[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 110 (Tuesday, July 21, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H8471-H8477]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE WESTERN CAUCUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, today, 134 Republicans came here to 
the floor and spoke for 1 minute each about the issue of jobs and where 
they had been, for, indeed, we were promised that there would be jobs 
that would be created and saved if we simply passed a stimulus bill and 
didn't take the time to read it like a couple of others we did. 
Unfortunately, the reality has not been quite the same. In fact, this 
is basically the report card that we came up with.
  This administration said that if we quickly pass that huge stimulus 
bill, there would be some unemployment but it would only be 8 percent. 
In fact, the dark blue line here is what they said would be the 
recovery path of our economy. They said if we didn't do that, we would 
follow a trajectory of the light blue line and actually have 9\1/2\ 
percent unemployment. That is a difference of 3 million workers being 
out of a job if we took the time to actually read the bill and think 
about it.
  The sad part is, though, after 5\1/2\ months, the trajectory line is 
actually the red dots there, which means we are far exceeding anything 
that was projected whether we did the stimulus or didn't do the 
stimulus. In fact, you can arguably say that we might have been better 
off not doing anything at all.
  The Vice President was correct when he said that this administration 
totally misread the economy. Nonetheless, Speaker Pelosi and President 
Obama have teamed together to put up the largest budget, and we're 
still in the process of voting for it. We are on track now, Mr. 
Speaker, of actually spending $4 trillion in this year's Congress. We 
are spending money like it was Monopoly money with the possible 
exception that you can't pass go and you don't get $200 every time you 
do it.
  To put this kind of concept in place, at $4 trillion, we would be 
spending $1 billion every 2.2 hours. To put it in perspective again, if 
you tried to pay off $4 trillion, that means every single household in 
America would have to cough up 35 grand to cover it. And the problem 
that we have with that is simply we don't have that kind of money lying 
around, whether we spent it or not. In fact, we will be predicted to be 
in a deficit. CBO scores this year's deficit at $1.85 trillion. That's 
the amount of money we'll spend that we have absolutely no funds for.
  Now, you can see on this chart, back there at the turn of this 
century, we actually had a surplus. You can notice when 9/11 hit we 
went into deficits. Those grey lanes are the deficits run up by the 
big-spending George W. Bush--at least, he was accused of that. What we 
have over here is what we have been spending ever since. The light red 
lines are the estimates of the Obama administration. The dark red lines 
are the estimates of our Congressional Budget Office, and they predict 
that this year it's $1.85 trillion that we will overspend.
  Now, this isn't perhaps the best view. This is only a 1-year shot of 
what we are doing as far as our finances. If we actually took a bigger 
view of it and tried to find all of the things we still owe, we are 
actually at about $11.6 trillion in total debt. And if you add things 
like the bailouts and the bank rescues and the auto recovery loans we 
have, we're about $23 trillion in debt, which is difficult when our 
total gross domestic product is about $14 trillion.
  Let me put that in a kind of perspective for you.
  When we went to the Moon, if you put the money we spent on that 
effort to go to the Moon in today's dollars, we would have spent around 
$200 billion. Everything FDR did in the New Deal to try to get us out 
of the old original Depression in today's dollars would be about $500 
billion. If you took everything we spent on World War II, that's about 
$4 trillion. Today, we are spending, in real dollars, $4 trillion and a 
deficit of almost $2 trillion and a total deficit of $23 trillion of 
everything combined. That was not the change that we were promised.
  And the proponents of the stimulus package, quite frankly, view its 
failure in the fact that we didn't put enough money into it and that 
perhaps we should have another stimulus package to spend more money. 
The Democrats' solution, quite frankly, is we need to spend more money. 
The bottom line, though, is spending money is not the same thing as 
creating jobs. There are other alternatives that are out there.
  The Republican Party has introduced almost a thousand bills of 
alternatives that have never been allowed to be discussed on this 
floor. We had one called the no-cost stimulus bill. It was estimated 
that it would grow our gross domestic product by $10 trillion and 
create 2 million jobs and would cost the taxpayers exactly nothing and 
has still yet to be allowed to be discussed on this particular floor.
  Now, we come here today as part of a Western Caucus with the 
understanding that much of what we do in the West is a catalyst for us 
solving this particular problem in moving our economy ahead.
  Unfortunately, this administration, which misdiagnosed what the 
stimulus would do, has also misdiagnosed the opportunity that so much 
of our public lands have offered to us. It is not an effort to try to 
destroy the environment, but there are enough resources we have in this 
country that we could create an energy policy that would indeed build 
real jobs.
  Unfortunately, this administration looks at the gift that it has at 
its disposal and instead goes in the opposite direction. It creates an 
environmental policy that is aimed at benefiting special interest 
groups so that instead of our using our resources to create jobs, we 
actually are sacrificing jobs to a false ideology.
  In this opportunity today, we are going to be talking about some of 
the things this administration is doing which actually harms this 
country and loses jobs when we have a great opportunity to try and grow 
jobs if we'd just use the resources that we have wisely.
  I am joined and will be talking with Representative McClintock of 
California. He has a unique area that deals with the forest area that 
has a chance of actually bringing people together for a benefit that 
could grow jobs, help the economy, help the environment, and for some 
reason, we simply are not doing it.

