[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 134 (Monday, September 12, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H6085-H6091]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        GOP JOBS OFFENSIVE: ROLLING BACK JOB-KILLING REGULATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, last week we were here talking about jobs. 
This week, we need to talk about jobs again because, quite honestly, 
the problem the United States has is we have to get our people back to 
work.
  These fine folks who just had the hour before us, they were talking 
about jobs, talking about the ability to get a job. I thought it was an 
interesting discussion. We are all concerned about jobs, and we all 
have different views of how this should be done.
  The President laid out a broad agenda for another stimulus bill that 
he believes will cause us to have new jobs. He's going to deliver that 
I think today in writing so we can all sit down and look at it and 
analyze just exactly what it actually says so we can figure out how 
much of that will create jobs, and if there is a disagreement, we will 
at least know what we disagree with.
  But the bottom line is there are some things that are basic. People 
take their money and they invest their money when they feel like, A, 
it's going to make them money, and B, they can feel relatively safe 
that the future that they envision is the future that's going to 
actually happen. You've got to look down the road in any organization 
and get yourself a perspective of just what it takes to make your 
business or your operation thrive and go forward. And there are some 
basic things you want to know. You want to know, basically--let's say 
you're doing a 5-year plan. Over the next 5 years, there are some 
simple things you would like to know: What are my taxes; what taxes am 
I going to have to pay on my business? What regulations are going to 
affect my business, and are they going to change? What is the source of 
money to borrow or invest in my business if I want to expand? Let's say 
I want to put a new assembly line in my factory, or I need a new 
building for my business to grow and put my employees in. Am I going to 
be able to finance that building? Am I going to be able to come up with 
the mortgage money to be able to do that? Can I envision a pathway to

[[Page H6086]]

income that will support that mortgage and the paychecks for those 
people that I'm going to hire to run my business with me, to operate 
the business? These are not mind-shattering things. This is very simple 
stuff.
  If you were starting a lemonade stand, you would have to make some 
kind of projection on a lemonade stand to figure out whether you were 
just going to sell lemonade today, or maybe you could sell it all week 
if you're a little kid. But you've got to know what the playing field 
is about.
  Tonight I'm going to talk about the same thing we talked about last 
time, something that may be unintended consequences. It may be a 
different agenda of a different view of the world, or whatever you want 
to call it, but there are very, very onerous regulations that are 
popping up now on a basically daily basis that are surprising people 
and industry around the country. The one that is a front-page headline 
and will be the subject of legislation I believe this week in Congress 
is on this board right here. And Congressman Tim Scott of South 
Carolina has a bill to block this regulation, this action by one of our 
regulatory authorities, the National Labor Relations Board.
  The National Labor Relations Board has filed a complaint against 
Boeing to prevent them from building a new aircraft plant in South 
Carolina. Boeing currently has a large complex of production in 
Seattle, Washington--or somewhere in Washington, I think it's Seattle--
Puget Sound it's called. The problem that the National Labor Relations 
Board has with the South Carolina site--which is not going to displace, 
to my knowledge, any of the union employees that are at Puget Sound, 
but it's a new factory with new employees. But because this factory is 
in a right-to-work State, where a person doesn't have to join a union 
in order to get the salary and benefits that the company pays, the 
National Labor Relations Board has filed suit against Boeing to prevent 
them from hiring these people and opening this plant.

  Now at a time with over 9 percent unemployment--close to 10 percent 
in some estimates--and as you heard, in some communities, the African 
community, 16 or 18 percent unemployment, in the Hispanic community, 
the very same kind of numbers for the Hispanic community, why would a 
board in Washington, D.C., the National Labor Relations Board, why 
would they want to say to a company which has made a financial 
determination that the wise place for them to build their next factory 
is in the great State of South Carolina, but because they are not a 
union State, they say, no, we're not going to let you build it there? 
When did it become the government's job to have regulatory authorities 
telling people where they could and could not build a plant based 
solely on union membership? This is very, very onerous. It's very, very 
unfortunate.
  Without any argument pro or con toward union membership, this State--
which is a sovereign State of our Nation--has chosen to have right-to-
work laws, which means you don't have to join the union to go to work. 
Other States choose to have union laws, and closed shops, which means 
that you can't work in a place unless you join the union. Whether you 
like one version or the other depends on where you stand, but the facts 
are that in this country we have both union shops and right-to-work 
States, and I don't think the government should be picking winners and 
losers.

