[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 124 (Tuesday, July 24, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H7145-H7148]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             A BETTER DEAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank you very much for the opportunity 
to address the House.
  As I often do in these evenings in the Special Order hour, I try to 
first lay out what it is: what is the purpose, what is the goal, and 
what is the value in what we are trying to accomplish.
  I find myself always harkening back to a quote that I saw many years 
ago, and then more recently found etched into the marble at the FDR 
Memorial here in Washington, D.C. It comes from Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt, and he talked about what he was trying to accomplish and 
what he thought America ought to accomplish during the Great 
Depression. His words are equally important during the Great Recession 
and the years thereafter.
  He said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the 
abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for 
those who have too little.''
  It is kind of what we are all about as Democrats, and that is why we 
found the tax cut, the Republican tax cut which no Democrat voted for 
last December, so profoundly troubling. That tax cut, on top of the 
2001 and the 2003 Republican tax cuts, added $2 trillion to the wealth 
of the top 1 percent of Americans.
  Let me say that once again. FDR was quite clear in his test of 
policy. He said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more 
to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide 
enough for those who have too little.''
  The 2001 and the 2003 Republican tax cuts, together with the December 
2017 Republican tax cuts, which no Democrat in the House of 
Representatives voted for, added $2 trillion to the wealth of the top 1 
percent of Americans.
  I suppose that would be okay if the 99 percent had somehow seen their 
wealth grow. It didn't happen. In fact, what we have seen in the last 
decade since the Great Recession is that the great middle class of 
America and the poor have seen no real income growth.
  In the last couple of years, yes, there has been a wage increase, 
about 2 percent, totally consumed by inflation, which was slightly more 
than 2 percent--no real income growth.
  So what is happening here is that we Democrats are proposing a better 
deal for Americans. Yes, those words are similar to what FDR used. But 
we are proposing a better deal for Americans, not one that makes the 
rich richer, although that would be fine if the rest of America could 
also become richer.
  But that is going to take a change in public policy, and that is what 
we are proposing to do, because our public policy going forward is 
going to be about a better deal for the American people.
  We are proposing, as we go into this election year, that we push 
aside the Republican proposal, which is essentially a better deal for 
the superrich, and we want to bring about a better deal for the people.
  Here are the three major elements of that deal:
  We want to lower our healthcare costs and prescription drugs for the 
American people. We can do this. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the 
Republican side of the aisle are going in exactly the other direction. 
As they have ripped the guts out of the Affordable Care Act, we have 
seen the cost of healthcare in America skyrocket.

                              {time}  1945

  We have seen the cost of drugs skyrocket. We want to end that. One of 
the things we most definitely want to end is what the Republicans are 
now proposing and that is that we go back in America to the bad old 
days when, if you had a preexisting condition, you could not get 
healthcare; or, you would have to pay a small fortune just to get an 
insurance policy.
  No, we don't want that, but that is what our Republican colleagues 
are trying to give us all across this Nation--a return to the insurance 
discrimination where, if you have a preexisting condition, you cannot 
get healthcare at an affordable price and quite probably couldn't get 
it at all.
  Issue one, the cost of drugs. The 2003 improvement to Medicare part D 
provided prescription drugs at a reduced cost for seniors. All good. A 
clause was written into that which prohibited the

[[Page H7146]]