  We will be joined later by Representative Thompson of Pennsylvania; 
not necessarily the West, but he has the same situation with a forest 
in Pennsylvania and, once again, the administration's misuse of land 
policy is costing people jobs and should not be there.
  I'm joined by my good friend Representative Broun from Georgia. He's 
going to try to put all this into some kind of perspective at the same 
time as

[[Page H8472]]

we deal with this issue and other issues, all of which have the same 
problem of costing us jobs. And hopefully there will be a few more 
Members who will join us before this hour has concluded.
  And I'd also like to talk about a couple of policies that this 
administration has started which, in reality, costs American jobs when 
we should be producing jobs with the resources that we have.
  But, Mr. Speaker, with that said, I would like, first of all, to 
yield some time to Representative McClintock of California, who has a 
wonderful opportunity of creating jobs in California, desperately 
needing the jobs, desperately needing the income, but is faced with a 
unique barrier that's going to be extremely difficult to overcome.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. I want to thank my colleague from Utah (Mr. Bishop) 
for yielding and for organizing this Special Order for the House 
tonight and for the attention he's devoted to the suffering in my 
district that's been caused by the lunatic fringe of the environmental 
movement that now seems to be so firmly in control of our national 
policy on public lands. At this point, we're not just trying to create 
jobs, we are desperately trying to stop losing them because of these 
policies.
  You know, a generation ago we recognized the importance of proper 
wildlands management. We recognized that there is a balance between the 
environment and the economy and that both can thrive through proper 
policy. We recognize that nothing is more devastating to the ecology of 
a forest than a forest fire, and we recognize that public lands should 
be managed for the benefit of the public. We recognize that in any 
living community, including forests, dense overpopulation is simply 
unhealthy.
  So we carefully groomed our public lands, we removed excessive 
vegetation and gave timber the room that it needed to grow. Surplus 
timber and overgrowth were sold for the benefit of our communities. Our 
forests prospered and our economy prospered, and forest fires were far 
less numerous and far less intense than we see today.

                              {time}  2015

  But that was before a radical ideology was introduced into public 
policy--that we should abandon our public lands to overgrowth and 
overpopulation and, in essence, to benign negligent. We are now living 
with the result of that ideology. Forest fires that are fueled by 
decades of pent-up overgrowth are now increasing in their frequency and 
their intensity and their destructiveness. One victim of this 
wrongheaded policy is the environment itself. Recent forest fires in my 
region make a mockery of all of our clean-air regulations. And anyone 
who has seen a forest after one of these fires knows that the 
environmental devastation could not possibly be more complete. But 
these policies also carry a tremendous economic price. Timber is a 
renewable resource. If it is properly managed, it is literally an 
inexhaustible source of prosperity for our Nation. And yet, my region, 
which is blessed with the most bountiful resource in all of California, 
has literally been rendered economically prostrate by these policies. A 
region that once prospered from its surplus timber is now ravaged by 
fires that are fueled by that surplus timber.
  Which brings me to the story of the townspeople of Quincy and El 
Camino, both little towns in the northeast corner of California. Two 
months ago, 150 families in each of those little towns received notice 
that the sawmills that employ them must close. The company made it very 
clear in its announcement that although the economic downturn was the 
catalyst, the underlying cause was the fact that two-thirds of the 
timber that they depended upon had been held up by environmental 
litigation. Despite the recession, they still had enough business to 
keep those mills open--and to keep these families employed--if the 
environmental left had not cut off the timber that those mills depended 
upon.
  Now bear in mind that the population of the town of Quincy is about 
400 families--the greater Quincy area about 1,250 families. We are 
talking about pink slips going to 150 of those families. And they are 
not the only ones who have lost incomes. Many more jobs were lost 
indirectly--the folks who drive the trucks and sell the supplies--all 
lost their jobs as well. This occurred despite the groundbreaking work 
of a local coalition called the Quincy Library Group that forged a 
model compromise between environmental, business and forest management 
advocates a decade ago. That work had culminated in legislation called 
the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act. It was 
adopted 11 years ago in this very Chamber by a vote of 429-1. This 
consensus agreement provided for sound and sustainable forest 
management practices that in turn would support both local jobs and 
healthier forests. As Senator Feinstein, a Democrat, pointed out at the 
time, every single environmental law, including the National 
Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act, would 
be followed as this proposal is implemented. Yet despite a model 
compromise that produced a model law, the will of the Congress, the 
livelihoods of hundreds of innocent families, and the fire safety of 
scores of mountain communities is being challenged and undermined by a 
constant stream of litigation from groups purporting to support the 
environment. And I say ``purporting'' because, as the Web site of one 
of those groups declares, their number one policy goal is to 
``eliminate commercial logging on all public lands in California.'' 
Their policy is not to protect the environment. Their policy is 
deliberately to destroy commercial enterprise.
  We held an informal hearing in Quincy after the mill closures that my 
friend from Utah was kind enough to join us for. And the stories we 
heard at that hearing were absolutely heartbreaking. It is a story of 
how, despite the law, this constant litigation, which is ultimately 
rejected by the courts, has nevertheless delayed implementation of the 
Forest Recovery Act until the mills collapse, and that's what we are 
dealing with today. They know they don't have to win the litigation, 
all they have to do is draw out the process. And they have done that 
very successfully until 150 families in Quincy and another 150 families 
in El Camino lost their jobs. We then held a formal hearing here in 
Washington, and from that hearing, Congressman Herger has introduced 
his bill, H.R. 2899, to prevent frivolous litigation from continuing to 
destroy those jobs and continuing to impede the fire safety measures 
that are so vital to the preservation of these forests. I'm in the 
final stages of preparing legislation to at least grant litigation 
relief for the land that is actually within the Quincy Library Group 
territory defined in the legislation. And of course these bills are 
already being attacked by the same radical groups responsible for the 
litigation and regulation that is destroying these jobs, destroying 
these families, destroying these communities and destroying our 
forests. These extremists even oppose the salvaging of timber that has 
already been destroyed by forest fires or by disease. Now think about 
that. Trees that are already dead cannot be salvaged because of 
lawsuits filed by these extremist groups. And again, they know if they 
can simply delay the salvage for 2 years, the trees decay to the point 
where they can't be recovered. And they would rather let those trees 
rot on the ground rather than to be removed and salvaged to provide 
jobs for families and lumber for homes and revenues for the national 
Treasury.
  The economic suffering this is now causing is immediate, and it is 
acute. But an even more ominous effect is placing at risk our mountain 
communities and our national forests to intense wildfires made possible 
because overgrowth is no longer being removed. As one forester told me, 
those trees are going to come out of the forest one way or another. 
They are either going to be carried out, or they will be burned out. 
When the excess timber was carried out, we had a thriving lumber 
industry that put food on the tables and clothes on the children of 
thousands of working families throughout northern California. More 
importantly, we also had much healthier forests and far fewer and 
milder forest fires than we suffer today. This isn't environmentalism. 
True environmentalists recognize the damage done by overgrowth and 
overpopulation and recognize that the role of sound forest management 
practices

