[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 112 (Thursday, July 23, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H8687-H8693]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


       OUR FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM AND THE ROLE OF BIG GOVERNMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, what we will see over the next 60 minutes is a 
conversation here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives about our economy, this issue of energy, and 
innovation; frankly, our free enterprise system in the future, the role 
of the government, and I think the problems with excessive spending.
  But I want to open by talking a little bit about how I have vested my 
time and energies as a Member of the House over these last 15 years--
because it's a privilege to serve my last term here in the House as I 
am a candidate for governor of the State of Tennessee now--but I will 
tell you, I am one on the Republican side that has been extraordinarily 
active on alternative energy. For 8 years, I chaired the Renewable 
Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus here in the House with 
Congressman--now Senator--Mark Udall of Colorado.
  We built a caucus of over half the House, almost evenly divided 
between Democrats and Republicans, and advocated while Republicans were 
in the majority for unprecedented investments in renewable energy 
technologies. None of us got as far as we would like to have gotten, 
but we need to be realistic about how far we have gotten and what the 
capacity is for renewable sources today.
  But in 2005, we wrote the Energy Policy Act. Some people didn't like 
it, others did, but without question it had more investments in the 
renewable and energy efficiency sectors than any bill that had ever 
been signed into law before, and I was proud to help write that very 
language in that bill. So I've got a long history on alternative energy 
and moving towards new sources.
  But I voted against the recent cap-and-trade legislation because the 
differences today are not differences in goals or motives, because I 
think all Members of the House want the United States to move away, as 
much as possible, from fossil fuels or dirtier ways to create energy 
for our country's competitiveness. But the fact is, we have not 
developed these alternative sources yet to move as rapidly away as the 
leadership of the Congress now proposes if we're going to remain 
competitive. Their approach is much more a regulatory approach, and our 
approach is much more an innovation and technology approach.
  A year and a half ago, I was in China, in Shanghai, where you 
couldn't see from one side of the Bund, the river, to the other. 
Extraordinarily bad pollution. So we broached the subject with the 
Chinese: Where are you on the environment? Basically, the answer you 
get from the Chinese is, you are entitled to your industrial 
revolution; we're entitled to ours.
  Well, there's a big difference between when the United States had 
their industrial revolution and China having theirs now if there's no 
environmental regulation, because they're literally one-fifth of the 
world's population and climbing, and they are far and away the biggest 
polluters in the world. And if you think they're doing a cap-and-trade 
scheme to regulate their pollution or their air quality or their carbon 
emissions, you're kidding yourself. They're exactly the opposite.
  And here we are seriously considering a scheme that will dramatically 
regulate our productivity and our competitiveness, raise the cost of 
energy, frankly raise taxes to pay for it and, at the worst time since 
the Great Depression, strangle our ability actually to pull out of this 
economic downturn. And that is the beauty of American innovation.
  Not long ago, I was personally speaking with the prime minister of 
Australia, and he was telling me that he had great hope for the future 
because the U.S. had such innovation that we would lead the world out 
of this economic malaise. But I've got to tell you, we are now moving 
more towards big government regulation and the lack of innovation than 
at any time in modern history, instead of moving towards it.
  Now, I think this is a challenge that we share in the House, but we 
have got to get back to a reasonable middle ground because American 
innovation is the only way to turn this economy around. Our 
entrepreneurship is the beautiful, what I call the goose, that lays the 
golden egg, the engine that creates the revenues to get back to a 
balanced budget. That's how the budget got balanced in the 1990s. We 
did slow the growth of spending below inflation and that was laudable, 
but it was new revenues in the information sector. People like Bill 
Gates. We actually led the world for so long on the information 
revolution that revenues surpassed expenses, and we balanced the 
budget.
  We could do that again with energy. I call it the En-Tech agenda, 
where we would have a robust, U.S.-led manufacturing explosion in new 
energy solutions instead of this regulatory scheme that says we're 
going to actually limit the amount of energy that can be produced by 
certain sources and mandate a certain amount by other sources. And

[[Page H8688]]

the harsh reality is those sources are not available, and the irony of 
ironies on the floor of this House is that the very people who are 
opposed to coal and clean coal and new investments on how to better use 
fossil resources are the same people, many of them, like the gentleman 
from Massachusetts and the gentleman from California whose very names 
this legislation is under, Waxman and Markey, that are anti-nuclear.
  The one single technology in the United States that can rapidly move 
us away from fossil electricity production, they're against it, too. So 
if you're against nuclear and you're against coal, what you end up 
being for is a lack of electricity and a lack of energy and a lack of 
competitiveness and a lack of innovation and a lack of manufacturing.
  And the question was asked on the floor earlier this week, where are 
the jobs? I hate to admit this, but a lot of those jobs are in China 
and India, and they are going other places. That's where those jobs 
are, because our manufacturing sector is leaving because we're not 
unleashing the innovation and the entrepreneurship and the incentives 
for people to take risk and invest; just the opposite.
  And back-to-back behind this cap-and-trade scheme, which is a big 
regulatory and tax burden on the American people and small business, 
then you talk about this health care scheme; this is a one-two punch 
that lands America flat on its back. And I've got to tell you, the 
American people are turning against it, and that's why the majority 
party can't pass the bills even through the committees. They have 
punted for the week, even though they are in a big hurry, because they 
want to do it before their approval rating falls too low, and they 
don't have the political capital to do it. And why would you rush the 
largest transformation in modern American society, this health care 
scheme, through before your political clout evaporates? That is really 
an un-American approach.
  Now, we've got some people on the floor tonight that want to speak. 
Dr. Virginia Foxx, an outstanding Member from North Carolina, comes, 
and I yield to her.
  Ms. FOXX. Well, I want to thank my colleague from Tennessee (Mr. 
Wamp), whose loss to this House is going to be immeasurable. His 
contribution here in the House of Representatives representing his 
district in Tennessee has been outstanding. Not only has he done a 
fantastic job as a legislator, but his leadership in our weekly prayer 
breakfast has been exemplary. I should think of some better adjectives 
to say, but exemplary will have to do. He is really a tremendous role 
model for all of us in his attendance, in his caring for others, and he 
is going to be very much missed in the House when he leaves here. He 
didn't pay me to say that. He didn't know I was going to say that, but 
it needs to be said. Fortunately, we have him for the next 17 months 
still in the Congress, and I'm very, very grateful to him.