Federal Government from negotiating drug prices for the tens of 
millions of Americans on Medicare.
  So we have seen the cost of prescription drugs soar. We have seen the 
stories about a drug that was acquired by some rip-off person who then 
took the cost of that drug from a few dollars per pill to several 
hundred or several thousand dollars per pill.
  So that is point one. I am going to go down to point three, because I 
am going to spend time on point two.
  What we want to do is clean up the corruption of politics in 
Washington and across this Nation. Just recently, the Treasury 
Department said that the NRA didn't have to reveal who its contributors 
were to its dark money program. Similarly, no other dark money PAC 
across the State had to reveal who their contributors were.
  Citizens United opened the floodgates to hidden money, secret money. 
Millions upon millions of dollars pour into campaigns to influence the 
effect of those campaigns. So we want to deal with Citizens United. We 
want to deal with this problem of corruption in our political system. 
There are many ways we can do it, but until we can deal with it, we are 
going to continue to see more and more legislation that benefits the 
rich at the expense of the working men and women of America.
  Now, let me go to this second one here. We want to increase and grow 
our economy and jobs through an infrastructure program rebuilding 
America. That will be the central focus of what I want to spend this 
evening on.
  So, as we talk a better deal for the American people, we will be 
talking about healthcare issues, we will be talking about corruption 
and ending the dark money. We will also talk about rebuilding the 
infrastructure for America and creating jobs.
  As we go into this, why is it important? Why is infrastructure 
important?
  I suspect many of you remember just more than a year ago that the 
greatest waterfall in all the world was created at the Oroville Dam in 
California, just a few miles upstream from my district on the Feather 
River. Yes, an infrastructure failure. The Oroville Dam spillway was 
about to give way, just to the side of this, creating a 30-foot wall of 
water, because the main spillway had collapsed.
  I suppose if you are interested in waterfalls, this was quite an 
event. But it was dangerous. Two hundred thousand of my constituents 
had to immediately evacuate in the cities of Marysville, Yuba City, and 
Live Oak, and other small communities in that area, for fear that that 
infrastructure project would fail. Well, it did, but not totally.
  For the folks in Seattle, Washington, or anybody who was traveling on 
Interstate 5 from Washington State to British Columbia, it turned out 
it was a tough day to get there. This is the Interstate 5 bridge. Well, 
I suppose if you had pontoons or maybe water wings, you could stay on 
Interstate 5.
  This is just one example of the tens of thousands of bridges across 
America that are considered to be unsafe and structurally unsound. This 
one proved it.
  A similar bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the Twin Cities area, 
resulted in deaths as that bridge collapsed.
  Infrastructure. American infrastructure, according to Duke University 
and the study they published a couple of years ago, ranks in the Ds. I 
do think we have one C. This is going to require glasses to try to find 
the one C in our infrastructure system.
  Our ports are a C-plus. The rail systems, the private rail systems 
are a B. The rest of them are Ds and Fs. Roads, bridges, dams, on and 
on, sanitation systems, water systems.
  All of us have heard about the problem in Michigan with the water 
system there. Well, it is repeated in California up and down the 
Central Valley of California with water systems that are contaminated 
in multiple ways, as they are in Michigan.
  So, what are we going to do about it?
  Well, we have the good fortune of an opportunity presented to us by 
Democratic leaders. Let me start with a couple of examples of what can 
be done if we were to Make It In America.
  Take, for example, an American success story of Make It In America. 
The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York, they did it right. They did it with 
U.S.-manufactured steel. It was a $3.9 billion project and 7,728 
American jobs created.
  Out in California, we do things a little differently and not always 
better. You have heard of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Well, 
they decided that the Chinese steel would be cheaper. It turned out it 
wasn't, and there were thousands of American jobs that didn't happen. 
It was $3.9 billion over budget, as that Chinese steel was used. There 
were 3,000 jobs created in China, and the most modern steel mill in the 
world to produce steel that was badly welded and flawed in many ways.
  So, we have a choice: We can make it in America, as New York did with 
the Tappan Zee Bridge, or you can have it made in China, as California 
did with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, not our proudest moment.