[[Page H8473]]

is to maintain healthy forests. We are also watching them 
systematically shut down our public land for public use and public 
benefit. And every time a little town like Quincy or El Camino is 
strangled to death by these policies, it has a ripple effect throughout 
the Nation. Our Nation loses tax revenues, commerce withers, the price 
of raw materials rises and public resources are diverted to provide 
economic relief. And our forests suffer as well.
  But there's one infinitely higher cost that I haven't mentioned yet, 
and that brings me to the tragic news that I must impart to the House 
tonight. There is a raging fire in the Shasta/Trinity National Forest 
as we speak right now. It's called the ``Backbone Fire.'' About 2 hours 
ago, I received word that a young man, Thomas Marovich, Jr.--20 years 
old--from the little town of Aiden in my district, was killed this 
afternoon fighting that fire. And every time a little town like Aiden 
mourns the loss of a promising young man like Thomas Marovich, Jr., it 
is not only a tragedy--if preventable, it is an outrage.
  Mr. Speaker, the time has come for the great silent majority of 
Americans to rise up against the most radical elements of the 
environmental movement that now seem to control so much of our public 
policy and to demand that we restore our public land for public use and 
public benefit, and that we restore the sound forest management 
practices that once minimized the forest fires that are now again 
destroying communities and taking lives.

