[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 20 (Wednesday, February 9, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H589-H593]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1700
THE FUTURE OF AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Walz) is recognized
for 30 minutes.
Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Over the past several weeks, I have had the incredible privilege and
honor to be traveling up and across my district, the First District of
Minnesota, from the plains of Worthington to the Mississippi River
Valley at Winona, listening and holding grocery store stops and hearing
what the American people are talking about. They're not talking a lot
about ObamaCare. They're talking a lot about jobs. They're talking a
lot about moving the country forward. And this is a place that, I have
to tell you, it was 18 below zero yesterday when I left. These are
hardy folks. They're used to weathering tough times.
They're also the place that gave root to, in a collective effort, the
Mayo Clinic. They're also a place that is one of the top leading
producers of food in this Nation in feeding the world. Also, a place
where we generate--the fourth
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largest of any State in the country--the fourth largest amount of wind
power and innovating down that road. To be able to walk those streets,
to go to those grocery stores--and in Mankato, where my office is
located, you hear a lot of people talk about Main Street. That was the
Main Street Sinclair Lewis was talking about. That's where he lived
when he wrote his famous novel about what it means to grow up in rural
America and what it means to collaborate together to grow this country.
And listening to those folks talk about things like the national
debt, talk about how we invest in our infrastructure, how do we keep
our schools strong, how do we make sure we care for our veterans, how
do we keep this Nation safe by adhering to our ideals of freedoms and
liberties and being that beacon for the rest of the world, those are
things that people are talking about while we're seeing improvements in
the economy that no one would argue by early 2008 was the worst economy
we had seen since the Great Depression. And for those who said, I guess
we should have done nothing, I'm here to tell you today I'm glad we're
not repeating the Great Depression. I'm glad we're not seeing our
markets collapse all the way. And I'm proud of the work we did to move
back.
Now we're seeing exports grow. We're seeing GDP grow. We're seeing
consumer spending strong over the holidays. But I have to be very
honest with you. The people who came to see me in those groceries
stores in Owatonna and Worthington, Minnesota, those don't really
matter if you don't have a job. If you don't have a job to pay for
groceries, if you don't have a job to pay for the gas in your car to
get to work, those are the things that matter.
So I have to tell you these people know something about struggling
through tough times. Their ancestors went to those plains of Minnesota
and carved out not only a living, they carved out world-class
agriculture production, world-class delivery of health care, world-
class innovations in manufacturing and energy on the premise that this
country provided incredible opportunities. But we couldn't do it alone.
We needed to do it in a collective effort to view the future and to
bring the best out in individuals.
So as we face these challenges and as we pay down debts that have
been generated for decades, and when Dick Cheney sat in the Vice
President's office and said, We proved deficits and debt don't matter,
he couldn't have been more wrong. They do matter. But we can't be penny
wise and pound foolish with our children's future. It makes no sense to
talk about paying down the debt if we're going to collapse our
education system, our investment in science and technology. If we're
going to let our infrastructure deteriorate, we will never pay the debt
down, because what's happened is the revenues have shrunk. The pie has
shrunk.
Instead of trying to figure out how to carve up a smaller and smaller
pie, let's bake a bigger pie. Let's get a handle on our energy needs.
Let's create homegrown energy and quit sending a billion dollars a day
to foreign nations who hate us. They will hate us for free. We can keep
the money at home and create jobs. We can create the security we need
to make sure that when great revolutions on democracy rise up in Egypt,
we're watching it based on what's best for human rights, what's best
for the stability of the world, not worrying about what the price of
oil is going to do when we can get that right out of the Midwest with
our innovation.
I do think there's lessons to be learned there. Going out and getting
back to traveling throughout my district, the one thing I can tell you,
the countries watch this, and the folks who sit in this institution we
get even enamored with.
I had no illusions. When I was elected in 2006, with no elected
experience--a high school teacher; never ran for office, didn't know my
county chair, and I think most of my students didn't know my political
affiliation. What they knew was I cared for the community, I served in
the National Guard, and I wanted to get things right. I wasn't under
any illusion that people elected me based on Democratic ideology. They
elected me because they wanted to hear about solutions; they wanted to
hear how we work together to solve things.
