worthwhile for the country.
  And then, as we found out, there really wasn't such a rush because at 
the end of the day the bill languished for several days, then got 
shipped to Denver, then got signed. Now the Federal agencies are 
telling us that it may be some time before they actually get the rules 
written and the details in place for getting the money out there to the 
people.

  I felt a need also to tender an apology to the high school students 
that I talked to because, after all, it was our haste in getting this 
bill out there so quickly, without fully vetting it, without perhaps 
fully thinking through the consequences of what this level of Federal 
debt was going to do to subsequent generations. I felt a need to take 
some responsibility for that even though I did not vote for the bill in 
its final form and final passage, but nevertheless, as an institution--
and we just heard Mr. Flake so eloquently talk about the integrity of 
the institution--because of the integrity of the institution, I 
certainly bear the responsibility of that bill that left out of here 
down to the President's desk last week the same as anyone else in this 
body.
  And I also thought it was important to talk to the students about the 
fact that this is America, this is America. And things may be dark 
today, but they are not going to be dark forever; in fact, in my 
opinion, they will not be dark for long. In north Texas, in the late 
1980s, we were up against severe, severe economical straits. There was 
a recession in the country that had sort of slowly languished and 
rolled around various areas of the country. The price of energy dropped 
overnight. The price of a barrel of oil plummeted to levels unseen 
previously down to $10 a barrel and even lower. The price of real 
estate in north Texas plummeted. And loans that were made so businesses 
could expand were suddenly undercollateralized and those loans were 
called by the financial institutions. And the people who had made those 
loans found themselves facing great difficulty in being able to either 
supply the justification why the loan should be continued or to pay off 
that loan and settle those debts so that the lending institution would 
be made whole.
  And it was very difficult, very, very difficult times back then in 
north Texas. Many businesses didn't make it. Many small businesses 
didn't make it, many medium size and large businesses didn't make it. 
Many banks in north Texas failed. Fortunately, we did have the Federal 
Deposit Insurance Corporation, which came in--they didn't nationalize 
banks, to be sure. If they found a bank that was in serious trouble 
they came in and examined its books and said you simply cannot make it. 
They failed a bank and found a buyer. And sometimes that required 
subsidizing some of the bad debt within that bank, but they found a 
buyer, they didn't simply own that bank in perpetuity.
  Banks were sold to other areas of the country that weren't in such 
bad shape. Some banks were allowed to continue, they were allowed to 
continue with a protocol known as a net worth certificate back at the 
time which allowed a bank to have on its balance sheet some additional 
collateral provided by this net worth certificate that was in fact 
backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--no actual cash 
exchanged hands--and then when the bank found its way out of that 
difficulty, that net worth certificate was repurchased from the bank. 
And as a consequence, many banks are in business in north Texas today 
that otherwise might have faced closure, or, in our present scenario 
today, might have faced what is being euphemistically referred to as 
``nationalization'' with the Federal Government being the owner.

                              {time}  2015

  To be sure, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation owned a portion 
of those banks for a short period of time, but it was never in business 
to own those banks long term and did its job as it was intended to do, 
and also to protect the depositors. And perhaps one of the few good 
things we have done in the past several months is when the TARP bill 
was passed last fall, the bank bailout bill, the Wall Street bailout 
bill was passed last fall, we did increase the dollar amount of Federal 
Deposit Insurance Corporation insurance to $250,000, which, in my 
opinion, was an important thing to do as far as reestablishing some 
credibility within the banking sector.
  But I wanted these students to know, I wanted them to know that I had 
lived through north Texas in the 1980s. I had seen businesses fail. I 
had seen friends of mine who owned businesses and had