  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Would the gentleman yield for one moment?
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Absolutely.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. This is truly a tragedy that you have mentioned 
that is taking place in your home district. As I was out there in the 
community of Quincy, I was noticing that the concept that they said is 
that if they could thin those forests, they could minimize the risk of 
forest fire as well as using the resources that would be pulled out to 
create jobs at the same time.
  Could this fire have at least been mitigated if we had gone through 
these practices of thinning the forest under proper procedures that 
would help the forest as well as help the economy at the same time?
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Well, that is why for many years we thinned those 
forests, to reduce the intensity of those forest fires, to reduce the 
number of those forest fires, and from that excess timber, we provided 
a thriving economy throughout that region. And by the way, we also 
provided a tremendous revenue stream to the national Treasury because 
that timber is on land owned by the people of the United States. So we 
had healthier forests, and we had a healthy economy. Both have been 
imperiled by those policies. And then to that you have to add the 
tragedy of the human loss of those heroic young men like Mr. Marovich 
who gave his life today to try to stop those fires, which are much more 
intense today and much more numerous today than they were a generation 
ago when we practiced sound forest management practice.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. To the gentleman from California, I thank him for 
joining us here. I know that we all send our sympathy to the community 
and especially the family at this time of their particular loss in a 
heroic effort to try and help and save others.
  Part of the problem that the gentleman from California is talking 
about is because of the land that is owned by the Federal Government. 
On this particular chart, everything that is in red is owned by the 
Federal Government. You will notice that it has a preponderance in the 
West. And where Mr. McClintock is talking is that area in California 
surrounded by red. Let's face it. If you live in that area that is 
surrounded by red, you really don't have a whole lot of options. The 
Federal Government controls what opportunities you do or do not have.
  Let me give you just one example in my State of a different area. And 
I want to introduce you to a young man by the name of Mr. Pitchforth. 
Mr. Pitchforth is a young and exciting school teacher who got 12-, 13- 
and 14-year-olds excited by geography and history, which by itself 
should give him some kind of hero's medal. This September, though, he 
is not going to be teaching school. He is not going to be teaching 
school because the district in which he lives is one of those red areas 
in which this administration unilaterally and arbitrarily decided to 
take 77 oil and gas leases and suspend them, take them off the market, 
making them unusable. And in so doing, took neighboring and abutting 
pieces of property owned by the school trust lands and make them also 
sterile for this time period. The schools lost money. And in so doing, 
their reaction was to fire the first teacher hired. Mr. Pitchforth is 
not there anymore. You see, this doesn't deal with just people who are 
working in oil and gas. There's collateral damage from every one of our 
decisions that the government makes. Mr. Pitchforth isn't working 
because of a choice he made, but because of a choice some bureaucrat 
back here in Washington made. And it's not fair. It's not fair for him. 
It's not fair for his family.
  There's other collateral damage that takes place in this area where 
the Secretary of the Interior decides to pull these leases and suspend 
these leases for the rationale that the Bush administration did them 
too quickly. Actually, the Bush administration took 7 years to go 
through the process. I guess 7 years was not enough time to decide 
whether we were doing the right thing or not, at least that is what the 
Secretary said. Let me read to you a letter from, once again, somebody 
who is not directly employed but who is in the transportation business 
that does the shipping of materials both to and from those potential 
sites. As he wrote the county commission where he lives, Let me applaud 
your efforts in trying to get the message to our Interior Department 
that their actions have caused great harm to the economy of our area 
and to individuals living there. At the end of 2008, we employed over 
230 truck drivers and leased 204 trucks. Our payroll was $12 million a 
year. But since the first of the year, we have laid off 36 trucks and 
47 drivers. There are now 47 families without income nor payroll 
benefits associated with them. Our overall payroll is down 29 percent, 
projected now to be down to $9 million by the end of this calendar 
year. On a personal note, my son who has worked in the oil fields for 
the past 8 years has never been unable to find employment until now. He 
has been off now for 3 months and is getting very discouraged. My 
daughter is a single mother of two growing boys. She has been 
struggling to make ends meet with the economy the way it is now and 
seems she has lost hope of ever finding employment elsewhere. To Brett 
who is the field manager who was laid off on July 1, July 13 he and his 
wife had a baby. To Jody and Jeff, two truck operators, Jody lost his 
truck because he couldn't make payments after he was laid off because 
of the decision made by the Secretary here in Washington. Curtis was a 
craftsman and a cabinetmaker who lost his job due to the cancelled 
contracts once they realized these leases were taken off the table. 
Travis, a construction worker, husband, father of two children, laid 
off, once again, as soon as a bureaucratic decision here in Washington 
was made that had unintended consequences far beyond what was 
anticipated when a bureaucrat in Washington decided to make decisions 
on what should take place on the ground out there and took the 
opportunity of solving our problems and creating problems and taking 
jobs away from people.
  We talk about the numbers unemployed. Each of those unemployed 
numbers is a face and a real person with a real family and a real 
issue. I would like to yield some time to the gentleman from Georgia to 
try and put this in perspective. And then we will be joined by two 
other members of the Western Caucus.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank you, Mr. Bishop, for yielding me some 
time. I was really touched by the faces that you've brought forward to 
the American people tonight here on C-SPAN about these people who have 
lost their jobs and my good friend Tom McClintock talking about the 
National Forest and the mismanagement that is going on because of the 
endless environmental wacko lawsuits that are going on there and the 
unfortunate untimely death of this young man who was fighting those 
fires that probably could have been prevented if we had managed the 
forest in a better way, in a correct way, according to normal 
silviculture practices.

[[Page H8474]]