  For you who are not aware, I am a Californian. I was the Lieutenant 
Governor when this disaster was going on. I screamed and yelled and 
jumped up and down and said, What in the world are you doing? Oh, but 
it is cheaper. It is supposed to be by 10 percent. Cheap is not always 
better--an example of what could be done if we were to make it in 
America.
  Now, this idea of Make It In America actually started with Steny 
Hoyer, our minority whip. I am going to put up a couple of things. He 
has renewed his program that he and I worked on beginning in 2010.
  Over the years we have talked about Make It In America. We have 
talked about various ways it can be done, policies and the like. This 
Monday, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer re-energized Make It In America. I 
think it is Make It In America 4.0.
  So we have encouraged entrepreneurship by assuring access to 
workplace benefits like healthcare and retirement security, and 
providing more and stronger boosts to businesses with ideas and 
successful businesses.
  I just came across one of these earlier today. I was talking to a 
friend out in California, Phil Wyatt, a Ph.D. guy who worked out of the 
University of California, Santa Barbara for some time. He came across a 
way of using a machine to analyze what is in something--a chemical 
analysis, an analysis of biological components, and the like. He 
started a company called Wyatt Technology.
  It is an analytical machine that is used all around the world. It is 
used in healthcare. It is used in biology. It is used in chemical 
analysis and the like. The company is an American company, an 
entrepreneurship that was developed in this country. There are 88 
straight quarters of profitability, and no way in hell is he going to 
allow the Chinese to steal it from him, even though his equipment is 
broadly used throughout the world. A great success story, Wyatt 
Technology.
  So, where did it come from?
  Well, it was an entrepreneurial program. We need more entrepreneurs. 
We need more entrepreneurs who are out there developing new businesses 
like Phil did several years back. They can do it. They are going to 
need support from their government. They need sound tax policy. They 
need the education and research that is going on in our universities.
  They need to be able to accept the risk of starting a new business, 
whether it is a high-tech business or maybe it is somebody that wants 
to go out and work at a taco stand. But they ought to be able to have 
their healthcare and they ought to have their retirement security 
available to them as they go through that time.
  So, that is one of the things that Mr. Hoyer has talked about as he 
renews the Make It In America plan. We are going to hold infrastructure 
for a few moments and pick up the third element in his plan, which is 
education, which ties directly to what I talked about with Mr. Wyatt.
  Wyatt's business, almost more than a decade old, actually came out of 
the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a professor 
and he was doing research. And so it is the educational system, not 
only at the high level, but also all the way down the line, promoting 
pathways for career opportunities.
  A lot of this is something you might find in the career technical 
education field, where a man or woman learns to be a welder and then 
says, Well, I can start my own welding shop. I can become my own boss. 
So they do.

[[Page H7147]]

  Or, maybe it is somebody that has learned hairstyling or cosmetics 
and decides they want to open their own shop. If they are able to have 
portable healthcare, if they have their retirement benefits, they can 
run the risk of starting their own business.
  The training programs and education and the research all fit into 
this focus on education. So Mr. Hoyer has outlined that as the second 
element.
  The third element in the renewal of the Make It In America plan that 
he and I worked on in the beginning of 2010, and continued working on 
these many years, is a focus on infrastructure.
  As I said earlier, as I talked about the failure of our basic 
infrastructure systems--water, sanitation, bridges, highways, 
reservoirs and dams--is this problem, also this opportunity. As I said, 
with this report coming out of Duke University, where they rated the 
infrastructure systems--as did the Society of Civil Engineers--it is a 
fact that if we are building our infrastructure system, for every 
dollar we invest in the infrastructure, we will be able to create 
21,671 jobs. And for every billion dollars we invest, we will create 
those jobs. For every dollar we invest, we will improve the economy by 
$3.54.