                              {time}  2010

  I think it's inappropriate for the government to be picking winners 
and losers. So that's why Tim Scott is bringing a bill to the floor 
this week, I believe it's this week, to discuss this very issue and, 
basically, restrict the National Labor Relations Board from having the 
power to do something like this, because this is not appropriate. The 
National Labor Relations Board's job is to develop the relationship 
between labor and management. It's not a guarantee of union membership. 
The reason we're talking about this, first and foremost is this is the 
current event in regulations and government interference in a company's 
business.
  And by the way, what is a corporation?
  This is something I'm always amazed by. The minute you said the words 
``Boeing Corporation,'' it's like they become something, some giant 
something, and like it's one rich man someplace that owns Boeing. If 
you own a 401(k), if you have a retirement plan, if you are involved in 
even the government investment plan that we have for our Federal 
employees, there's a pretty good chance you might own Boeing stock. 
Your plan might own Boeing stock.
  So what is that corporation? Well, it's you, if you own Boeing stock, 
because the owners of that company are the people who own the stock. So 
we need to realize that it's not one or two rich people that own 
Boeing. It is a multitude of Americans who have invested a small part 
of their paycheck in buying a share or 10 shares or a million shares, 
whatever they can afford, of Boeing stock.
  So we've got this concept that came out of the sixties, it's don't 
steal from the individual, but steal from ``the man.'' In criminal law 
where I've spent much of my life, that was always an amazing thing for 
me. ``The man'' seemed to be anybody that you didn't know. But it 
certainly was the corporations.
  And, yet, an awful lot of people have their life savings invested in 
companies like Boeing, like Shell Oil Company, like Exxon, like United 
States Steel, if they still exist, I don't know whether they do or not, 
like Continental Airlines, like American Airlines, like Union Pacific 
Railroad. Those are all owned by people. People own those corporations.
  Why should the National Labor Relations Board tell the 
representatives of the people that own Boeing stock that they can't be 
in South Carolina because it's not a union shop?
  I don't think they should. I think this bill will pass out of this 
House and, hopefully, will get the support of the President and the 
realization by the Democrats over in the Senate that this is an 
important thing and a very bad precedent for the government to be 
picking winners and losers.
  So we started with this board. Now, I talked about my bill that I 
have, which we may or may not take up. First off, let me tell you 
something we've been doing. The Congressional Review Act is in 
existence at this time, and it allows Congress to review every Federal 
regulation issued by the government agencies and, by the passing of a 
joint resolution, overrule those regulations.
  Federal agencies shall, that means they must, submit to each House of 
the Congress, that's the Senate and the House, to the Comptroller 
General a comprehensive report on any major proposed rule. Congress has 
60, and that's legislative days, to pass a joint resolution of 
disapproval of any rule. The Senate must vote on a Congressional Review 
Act resolution of disapproval.
  So there is a tool to actually disapprove of some of these rules that 
we're going to be talking about tonight, and we're going to be using 
that tool. We've already started using it. We're going to continue to 
use it, so I'm going to put it down here at the bottom so we'll 
remember we've got a tool.
  People have asked me why I put a bill forward that would be so 
general as to say let's have a general regulation moratorium on all 
regulations until 2013. Let me read you some--this is not an original 
idea by John Carter, that's me. This is some regulations that come, 
some articles out of some newspapers. Let me just read you a couple of 
them.
  The Detroit News: The flood of Federal regulations coming out of the 
Obama administration add costs, stifles economic growth and limits job 
creation. Growth is a smarter way to generate additional taxes from 
businesses than raising the rates and thus the operating costs. The 
former approach creates jobs. The latter kills them.
  The business community is also warning that a flood of Federal 
regulations will limit growth and job creation. Obama should suspend 
implementation of any regulation with the potential impact on the 
economy until the unemployment rate falls below 6 percent.
  The Environmental Protection Agency, in particular, must be 
throttled. The EPA's war on coal affects power plants that provide 
roughly half of the Nation's electricity. In Michigan, DTE

[[Page H6087]]

energy says that the new rules will take 20 percent of its capacity off 
line within 3 years. Without an assured supply of energy, companies 
will not invest in new facilities.

  That's the clip from the Detroit News.
  The Wall Street Journal: Business leaders, ``Stop the Implementation 
of Job-Destroying Regulations.'' Many of their suggestions are 
familiar. The CEOs want lower corporate taxes in the U.S., which has 
among the highest corporate rates in the world, and a moratorium or a 
rollback of business regulations.
  ``The government needs to be a better partner with the business 
world,'' says Magellan Health Services CEO Rene Lerer, echoing a 
sentiment expressed by many. James Turley, Chairman and CEO of Ernst 
Young, ``Remove government regulatory policy uncertainty through 2013 
by halting initiation or implementation of regulations when such 
regulations could hurt jobs or economic growth.''
  So that's just two quotes out of the newspaper. There are more here. 
But the point of that being is that the people who create jobs, the job 
creators are the small and mid-sized businesses of this world, and the 
big businesses for that matter. But the real generator is the small 
businessman in America. Over 90 percent of all the jobs held by anybody 
in this country, those people work for small businesses.
  Now, what's a small business?
  Well, the other day we had, sitting up here listening to the 
President's speech, we had a franchise holder for McDonald's 
franchises. McDonald's hamburger place is a small business, as it 
belongs to a person who has purchased the franchise for that business.
  We had another man with Sports Cuts, which is a haircut franchise. 
And these are individual people who get a national name, and a national 
product, and they pay money for that, for the right to use that 
national name and national product, but they are a small business, 
usually run but one or two individuals. And they're telling us the 
uncertainty of regulatory procedures of the Federal Government is 
making their job untenable.
  I'm joined here by my good friend from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo). I 
think he might have something to say about this. Don, would you like to 
take the mike? I'll be glad to yield you whatever time you'd like to 
have concerning regulations and how you see them affecting folks in 
your part of the world.
  Mr. MANZULLO. Thank you, Judge Carter, for the opportunity to be with 
you this evening.
  I spend, as you know, most of my time working on manufacturing 
issues. Our congressional district in the northern part of Illinois is 
home to over 2,000 factories, and McHenry County, in particular, is 
home to some of the most high-tech plastic companies in the world.
  The President, last week, spoke before Congress and talked about 
regulations, and he said that every rule should meet the so-called 
commonsense test.