                              {time}  2030

  Civil culture means forestry practices to the best extent for 
economic purposes, and I thank both of you for bringing the face of 
people to this discussion tonight.
  Mr. Speaker, I'm a medical doctor, and I've seen the faces of a lot 
of patients who have struggled with the cost of health care expenses, 
the cost of health insurance and medication and hospital bills. In over 
3\1/2\ decades of practicing general medicine in rural south Georgia 
and now northeast Georgia, I've literally given away in my services 
several hundred thousand dollars of my services if I had charged for 
them.
  We have a proposal that I call ObamaCare that's being debated here in 
the Halls of Congress. Mr. Speaker, the director of the Congressional 
Budget Office last week said that if ObamaCare is passed it's going to 
cost 750,000 people their jobs across America. Three-quarters of 1 
million people are going to be put out of work just because of passing 
a bill that supposedly is going to make everybody covered by health 
insurance.
  But the Congressional Budget Office director also said that even in 
the next 10 years not everybody would be covered. Let me say that 
again, because what we keep hearing from the Democratic side is we're 
going to cover everybody; everybody's going to have health care. Well, 
everybody does have access to health care today. Federal law requires 
it. What everybody does not have is health insurance.
  But our Democratic colleagues want to give free health insurance to 
illegal aliens, and that's what ObamaCare does. It gives free health 
insurance to illegal aliens. The 12 million, 15 million illegal aliens 
in this country who are criminals have entered this country illegally. 
Virtually all of them have illegal documents. They've broken many 
Federal laws. They're criminals. And my Democratic colleagues want to 
give them free insurance. It's going to cost 750,000 American citizens 
jobs to do so.
  Mr. Speaker, this House considered a bill just a few weeks ago that 
they, my Democratic colleagues, call cap-and-trade. I call it tax-and-
trade or tax-and-cap because it's about taxes. It's about revenue. We 
hear over and over again that it is going to create all these green 
jobs. Well, it will create some green jobs. In fact, I saw a friend, my 
next door neighbor in the hall over in the Cannon House Office 
Building, bring in a chart where he's going to talk about green jobs, 
and it indeed will create green jobs, but what you're not being told is 
what happened to Spain.
  Our President has lifted up Spain as being the model of what we need 
to do on these green jobs and environmental policy. Well, about a 
decade ago Spain put into place a similar piece of legislation as our 
tax-and-trade bill that's languishing over in the Senate, and I hope 
the Senate will defeat it. But in Spain, for every single green job 
that was created, 2.2 other jobs cost. In other words, 2.2 people were 
put out of work for every one person put to work by these green jobs 
that tax-and-trade is going to create.
  I know my Democratic colleagues can add and subtract. I don't want to 
accuse them of not doing so, but if you subtract 2.2 from 1, you get a 
minus 1.2, and that's exactly what's going to happen. If the American 
people don't stand up and say ``no'' to tax-and-trade, or tax-and-cap, 
whatever you want to call it, and tell the U.S. Senators, Mr. Speaker, 
that this is going to be disastrous and it's going to cost American 
jobs and to defeat it over there in the Senate, there will be 2.2 
people put out of work for every 1 person that is put to work.
  I already said the Congressional Budget Office says 750,000 people 
are going to lose their jobs because of ObamaCare, but it's going to do 
many other things, too, that are disastrous. ObamaCare is going to 
insert a Washington bureaucrat between every patient and their doctor, 
and the Washington bureaucrat is going to be making, Mr. Speaker, every 
single individual in this country's health care decision. The patient, 
the patient's family won't be able to make those decisions. The doctor 
won't be able to make those decisions. It's going to be a Washington 
bureaucrat that makes that decision.
  We were told by our Democratic colleagues it's all about lowering 
costs; but just last Friday the Director of the Congressional Budget 
Office said that it's not going to rein in the cost of health care. In 
fact, it's going to cost more money.
  So let me get this right. It's going to cost more money to put in 
place ObamaCare; it's going to take decisions away from patients and 
their family and their doctor about making health care decisions; and 
it's going to put a Washington bureaucrat in charge of those decisions, 
and that Washington bureaucrat is going to say whether a patient can 
get needed treatment, surgery, x rays, MRIs, or not.
  We already know in countries such as Great Britain and Canada that in 
those socialized medicine, government-run programs, that the death 
rates for cancer overall are much higher than here in the United 
States. Women who get breast cancer in Canada and Great Britain, 
roughly 50 percent of them are dead after 5 years. Prostate cancer, the 
same, roughly 50 percent of people that are diagnosed with prostate 
cancer in those countries, or 60 percent, are dead in 5 years. Here in 
the United States, it's over 90 percent are still alive. So what's 
going to happen here? Our death rates are going to go up for all 
cancers.
  Just today, we had a bill here on the floor that I talked about that 
is one to try to encourage people to understand diabetes. As a medical 
practitioner, I've treated diabetes for years, and the end result of 
diabetes and the reason it's so important to catch it early and to 
treat it is that people die at a young age when they have diabetes, a 
lot younger than they should if it's treated.
  But the thing is, as we ration health care and the Washington 
bureaucrat tells patients that they can't get the tests that they need, 
they can't get the life-saving coronary bypass surgery or stints and 
the procedures they need to help them not die from heart attacks or 
from strokes, the Washington bureaucrats are going to say particularly 
to the elderly that you can't get the dialysis that you desperately 
need because you're old and it's not cost effective, it's not 
comparatively effective, and thus, you just must die and not get the 
treatment that you desperately need.
  So people are not only going to be put out of work but people are 
going to be in poor health. We're going to degrade the quality of 
health care delivered by doctors and hospitals across this Nation 
because a Washington bureaucrat's going to say ``no'' to patients and 
say ``no'' to doctors.
  This is going to be disastrous. We're creating a debt and a deficit 
that's unprecedented in the history of our Nation. We're going down a 
track right now, Mr. Speaker, that every great nation in history has 
gone down: Great Britain, Spain, even Rome. We're going down a track of 
spending money that we don't have, creating debt that we cannot pay. 
We're robbing our children and our grandchildren of their future. They 
will live at a lower standard than we live today because of this huge 
debt that we're creating, Mr. Speaker, this huge deficit that this 
administration is creating.
  I hear from our friends on the Democratic side, even just this week I 
heard them blame President Bush for the debt and deficit. Well, I blame 
President Bush for being a big spender and he was. While I was here 
during the tail end of his Presidency, I fought all those big spending 
bills. I fought the Washington bailout of Wall Street.
  But President Bush was just a piker compared to what this 
administration's doing. We're creating unprecedented debt and deficit 
that our grandchildren cannot pay. So their standard of living is going 
to be worse than it is today.
  Mr. Speaker, there are going to be a lot of people put out of work. 
During the Great Depression all the spending that FDR did did put some 
people to work, but the unemployment rates bounced up and down and 
stayed very high.
  Mr. Speaker, in my district in Georgia, many counties have over 13 
percent unemployment today. I've talked to several managers of plants, 
manufacturing plants in my district, that tell me that if this tax-and-
trade bill that the Senate has over here that this House passed, they 
are they're going to lock the doors. Those jobs are going to go 
overseas because they can't afford to pay the higher energy tax.