                              {time}  2000

  So the return on that $1 investment is 3.5 to 1, so it makes a lot of 
sense to do that. Besides that, the bridges won't fall down and the 
dams won't crumble.
  This one is extremely important: repairing and rebuilding our aging 
infrastructure. It also gives us the opportunity to innovate in the 
infrastructure of the future.
  Well, as Mr. Hoyer wants to talk about the infrastructure of the 
future, I want to talk about, for my remaining time here, the 
infrastructure of the past.
  You may be aware that America is now a nation that exports a 
strategic national asset. It is our petroleum products. For fracking 
and other reasons, we are now an export nation when it comes to crude 
oil, gasoline, diesel, and, above all, natural gas. We have succeeded 
in turning this around from an importing nation to an exporting nation.
  Some of these statistics lead me to an opportunity that we could 
rebuild, reenergize, a critical national infrastructure.
  We don't often think about our maritime industry as being 
infrastructure, but it really is. It supports, to be sure. And we often 
talk about ports. We talk about intermodal, from the ship to the port, 
to the trail, to the train and rail, and then on to the highways. All 
true, but we often ignore the ship itself.
  So here we are. The future of American shipbuilding actually resides 
in the export of oil and natural gas. By 2020, the U.S. is expected to 
be the world's third largest exporter of LNG, liquified natural gas.
  Mr. Speaker, 225 LNG vessels are expected to be added to the world 
fleet by 2020. Those are big ships. There is a little picture there of 
one.
  Due to the eroded capacity of American shipyards, not one--none, 
nada, none--of those 225 LNG ships, vessels, will be built in American 
shipyards unless there is a law that requires that just a small part of 
that export of LNG be on American-built ships.
  Similarly, oil, I don't have that up here, but none of the oil that 
will be exported from the United States will be on American-built ships 
unless there is a law.
  So, are you surprised that we are proposing a law called the 
Energizing American Shipbuilding? It is a piece of legislation that I 
have introduced to deal with a critical infrastructure, the ships that 
America once had.
  So, of 225 new LNG vessels, currently 70 percent of those orders are 
going to Korea and the rest to China, maybe a few to Japan, and none to 
the United States.
  So, the legislation called Energizing American Shipbuilding Act, 
introduced by myself, H.R. 5893, was introduced a few weeks ago. It 
requires that a certain percentage of the liquified natural gas and 
crude oil exports be transported on United States-built ships and 
American-flag vessels, crewed by American mariners, from the captains 
to the engineers to the seamen, American men and women on these 
American-built vessels.
  A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Wicker, and 
that bill also does exactly the same thing. Senator Casey, Mr. Hunter, 
Mr. Courtney, and Mr. Wittman--two Democrats, two Republicans--
introduced the legislation. In the Senate, one Republican and one 
Democrat have introduced the very same legislation, bipartisan, 
bicameral, and, by God, we ought to do it.
  What happens if we were to do it? Well, let's look at some of the 
very simple opportunities that exist.
  Instead of China and Korea and Japan building the ships for the 
export of this strategic national asset, let's do it in America. Let's 
make them in America.
  The Energizing American Shipbuilding Act, introduced in the House and 
the Senate this year, if we were to pass this legislation, we are 
talking at least 50 new ships built in America. Let's see. That is 3, 
6, 9, 12--about 15 of them, LNG ships, would be built here in the 
United States. And when they are commissioned and they are on the 
oceans, they would have American mariners on board providing a 
strategic advantage to our American defense policy. I will talk about 
that a little later.
  There would be many, many more on the crude oil side, perhaps more 
than 30. Probably closer to 35 ships would be built in the next decade 
and a half to two decades, providing, oh, I don't know, maybe more than 
1,500 jobs for American mariners.
  And we haven't yet been able to calculate all the jobs in the 
shipyards of America, but we know that, for San Diego, at the shipyards 
in San Diego, they would be building these ships. We know that they 
would be building these ships in the shipyards of the Gulf Coast and in 
the shipyards on the East Coast, particularly in Philadelphia. These 
jobs would be spread around at the shipyards on the West Coast, the 
Gulf of Mexico, and the East Coast.
  And, just as important, the bill would require that the engines, the 
hydraulic systems, the pumps, the pipes, the electronics, that those, 
too, also be built in America.
  We are talking about a major opportunity to make it in America, to 
make it in America once again so that America can continue to be a 
major place for the construction of American-built ships, whether those 
are naval ships, as they are today, required to be built in the United 
States, or whether they are commercial ships requiring that a small 
percentage of the export of oil and natural gas be on American-built 
ships with American sailors. Bottom line: manufacturing matters.
  So, when Mr. Hoyer, our minority whip, talks about renewing the Make 
It In America agenda and he talks about the necessity for that to be 
focusing on infrastructure, we put forward that a critical piece of 
that infrastructure is the American maritime industry--just as 
important as the trucks that travel our highways, another piece of 
infrastructure; just as important as the trains that travel the rails, 
another critical piece of infrastructure; just as important as the 
barges that move up and down the Mississippi River system on the Ohio, 
the Missouri, or the Mississippi itself. All of that is infrastructure, 
as are the airports and the airlines.
  We ought to start and always think about the fact that we are a 
maritime nation and that in our infrastructure we consider the American 
maritime, we consider the ships and the men and the women who are on 
those ships.