  He has set the stage very well on this issue of the cap-and-trade 
bill, which the majority in this House pushed through the House with no 
chance for people to read, a 300-page amendment brought to the Rules 
Committee at 2:30 in the morning, and then the bill brought to the 
floor later that day.
  There is a lot of sentiment out in the public now by the American 
people about the fact that people voted for that bill without having 
read it. Now, fortunately for our side, most of us voted against the 
bill. We knew pieces of it, and we knew there was enough bad in that 
bill to vote ``no,'' because the bill is going to do a lot of negative 
things in this country.
  It's going to raise taxes. It's going to raise the cost of utilities. 
The President warned during his campaign last year, he admitted it--and 
we're quoting him--he admitted that, you know, under his energy plan, 
utility rates would necessarily skyrocket. Well, skyrocketing means 
probably an average of $3,000 more to pay for energy for the average 
family. The average family is going to have to pay over $3,000 more a 
year for energy.
  The American people deserve better, and as my colleague from 
Tennessee (Mr. Wamp) said, we are the most innovative people in the 
world, and the reason we are the most innovative people in the world is 
because we are the freest people in the world. This country was founded 
on the concept of freedom, founded on the concept of innovation. Many 
people don't realize that, until this country was formed, never before 
had a people believed that they weren't the property of another human 
being. We believed in freedom, God-given freedom, and that's what 
formed this country.
  Now, through the people in charge of this Congress, the Democrats in 
charge of this Congress, and a Democrat President, they are working at 
every level of our lives, every aspect of our lives, to take away that 
freedom. They want to take away our ability to have low-cost energy.
  Many people also don't make the connection between the fact that the 
reason we were such a manufacturing powerhouse for so long was that we 
had low-cost, reliable energy. India and China didn't have low-cost, 
reliable energy. They couldn't count on having the energy they needed 
to run their plants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like we did. It 
helped us tremendously to become a manufacturing powerhouse. But with 
the cap-and-tax bill and the concepts that the Democrats have put 
forward, it's going to seriously undermine that ability.
  Republicans want us to be energy independent, and I am highly 
insulted when over and over the President and the leadership of the 
majority party say that Republicans don't have an answer, that we just 
want the status quo, that we're the Party of No. We're not the Party of 
No. We're the party of doing things right.
  Let's stick with what has worked in this country over the years. We 
can look at Europe and see what they've done. They've tried cap-and-
tax, and what has it done? Bankrupted them. Spain wanted to create lots 
of green jobs, they said. They have the highest unemployment rate in 
Europe, over 15 percent.
  We can look across the ocean and see how this has failed, and it just 
is mind-boggling that the people who are in charge of this Congress and 
in the White House think that they can replicate what was done in 
Europe and have a different outcome. It's never happened before. It's 
never going to happen again, and as my colleague from Tennessee said, 
we are facing one of the greatest takeovers of our freedoms through 
cap-and-tax and the health care plan that's being proposed.
  But you know, the American people are still in charge. They stopped a 
bad immigration bill a couple of years ago that was being debated in 
the Senate. They stopped it cold. We can stop these things, too. And 
what I'm urging people to do is--you don't have to write to most of us, 
all of us are going to be on the floor tonight--and say, Don't vote for 
this health care plan. We know that. We're not going to do it.

                              {time}  2045

  Cap-and-tax has passed the House, gone to the Senate, but put the 
pressure on your Senators and write to somebody who lives in a district 
who is represented by someone who voted for cap-and-tax and tell them 
you're going to remember that, they're going to remember that. 
Encourage them to do that.
  We have other very eloquent Members on the floor tonight who want to 
speak on this issue so I'm going to yield back to my good friend, Mr. 
Wamp from Tennessee.
  Mr. WAMP. I thank the gentlelady for her intellect and her insight 
and dogged determination on behalf of the people of North Carolina. She 
raised two issues I want to address before yielding to the gentleman 
from Georgia.
  One, she said that sometimes Republicans are called the Party of No. 
I would say to the gentlelady, if that means saying ``no'' to tax 
increases and large rate increases in your electricity bills at a time 
of economic duress by the people we represent, then, yes, we would be 
the Party of No.
  And she said something about bad legislation was stopped. I remind 
people that the immigration reform proposals were made by a Republican 
President, and they were wrong. And Republicans in the Congress stopped 
the President from going forward.
  One question I would ask today is: At what point are the Democrats in 
the majority here going to stop the Democrat President from a wrong-
headed