[[Page H1644]]

owned businesses for a number of years not be able to make it in those 
tough economic times. But, in fact, there was no largess coming from 
the Federal Government. No one came down from the Federal Government 
and opened up the coffers and said here's some dollars until you can 
see your way to get your business going again. That did not occur. 
Tough times, to be sure, but after those tough times that were over 
much more quickly than anyone anticipated, we had 25 to 28 years of 
sustained economic growth, sustained prosperity in north Texas. And the 
reality is it was only until the recession that hit the rest of the 
country a little over a year ago finally caught up with north Texas 
last fall, we had been creating jobs every month up until October or 
November of last year. So north Texas did, indeed, have a sustained 
period of prosperity, and it wasn't because the Federal Government came 
in and bailed people out during the 1980s. It was because people 
recognized the problems that were before them. They corrected their own 
finances. They corrected the finances within their business. If they 
couldn't, the businesses failed, the banks failed. But they picked 
themselves up, they dusted themselves off, to take a phrase from the 
presidential inauguration address, and they got on with their business. 
And they got on with their business in north Texas, and north Texas 
ultimately reaped the rewards of that.
  Contrast that to the country of Japan, which a few short years after 
that found itself in a recession. Japan was held up to us during the 
late 1980s as being the beacon of economic strength, but a few short 
years later, Japan itself was in great difficulty. Japan's federal 
government decided that it would spend its way out of the recession. 
They would spend federal dollars until that economy, by golly, got 
moving again, and the result of that is what is known as the ``lost 
decade'' in the country of Japan where economic growth stagnated. And 
even to this day, even to this day, they are having difficulty facing 
economic growth in the country of Japan.
  North Texas, by contrast, through a severe recession, to be sure, 
many people suffered as a consequence of that recession, but the 
rebound for that was many people profited from the sustained period of 
prosperity that followed.
  So I wanted the high school students to know that although the days 
may seem dark today and although when they turn on their broadcast news 
or their cable network news shows and people talk about the dire 
straits of the economy that this is America and we have not forgotten 
how to grow and we will again grow and this country will again have 
that long, sustained period of prosperity that we all know of which 
this country is capable.
  But at the same time, the one danger sign, the one red flag out there 
is that explosive growth of Federal spending that could undermine that 
ability of our economy to pull itself up out of this recession and take 
off into the next period of rebound. And I talk about this, it's not 
just simply an idea in abstraction. Two weeks ago, coming back to 
Congress, I went with a group of other Members of Congress down to a 
little known Federal agency called the Bureau of Public Debt. The 
Bureau of Public Debt is a part of the United States Department of 
Treasury. The Bureau of Public Debt is in a big tall building downtown. 
You go down there, and several times a week they auction off Federal 
paper, the loans that we are willing to sell to other people. The day 
we went down there, we watched the third auction of that day. It was 
for $32 billion. These were 3-year Treasury notes on sale at that time. 
Previously they had sold notes that were of a shorter duration and a 
longer duration. Each time a similar volume of notes were sold. So 
we're talking about $100 billion that was sold 2 weeks ago on Tuesday. 
The auction that we witnessed took about 30 minutes to complete. Again, 
the good news is there are plenty of people out there willing to buy 
our debt, willing to buy our paper. Apparently, United States dollars, 
the United States Treasury note is still a very, very safe place for 
people to go when they have money and they want to ensure that it stays 
safe. The interest rate was about 1\1/3\ percent, which seemed like a 
reasonable amount.
  But, Mr. Speaker, you must understand later that week we spent 
another $787 billion. Really $1.2 trillion if you figure in the cost of 
capital. And we're going to spend another $410 billion this week, and 
then we're going to have the President's budget, which will be much in 
excess of $3 trillion. Ultimately, ultimately, that debt is going to be 
able to be sold only by an increase in the interest rate. And if that 
happens, the interest rate increases for everyone else across the 
country. That crowds out private borrowing. That makes the cost of 
capital that much higher for any small business person in the country. 
That makes the ability to create new jobs for any small business person 
in this country that much more difficult. And do we really want to make 
it more difficult to create new jobs? Do we want to make it more 
expensive to create new jobs? That doesn't seem like the way to get 
yourself out of a recession.
  But we sold this public debt, and, again, the good news is that it 
did sell. We didn't just have to print the money and hope that it sold 
at some point in the future. There was, in fact, a willing buyer for 
the debt. The bad news is we are selling about between $150 to $160 
billion a week in public debt. That's not all new spending. Some of 
that is recycled debt as those notes mature. But it still underscores 
the volume of dollars that we are having to float out there in the 
world currency on literally a weekly basis.
  The amount of public debt sold in contrast about a year ago was about 
$100 billion a week. Now we are up to $150 to $160 billion a week, 
which just goes to show the rapid rate with which that has increased. 
And so far what we have seen out of congressional spending this year, 
there hasn't been any lack of enthusiasm for spending Federal dollars.
  Now, some of the things we saw in the so-called stimulus bill last 
week, some of the markers for what might be described as health care 
reform, some people might describe as a greater Federal share in the 
administration of health care in this country, we certainly saw the 
markers last week in the stimulus bill.
  Now, the state of health care reform, in fact, the whole question of 
health care reform, was a pretty big piece of the Presidential campaign 
last fall. In fact, both presidential candidates, the presidential 
nominees of both major parties, talked a lot about health care during 
the course of their campaigns, and, of course, any sort of health care 
reform did comprise a significant portion of the debates between the 
candidates as we came through the fall. So there really was not any 
question that some type of change in health care would be coming with 
whoever took office, and certainly when President Obama was elected, it 
became clear, at least clear to some of us, what his ideas were during 
the campaign, and we expected those to come forward during the course 
of this year.