[[Page H8475]]

  Most Americans are going to have a hard time, particularly the poor 
and the people on limited incomes are going to have a hard time paying 
the higher energy cost.
  Mr. Speaker, Republicans have stood up over and over again and have 
talked about the proposals that we have made, proposals to stimulate 
the economy and create jobs; proposals to lower the cost of health care 
expenses to all Americans; proposals that would stimulate the economy; 
proposals that don't cost our grandchildren their future and, in fact, 
will not even cost the taxpayers today any increase in their taxes. But 
those proposals are not heard because the leadership of this House and 
the leadership of the Senate across the way won't let those proposals 
get to the floor to be discussed, and it's not right, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, we're robbing America of its future. We're robbing 
Americans of their jobs today. We're going down a track that's going to 
put more and more people out of work. It's going to create more 
problems for people paying their utility bills, their gasoline, their 
home heating costs and things like that. Even with the mandates from 
our friends on the Democratic side that they are putting on health 
care, it's going to literally lower the income of people who are 
working, and it's not right and it's not fair.
  Mr. Speaker, it's got to stop. The American people need to stand up 
and say ``no'' to ObamaCare, ``no'' to tax-and-spend policies that this 
administration, that this leadership in this House and the Senate are 
bringing forward because it's going to destroy America.
  And I thank my friend from Utah, Mr. Bishop. I see he has a poster 
here that we have a lot of these unemployed people in my district. 
Praise God that we don't have 14.7 million people in my district out of 
work; but more and more people are becoming unemployed, and they're 
going to continue to lose jobs in my district in Georgia, and I'm sure 
they are in yours in Utah if we don't stop this outrageous spending 
that the leadership of this Congress, of this administration, are 
doing. We've got to stop it, and it's up to the American people to 
demand from their Senators and their Congressmen and this 
administration saying ``no'' to this outrageous spending that's going 
on.