[[Page H8689]]

proposal when the American people are clearly against it? Yet, this is 
where you have to stand up and say, This is not only bad for America, 
Mr. President; it's bad for our party. And we said that and immigration 
reform did not go forward under Bush, because it was wrong-headed. The 
American people weren't for it.
  And here, today, we would ask: Are you just going to follow the 
President of the United States and his Chief of Staff down this very 
liberal road? And for how long? And for the 52 so-called Blue Dogs, 
it's going to be a real test. What are you for? More for the liberal 
leadership of your party or the values that you say that you represent?
  So I'd like to yield to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Broun, who's 
been a really dynamic Member of Congress in his relatively short 
tenure, but he worked a long time and worked really hard to get here 
and he brings a depth of experience.
  I yield to Dr. Broun of Georgia for as much time as he may consume.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Thank you, Mr. Wamp. I appreciate you yielding 
me some time.
  Mr. Speaker, government is growing, freedom is going. Many of us came 
to the floor through Special Orders and said, Where are the jobs? Mr. 
Wamp very eloquently told you, Mr. Speaker, where the jobs are. They're 
going to China and India and Sri Lanka and all the different countries 
around the world where the energy costs and the environmental 
regulations aren't such a hamper to industrial growth and development.
  Mr. Speaker, I have several manufacturing plants in my district in 
northeast Georgia that have told me if that tax-and-trade, cap-and-tax 
bill passes the U.S. Senate, that they're just going to have to lock 
the door. They're going to lock the door and all the people who work in 
those factories in northeast Georgia are going to be out of work.
  Right now, today, this very day, many of the counties in my Tenth 
Congressional District of Georgia have unemployment rates pushing over 
14 percent. In Georgia, just a couple of days ago, it was announced 
that the State unemployment rate is 10.1 percent.
  I heard today in Augusta, Georgia, which because of all the job-
producing entities that have to do with government, State and Federal 
Government, such as the Eisenhower Army Hospital on Fort Gordon, Fort 
Gordon itself, the Savannah River site Department of Energy facility 
over in South Carolina, in my good friend Gresham Barrett's district, 
and the Medical College of Georgia, my alma mater, those four entities, 
plus the VA hospital--we have two VA hospitals in Augusta, Georgia--
those give a buffering effect to job losses. But in Augusta, Georgia, 
it's 10.1 percent now, from what I understand.
  So where are the jobs? Well, they've left. And why? If you look at 
what has happened, we see over and over again our colleagues on the 
Democratic side blame George W. Bush for this bad economy and all the 
things that are going on today. I heard Members of the Democratic Party 
just this week blame the stagnation and poor economy on George W. Bush.
  Well, George Bush was a big-spending President. There's no question a 
about that. He did create some deficit and debt. There's no question 
about that. And I was against that. I wasn't here during most of that 
period of time in Congress, but the last almost 2 years of his 
Presidency, I was here, and I voted against every big spending bill, 
every tax increase.
  But I want to remind you, Mr. Speaker, and I want to remind the 
American people, if I can speak to them directly, that it's been on the 
Democratic leadership for the last 2\1/2\ years that most of the jobs 
have been lost. And if we look at the deficit and debt that's been 
created just in the last 6 months under this Democratic administration 
and under the rule of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in Congress, we have 
seen more debt, more deficit created than George Bush ever thought 
about doing.
  The Democrats need to quit talking about George W. Bush because it's 
their deficit, it's their debt.
  And then they passed this tax-and-trade bill. They call it that. They 
also call it cap-and-tax because it's about taxes. The President 
himself a few weeks ago said he had to pass this cap-and-trade bill to 
be able to fund his health care reform. Now what's that mean? It means 
that he needs the revenue.
  It's about revenue. It's not about the environment. In fact, that 
bill, if it passes in the U.S. Senate, is going to cost more jobs. And 
it's going to hurt the very people that I hear over and over again that 
the Democrats claim that they represent.
  They claim the Republicans only represent Big Business, but actually, 
Mr. Speaker, it's the Democratic Party that represents Big Business, 
because Big Business prospers under Big Government.
  It's small business that we as Republicans represent. And this energy 
bill that's sitting over in the Senate is going to hurt small business. 
It's going to hurt everybody. It's going to hurt the poor people 
because they're going to be paying for higher energy costs.
  Dr. Foxx was talking about it, and I think my good friend Mr. Wamp 
from Tennessee was saying that everybody in this country is going to 
have to pay more. They're going to pay more for gasoline. When you flip 
on the light switch in your home, you're going to pay more for that 
electricity. When you go buy groceries, you're going to pay more for 
groceries. When you go to the drug store to buy your medications, 
you're going to pay more because these energy costs are going to be 
passed to every single good and service in America. Every single one.
  It's been estimated that it's going to cost, because of higher energy 
costs, the average family, as Dr. Foxx was saying, over $3,100 per 
average family in America. Now some people try to refute that. The MIT 
economist said, Well, we're taking this a little out of context. But 
the thing is, what he looks at is not what it's going to cost people 
out of their pocketbook. In reality, it's going to cost every average 
family in this country over $3,100 per average family for higher energy 
costs if that bill passes the U.S. Senate.