  Now, for whatever reason here we are now nearing the last week of 
February of this year, the President's having been sworn in a little 
over a month ago, and as yet we haven't seen the big plans coming out 
of the White House, the Senate, or the House of Representatives that 
would signal what type of health care reform is coming down. I noted 
today after the Economic Responsibility Conference in the White House, 
a Member from the other body who's chairman of one of the major 
committees over there stood up and spoke about his vision on the 
changes in health care and how he still wanted to see a unified 
position come out of the Senate for consideration, and I still expect 
that is something we are likely to see.
  On the House side, at least on the committee on which I sit, the 
Committee on Energy and Commerce, the focus seems to be much more on 
climate change and global warming than it does on the health care 
reform side. Obviously, we had our early debates with the stimulus 
bill, but there doesn't seem to be the push on the House side, at least 
that I got the impression, that the other body is going to put behind 
this. But suffice it to say it will be part of the discussion. It will 
be part of the landscape here in the United States Congress certainly 
for the balance of this year no matter what time that it actually comes 
up.
  There were some significant changes in health care spending that came 
about as a result of the stimulus bill.

[[Page H1645]]

Probably most striking was in the aids to States for Medicaid spending. 
Currently, the Federal Government takes on about a 57 percent share of 
Medicaid spending. The States pick up the other 43 percent. Within the 
stimulus bill, the Federal matching part of that will be increased 
significantly for some States. It varies in amount from State to State. 
But this increase in Federal matching for State Medicaid will occur for 
the next 18 months' time.
  Now, you don't have to be a math whiz to know that 18 months from now 
puts us pretty close to the election of 2010. I don't realistically 
expect this Congress to back off on any Federal spending a week or a 
month or 2 before election day. It's going to be very, very difficult 
to throw a million-plus people off of Medicaid rolls a few months 
before the election day in 2010. So when I talk about funding cliffs, 
when I talk about funding that is not sustainable over time, this, 
indeed, is one of those areas where really people need to concentrate 
on just how much money has been obligated and what is the likelihood 
that we will behave by the 18-month time frame that we have set out for 
ourselves, 12-month time frame on the increased COBRA benefits that 
were put forward, and the 18-month time frame on increased aid to 
States for their Medicaid expenditures.
  The reality is this is a subprime loan, a subprime loan to the 
States. There's a big balloon payment due at the end. It's a low 
interest rate to get you in at the front. You increase the State 
Medicaid rolls, and 18 months from now, that increase in Federal 
spending just simply goes away. Again, there is not a person in this 
body who believes that 18 months from now, just shy of Election Day 
2010, that this body is going to withdraw the Medicaid subsidy for a 
million Americans. It's just not going to happen in a few short weeks 
prior to Election Day. So, again, if we were really honest about what 
our spending was last week when we took on this stimulus bill, we would 
be honest and acknowledge that that spending is, indeed, going to be 
much higher, much higher than anyone has calculated to date. The actual 
expenditure, if you were to fund that over the 5-year budget cycle, if 
you include that plus the cost of capital, it's going to put this bill 
somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion.
  Now, there were other health care provisions that were placed into 
the bill. There was funding a billion dollars for a center for what's 
called Comparative Effectiveness. ``Comparative Effectiveness'' sounds 
on the surface like, well, why wouldn't you want to compare treatments 
and only use the treatments that were the best and encourage those 
treatments that were the best? But the problem is when the Federal 
Government gets into that type of activity, it's not just that we make 
recommendations; we tell people what they are going to do because if 
they don't do what we tell them, we are not going to pay them. And as a 
consequence, the role of the Institute for Comparative Effectiveness 
may loom as a very large player in the delivery of health care in this 
country.
  And it's not just me, a Member from Texas, or even Texas newspapers 
that are concerned about this. The Boston Globe, the online edition, in 
an op-ed piece from a few days ago by Phyllis Greenberger talked about 
why one size doesn't necessarily fit all. And let me just read the last 
couple of paragraphs from this piece in the Boston Globe:
  ``In Britain the National Institute for Health and Clinical 
Excellence has been issuing appraisals of medical treatments for close 
to a decade. The institute considers both cost effectiveness, which 
measures the benefits of a treatment against the expense to provide it, 
and clinical effectiveness, which measures how much better a new 
treatment is for patients than an older one. The agency then makes 
recommendations to Britain's National Health Service about which 
treatments are worth covering.''
  That all sounds innocent enough and perhaps a way to get some cost-
effective medicine. But remember, Mr. Speaker, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who 
recently was head of the National Institutes of Health. When he would 
come and talk to this body, when he would come and give testimony in 
front of our congressional committees, he talked about a day when 
medicine became a great deal more personalized. He talked about the 
wonder of sequencing the human genome, of knowing so much more about 
what a person's risks were before those problems ever even had a chance 
to surface.