                              {time}  2020

  Regulations should protect people from environmental health hazards 
and unsafe workplace practices. There's no disagreement on that. We all 
agree on that. But overregulation has a tendency to destroy jobs.
  For example, the Department of Health and Human Services, under the 
directive of the National Toxicology Program, has labeled, recently, 
styrene as a human carcinogen that causes cancer. Now, styrene is the 
basic ingredient that is used in plastic composites. About 90 percent 
of the composites contain that and about 50 percent of other plastic 
resins for other uses.
  And some of the uses for products with styrenes, they're used in 
packaging and disposables under polystyrene plastic resins, food trays, 
egg cartons, furniture, office fixtures, equipment covers, mail trays. 
In fact, the plastic that is oftentimes used on electronic equipment, 
refrigerator components, liners, air-conditioning parts in housing, 
toys, high-tech products, consumer electronics, major appliances, 
insulation, floor backing, pipe and siding, computer monitors, IV 
connectors, syringes, stereo covers. You can see that it's almost 
anything that is used in manufacturing. And the fiberglass tubs, 
showers.
  Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman will yield, I believe this board is made 
out of that styrene. This is what we call plastic board.
  Mr. MANZULLO. It could very well be.
  Mr. CARTER. If you look at it, it probably is made out of styrene.
  Mr. MANZULLO. So that just demonstrates, Judge, the fact that styrene 
is so pervasive in all of our consumer products.
  Now, what has happened is the National Toxicology Program said that 
styrene is a carcinogen. They looked at a couple of studies, did a 
very, very poor job in looking at the history and the other studies 
available. In fact, the European Union and Canada came to the opposite 
conclusion and said that there's nothing wrong with styrenes, that it 
does not cause cancer.
  What we're trying to do is get the National Academy of Sciences, 
which is widely regarded as the final word in these scientific matters, 
to conduct an independent study on styrene.
  Now, if nothing happens and styrene remains on this list of something 
that's ``likely to cause cancer,'' it could end up destroying hundreds 
of thousands of jobs in America. Let me give you an example.
  The company that makes all the plastic utensils for McDonald's, that 
company uses styrenes. And what we see developing here are insurance 
companies that are taking a look at the plastic companies that use 
styrene, and they're becoming very nervous over the fact that the 
government is taking a position that, without good case study, styrene 
is a carcinogen. So insurance companies are starting to balk at 
insuring the companies that use styrene.
  Lawyers have already met examining the best way that they could bring 
the class action lawsuits for all of these products that contain 
styrenes. And what could end up happening is, because of the 
regulations that will come down from the Federal Government, the 
government will say, well, in its finished product, there's nothing 
wrong with a product involving styrenes, but in the manufacturing of 
it, that's where the problem is. We could lose hundreds of thousands of 
jobs. Our plastics industry could be destroyed.
  Now, these are the types of things that absolutely do not make sense, 
where, because of the jungle of rules that the Federal Government has 
that makes it very difficult to get in a counterargument, where people 
make decisions not based upon a cost analysis but based upon a couple 
of studies here and there as opposed to volumes of studies that have 
gone on examining whether or not styrenes are a carcinogen, we could 
lose the plastics industry in America. Those jobs could easily go 
overseas all because of poor science on the part of the regulators.
  Regulation in America is out of control. And I work not only with the 
styrene industry but the people that are involved in foundries, where 
regulations are underway that if they're not done correctly--you could 
take a look at the silicas and say even though silicas are a problem, 
we know that if the regulations are done improperly, we could lose the 
foundry industry in this country.
  America is great because of our manufacturing background. America 
will only recover from this economic crisis when the manufacturing jobs 
are secure and come back. That's why we've been pleading with HHS, 
saying, You don't understand, the Department of Health and Human 
Services, the impact of the poor decision that you have made with 
regard to these styrenes.
  We could go on to other products from other manufacturers, and it's a 
slew. You have, up there on the chart, the scissors cutting the red 
tape. The red tape is so thick it would take a blowtorch to go through 
it, or some kind of a chopper or buzz saw, besides the scissors on it.