  So we're going to lose jobs. We're going to lose jobs because small 
businesses are going to have a hard time paying the energy costs with 
this tax-and-trade bill that this House passed.
  All small business can do is increase the cost of their goods and 
services to the public or they have to cut back or they have to cut 
back on their expenses. And the way they do that is by letting people 
go or reducing salaries or cutting hours to their employees.
  So the average worker in this country is going to take home less 
money if that tax-and-trade bill passes the U.S. Senate. This health 
care reform bill that we hear the Democrats are going to bring before 
the August break is going to cost more jobs.
  Well, how many more jobs are these two bills going to cost? Mr. 
Speaker, it's estimated it's going to cost many millions of Americans, 
working class, blue collar, small business jobs all across this 
country.
  Just last night, the President said if the burden primarily falls on 
the middle class, he won't be for it. That's hogwash because his bill, 
his plan is going to fall on the backs of everybody, including the 
middle class. It's not true. Middle class is going to pick up the bill 
for this health care reform, for the tax-and-trade. We've got to stop 
it.
  Now, Republicans aren't going to stop it. Only the American people 
can stop it. Former U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen one time said when he 
feels the heat, he sees the light, Mr. Speaker. And what he's saying is 
when he gets calls and letters, faxes, e-mails, visits about an issue, 
he starts feeling the heat.
  Most Members of Congress in the House and the Senate are going to be 
running for reelection at some point. Most want to get reelected. And 
so when their constituents contact them about an issue, that's how we 
feel the heat.
  So, Mr. Speaker, if I can speak out to the American people and tell 
them what to do to defeat this, Mr. Speaker, what I would tell every 
single individual who wants to solve the economic problems is to stop 
this cap-and-tax bill that the Senate is debating, also this health 
reform bill that's going to destroy quality health care, put a 
Washington bureaucrat between every patient and their doctor and the 
decisions are going to be made by that Washington bureaucrat, not by 
the patient, not the patient's family, but by a Washington bureaucrat. 
It's not going to even cover everybody, and it's going

[[Page H8690]]

to be extremely expensive, according to the Congressional Budget 
Office.
  If the American people really understood what was going on in those 
two bills, they would rise up and say ``no'' to their U.S. Senators, 
``no'' to their Members of this House, to their U.S. Congressmen. They 
can call, Mr. Speaker, they can e-mail, they can fax letters, they can 
visit the district offices, State offices, and say ``no'' to cap-and-
trade, ``no'' to Barack Obama's plan, ObamaCare, and it's critical that 
we do that, because if we don't, our economy is going to be destroyed, 
jobs are going to be destroyed, the environment is not going to be any 
better worldwide. In fact, I think it will be worse.
  And we're going to go down a road towards exactly what Mr. Obama's 
good friend Hugo Chavez has taken in Venezuela. We have a clear picture 
of what's going to happen in America if we continue down this road that 
this administration and the leadership in this House and the Senate 
today, the Democrat leadership, has taken us. All we have to do is look 
off the shore of Florida at Cuba and see where America is going, 
because that's the picture of what this country is going to be like 
several decades from now if we go down this road the way we're going.
  So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that the American people will understand. God 
says in Hosea 4:6, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
  Please, please, our American people need to be informed. We need to 
have that knowledge spread among the people. And the American people, 
Mr. Speaker, need to rise up and say ``no'' to ObamaCare, ``no'' to 
cap-and-trade, ``yes'' to jobs, ``yes'' to a strong economy, ``yes'' to 
creating jobs.
  We're accused, as Dr. Foxx said, of being the Party of No on the 
Republican side. But, actually, we are the Party of Know, K-N-O-W. We 
know how to stimulate the economy, we know how to create jobs. We know 
how to be good stewards of the environment. And we will be. And that's 
what we need to do.
  I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for yielding. God bless you.