                              {time}  2030

  So, personalized medicine was the holy grail of the future.
  He talked about medicine that was going to become more personalized 
and, as a consequence, it would be a great deal more predictive. 
Because it's more predictive it could be much more preventive and, 
along those same lines, it would have to be more participatory. But we 
pretty much throw the concept of personalized medicine to the wayside 
when we embrace concepts like the Institute for Comparative 
Effectiveness or Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical 
Excellence.
  Let me read from the second to the last paragraph from a Boston Globe 
article by Phyllis Greenberger: ``Sometimes, though, the agency's 
findings prevent people from getting the best care possible. Last year, 
for instance, the institute recommended that the National Health 
Service not cover the life-extending lung cancer drug Tarceva because 
of its price tag. Even though the institute's decision was eventually 
overturned, some British cancer patients were denied their last hope 
for staying alive.''
  Now, think about that for a moment. Here is an agency, albeit from a 
government from another country, that made a decision that this drug is 
too expensive. This person has a disease which is not compatible with 
longevity. Here is a new medicine. It's terribly expensive. We are not 
going to cover that medicine, and only after they lost the fight did 
they go back and cover the medicine. But think of the patients during 
that interval that were denied that newer treatment for a very 
debilitating disease, their families were denied that treatment and 
now, of course, the treatment is readily available.
  But that is the problem when you have a Federal body that has that 
order of magnitude of power within their hands. The group that is going 
to be comprising this, right now nobody really knows who that is or 
what that will look like. For heaven's sakes, we don't even know who 
the next Secretary of Health and Human Services is here a month into 
this new administration.
  We need to be more careful about these types of decisions because 
they may affect each and every one of our constituents at some point in 
their lives going forward. These are tremendously important decisions 
and yet, and yet, they are wrapped up into this great big stimulus 
bill, rushed through, no chance for debate, no chance for thinking 
about it, simply this is the way it's going to be, take it or leave it, 
this is what you get.
  This is what people find so objectionable about these large bills 
that come through Congress. And make no mistake about it, they found it 
objectionable when my party was in power. But it seems like, lately, 
the bills have gotten bigger, the provisions hidden within them have 
gotten more varied, more stringent, more widespread, more wide-sweeping 
provisions, and we are cutting the American people out of the debate 
when we cut out other Members of Congress, regardless of party.
  Remember, each and every one of us was elected to serve roughly 
650,000 constituents back home. Some of our congressional districts 
have grown, some have shrunk since that time, but all of us were sent 
here with an equal mandate with an equal number of people that we 
represented. So to cut 40 percent out of the body out of the vote, to 
cut 40 percent of the body out of the debate, rather, is to cut 40 
percent of the American people out of the did debate as well.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, we heard from the previous speaker from Arizona 
that we will be considering the omnibus bill, House bill 1105, I think 
it is, on Wednesday of this week. The good news is the bill is up on 
the Rules Committee Web site, so, Mr. Speaker, if you or I wanted to 
look at this bill it, indeed, is available for our viewing here 36 
hours before we actually have to vote on the bill. So that's the good 
news.
  The bad news is the bill is up there as a photostatic copy of a 
previous bill, so it's got some handwritten corrections