  Now, this is a national security issue. TRANSCOM, responsible for 
moving American military supplies around the world, has stated 
categorically that, unless we revive our American maritime industry, 
unless we have sailors and captains and engineers on ships who are able 
to transport our military wherever they need to go around the world, we 
are going to be in a world of hurt.
  Earlier today, I was talking to one of the officers of Liberty 
Maritime, one of the American shipping companies, owners of ships that 
will soon be transporting a brigade of Reserve men and women from the 
United States to Europe as part of our European defense issues.
  So it becomes important that we deal with the infrastructure of the 
United States and that we do so keeping in mind that these are American 
jobs that fulfill this important policy position. This is the value 
that, as we go about our legislative work here, we keep in

[[Page H7148]]

mind that the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the 
abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those 
who have too little.
  Among those who have too little are the working men and women of 
America. And if we carry out this infrastructure challenge, if we make 
it in America, if the steel is American made, if the locomotives are 
American made--and there is a marvelous example of what can be done 
with public policy that says, if we are going to build locomotives for 
the Amtrak system on the Northeast corridor from Washington, D.C., to 
Boston, that those locomotives will be American made, with 100 percent 
American-made equipment.
  Interestingly, when this was part of the American Recovery Act back 
in 2010, a bill put forward by Democrats and President Obama, there was 
a requirement for $700 million or $800 million to be spent on American-
built locomotives, 100 percent American made. A German company said: 
Whoa, $700 million? $800 million? Locomotives? American made? We could 
do that.
  So, in Sacramento, California, Siemens, one of the great 
manufacturing companies in the world, said: Well, let's see. We make 
not locomotives, but we do make cars for the transit systems. We can do 
locomotives.
  And they did. Just this last week, I got off one of the Amtrak trains 
from New York City, walked past a gleaming locomotive, brand-new, and 
on the side it said ``Siemens.'' I am going: That locomotive was made 
in Sacramento, California, just outside my district, by a German 
company with American workers, American steel, American wheels, 
American engines--made in America.
  How did it happen? Because Congress, with Democrats in control and a 
Democratic President, said: We are not going to talk about making 
America great again; we are going to actually pass a law that says this 
money will be spent on American-made locomotives.
  And so it was. And now that plant is continuing to expand as they 
produce cars for transit systems all across this Nation.
  FDR had it right, and we are going to follow. We are going to make 
sure that the laws of this Nation actually provide for the working men 
and women; for those who don't have a job, an educational program, job 
training programs, career development programs in community colleges 
and high schools, apprenticeship programs, so that the men and women of 
America can participate in the revitalization of the American 
infrastructure system.
  Whether that is a highway, an interstate freeway, an airport, a dock, 
or a port, we are going to make sure that the American workers have a 
chance not only in building the infrastructure, but in using the steel 
and the concrete and the other elements that go into these 
infrastructure projects. Those should also be made in America so that 
that infrastructure program flows way beyond just those who are pouring 
the concrete to those who are making the cement and making the 
manufacturing plant that will develop the cement.

                              {time}  2015

  This is where we are. And by the way, we want to make sure that tax 
policy does not do what the Republicans have repeatedly done--2001, 
2003 tax cuts and again in the 2017 tax cuts that have transferred $2 
trillion of American wealth to the top 1 percent. That is shameful, but 
that has actually happened. And all the while the rest of Americans 
have seen virtually no improvement in their economic situation.
  Tax policy--critically important. Policy that requires that when we 
spend your tax dollar, that your tax dollar is spent on American jobs 
in American factories, putting Americans to work in what we call a 
``Make It In America'' agenda.
  And so keep this in mind, Mr. Trump, this is how you make America 
great again, by making it in America. So we can work with our 
Republican colleagues, as we are with our shipbuilding program, the 
Energizing American Shipbuilding Act. Democrats and Republicans 
understand, together, that it is public policy. It is the laws that we 
write that set the pace for economic growth and spread that growth out 
across the great American population so that everyone--everyone can 
participate in the rebuilding of America's infrastructure, whether it 
is a ship at sea, a port that is being developed, an airport, a highway 
or a railway, water system, sanitation system, we must write into all 
of those laws that when American taxpayer money is used, it is spent on 
American manufacturing and American workers.
  So we will make it in America, and America will make it when we 
follow these kinds of wise public policies, keeping in mind that our 
task is to make sure that we always focus not on those who have much, 
but, rather, on those that have too little.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________