                              {time}  2045

  I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate Representative Broun from Georgia 
for joining us. He provides a unique element to the Western Caucus of 
giving a Southern input, which we find so similar to the problems that 
we're facing, as well as a medical background. Part of the problems 
he's talking about is the reason that the policies we have been 
creating as a government is part of the problem why we have 14.7 
million unemployed right now.
  I'd like to go to the Eastern part of the country, if I could, and 
yield some time to Representative Thompson from the State of 
Pennsylvania, who also has a similar problem, similar situation, with a 
similar heavyhanded result of bureaucratic Washington decisions, and it 
has direct impact, so that these unemployed are not just faces, they're 
real people.
  Then, we will be happy to be joined by Representative Lummis from 
Wyoming, who has the same things in her home State as well.
  Representative Thompson.
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank my good friend from Utah (Mr. 
Bishop) for coordinating this event tonight. I'm very proud to 
represent Pennsylvania's Fifth District and am very proud be a part of 
the Western Caucus. We have a lot of wonderful natural resources that, 
frankly, help to make, Mr. Speaker, make this country strong, and I 
believe as a part of our promising future if we use them and use them 
wisely.
  Federal policies that lead to job losses is a very personal one for 
me and many of my constituents in Pennsylvania's Fifth Congressional 
District. My district is home to Pennsylvania's only national forest, 
the Allegheny, or the ANF as we often refer to it--513,000 acres.
  The ANF is as special as the district that I represent and has a long 
history as an economic and a tourism center for the region. Nearby, in 
Titusville, Pennsylvania, Colonel Edwin Drake founded the world's very 
first commercial oil well in 1859. The energy industry has been the 
economic engine in that region in my district ever since. Now this 
includes the ANF.
  For 86 years, the forest has successfully operated for multiuse 
purposes. These uses include recreation tourism as well as timber 
harvesting, oil, and natural gas production. Frankly, before this 
forest was formed 86 years ago, it was an oil and gas field.
  Since oil and gas has been the economic engine in the region for over 
60 years, when the ANF was created, the Federal Government only 
purchased the surface rights. This was done intentionally by the 
Federal Government in order to leave the mineral rights, meaning the 
rights to oil and gas and minerals, in private hands. And for some 85-
plus years there's been a positive working relationship between the 
Federal Government, who owns the surface rights, and the private and 
oil gas developers, who own the mineral rights.
  However, this longstanding and beneficial relationship recently has 
been ruptured. Last fall, the Forest Service was sued by three 
environmental groups: Sierra Club, the Allegheny Defense Project, and 
the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. The Sierra Club 
is based in the Speaker's home district in San Francisco, California. 
The Allegheny Defense Fund is based somewhere in Oregon. And the Forest 
Service Employees for Environmental Ethics--well, they won't identify 
themselves. We don't know.
  These groups are attempting to apply the National Environmental 
Policy Act, or NEPA, to the permitting processes, which effectively 
will shut down energy production in the forests.
  Let me be clear, oil and gas production is the major economic force 
in the region, and has been since that first oil well was drilled 150 
years ago.
  Penn State University performed a study and concluded that for every 
100 direct oil and gas sector jobs in northwestern Pennsylvania, 23 
industry support jobs are created, with an additional 40 ancillary jobs 
in the retail and residential sectors. Want a true economic stimulus 
that leads us to energy independence? Let's support that industry. 
Again, I can't emphasize enough how important these jobs are to our 
region and the local economy.
  As a direct result of the lawsuit, the forest service indefinitely 
suspended the permitting process for all new oil and gas leases in 
January of this year. To make matters worse, the Forest Service 
released a settlement this past April that sides entirely with the 
environmental groups.
  This settlement was reached behind closed doors and was reached with 
no industry input. There was no judge, no court that told them to do 
this. Applying NEPA was a decision made by the Forest Service and did 
not even take into account the people that it would hurt directly and 
the most. No court told them to do this, which means that it was a 
policy change that occurred within the National Forest Service.
  Now, while these environmental groups would like everyone to think 
that oil and gas production in the ANF goes unregulated, it's 
rigorously regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental 
Protection. And they do a great job. They always have.
  Today, I, along with Mr. Bishop and 18 other members of the 
Congressional Western Caucus, sent a letter on this topic to 
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The Secretary, unlike some Members 
of Congress and environmental groups, knows that the Forest Service is 
a part of the Agriculture Department, not the Interior Department.
  The bottom line is that Congress and the President have this year 
alone spent about a trillion dollars in the name of job creation. Yet, 
some within the administration are also actively trying to make policy 
changes like this that kill good-paying jobs which have existed for 86 
years.
  Not too long ago, I was in Bradford, Pennsylvania, on a Sunday 
morning, and I picked out a small church to worship in. And at the end 
of the service I had a young mom come up to me. She had three little 
kids in tow. They weren't very big. The oldest maybe was four years 
old.

  And she came up to me and she said, You're Mr. Thompson. She said, I 
want to thank you for what you're trying to

[[Page H8476]]