[[Page H1646]]

on the page. In fact, on a couple of different sections you can see a 
staple mark up at the top of the page as this bill was photocopied or 
scanned into some type of scanning reader.
  The bad news for that is that when you try to search for a keyword on 
a page or in the bill, you are not going to be able to do it, because 
the bill is a replica. It's a scan of a previously printed bill. It's 
not a committee print of a new bill that is, in fact, searchable on 
line.
  So, we are left with our staffs, over the next 36 hours, to comb 
through this bill. As the gentleman from Arizona outlined, there are 
some provisions in that bill that many of us would not be proud of. We 
will be voting for earmarks for companies that no longer exist because 
of questions that were raised about some of their practices. Well, none 
of us, none of us would want to vote in favor of a bill that contained 
those types of provisions therein.
  There may be some provisions, an e-mail I received just taking the 
floor this evening, a bill that will seriously affect or phase out the 
District of Columbia school choice program, a program that has been 
invaluable to many, many families here in the District of Columbia. Why 
is it necessary to do this on such short notice? Why is it necessary to 
do this without any debate in Congress, without any public discourse or 
debate? Why is it necessary to do so so quickly unless you don't want 
people knowing what you are doing?
  I will give credit where credit is due. This time the bill is up on 
the Rules Committee Web site. Mr. Speaker, if you or I go to the 
Committee on Rules in the House of Representatives, perhaps if we type 
that into our search engine on our computer, we could, in fact, see the 
verbiage for House bill 1105 which will be the omnibus or minibus bill 
on which we will vote next week.
  This is a $410 billion bill, so it's not insignificant. It may sound 
significant after TARP 1 and TARP 2 and the stimulus bill, but, 
nevertheless, it is a significant amount of spending and, in fact, 
represents one of the largest increases in discretionary spending 
because this is, after all, spending that we should have passed last 
summer but decided not to work on before the election because it was 
politically too dicey. So, again, we simply rolled everything up into 
one big package, held it until well into the next Congress, and 
hopefully we are going to pass it very quickly before anyone has a 
chance to notice what we have done.
  This year, regardless of the top number that the President comes down 
with in his budget, this year I hope we will go through the normal 
appropriations process. I know it's painful. I know it's painful to 
have an open rule on these appropriations bills. I know that many 
Members from my side come down and offer endless amendments. Many 
Members from the other side come down and offer endless amendments, and 
it seems to drag on into the night day after day after day, but this is 
the work we were sent here to do.
  So this year I hope that the House leadership will take it under 
advisement to do this the correct way, to do this the correct way, to 
do this the time-honored way, bring these appropriations bills to the 
floor of the House after they have gone through their markups in 
subcommittee and full committee, bring them to the floor of the House 
as an open rule, as an open product, any number of amendments may be 
made in order, and let's have these bills have a full and fair debate 
under the intense light of the House of Representatives here. Let's not 
do it under the cover of darkness, roll them up into a big package and 
then punt them to sometime in the future when we hope no one's paying 
attention.