And when they did that in 2008 and expanded that, and then when the
country swung back in 2010, I think my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, need to
recognize the American public wasn't talking about critiques on
ObamaCare. And I heard my colleague mention we need to rip that cancer
out by its roots. The cancer being treated is a young boy who sits in
New Hope, Minnesota, who didn't have care before and now is seen at the
Mayo Clinic and is actually having a real cancer treated with the best
quality care. And the Mayo Clinic said this bill was a step forward and
we should not step backwards.
So I think what I'm hearing from my constituents is, Can't we get
beyond the partisanship? Can't we focus on those things that aren't
imagined about ourselves and find the 90 percent of things that we
share in common? And we should never give our passions on differences.
We should never compromise on our core principal values. But we should
always recognize the interesting thing about this great country is the
previous Speaker's district--and is a good friend of mine--borders
mine. You might, when you hear us speak, think we're on opposite sides
of the world. We are not. Neither are our constituents. But we need to
come together with a recognition that the things we do here are meant
to lay the framework, and that framework is the thing that's always
made this country great--opportunity.
Yes, there's safety nets when we're down. Yes, those things need to
be there. And we talk about those things in a tough economy. But what
the middle class cares about is opportunity. No one guarantees you
success in this country. But we should guarantee the opportunity to
achieve success on your own. And the way we do that is by ensuring we
have world-class educational institutions. That no matter if you're in
Windom, Minnesota, New York City, or Tampa, Florida, that child has
access to it. Not only is it the right thing to do; it strengthens our
Nation.
We can bring those things today. We can continue to innovate. The
can-do spirit that has been here since the inception of this country
understood that's how we needed to move forward. We need to find those
common grounds. We need to lay the groundwork. Unfortunately, that rung
of opportunity, that ladder of opportunity by having safe and quality
schools, by having transportation systems that serve all, by having
affordable housing, by having access to basic health care, those were
the rungs that allowed a person to pull themselves up and achieve
success.
I think of my own family in this case. When my father died and my
brother was 8 and I was a young man out of high school, Social Security
survivor benefits were there for my mother and my young brother. When
people say in this country you should pull yourselves up by your
bootstraps, I agree. We just didn't have any boots. They were lent to
us by Social Security. And we have paid it back ever since--my mother
going on becoming a nurse, my younger brother going in and becoming a
teacher like myself. I used the GI Bill that was afforded that was not
just about enticing people to serve their Nation. It was the idea that
those who are willing to serve are going to be assets to our community
and to our country.
At this time of tough economic solutions the easy thing to do is say,
Posture. We're going to have spending freezes. Well, here, that's fine.
We have to get a control on spending. But don't leave the other side of
the ledger out. The economy shrunk. And don't tell people this. If you
freeze those numbers, be honest. You have just frozen programs that
should be cut to zero, and you've just frozen programs that provide
opportunity.
We've got people now that seem to think after they climb that ladder,
after they believe they built that ladder themselves, they want to pull
it up behind them. What we're talking about here is creating those
opportunities, unleashing the American spirit, and winning the future.
And I have seen it. I heard it in my district.
There's a company called Angie's Kettle Corn. Somebody might have
seen it--my colleagues here, Mr. Speaker. It's sold in Costco and sold
across the country. It started as a mom-and-pop business literally in a
garage in Mankato, Minnesota. And this
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last week they were on with Martha Stewart. They sold it at the Twins
Stadium, and it's selling across the country now. That started with a
passion, with a dream. It started with the ability to have local input
and local ability to entice businesses to be there. It started by
investments in transportation that allow you to move goods made and
manufactured in Mankato, Minnesota, to the coast as efficiently as
possible. That's how we've always competed. That's how we've always
out-produced the rest of the world.
And at this tough time when people are saying, We can't spend any
money now because we have a national debt, I agree we need to get a
handle on the debt. I have been saying it needed to be paid down for
years. But if we make the mistake and don't invest in infrastructure,
don't invest in the correct ways in the future of providing
opportunities, we are going to make drastic mistakes that will be hard
to overcome.
{time} 1710
There is another great company in my district, a company called
Peerless Chain. This one is fascinating because I think these are
things that people forget about, one of which is the idea that you can
no longer compete in manufacturing in America because other countries
simply are going to pay their workers less.
Well, I'm not interested in a race to the bottom. Yeah, we're
probably never going to be able to pay low enough wages to compete with
China on its wages, but we can beat them on innovation; we can beat
them on quality products; we can beat them on moving things to market.
