[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 97 (Wednesday, June 17, 2015)]
[House]
[Page H4436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            STOP MESSING AROUND WITH FAILED TRADE AGREEMENTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, 44 days--44 days--that is when the highway 
trust fund runs dry.
  Now, this isn't a surprise. We have been kicking the can down the 
road for awhile. The Republicans have been in charge for 4\1/2\ years. 
And today, the Ways and Means Committee is, rather begrudgingly, 
holding its first hearing on the issue of the highway trust fund. 
However, they have already foreclosed the options.
  The chairman and the Republican leadership have said: We can't do 
user fees the way Dwight David Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan did. That 
is off the table. We are going to come up with some other creative or 
phony way to pay for these investments.
  And they pretty much have said they are going to try to kick the can 
down the road until the end of December.
  Well, those sorts of patches won't deal with the massive pothole that 
we have with our infrastructure in this country: 140,000 bridges need 
repair or replacement; 40 percent of the service of the National 
Highway System is degraded to the point where you have to dig it up and 
put in a new roadbed, not just pave it over a little bit; $86 billion 
backlog to bring our transit system just up to a state of good repair--
not to build out more options to get people out of congestion and 
traffic, just to bring the existing system up to a state of repair. It 
is so bad that in the Nation's Capital they are unnecessarily killing 
people because of a system that is outmoded, obsolete, and defective.
  But we are the United States of America. We can't afford to invest, 
according to Republicans. They don't distinguish between investment and 
spending, unless it is the Pentagon, where spending is good. But 
rebuilding American infrastructure, they can't find the money for that.
  Luckily, there is furious, furious activity going on now. The 
President went to the baseball game last week for the first time in 7 
years. He showed up at the House baseball game. He came to the 
Democratic Caucus last week. He sent three secretaries here. He is 
inviting groups down to the White House, bringing them down by 
motorcade. He is on the phone with John Boehner, his former archenemy. 
They are furiously, furiously at work.
  Unfortunately, what they are scheming over is how to undo what we did 
last week, blocking the last worst trade agreement that America will 
ever have, saying: We want a new paradigm on trade. No more failed 
trade policies for this country. It is not working, to just rebuild or 
build upon the massive profits of multinational corporations, hoping 
some of it might trickle down.
  Actually, it has just led to job exports because they can get 30-
cent-an-hour labor in Vietnam. They desperately want this agreement. 
And Malaysia, hey, the House stripped out the minor restrictions on 
human trafficking so that U.S. companies could feel free to go to 
Malaysia.
  So they are furiously plotting what way they can trick us or somehow 
overcome 85 percent of the Democrats in the House caucus here and a 
number of Republicans who have concerns about these failed trade deals.
  Now, just think--just think--if Speaker Boehner, President Obama, and 
corporate America assembled, were just working to help us find a 
solution to our crumbling infrastructure, because it is certainly 
important to everybody in this country. If we found that solution, if 
we moved forward with a long-term bill, we could, instead of having to 
argue over assistance for workers who are going to lose their jobs 
because of this trade agreement, we could be hiring hundreds of 
thousands of Americans, and not just construction workers. This would 
involve manufacturing. For transit, it involves high tech. It involves 
small business. It involves minority business enterprises. It involves 
family-wage jobs where people can make a living, not getting retrained 
to go to McDonald's because their job was sent to Asia or Mexico or 
someplace else.
  We have a tremendous opportunity. Stop messing around with these 
failed trade agreements, and let's put our heads together and figure 
out how to pay for a long-term transportation bill and get this country 
moving again.

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