  So I share with you the deep concern over the people who are losing 
jobs in America today because of overregulation by the Federal 
Government.
  Mr. CARTER. Recapturing my time, I thank my friend and say that I 
hope that all of those Members of this House and others that might be 
listening heard you say America could lose this industry. You didn't 
say that the world would lose this industry because, quite honestly, 
once again, a great industry that produces good-paying jobs will, all

[[Page H6088]]

of a sudden--not because of taxes or not because of high labor costs, 
which are a lot of the arguments we get--a new factor, the regulatory 
industry, drove this prosperous industry out of our country because of 
possibly voodoo science that they didn't investigate enough. They've 
got a concept, and they stick to that concept on their science 
arguments and they don't go outside the scope of their view of the 
world.
  They're going to shut down an industry. But are we going to stop 
making plastics? No. The world's not. Just the United States is going 
to stop. And then people say, Why are all of these jobs offshore?
  It's not just the cost of labor that drives people offshore. Our 
regulatory agencies have as much to do with that as anything there is 
out there.
  The President made a joke recently where he said he found out that 
all shovel-ready jobs are not shovel-ready jobs. Well, let me tell you. 
I haven't checked all of those jobs he's talking about, but I'd be 
willing to bet you that there's either an endangered species or, in 
some form or fashion, the Environmental Protection Agency is in between 
the shovel taking the first load of dirt on a project and somebody 
trying to get a project done, because it's the agencies that are 
shutting down our highways. They're shutting down our bridges. They're 
shutting down our sewer projects, our water projects, and sometimes for 
very bizarre reasons.
  Mr. MANZULLO. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. CARTER. I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.
  Mr. MANZULLO. Look at the Keystone pipeline coming down from Canada 
to Texas, which branches, really, into central Illinois. It's been tied 
up by the EPA and other regulators for 3 years. We're looking at 20,000 
new jobs. I think it's a $5 billion to $8 billion project. That doesn't 
count the people that make the pizzas, the people that make the shoes.
  I was talking to a shoe salesman, Red Wing shoes that are mostly made 
in America, and those are the industrial shoes. And I said, How's 
business?
  He said, Don, when manufacturing is down and construction is down, my 
sales of shoes are down.
  And so it continues. It's not just the actual cost of the impact to 
that particular entity, the particular construction site, the 
particular regulation, but all of the peripherals that come as a result 
of it. Those are the things that destroy our economy.

                              {time}  2030

  Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time to just continue this conversation, I 
think it's very interesting what you said about the pipeline. That 
pipeline is bringing heavy crude from Canada to the United States to be 
refined. Now, let's just point out that it was in The Wall Street 
Journal sometime this week, as I read it this week, that Alberta, 
Canada is just exploding. Everybody has got these great jobs because 
they are going forward, their environmentalists are staying out of the 
way, and they're developing this heavy crude industry, this tar they've 
got there, tar sands; and that's what we're shipping down here to be 
refined in this proposed pipeline, down to where the market is in the 
United States. Canada is one of our largest, if not the largest single, 
exporter to the United States of petroleum products.
  Now, what's interesting about this picture is that same field that's 
across that imaginary line in Canada is also down in North Dakota, and 
we know it's there. It's in Montana, and we know it's there. And it's 
probably in a lot of other places that are called ``public lands'' in 
this country right now. Those are lands held by the Federal Government. 
They own those lands.
  Now, what does that mean? That means that they're not letting the 
drilling going on or the exploration going on on our land for the same 
petroleum products that we're buying from Canada and building a 
pipeline to ship down here. Why? EPA and others, regulators and 
bureaucrats, are preventing the development of those products. Now, it 
all goes back to the global warming or climate change argument or 
whatever this whole big umbrella is over this whole idea.
  But you wonder why there are no jobs; 250,000 jobs have been created 
in Alberta, Canada in the last 18 months. 250,000 jobs all to do with 
that oil. Right across the border, we could be doing the same thing.
  Mr. MANZULLO. And it's not just oil; it's natural gas.
  Mr. CARTER. It's natural gas. And I will tell you something else. I 
was just down in San Antonio meeting with some friends down there. One 
of them is a banker, and he said, Go to south Texas. Man, you should 
see what's happening in south Texas. Besides the oil and gas we'd 
already found many years ago down there, they have now found out that 
there is shale oil and shale gas down in the ground, amazing deposits 
down there. They're going to have to be using the fracking system to 
get it out.
  But already they're building hotels in towns that only have 8,000 
people in them. They're building four-story hotels. Why? Because for 
the foreseeable future, working men and women are going to be in those 
hotels, because they've got a job there, until they can find a place to 
live. Builders are already looking at developing subdivisions, and the 
people who sell work boots are selling work boots in south Texas. And 
all those periphery things that come off of that discovery and that 
development of that discovery create thousands and thousands of jobs.
  It multiplies as it goes, just exactly as you were describing, Mr. 
Manzullo; and that's the exact kind of progression that will bring this 
country back if we let those folks continue to manufacture.
  I guarantee you there's not a person that's watching this or 
listening to this or who is in this Chamber that there's not somewhere 
almost within their reach something that's made out of styrene that 
you've just been describing to us. It is almost as abundant as wood. In 
fact, if you remember the old movie ``The Graduate,'' what was the 
advice the guy gave the kid? ``Plastics.'' That's the future: plastics.
  Well, we're in that future now, and it is the future. In fact, one of 
the reasons we have such an outstanding medical world that we live in 
is we're not having to rewash and sterilize metal and glass 
instruments. We're making all of our instruments out of this plastic 
with that styrene in it, and then we're throwing them away. They're 
disposable. We're making them at a price where we can dispose of them 
for health purposes, which has changed the lives of many thousands and 
thousands of Americans in this country every single day, the health 
pluses of having that product on the market.
  But with the government's interference, we will be getting it from 
China or India or who knows where. But it won't be from here, and no 
American will have a good job on that. It's almost criminal.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. MANZULLO. Plus we would end up losing the people that made the 
machine tools, the actual molds, the dyes for the injection systems and 
other types of systems and molding systems that are used in the 
manufacture of these plastics.
  I appreciate Congressman Carter's yielding to me to explain this 
styrene issue, and I look forward to the rest of his presentation.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank you for joining me. And if you would like to 
stay, we'd love to have you.
  Going back to another quote: CNBC, CEO: ``From a regulation 
standpoint, government just needs to get out of the way. We asked 
several CEOs leading up to the speech what bold steps Obama could take 
to reduce the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. John Schiller, chairman 
and CEO of Energy XXI, said, `If the government would get out of the 
way, from a regulation standpoint, and let us, XXI, do what we do good, 
you'll see us continue to hire and grow this economy. I think that's a 
message from across the board,' said Schiller.''
  From the Washington Examiner: ``If President Obama was serious about 
boosting job creation, he would stop his administration from creating 
even more regulatory uncertainty. This is the President who once 
blithely quipped, `You know, the business community is always 
complaining about regulations.'
  ``But Friday's decision can only be viewed positively if it is indeed 
a first step. There are still six other proposed regulations from the 
EPA that would cost the economy dearly. According to