Peerless Chain is now one of the top producers of all forms of chain
in the world. In fact, they provided all the chain to the booms after
the oil spill in the gulf, protecting the gulf coast. This is a company
founded by immigrant veterans after World War I, a company which is now
hiring veterans and is manufacturing large, heavy-duty steel chains in
Winona, Minnesota, stamping them ``made in America,'' and shipping them
to China.
That's a future that makes sense. That's a future that creates jobs.
That's something we can embrace. I've got to tell you, as to the people
working there, I don't give a dang if they're Democrats or Republicans.
They don't care either. They have American jobs with American security.
They are living the American Dream.
Do you know what that dream is? Having the chance for an opportunity
to maybe own your own home, to maybe make it and, by the time you get
there, to be able to buy a boat--or a snowmobile in our case--and be
able to put your kids through school, and know that those children have
that opportunity.
It's not good enough for us in this place to make policies that
incentivize work to go overseas, to give tax breaks to those companies,
and to make it harder for Peerless Chain to produce right here. Those
are the things that we can do together. Those are the things that we
can agree upon. Small businesses make it. They're the things that make
it in America. They've provided the jobs. They've done the things that
need to be there.
What you're hearing here--and I have to be very honest with you--and
what the false dichotomy of choices here is that the government can't
do anything right--the government is us. It's the schoolteacher from
Mankato. It's the construction manager from Iowa. It's all of us
together trying to decide. No, we're not going to do everything right,
but together we can create something that is bigger than any individual
person here. I think, as we move forward, we're going to have to be
willing, all of us--myself looking in the mirror first--to be able to
reach across and find common ground, to be able to find those things
that create opportunity and to then have the courage to go forward and
talk about investing.
I want to give a couple of examples of this investing. When people
say that the government can't do anything right, the trick is not to
have the argument about big versus small government. The argument is
about effective government. Does it do what the people want at the most
efficient/effective cost available? Anything less, and now the police
don't respond when you call 911. Now we aren't correctly making sure
we're managing the ingredients in the food that people eat, and we have
contaminated food, or we have lead in our children's toys as anything
more will hamper business growth.
So, when I watched the President sit right up here underneath where
the Speaker is and talk about ``let's get smart reforms,'' it's not an
either/or about getting regulation one way or adding regulation on.
An example of what we can do together to make things work happened in
a hearing today. One of this Nation's major banks, for whatever
reason--and it will be determined in time--was foreclosing on the
houses of servicemembers who were deployed overseas. This Congress has
determined that one of the things we will do if you're willing to serve
this Nation is to give you protections while you're there, serving in a
war zone, against excessive interest rates, foreclosure and things like
that.
Since the beginning of this country, we've understood if you're
fighting in a war zone and if you're worried about your family--your
wife and child--being thrown out of your house, it's pretty difficult
to focus on your job. Yet they continue to do it, and they continue to
make it happen.
Well, that young marine and his wife came today to testify in front
of Congress, Democrats and Republicans. They said, no, there need to be
safeguards over that; there needs to be oversight; and yes--a horrible
word I'm hearing here--there need to be some regulations enforced so
that we don't do that to our members. That's not antibusiness. That's
not hampering business growth. That's coming up with the collective
decision that, if you're going to serve this Nation in war, then we
should have a business ethic that says we're going to do the right
thing since it's law. I have to tell you those are compromises we can
come to.
Investments. We have a project in southwest Minnesota. It's in
combination with the gentleman who spoke before me and with our friends
in South Dakota. In southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa and southeast
South Dakota, about 800,000 people altogether in rural areas do not
have access to drinking water.
In 2009, I met with a woman who, still today, gets her drinking water
by collecting it in a cistern when it rains and snows. It's not
poverty. It's necessity. There is no wealth. So a project was designed,
an incredible project, of bringing together local municipalities,
States, and the Federal Government to divert water from the Missouri
River to the Lewis and Clark Rural Water Project. This is not a ``nice
to have'' thing if you think it's an amphitheater or something. This is
drinking water and water for businesses. I have communities in my
district that cannot add one single home because they don't have the
capacity for water in order to hook up to the sanitary sewers. I have
businesses, large ones--some of the largest packing plants in the
country--that can't continue to expand and create jobs because they
don't have access to water.