do to stand up for the right things of making sure that we have the 
rights to access to subsurface rights. You see, her husband makes his 
living working on oil wells. At that point, he was struggling to find a 
job and struggling to be able to support his family because of a policy 
change by this administration which attacks the subsurface private 
property rights. And that's not right.
  I've talked with businesses that have been in the business, have 
lived their entire life for generations in the Allegheny National 
Forest, that own subsurface rights and have every right for 86 years to 
access oil, natural gas, and minerals that they own. And, because of 
that arbitrary policy change by this administration, that's been shut 
down. And these folks who have been in business for just generations 
are no longer able to support themselves.
  This type of attack, this type of policy by this administration on 
private property owners, it impacts timber workers, it impacts 
drillers, excavation companies, businesses, schools, townships, and 
families. Frankly, they're all suffering. And they're suffering because 
of the arbitrary and devastating policies of this administration on 
private-property-right owners.
  I thank the gentleman from Utah and I yield back.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. This 
clearly shows we are desperate to create jobs and yet we have an 
Interior and an Agricultural Department whose decisions are killing 
jobs and the ripple effect those jobs have.
  I'd like one other illustration of how this is happening. My good 
friend, Representative Lummis from Wyoming, one of my favorite elements 
about Wyoming is that fact I'm an old schoolteacher. And this chart 
clearly shows that the blue line is what Wyoming pays their 
schoolteachers. The red line is what Montana pays their schoolteachers. 
And the only difference between those two States is Wyoming clearly 
realizes what can happen and how much good you can do when you develop 
the resources that are there in that particular State.
  I yield to the gentlelady from Wyoming.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman from Utah for yielding. The chart 
he shows is exactly right. The fact that Wyoming chose to develop its 
mining resources and Montana chose a path that retarded the development 
of its mining resources is the difference in the teacher salaries, as 
pointed out in that chart.
  We have been blessed in Wyoming by having low unemployment and it 
created an opportunity, until recently, for people from other States 
who have suffered job losses to find gainful employment and make a new 
life in Wyoming.
  A number of families have relocated, especially from Michigan, to the 
State of Wyoming, and predominantly the community of Gillette. 
Gillette, Wyoming, has become Wyoming's third-largest city and is 
growing in a way that brings young families vibrancy, activity, and the 
arts and recreation to a wonderful Wyoming community in northeast 
Wyoming.
  It's brought a lot of new people to Wyoming from Michigan looking for 
a new life and looking for work. Many of them came from the automobile 
industry and manufacturing industries and mining industries, quite 
frankly, that were devastated due to the economic downturn. But they 
were able to find jobs in Wyoming, and we're so happy to have them.
  Then, along comes Waxman-Markey, a bill that creates a national 
energy tax and a bill that creates a tremendous threat, especially to 
coal mining jobs.
  Jobs in the Wyoming mining industry are high paying. Eighty-six 
percent higher than the average wage in the State. The average annual 
wage in the mining industry in Wyoming was $73,000 in 2007. It is an 
extraordinarily liveable wage in Wyoming.
  But, if you look at the total coal mining jobs in the U.S. and the 
changes in policy under Waxman-Markey and other bills going through 
this Congress, the outlook for those Michigan residents who have 
proudly relocated to Wyoming is not very prosperous.
  Job losses related to Waxman-Markey, optimistic projections, total 
U.S. job loss in 5 years: 14,000 jobs lost in coal mining alone. A 
pessimistic number for job losses 5 years from now in coal mining 
alone: 35,000 jobs.
  Let's project it out because, as you know, Waxman-Markey doesn't take 
effect completely until the year 2050, but let's just go out 10 years 
and 15 years.
  The projected loss in jobs in 10 years due to Waxman-Markey, under 
the most optimistic scenario that can be put together: 20,000 jobs lost 
in coal mining alone. And the pessimistic number: 67,000 jobs. That's 
the entire population of my community of Cheyenne, and then some.
  Of course, 20 years out the optimistic job loss in coal alone: 50,000 
people. And the pessimistic number: 125,000 people in coal alone. These 
are not jobs that can be replaced by green jobs. These green jobs are 
not projected to pay 86 percent higher than the average wage in my 
State.
  Not only is the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the national energy 
tax, an attack on coal-producing States around the Nation, but other 
bills going through this Congress are having the same consequence.
  Let's take, for example, the Interior Appropriations bill that just 
passed the House. It had a provision in it that when a company acquires 
a Federal lease to mine more coal, they will pay a bid bonus payment. 
That occurs now. The problem is, these bid bonus payments are such a 
large amount of money that they have been spread out over 5 years so 
the companies can borrow less money or use production that they're 
currently accomplishing to pay in 5-year increments for those big coal 
bid bonus payments.
  Under the Interior Appropriations bill that just passed this House, 
they will have to pay that all up front. These are staggeringly large 
numbers, in the tens of millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of 
dollars.

                              {time}  2100

  Companies in this financial crisis cannot borrow those kinds of 
moneys. Consequently, there will be companies that will not bid, 
thereby reducing the receipts to the American taxpayer when there's not 
competitive bidding for the coal or there may be no bids at all because 
no company can borrow enough money to pay the entire 5-year payment up 
front.
  One little amendment in an enormous bill that has tremendous 
consequences to coal mining jobs went through without discussion, and 
there are many such amendments in these bills every day that are an 
attack on jobs in this country, an attack on jobs in my State. The 
attack on jobs in the Appalachian States is unbelievable under the cap-
and-trade bill. If I were in an Appalachian State, I would be even more 
concerned than I am for my State of Wyoming, and as the number one 
coal-producing State in the country, I am tremendously concerned about 
the loss of jobs.
  These policies are not good for America. They're not good for my 
State. They're not good for the West, and they're certainly not good 
for the hardworking people of America.
  I thank Mr. Bishop of Utah for allowing me the time to speak this 
evening.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I thank the gentlewoman from Wyoming who has so 
clearly pointed out how small decisions that we make here still have 
enormous impacts. We have seen what this administration has done in an 
effort, for whatever reason, to harm the creation of jobs when it deals 
with land policy.
  This week the Secretary of the Interior decided to have a time-out on 
new leases of uranium mining, which will lose at least 1,100 jobs. He 
earlier decided to put a halt on the development of oil shale projects. 
That could be up to 1 million jobs. It is estimated at 160,000 jobs 
that will be lost from the delay on Outer Continental Shelf 
development. An effort to stop the timber harvest in western Oregon 
immediately costs another 5,000 jobs.
  Mr. Speaker, as we look at what we're doing here, it is very clear 
that small business and families are struggling today. Republicans have 
put forth thoughtful, serious alternatives which have been ignored and 
not even discussed. It's also clear that the President's economic 
decisions have not produced jobs, not produced prosperity, and simply 
have not worked. It doesn't mean that we're out of options. We can 
still have a real recovery.

[[Page H8477]]

  If we emphasize and create an environment that empowers small 
business and empowers Americans and we focus on job creation, we stop 
the attack on the West and other areas of public lands and the people 
who live there and allow them to develop the resources that we have 
been given to create real jobs in this country, we can do that. That is 
still an option that we have. But we have to do it, and we have to do 
it together.
  There are a lot of other examples that I would like to go into, Mr. 
Speaker, but time does not allow that--maybe at some other time--where 
decisions by this administration have actually harmed families and 
their creation of jobs. Once again, we have to change directions. That 
has to stop.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________