[[Page H6089]]

the EPA's own estimates, the cost to small businesses for obtaining 
carbon emission permits alone would be $76 billion per year, not 
including the hundreds of billions of dollars in widespread economic 
damage from higher energy prices. If Obama really wanted to remove 
`regulatory uncertainty' from the economy, he would use his Thursday 
jobs speech''--that was last Thursday--``to announce that he is 
ordering EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt all of her agency's 
work on global warming regulations.''
  Now, these are just some quotes from some of the media out there that 
are talking about job creation. I'm for a moratorium. We'll see if we 
can get that done.
  Red tape reality: the White House promises to save $10 billion in 5 
years. The White House just put forward $17.7 billion in regulations in 
only 2 months.
  The next chart, this is something we call the TRAIN Act. The purpose 
of the TRAIN Act is simple: Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of 
Impacts on the Nation, TRAIN. These guys sit up late at night to figure 
out how they can have an acronym to cover whatever they're doing. But 
this is very simple: TRAIN delays MACT and CSAPR--these are two huge 
rulemaking issues which I will tell you about in just a minute--until 
the full impact of the Obama administration's regulatory agenda has 
been studied. They basically say 1,000 power plants are expected to be 
affected. The annual electricity bill increases in many parts of the 
country from 12 to 24 percent.
  Now, what is this? The administration's new Maximum Achievable 
Control Technology standards and Cross-State Air Pollution Rule for 
utility plants will affect the electricity prices for nearly all 
American consumers. A total of 1,000 plants are expected to be 
affected. Middle class Americans can expect their bills to go up 
between 12 and 22 percent.