So we came together on this, and here is what happened: the local
municipalities and the States agreed in concert with the Federal
Government to pay their taxes ahead to accelerate a project with the
promise that the Federal Government would fund the program. Those
promises were made, and then they were broken.
What ends up happening then, as a Member of Congress and those who
posture on this floor that we certainly can't have earmarks, is elected
Representatives of the people of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa don't
have the access to redress the grievance that we have invested millions
of dollars, with our citizens paying ahead, with the idea there would
be some help.
Yes, those tax dollars will come from across the country, but my
State is one that is a net return on tax dollars. We send more to the
rest of the country, but I understand how that benefits us all. We can
create food and export it elsewhere. Manufactured goods are created
elsewhere and sent to my district. That's the idea of the 50 United
States. That's the idea of federalism. In many cases, I think some of
my colleagues get confused, between the Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution, of where we're at. That's a project where people say,
We can't spend a penny on
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that. Now we will end up spending more money, stopping economic growth,
and making sure that people in this country don't have access to
drinking water, all with the idea that we're going to be fiscally
responsible.
It will do nothing but add to the debt. It will do nothing but
deprive people of a basic commodity in this country, a basic commodity
that you'd like to believe you have access to, which is water, and it
was paid for ahead of time locally.
Those are the types of things that we need to have honest discussions
about. There is no doubt that we've got budgeting situations. If we do
not handle the national debt, our children and grandchildren will pay a
heavy price for it. They will pay a price in some very simple things.
As interest rates begin to climb, their buying power will become less.
Their ability with the dollars they make are already shrinking for the
middle class. As our real wages decline, they will have a lower
standard of living. It will be harder to go to college. It will be
harder to buy a house. It will be harder to buy a car. That all
translates into the American Dream slipping a little further away.
So we have a responsibility to pay our fair share. That's why, when
the bill came up in December, asking for changes to the Tax Code or
whatever, I don't think it was that bad to ask for 140 million people
to get the tax cut in a time of economic downturn. That had to happen.
That cost us money. There is no doubt about that. It will add to the
debt. The idea behind that is that money will be spent. Businesses will
only grow if consumers spend money and if there is a demand for goods.
The problem many of us had was that the other half of that money went
to 6,600 families; $154 million to 6,600 families. Yeah, let's slice it
down the middle.
There has always been a sense of fairness in this country. We applaud
success. We applaud people who achieve greatness. If you have a large
business and if you're employing a large number of people, we're happy
for you, but keep in mind we're educating those children in our
schools; we're getting those people to your jobs on our roads that all
of us are paying for. There has always been the assumption that there
would be a fairness to our Tax Code, that you would pay it back.
All of those things create a balanced budget; they create economic
growth, and they have done the one thing that America has done better
than anybody else--provided innovation and opportunity for growth for
the middle class to continue to be able to achieve.
So what we're going to see over the next couple of years is a turning
point in this country. I believe we are going to get it and are going
to figure out what the American people said on November 2. I'll tell
you they didn't say in 2006, ``Do it all the Democratic way.'' They
didn't say in 2008, ``Do it all the Democratic way.'' I can tell you
they did not say on November 2 of last year, ``Do it the Republican
way.''
They said, Solve problems. Get together. Move us forward. Create the
infrastructure and the opportunities for the middle class. Then get out
of our way. Stay out of our civil liberties. Stay out of our personal
business. Allow us to do that and create the type of country that we
were founded on, one that understood that the Constitution was not a
static document.
The Constitution was one about the birth of a new Nation and the
idea, the audacious idea, that you could take a high school teacher
from Minnesota and plop him down in the very place where Abraham
Lincoln spoke and say, Go and speak.
I will tell you, when you sit down on this floor, Mr. Speaker, and
when you wonder, how in the world did I ever get here? the good thing
is you meet all of your other colleagues, and you say, how did they get
here? Then you understand the great diversity of this country. Then you
understand that our strength lies in our ability to have different and
competing opinions with a common goal--a strong, fair country with
equal opportunities, a country that rewards hard work, that rewards
achievement, but that understands you can't always control life's
circumstances.
{time} 1720
At times, there is going to need to be a safety net, and the idea
that we're going to rip out ObamaCare, please keep in mind, I don't
want to go back to the days when 47 million of my fellow citizens had
no access to health care, for several reasons. One, I don't think it's
ethically right. Two is I know I'm paying for it anyway when they go to
the emergency room and it's more expensive. So why not get the
preventive care in the best possible manner, deliver that care, and
quit spending twice as much as any other nation, and start using that
money to invest in innovation and job creation. That's how we pay down
the debt. That's how we move forward. That's how we start to get a
handle on what the core values of this country are and the things that
have always made us great.