  That was a dreadful way to govern last summer. I am, frankly, 
shocked, Mr. Speaker, that the American people did not take greater 
umbrage to the way we behaved as we went through our appropriations 
process last year. Not only did we pass a big bailout bill right before 
we left to go home and campaign and not bother to explain to anyone why 
we had done it, but prior to that, prior to that when we were supposed 
to have done all of our spending bills we quite frankly just didn't do 
it.
  We gave ourselves an incomplete and said we will get back to it 6 
months from now when we have got a little more time. Well, now, that 
bill has come due and this Wednesday we will have that omnibus bill on 
the floor of the House. We won't have much chance for debate. We likely 
will not have many amendments that will be made in order, so as a 
consequence we will have the largest increase in discretionary spending 
prior to the TARP last year. We will have the largest increase in 
discretionary spending for a fiscal year ever to come to this country. 
We will pass it without batting an eyelash.
  But the next level of appropriations that start in May, June and July 
of this year, let's be sure that we do those the correct way. Let's be 
sure that we have the debates here on the House floor.
  If we have to take some difficult votes on amendments, and we always 
do, there are always some amendments from the other side on which I 
have difficulty. I am sure there are amendments from my side that give 
other Members on the other side difficulty, but that's what we are sent 
here to do, take the tough votes, make the tough decisions, go home and 
explain ourselves to our constituents.
  That's what we were sent here to do. And to abdicate that 
responsibility, say it's too tough, we are going to roll it up into a 
big ball, punt it until the next session, that's not what the American 
people sent us here to do. And I would reference back to the gentleman 
from Arizona's remarks, it impacts negatively on the dignity of this 
House to behave that way.
  What are we trying to hide? What are we so afraid of that we can't 
debate these bills out here on the House floor, let the American people 
see what is contained within these bills and let us vote with the full 
knowledge that the country is aware of what we are doing to the extent 
the country wishes to be aware of what we are doing.
  Mr. Speaker, I would point out that you or I could go to the Internet 
tonight and visit and read House bill 1105 which will be voted on 
Wednesday. As the speaker from Arizona pointed out, there are some 4, 5 
or 6,000 earmarks contained within this bill. It is not a huge amount 
of the total dollars in the bill, but it is certainly representative of 
some of the things that people think are important to push into 
congressional bills at the 11th hour.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I hope you and I will spend some time reviewing this 
bill, House bill 1105, which is now available on the rules Web site. I 
do apologize, Mr. Speaker, I wish it were searchable by keyword, but 
unfortunately at the present time we have only got a scan of the bill 
that was reported back to the Rules Committee from our counterparts in 
the other body.
  As a companion bill that's up there--and I have not had a chance to 
look at this--but, Mr. Speaker, many of us might be interested in 
looking at it because I think the bill is likely to come to the floor 
on Thursday, and this is House bill 1106 which is the bill to adjust 
mortgages that the President spoke about earlier this week, a $75 
billion bill, and I do hope that many Members, Mr. Speaker, will take 
the opportunity to become familiar with that bill before we do vote on 
it later this week.
  This is an important concept. I have had many calls from people in my 
district. I know there is concern because if a bank makes a loan at 4 
percent, loans that money out at 5 percent and then is told by the 
government that it has to reduce that 5 percent expectation of return, 
how is the bank going to stay solvent if they are borrowing money at 4 
percent and they are told they have to accept loans that are going to 
pay back a lower amount?
  It does look like something that may play havoc with the lending 
industry but certainly, Mr. Speaker, I will be open, I will be open to 
reading the bill. I am glad to see that that bill was posted up on the 
rules Web site as well.
  Well, a little more than 24 hours from now, the President will stand 
in the House and deliver his presidential budget to a joint session of 
the House and Senate. Additionally, I expect him to talk about some 
other parameters and other prerogatives that are important to the 
President. I expect to hear a great deal about health care in the 
President's address to the Nation tomorrow night. In fact, I am looking 
forward to that.

[[Page H1647]]

  Certainly some of the comments that came out of the meeting, the 
bipartisan meeting that the President held with Members of Congress, 
both the House and the Senate, members of the business community, 
members of industry, many of those comments were positive comments, 
particularly as it pertained to health care.
  So maybe this is the year where the American people see some 
significant change in the way health care is administered in this 
country. I hope that we will have the good sense to do that in a 
rational way and not in a way that undermines the delivery of health 
care in this country, but that remains to be seen.
  But, nevertheless, the President did speak about that favorably at 
the conclusion of his remarks today and many of the other Members, both 
House and Senate, and members of industry that were present in that 
meeting of responsibility and spending today voiced similar optimism. 
So being an optimistic person at heart, I hope to hear some significant 
words about the future direction of health care from the President 
tomorrow.
  It would have been helpful, Mr. Speaker, if Members of the House of 
Representatives could have received information about the President's 
budget directly from the White House. My staff has primarily relied 
upon press reports today in order to get information about the 
President's budget, that is probably not the ideal way for a budget of 
this size to come to Members of the Congress.
  I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, the House to be assertive in its 
prerogative to receive this information in a timely fashion from the 
other, from the other branch of government. After all, we are a coequal 
branch of government here in the legislative branch.
  It was the same phenomenon we encountered during the stimulus bill 
last week where we were getting reports from people who had 
acquaintances on K Street, the main lobby groups downtown, where they 
were getting reports of what was contained within the stimulus bill 
before we were privy to those same provisions here in the United States 
Congress.