                              {time}  2040

  Mr. Sullivan is saying, look, let's make an economic analysis before 
you actually impose these regulations, see what it's actually going to 
do. How is it going to hurt the individual consumer, and how, by the 
way, is it going to hurt the act of ability of people to get a job?
  If you are going to shut down in some instances up to a third to half 
of power plants, because they are either coal emission power plants or 
because they've got boiler issues that have got to be dealt with, then 
what happens? You are talking about people's jobs, getting laid off. 
When it comes to coal-powered plants, there are some places where the 
majority of the electricity in the Midwest, for instance, is coal 
power.
  Now if you are going to shut down coal-powered plants to make them 
retool for new regulations, here is an interesting thought: They have 
already retooled to put scrubbers on these things three or four times. 
It's another set of retooling on top of the retooling before the 
retooling and the other retooling. When they get to this thing they 
find at some point the guy is going to say, my gosh, I have had about 
all of this regulation I can stand.
  I am going to tell you an amusing story, but it's true. When I was a 
young lawyer I worked for the Agriculture Committee of the Texas House 
of Representatives as their lawyer, and we had a hearing one day about 
new Federal regulations on sausage manufacturers.
  Now in Texas our heritage has a lot of folks from the sausage 
manufacturing parts of Europe. We have Germans, we have Czechs, we have 
Swedes, we have Norwegians, we have a lot of people who in their old 
country, they made sausage. And so we have lots and lots of small 
sausage operations in Texas. Almost every town you go to in Texas, some 
butcher shop somewhere is making their own best sausage made in Texas.
  You can go to our grocery store and you will see sausage that's 
produced--I am just talking about Texas now--in multiple cities all 
over the State. Most of them are small towns.
  Now, this is a true story. We were having testimony about new 
government regulations concerning the manufacture of sausage by small 
businesses. They brought a man in who was in a prison uniform from the 
State prison in Huntsville and they put him on the stand.
  They said, why are you here? He said, well, my brother and I, we made 
the best sausage in east Texas. But this guy came in our office and he 
says, I've got these regulations here. You're not going to be able to 
make this in your butcher shop anymore. You're going to have to redo 
your butcher shop.
  He gave us a list of stuff we had to do. We took it to our banker. He 
said, you boys have got the best sausage operation in east Texas. I'll 
loan you $25,000, you can fix your place up. So they put in tile floors 
with drains, and they put in different butcher blocks, this, that, and 
the other. He said, we borrowed $25,000.
  About 8 months later that same old boy came through the door and 
said, I've got some bad news for you, gentlemen. We've got new 
regulations. All that stuff you had to do last time, it's not good 
enough. Everything has got to be stainless steel. You've got to have a 
cement floor with a power drain in it. You've got to have certain kinds 
of saws.
  So me and my brother, we went to the banker and we said, hey, what 
are we going to do? He said, well, that's another $50,000 but you're 
good, you've got a great business. I'm going to loan you that $50,000. 
You boys do the work.
  So we did the work, and it was working great. We were manufacturing 
sausage. We still made the best sausage in east Texas.
  Then that same old boy came walking in our door, and he said, I got 
bad news for you, boys. And that's when I shot him.
  Now, that's a true story, and he was serving time for manslaughter in 
a penitentiary for shooting that regulator. I am not in any way 
advocating shooting regulators. I am telling you how frustrated a small 
businessman can get just for regulations on the manufacture of sausage 
in his hometown butcher shop.
  Now, think how frustrated an employer gets whether a regulation 
causes him to lay off one-third of his workforce to afford to do what 
he is doing. This is the whole concept of why regulations have to be so 
carefully planned and done, and you have to have good studies done as 
to the economic effect, as John Sullivan, my friend from Oklahoma, has 
brought before this House.
  This is called the Environmental Protection Agency Regulatory Relief 
Act. This has to do with Boiler MACT, hospitals, factories, colleges, 
thousands of major American employers use boilers that will be impacted 
by the EPA's new Boiler MACT rules. These new stringent rules will 
impose billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs, increase 
the cost of many goods and services, and put over 200,000 American jobs 
at risk.

  The American forest and paper industry, for example, will see an 
additional burden of at least $5 billion to $7 billion. Morgan Griffith 
of Virginia has this bill which provides a legislative stay of the four 
interrelated rules issued by the EPA in March of this year. This 
legislation would also provide the EPA with at least 15 months to re-
propose and finalize new regulations that are achievable and do not 
destroy jobs, and provide employers with the ability to extend 
compliance on these rules.
  These rules, as they stand, are business-killing rules today; 200,000 
people will lose their jobs if these rules are implemented. This will 
be brought up in October, around the 3rd of October, in that week, to 
basically put a hold on these job-killing regulations.
  The President himself said we need to examine regulations and see how 
they are going to kill jobs. Well, here's one right here, Mr. 
President: 200,000 jobs at a minimum will be lost, maybe forever, and 
cost us $5 to $7 billion in just one industry.
  Now, that's money, that is capital that has been put into a different 
project than building and expanding your business. That means instead 
of hiring people you are laying off people.
  Now, why in the world, in the environment where we have 9 percent, 
9.1 percent unemployment, we have been teetering around 10 percent now 
for almost a year, why in the world would we want to have these people 
who work for us in the government--they are not elected, they are 
appointed people, they are hired, just like anybody else--that are out 
there thinking up ways to shut off people, good, honest hard-

[[Page H6090]]

working men and women, in this country's jobs because of some concept 
they have on making an improvement.
  Let's make improvements. Let's keep our environment clean, but let's 
do it in a way that remembers that we are part of the environment too.
  Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time remains?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Texas has approximately 
15 minutes remaining.
  Mr. CARTER. This is something I have worked on. I have worked on it 
now for almost 6 months. This is cement, and John Sullivan, who has 
been working with us on this, is bringing this up that week of October 
3.
  The Cement MACT and two related rules are expected to affect 
approximately 100 cement plants in America. Now, when we say cement we 
are talking about a process that makes that powdery gravel and sand 
that, if you go to the--I won't advertise for anybody--but if you go to 
one of these stores that sells stuff for construction, you will see 
these sacks of stuff that say something ``crete''--``cement crete'' or 
something like it. And in that sack is a bunch of stuff, and you add 
water to it, you make concrete. Gardeners use it, everybody uses it.
  On a bigger scale you pour slabs for foundations for buildings. On an 
even bigger scale you put special reinforced steel in the cement pour, 
the concrete pour, and you make pre-stressed concrete walls which most 
of our big buildings in this country and around the world are built 
with. In fact, concrete is the number two building material in the 
world. The number one building material in the world is water.
  Of the elements that are used in building things, Portland cement is 
number two, and it's the process that makes the powder that binds it to 
make concrete.