So we're going to have an opportunity to discuss these issues. I'm
disappointed. When I was back home and I heard people talk about all
these things, jobs, jobs, jobs, the economy and the future, I came back
last night to a bill that was never debated. You heard about this new
open rule. Well, here is the fact: not a single debate on it, not a
single amendment, not a single minute of discussion on this floor, and
you know what that bill was? The Patriot Act, determining if you as an
American citizen, if the government can listen on you. I don't know
about you, but I hold a lot of those values that I am very, very
nervous when somebody is listening to my conversation. And I don't buy
this, you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry
about. That's nobody's business. There's legal ways to go about this.
We can keep this Nation safe by doing that.
But the new majority, who told us about how things have been done so
poorly, the first time we had the Patriot Act up on the floor, we
debated it for weeks. We talked about it. It was discussed. Last night,
it came in on a suspension calendar, and I have to tell you this, I
applaud the people here who said ``no'' and those people didn't say
``no'' to national security. They didn't say ``no'' to stopping
terrorists. What they said ``no'' to was we are not willing to
sacrifice our liberties for a little bit of false security. We want
that balance to be struck, talked about here, and agreed upon.
So as we talk about jobs, as we talk about what's going to be going
forward, bringing in the Patriot Act on Tuesday evening with no debate
and voting for it on the floor just that quickly, when a Member of the
Republican majority, a new Member, somebody who I know because they ran
against me on this, asked, did you read the bill, did you read the
bill, said he hadn't read the bill, but he voted ``yes'' anyway, and he
said, well, we will have time to work it out.
That's what America was tired of. That's what America, if they were
speaking out on November 2, was; and here's the thing. We have a choice
and I say ``we'' being me. We have a choice that's said on this floor:
Are we going to be part of the solution, or are we going to continue to
push problems forward? I think the American people deserve better.
I think that listening to that soldier today who did his duty, he
needs a government that's speaking for him. It doesn't matter how big
that bank is to get it right, and then here's the thing. I'm not saying
that bank can't do good. In this instance, they did not, and I simply
don't want to leave it to them to make the decision.
So together we've got some opportunities. We're going through some
growing pains, but here's the thing. Our grandparents and our
forebearers made it through civil wars. They made it through the Great
Depression. They made it through the civil rights movement. They made
it through there. We are the product of all that struggle. We are the
ones that now have to rise to that challenge. We are the ones that have
to get beyond the petty political bickering that can divide us for
short-term political gain that's not looking towards the next
generation.
We have an opportunity. I saw it everywhere across southern Minnesota
last week. I saw Republican and Democrat come together, and those
people coming in that grocery store, one man came to me and said, at
least I got the courage to come up here and tell you, Tim, I didn't
vote for you. I'm like, well, that's no big deal, almost half the
people didn't vote for me, but you're here. You're expressing your
citizenship. You're expressing solutions that
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can go forward. That's how the country gets back together, and we shook
hands. We talked about things that can be better, and we walked out of
that grocery store thinking that tomorrow can be a better day.
That's what the thought in this country has always been. The future
and the ability for our children can be better than we're at today. We
can handle our energy needs, and we can create those jobs at home. We
can make health care accessible, pay for it, continue to innovate. We
can manufacture and make it here at home and out-compete any nation in
the world if we choose to invest in our greatest natural resource, our
people.
So now is the time to be smart on budgeting, pay the debt down, get a
handle on things, get a handle on spending, make taxation fair but
don't shortchange the next generation, invest in education, invest in
infrastructure, invest in research.
And I'm looking forward to the next 2 years, and I think the American
public deserves nothing less than the best that we have to offer here,
the voices across this country offering up solutions, debating them in
a fair manner on this floor, voting for them, and then realizing that
just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they don't love
this country. Just because they don't vote the way you wanted to
doesn't mean they're a communist or a socialist or un-American.
What it means is we have the golden gift of being able to disagree,
to debate on this House floor, and to take that debate to the American
public in a civil, respectful manner with the understanding our
neighbors love this country every bit as much as we do.
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