                              {time}  2100

  Mr. WAMP. Thank you, Dr. Broun. And before I yield to the gentleman 
from Virginia, I just want to follow up to say, in my 15 years here, I 
have tried to temper my partisanship. And this is not, to me, about 
Republicans and Democrats. It truly is about all Americans and how 
serious these choices that we're making are for everyone. I don't think 
either party has an exclusive on integrity or ideas.
  The truth is, in 2009 neither party has a whole lot to brag about 
because, as Dr. Broun said, the previous administration--and I think 
President Bush restored honor and integrity to the White House at the 
time it needed it. He and Laura Bush are two of the finest people in 
history. But we lost our party's identification over these last several 
years by spending too much, making mistakes, and not being consistent. 
But that doesn't mean that what's happening today is either okay or 
better. As a matter of fact, it's like the mistakes we made on 
steroids.
  The budgets proposed by this President so far exceed all of the 
deficit spending that President Bush had over his 8 years. It's 
remarkable. It's actually breathtaking that we would be doing this. The 
whole question of ``Where are the jobs?'' this week came up over the 
stimulus. Nearly $800 billion of one-time spending. No way any analyst 
would say more than 15 percent of that spending would even create a 
single job. 85 percent of it was, frankly, pent-up welfare and social 
spending, their priorities that they thought hadn't been funded 
adequately over the last 8 years. They threw all that money at new 
government programs and more government spending. That's why the 
unemployment rate in Washington, D.C., is the lowest in the country 
today, because Washington jobs are growing, but jobs in the hinterland 
are shrinking.
  Now, economies rise and fall. They're cyclical by definition. But the 
government can either make it worse or make it better by their 
policies. Unfortunately, these policies are actually making it worse. 
That's why the question comes after the stimulus and the bailouts and 
the borrowing and the spending, ``Where are the jobs?'' because we're 
going the other way the more you do that.
  It didn't work in Japan. They called it ``the lost decade'' because 
they tried to borrow their way into success and a good economy. It 
doesn't work. You can't borrow your way out of debt. You can't spend 
your way to prosperity. Other countries have tried it, and it failed. 
And here we are making this big mistake. It's not a Republican/Democrat 
thing. It's whoever is doing it needs to stop for the good of the 
American people.
  I yield to the very well-schooled ranking member of the Agriculture 
Subcommittee on Energy and former lead Republican on the Agriculture 
Committee, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) for as much time 
as he needs.
  Mr. GOODLATTE. Well, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, my good 
friend, for yielding me this time and for organizing this excellent 
discussion about what we need to do about America's energy policy and 
about creating those jobs because we know we have the ideas. We have 
been talking about them for well over a year now in terms of the 
American Energy Act and things that we have been doing to try to bring 
this Congress in the right direction on the creation of new jobs by 
creating an America that is not dependent upon foreign sources of 
energy.
  I have had the privilege of traveling to the gentleman's district in 
Tennessee to talk about one of those areas. We held a conference down 
there, talking about renewable fuels, particularly fuels generated by 
switchgrass and other forms of agricultural production other than corn, 
which has been such a problem in our country today. That is right 
there, and that is something that we can do.
  We all support developing other forms of new technology. We want to 
find a cheaper way to build solar cells. We want to find a less 
expensive way to generate electricity from wind or to generate power 
from geothermal and other new technologies. We also want to encourage 
as much energy efficiency as we possibly can. All of those things will 
help our families and help our businesses. It will help them remain 
competitive and preserve and create jobs.
  But we also know that it is absolutely important, if America is going 
to create new jobs, that we have to utilize the resources that we have 
in this country, that we have been dependent upon for a long time. And 
until you have new technologies, you don't raise the cost of the types 
of energy that people are dependent upon.
  More than half of our electricity comes from coal, a resource which 
we have in tremendous abundance in this country. Twenty percent of our 
electricity comes from nuclear power, another area that the gentleman 
from Tennessee and I share a very strong common interest in, he having 
Oak Ridge in his congressional district and I having Lynchburg, a major 
nuclear power center in the country, in my congressional district.
  The legislation that we voted on a month ago here in the Congress did 
nothing to promote the most greenhouse gas-reducing form of electricity 
generation, nuclear power. That, to me, seemed to be something that was 
completely and totally neglected in that legislation.
  Coal, on the other hand, wasn't neglected. It was thrown out in a way 
that will raise the cost of electricity to my constituents and anybody 
in the country from areas that are heavily dependent upon electricity 
generation from coal, which, by the way, is most of the country.
  So that was the wrong approach. The right approach is the American 
Energy Act. Many of us--I think everybody who is here this evening--
came back here to Washington last August when gasoline prices were $4 a 
gallon and oil was $140 a barrel. We took the floor in a darkened 
Chamber day after day after day to talk to the people who were touring 
the Capitol. People around the country were aware of what we were doing 
to tell the story of what needed to be done.
  We came back into session in September, and that was completely 
ignored. And we never have revisited the need to have a comprehensive 
energy act where, if we really made this a top priority of our country, 
we would become free of dependence upon foreign

[[Page H8691]]

oil and other foreign sources of energy in 15 or 20 years. And even 
more importantly, we would create millions of jobs, exploiting those 
resources that we have in this country.
  This is not a new idea. This is how America came to be a strong 
Nation, a competitive Nation, a Nation with millions of jobs. The 
reminder of the importance of doing this is right there above us on the 
wall, above our Speaker's rostrum, above the American flag, above our 
Nation's motto, ``In God we trust,'' at the very top of the wall, a 
famous quote from Daniel Webster that says, ``Let us develop the 
resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its 
institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, 
in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be 
remembered.''
  That saying, more than 150 years old, is every bit as important today 
as it was back when Daniel Webster said it. That's what we have to 
hearken to; not the idea that somehow government will solve all of 
these problems, that government can provide people with all the health 
care they need, paying for it with taxes on small businesses and losing 
jobs, mandating all kinds of new agencies and institutions, more than 
30 to run this crazy program; not with the cap-and-tax proposal that 
will cost American jobs, raise the cost of living for every American, 
make it harder for manufacturers and farmers and others to be 
competitive with other countries around the world that have no 
intention of engaging in a practice that raises unnecessarily the cost 
of the basic ingredient for manufacturing and agricultural success and 
really enjoying a good standard of living for anyone's life, and that 
is having access to affordable sources of energy.