                              {time}  2050

  Now, this is our process. We discovered it. We did it. We originated 
the prestressed concrete that many of these buildings here in 
Washington, D.C. that aren't marble are built out of. And yet our 
regulatory process has the potential to drive anywhere from a third to 
a half of all the cement manufacturers, the people that make the powder 
that binds the concrete, out of the country.
  Now, we are doing it for the good of the environment. Right? Well, we 
have scrubbers on our cement plants, and we have lots of things that we 
have cleaned up in our cement process. But our competitors in China and 
India have nothing. I mean, zero. They don't have anything to do with 
cleaning up the environment. So is it really going to clean up the 
world's environment, all the way around the world environment, by 
taking it away from a place that does it right and putting it in a 
place that does it wrong? A $7 billion industry could cost as much as 
$5 billion to fix these regulations. Put a pencil to that. I mean, they 
are worth $7 billion, and $5 billion more has to be put into it.
  And the only solution that many of them see is just close down the 
plants in the United States, fire the people that are there. Hello? 
What kinds of jobs are these? The lowest paid man that works at a 
Portland cement factory makes around $65,000 a year, a laborer. And 
then the technicians get up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
These are not minimum-wage jobs; these are the kind of jobs that every 
American dreams about, the kind of job that every family dreams is the 
basis of their family.
  And because of the regulatory analysis of some people, they have 
decided that they are going to impose regulations that basically drive 
these people off to Mexico or to China or to India. And they bring up 
issues like mercury. But studies, their own people's studies, show that 
the majority of the mercury that is in the air right now in the United 
States comes from China and India because they don't clean things up 
over there, and it blows over here from China and India. So we are 
going to make it better by sending more over to China and India? I 
don't think so.
  But what about the American jobs that are here. What if they let 
these people thrive. If they thrive, building materials stay 
reasonable. We don't have to ship building materials from China to 
build our next house, to pour our next concrete slab. And so what 
happens, the price of everything goes up. Can we afford that next 
house? Who knows. This is what regulations do. It is a compounding 
effect that costs us jobs.
  I see one of the smartest men in Congress here, Mr. Gohmert, over 
there. Is he here to talk on a different subject? I know he is smart 
enough to talk about this if he wants to. Louie is one of my colleagues 
from Texas, and I'm proud to call him my friend.
  Let's go to the next chart. We don't have a board for this, but let 
me say something. I'll tell you about south Texas and the jobs that 
they are creating down there. Just to give you an example of how 
excited people are about that find of natural gas in south Texas--and 
now remember, Texans are oil and gas people. Remember this, too: when 
Texas came into the Union as a country, we had a special treaty which 
let us keep our public lands. So the Federal Government doesn't tell us 
what we do with our land in Texas because we own our public lands. And 
all of this land that is going to be drilled on in south Texas is owned 
by people, not by the Federal Government. So they can't keep us from 
leasing our land out to drill these wells.
  Now, they can keep us from using the process it takes to break up 
that shale to capture this gas, and that's what they're trying to do. 
Now, we created an Energy Department in this country, I forget, 30 
years ago. And its goal was to make us energy independent in our 
lifetime. Well, I don't know whose lifetime it was, but some of those 
people are already dead, because the truth is we are further from being 
energy dependent than the day that they created the Energy Department. 
Way further.
  At that time, less than 30 percent or 40 percent of our oil and gas 
came from overseas. Now we are in the 80 percentile range. Now, why in 
the world when we know that we've got it and we know we're going to use 
it, we have to use it, why would we keep buying it from Saudi Arabia 
and other places like Venezuela that hate us? Why don't we just get 
what we've got? Go down there and get what we've got. Out in the gulf 
and in south Texas and in the great State of Pennsylvania, where 
they've got a huge shale gas find, ask those people how they like their 
shale gas. They love it; 25,000 jobs have been created in that part of 
Pennsylvania in the last year and a half. The same shale goes into New 
York, and it is going other places. So there are jobs that get created 
by this.
  But here is another peripheral thing. Because there is no place to 
stay in south Texas--it is just a bunch of little bitty towns down 
there--big hotel firms are coming down there and building hotels down 
there because they see this as a long-term operation down there, and it 
is worth investing and building hotels and motels so the people working 
down there will have a place to stay.
  What comes with that, restaurants. And what comes with that, 
washaterias, and all of the other things that you need to help people 
grow. And then when people settle, what is the first thing that they 
are looking for, an apartment or a house to live in. They get tired of 
staying in a hotel.
  One company, I won't use their name, one company went down to south 
Texas and leased a whole eight-story hotel for 2 years. That's how 
convinced they are this is going to be an economic boom in south Texas.
  Why would we ever want to stop that. And yet there are people who are 
continuously bombarding this industry and saying that this terrible 
shale fracking process is poisoning the water supply. But there is no 
evidence, real evidence that proves that.
  By the way, anybody that tells you that they smell it in their water 
doesn't know what they are talking about because natural gas doesn't 
smell. It smells in your house because they put a chemical in there 
that makes it smell so you know when your gas is leaking. But it 
doesn't smell when it comes out of the ground.