                              {time}  2045

  This is not a good way to go about disseminating information. Again, 
I trust that we will see more openness from the administration, 
because, after all, that is what was promised to us during the runup to 
the election and certainly what was discussed during the President's 
inaugural address, and openness in government would require that the 
legislative branch be treated as that coequal branch of government that 
we all know it to be, and to receive these reports from the 
administration in a timely fashion.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to touch on one last point about the 
stimulus bill. There has been a lot made of the $19 billion or $20 
billion contained within the stimulus bill which is to go for advances 
in health information technology, the computerization of medical 
records, Mr. Speaker, electronic medical records, certainly a concept 
that is a valuable one and one that is worth pursuing.
  I will just have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, in my 6 years since coming 
to the House of Representatives since leaving the active practice of 
medicine for the full time practice of legislation, I have been 
impressed with the number of medical practices and the number of 
hospitals and clinics around the country that have voluntarily gone to 
a system of electronic medical records.
  Now, the money put forward in the stimulus bill as I have been able 
to understand it in the writings that I have been able to find on this 
money actually put the money forward not until the year 2011. Now, 
2011, if you do some quick math, is about 2 years from now, so it 
doesn't really comport with the concept of getting money out there 
quickly into the hands of practicing physicians.
  You may think, well, a doctor's office is hardly an area for economic 
development. But, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, in the State of Texas 
where we have revamped and reformed our medical liability laws, we have 
seen a number of physicians move to Texas from other States, a 
significant number, and it is estimated that each physician coming to a 
community will in fact generate between $900,000 to a little over $1 
million in economic activity within that state. So this is not an 
insignificant concept.
  The important thing is if there is advantage to gain from putting 
this money in the hands of medical practitioners in 2011, the advantage 
should be there in 2009 as well. I in fact introduced an amendment when 
we had the markup of this bill in our committee on Energy and Commerce. 
It was turned back by the majority. I frankly can't quite understand 
why.
  But I think this is something that we might re-look at. There is the 
ability to make technical corrections, and if indeed it is possible to 
pay physicians for improving their ability to keep and disseminate 
medical records and provide them substantial funding for doing so in 
2011, it would make good sense to do that in 2009.
  After all, Mr. Speaker, we have just 10 months' time before we have 
to deal with a very substantial and to some degree very disturbing 20 
percent cut in reimbursements to physicians, as is mandated under 
current law under the sustainable growth rate formula. We ought to give 
them at least a little bit of reassurance that we are serious about our 
approach to the practicing physician and their ability and willingness 
to take care of Medicare patients in the future by addressing this 
shortsightedness in the stimulus bill that we passed last week.
  Mr. Speaker, there is no shortage of things we can talk about when it 
comes to spending. Certainly the stimulus bill came to us advertised as 
a jobs bill. It turned out to be a spending bill, and that is a 
consequence that most of us will have to live with for the rest of our 
lives. It was an explosive growth in Federal spending.
  Unfortunately, we are on a pace to continue to see rapid growth in 
Federal spending. The President, to his credit, says he is going to cut 
the deficit in half by the end of his first term. That is a very, very 
tall order for him to have taken on. I intend to be supportive of that 
to the extent I can. If it is done in a way without harming the 
productive sector of our society, if it is done in a way without 
raising taxes on the productive segment of society, you can expect me 
to be there with him. If his only approach is to raise taxes during the 
time of a recession or perhaps even a depression, we have seen in the 
past that that formula doesn't work, and I don't think there is any way 
that I could be supportive.
  Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting hour to be down here and talk 
about the effects of the stimulus bill and spending. It is something 
where we will have ample opportunity to talk for many, many months 
ahead. Suffice to it say, it stands to be a very interesting year here 
in the People's House. I look forward to future full and lively debate 
on this subject.

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