  It is certainly not going to be solved by having this government 
spend through the roof. We saw back in January the most amazing single 
appropriations bill ever, the so-called stimulus package to create 
jobs. Now here we are 6 months later, and the question is being asked 
day after day after day, not just by those of us here in the Congress 
but by people all across America, ``Where are the jobs?''
  Well, you don't get them by government spending. You get them by 
returning to the ingenuity of the American people, their hardworking 
spirit, their knowledge that it is the free enterprise system that will 
bring this economy back. But we delay day after day after day and dig 
the hole deeper and deeper and deeper when we pile up debt like this--
$1 trillion. That is a stack of thousand-dollar bills 63 miles high.
  And then in March we went on to pass the budget for next year. We 
said, ``Ooh, I'll outdo that.'' I voted against it. Mr. Wamp voted 
against it. Others here talking tonight voted against it. Every Member 
of our party voted against it, but also a lot of Members in the other 
party voted against a budget that has a $1.2 trillion deficit for next 
year. That's a stack of thousand-dollar bills 75 miles high, which 
reaches up into outer space, and we don't see any end to it.
  The 10-year projection for the budget passed by the majority party 
and the President never sees it going below--the highest deficit ever 
before this year was $450 billion. It never gets below $600 billion 
ever again as far as the eye can see. That will cost jobs. That will 
raise the cost of living. That will raise interest rates and inflation. 
It is devastating to our country.
  We need to return to sound fiscal responsibility. We need to return 
to an opportunity to have an American energy policy that creates 
millions of jobs here by drilling for oil offshore and on Federal 
lands; by extracting the huge resources we have of natural gas; by 
building new, safe, more modern, latest-technology nuclear power 
plants; by using clean-burning coal technology and advancing that and 
developing new technologies. All of these things coupled together will 
lead to a bright future. But the path we are on now worries all 
Americans, and we need to turn off of it as quickly as possible.
  I thank the gentleman again and hope that the message that sits on 
our wall, let us develop the resources of our land--not Venezuela, not 
Nigeria, not Saudi Arabia. Let us develop the resources of our land. 
That will lead to the creation of the jobs that people are looking for 
and the restoration of our economy. I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. WAMP. The gentleman's comments are spot-on. We're grateful he 
came and participated and for his really brilliant leadership here in 
the House.
  Another one of our smarter Members from the Republican side is the 
gentleman from Michigan. There are other Members coming to the floor, 
so I am going to withhold my comments.
  I yield such time as he may consume to the chairman of the House 
Republican Policy Committee, Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan.
  Mr. McCOTTER. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee.
  When the cap-and-tax national energy tax bill was passed from the 
House, the Congress went on a break, and when people went home on 
break, they found out how much the American people did not like the 
cap-and-tax bill that this House passed. In fact, I remember being 
home--I am sure a lot of Members had this moment, both people who voted 
for it and voted against it. You go to the grocery store, somebody 
might recognize you. They would look around. They would walk up and 
they'd say, Are you my Representative? And you'd say, Yes. They'd look 
at you and look around again, and they'd say, Dude, this is crazy. This 
cap-and-tax is crazy. I would just say, Yes, it is. And I said, 
Especially in Michigan, our State where we have a 15.2 percent 
unemployment rate, where we are a manufacturing giant now in difficult 
times, why the Federal Government would make it harder to manufacture 
in the United States, why we would be but a Senate vote and a 
Presidential signature away from a radical, ideological imposition on 
America's energy future that will raise people's energy taxes and will 
kill their jobs.
  I still can't figure out why we would do this. It is absolutely 
insane to add massive government spending, debt and regulatory burdens 
on a recessive economy, and why you would threaten to raise tax rates 
on people at the very time we need the entrepreneurial genius of the 
American people to grow this economy, create jobs and start to 
stabilize ourselves for the future and the international competition in 
this age of globalization.
  Now, when I say it's insane, people say, Well, isn't that a little 
harsh? I say no. I'm 43. As I was growing up, we had a new book put in 
front of us in school. It was called Ecology. It had a nice picture of 
the world on it from outer space. I was like, Oh, this is nice. And in 
the course of learning about ecology, my generation, Generation X, was 
told that the greatest threat we faced wasn't the Soviet Union. I 
tended to disagree even at an early age. I was a bit precocious about 
the Russians.
  They told me in my generation that we would freeze to death in the 
next ice age if we didn't reduce pollution. Flash forward. My wife and 
I, our children are in school. Today our children's generation is being 
told that unless the government regulates the economy and raises energy 
taxes, they will face a climate change in which global warming will 
destroy their way of life.
  So we have gone from ice to fire, and yet the solution remains the 
same, oddly, from the proponents of the cap-and-tax legislation who 
say, We have to have government control of the weather, raise your 
energy taxes, dictate your lifestyle and devastate your jobs all so 
that we can prevent global warming. This from the people who told me 
there was an ice age coming.

                              {time}  2115

  That, to me, is not sane. That is not realistic. That is not based on 
science. That is based on ideology, and ideology applied to a nation at 
a struggling time leads to dire ramifications for the American people.
  I want to show you the extreme to which this goes. When in the 
majority the Republican Party heard about the debt dangers the United 
States faced, especially debts from nations such as Communist China, I 
agree with that. Now that the Democratic majority and President Obama 
are racking up unprecedented levels of debt and unprecedented levels of 
spending, I want to show you what the Commerce Secretary said about 
cap-and-trade regulations in our relations with Communist China. This 
is from The Wall Street Journal, But yesterday, Commerce

[[Page H8692]]