  I worked in that industry as a kid. I had the crummy job of actually 
digging up one of those smell machines that puts the smell in natural 
gas, and I could testify under oath, it's the foulest-smelling thing 
that you ever saw, but they have a machine that puts it into your gas 
so you can smell it when it goes into your home. There are a lot of 
people who are just being crazy over some of these issues.

[[Page H6091]]

  Look at this, coal. First, I was talking tonight at supper with one 
of our Members from Kentucky, and he said they've issued two coal 
mining permits in the last 2 years, I think he said. And they are one 
of the largest coal-mining areas in the entire country. They are doing 
everything they possibly can to kill the coal industry. And yet we have 
an abundance of coal, and cleaning up the coal process has been the 
goal of the coal industry and the manufacturing world. We have some 
States like Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, those States along the Ohio 
River, and many of the States on the east coast, and even this city 
have coal power plants. In fact, in some places the predominant power 
plant is the coal power plant.
  Now, if they shut those down and take them offline, how are we going 
to have enough electricity for everybody? We already worry about 
brownouts and blackouts if we have hot weather. How are we going to 
have enough electricity if we're going to take away the natural 
resources?
  And who's going to take it away? A vote of this Congress? No. We've 
had that vote, and it didn't happen. A guy who works for the government 
that sits in his little office in a cubicle and decides that he doesn't 
think we ought to have coal, should he and a group of people be able to 
write a regulation that shuts down a whole industry based on possibly 
bad science? That's a question we have to ask ourselves. And do we all 
want to sit around in the dark as we ponder because if we shut off what 
we use to power our power industry, we won't have any electrical power. 
This is for the residuals. I guess it's the ash, is the best word I can 
say.

                              {time}  2100

  Now, what in the world is anybody worried about coal ash for? Well, I 
think everybody in this room, if they don't have sheetrock in their 
house, there's something probably strange about it, because most 
everybody has what we in our part of the world call sheetrock. Now, up 
here they may call it wallboard or something else. Well, part of the 
component of sheetrock is coal ash. And yet this bill creates an 
enforceable minimal standard that allows coal ash to be used in the 
products it's being used in with appropriate studies. If they do the 
pending rules for coal ash, there's another thousand jobs that's going 
to be lost.
  So just in our talk tonight there's 300,000 jobs.
  We're almost through this stuff, but there's plenty more. I've just 
got 10 of the hundreds that have been passed, in just the last 2 
months, of new regulations. These are just 10. But in these short 10, 
now we're at over 300,000 jobs lost when these regulations go into 
effect.
  Most of these are current events. This will happen before the end of 
the year or certainly before the middle of next year. So, as we are 
trying to create jobs, we're losing them as fast as we can create them. 
And why? Because of the regulations.
  Now, we can regulate without shutting things down. There's a smart 
way to do things and there's a stupid way to do things. Let's do it the 
smart way. Let's get the politics--and by ``politics,'' I mean the 
environmental politics--out of this process and let's get off to where 
we need to be. And that is: What do we need, how do we accomplish it, 
and how do we keep working while we do it? If we can do that, which is 
certainly not flying to the Moon. It's less complicated than that. If 
we can do that, we can start solving the job problem we've got in this 
country because we can put people back to work.
  I'll give you one final example that we don't have a board on. I 
talked earlier about people who have franchises. If you wanted to buy a 
McDonald's hamburger franchise for your hometown--I don't know what it 
costs, but it's not cheap because it's a moneymaking business. And when 
you bought it, you would be a small business owner. You would own one 
McDonald's store. I think that would be a pretty good definition of a 
small business owner.
  Now, we have written a regulation--there's more pages in that 
regulation than there are chairs in this room--called the Dodd-Frank 
bill. It regulates the financial industry. As a result of the Dodd-
Frank bill, if you had the ability and the creditworthiness to get the 
money, to borrow the investment money and put up some of your own to 
buy a McDonald's franchise, the Dodd-Frank bill has put so many 
regulations on these folks that the availability of capital--and 
``capital'' is not a dirty word; ``capital'' is another word for 
investment money--availability of capital for these small businesses is 
almost impossible.
  And yet our banks are overflowing with capital. It's not that they 
don't want to make loans. It's, first, small business men are scared of 
this environment and they don't want to borrow. But if they do want to 
borrow, the regulations have made it so difficult, they give up and 
they don't borrow the money. Bankers don't make a living if somebody 
doesn't borrow the money. That's how they make a living.
  So, everything in our economy is interrelated and tied together. As 
we talk about small business, it is the driving force for the American 
economy. If you keep small business from creating new jobs, you keep 
our economy from growing. These regulations and others we'll talk about 
in the future are just that--job-killing regulations. And if they've 
killed existing jobs, they're certainly not going to be helpful in 
creating new jobs.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

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