Secretary Gary Locke said something amazing: U.S. consumers should pay 
for Chinese greenhouse gas emissions. You see, the Communist Chinese, 
in one of the ironies of life, are tending to protect their 
manufacturing base more than the free market--United States--from 
governmental intrusions, regulations, and taxation.
  Now, what Mr. Locke, our Commerce Secretary, said was this. It's 
important that those who consume the products being made all around the 
world to the benefit of America. And it's our own consumption activity 
that's causing the emission of greenhouse gas. Americans need to pay 
for that.
  I want you to think about this. After President Clinton signed the 
permanent normalization trade relations with Communist China, we in 
Michigan, before the rest of the country, started asking where are the 
jobs. Why is manufacturing in America hurting? Why is it going 
offshore? Where is it going? We knew where it was going. It was going 
to Communist China.
  So we have a two-for here. We have the Commerce secretary saying that 
he doesn't seem to mind that the jobs are going over there and that 
what we really need to do is, if the United States decides to continue 
to pass legislation that impedes and impairs and harms its 
manufacturing base, not that we should seek fair trade with Communist 
China, but what we should do is borrow money from Communist China with 
interest to pay them for their greenhouse gas emissions to get them to 
adopt the very thing that American people do not want to adopt in 
America. I want you to think about this. I'm going to borrow money with 
interest from Communist Chinese to give to them so they can be 
environmentally sound.
  Now, I do not understand why, given what happens to our party here in 
the House, why the Commerce Secretary did not say that the Communist 
China is the party of ``no.'' And I think it would have been 
appropriate. But I also would not expect that from an administration 
whose vice president says we have to keep spending to keep from going 
bankrupt. I had no idea that that meant that not only would he spend 
the money here, he'd spend the money over in Communist China and borrow 
from them to give it back, leaving you, the American taxpayer, with the 
interest.
  And it also would not be surprising to me from an administration who 
said we have to spread the wealth around. I don't think the President 
said quite how far he said he was going to spread your wealth. I don't 
remember him saying that that the world would be a better place in, we 
take U.S. taxpayer money, send it to Communist China to make red 
bureaucrats green. I would have liked to have heard that. I'm sure a 
lot of people would have liked to have heard that around October last 
year where their money was going to wind up, rather than announced now 
via the Commerce Secretary.
  The frustration that the American people feel is that they realize 
our prosperity comes from the private sector, not the public sector. 
They understand that we do not want a radical cold-turkey shift from 
fossil fuels into some nebulous green energy future. What we want to 
see is maximum American energy production, commonsense conservation and 
free-market green technological innovations that will transition us 
into a more environmentally sound economy of the future.
  What we see in an ideologically rife House, Senate, and 
administration is the opposite. They want to do cold turkey on fossil 
fuels and the existing economy and move us into a radical, and again, 
ill-defined green economy that in many ways--with the absence of 
nuclear and others--proves impossible to obtain in a reasonable period 
of time without doing more damage to a recessed economy.
  I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his time.
  Mr. WAMP. I thank the gentleman from Michigan.
  Before I yield time to the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Speaker, can 
you tell me how much time we have remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. I believe you have approximately 10 minutes.
  Mr. WAMP. I just want to point out that I believe there are shared 
goals in the House, but there clearly is some great difference in the 
approaches again to these goals. And the problem with these two big 
issues that are pending before the American people is that they involve 
energy and health care. And energy is the one big issue that can bring 
us to our knees economically. We've seen that because of the price of 
oil, the availability of electricity can paralyze our economy, and 
frankly, the cost of this move is heavy, the price is high.
  And that's why it is so important--really, the big issues in the 
world today clearly are water--it's a big issue around the world. It's 
going to be scarce, harder to come by, can create conflict. Energy is 
going to be scarce, hard to come by. We are all interested in air 
quality--and the environment is important--but there has to be a 
balance of regulation.
  And then this issue of health. The American people do not want the 
government to get between their health care provider and themselves, 
particularly between the doctor-patient relationship. And I have to 
tell you this leap does that. And you don't see people leaving here to 
go to Canada and Great Britain now for their health care. It's the 
other way around because they've already gone on these systems that are 
being proposed here.
  I want to come back before the bottom of the hour and talk about 
nuclear. But I want to yield to a member of the Commerce Committee, the 
gentleman from Louisiana who's brought great expertise to the Congress, 
is an energy production expert because of the State that he comes from, 
and knows that we have to increase the energy capacity in order to 
maintain our competitiveness globally today in a global economy. We 
can't restrict our sources of energy and stay competitive.
  Mr. Scalise from Louisiana is recognized for such time as he may 
consume.
  Mr. SCALISE. Well, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. I appreciate 
your leadership on this issue and the fact that you are willing to come 
here tonight and talk about some of these challenges that our country's 
facing. And when you look across our country today, people are facing 
many challenges.
  But I think what's even more concerning to people when they look here 
in Washington, and they look at what's happening in the Congress, and 
they look at what this administration is doing, I think it's 
frightening people across the country. The fact that they see these 
policies that are being proposed, and some of these policies that have 
actually passed. In January, when President Obama took the oath of 
office, one of his first steps was to pass this unprecedented spending 
bill that he called the stimulus bill and he rammed it through 
Congress, a bill that everybody knows that nobody that voted for the 
bill had time to read because they rammed it through so fast, because 
they said it needed to pass because it was going to stop unemployment 
from reaching 8 percent. Well, now we're at 9\1/2\ percent 
unemployment, and that number is climbing.

  The problem is our deficit is climbing even higher. We exceeded a 
trillion dollars in deficit just a week ago. Unprecedented in our 
country's history. And people are looking at that and saying, Why is it 
that every American family is cutting back to manage and live within 
their means? State governments have been cutting their budgets to live 
within their means. Why is it that Washington and Congress, especially, 
is spending money out of control at a rate that is unprecedented, and 
it cannot be contained?
  And then they look at the policies. And I think that's what's 
concerning people especially today. And they look at this crazy energy 
proposal, this cap-and-trade energy tax and this proposal to have a 
government takeover of our health care system. And clearly reforms need 
to be made to health care, but there is bipartisan agreement on a 
number of reforms that can be made to allow people to have the 
portability so if they move from one job to another, they can take 
their health care with them.
  But a real competition in health care or address pre-existing 
conditions, there is bipartisan agreement on all of those issues. Not 
one of those is in the President's bill because he chose to go it 
alone. He said, I don't need to work with Republicans. And in fact, 
he's not even working with moderate Democrats. He's decided to go with 
the most

[[Page H8693]]

far extreme leftists that want to just have a government takeover of 
health care where, literally, a bureaucrat in Washington that's not 
elected, didn't even go through a Senate confirmation, can have the 
ability to tell you which doctor you can see or even if you can get an 
operation.
  And we've seen the devastating results in countries like Canada, in 
England, where they've done the exact same thing. And now those people 
who have the means in those countries come to America to get health 
care. Because even with our flaws--and we've got flaws in our system 
that need to be worked out--but even with our flaws, we have the best 
medical care in the world. And yet they want to destroy that system by 
having a government take it over and then add $800 billion of new taxes 
on the backs of American families.
  And if that wasn't enough, that leads us into the topic that I know 
my friend from Tennessee really started off talking about, and that's 
energy. This cap-and-trade energy tax that actually passed this House, 
and I sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee and we debated that for 
weeks, and I strongly opposed their bill because their bill doesn't 
address the energy problems in our country. We don't have an energy 
policy in America. Imagine that. The greatest country in the history of 
the world, the most industrialized nation in the world, doesn't have a 
true energy policy. We've got the ability to create a comprehensive 
energy policy that actually eliminates our dependence on Middle Eastern 
oil. And we filed a bill.
  Some people would lead you to believe there is no alternative out 
there. It's just this cap-and-trade energy tax or nothing.
  Well, there is a different approach. There was an approach called the 
American Energy Act, which I'm proud to be a co-sponsor of. I know my 
friend from Tennessee is a cosponsor of. It's an all-of-the-above 
policy. It says yes, we should pursue those alternative sources of 
energy like wind and solar power. But unfortunately, those technologies 
aren't advanced enough yet. You can't run your car or house on wind or 
solar. You surely couldn't run a hospital on wind and solar because 
they're intermittent sources of energy, and so you need some other 
forms to keep power generating in this country. And so yes, you have 
coal production and we should advance the technologies to make clean 
coal technology.
  But you also need advance nuclear power; nuclear power emits zero 
carbon. It's a zero carbon emission source of energy. Eighty percent of 
Europe is on nuclear power now. It wasn't on their bill. They 
discouraged it. We need to move towards those other alternatives.
  We also need to recognize the existing types of energies we have in 
our country, and that's oil and natural gas. It's also some of the new 
sources and technologies that we have, like these tar sands in the 
Midwest which right now are prohibited from being explored by Federal 
policy. In fact, if you go into the Gulf of Mexico, there are many 
areas there where there are huge reserves of oil and natural gas that 
are banned from even being explored.
  I've taken a few Members out to the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks ago. 
We went out to the largest natural gas exploration facility in the 
country. It's called Independence Hub. Nine hundred million cubic feet 
of gas a day. Actually represents 2 percent of our entire country's 
natural gas needs. It's out there in the Gulf of Mexico, and they have 
greater capacity. In fact, we keep finding more and more reserves of 
natural gas every day. In north Louisiana, I'm proud to have gone out 
and visited the area in Shreveport, Louisiana, called Hainesville. 
Hainesville shale find is the largest new find of natural gas in our 
country's history. It was just found 3 years ago, and we continue to 
find more and more reserves like that.
  So there are all kind of natural resources that our country can use, 
and yet Federal policy blocks it. And the only answer President Obama 
gives us is this cap-and-trade energy tax--which actually limits our 
ability to explore American resource of energy and gives greater power 
to those oil OPEC barons in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the 
Middle East that don't like our way of life. So we've got to get a 
comprehensive energy policy, and we've got to move away from this idea 
of taxing businesses, taxing families, raising electricity costs--which 
their bill does--and go to a policy that adopts a comprehensive, all-
of-the-above approach.
  So here at this time I'm going to yield back to my friend from 
Tennessee. But we're talking in the same week that Neil Armstrong and 
Buzz Aldrin and Collins landed on the Moon, the Apollo 11 mission. The 
40th anniversary this week. I had the honor of meeting them. True 
American heroes. When I talked to Neil Armstrong earlier this week, 
what I told him was, What you did, what your crew did and what all of 
the NASA officials did, they inspired a Nation because they showed us 
what the greatness of America can be if we truly set our minds in a 
bipartisan way. And back then under President Kennedy when he said and 
set that objective that we were going to go to the Moon by the end of 
the 1960s, the entire country came together, Republicans and Democrats. 
We can do that again.
  But President Obama's got to set aside the bipartisanship and this 
extreme radical policy, and we can get there.

                              {time}  2130

  Mr. WAMP. I thank the gentleman. As I close out our hour tonight, I 
want to say when the question is asked, where are the jobs, if all of 
the applications pending right now before the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission for nuclear plants were approved, that would be 17,500 
permanent jobs and 62,000 construction jobs. Nuclear is maybe the 
single largest step towards stimulus, economic opportunity and global 
warming progress, all of those things that we need.
  We can reprocess and recycle the spent fuel. This administration 
doesn't want to bury it in Yucca Mountain. They won the election. 
That's their prerogative. Let's move as France has, and Japan and other 
countries, towards taking the spent fuel and turning it back into 
energy. We can deal with this. We built 100 reactors in less than 20 
years, and now we know so much more about it, if we said we were going 
to build another 100 reactors in the next 20 years, we would have a 
robust U.S. economy with new electricity capacity.
  And when we bring on new capacity, we will lower the cost instead of 
increasing the cost. This regulatory cap-and-trade scheme increases the 
cost, reduces the supply, by definition, because we're going to need 
new electricity and energy capacity. So tonight we just close, Mr. 
Speaker, by saying that American innovation and entrepreneurship, free 
enterprise, can help solve these problems without the government 
burden.

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