[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 120 (Tuesday, June 30, 2020)]
[House]
[Page H2679]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    REBUILDING AND RENEWING AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, people every day are struggling to make 
sense of the most challenging times our Nation has seen in more than a 
century, and that is saying something.
  A hundred years ago, we were recovering from the Spanish flu pandemic 
that hit America hard and people around the globe. Ten years later, we 
had the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and massive 
unemployment.
  But today, we have all of those circumstances and more. We are in the 
middle of a pandemic. We have the resulting economic upheaval. We 
reached near depression-era levels of unemployment, and rather than 
take 3 years, as happened in the 1930s, it has happened in a matter of 
3 weeks.
  We have the climate crisis which my colleagues have addressed so 
eloquently today both in terms of the challenge and what we can do 
about it. Luckily, the world is finally acknowledging that, but it is 
still too slow to respond.
  We have some lessons that we, I think, have learned from what we 
quaintly called the Great Recession of 10 years ago. As somebody who 
was legislating in the middle of it and watching the impact in my 
community and around the country, it seemed horrific. But it pales by 
comparison with what people are facing today and the demands for racial 
justice.
  My colleagues in introducing their handiwork of the Select Committee 
on the Climate Crisis all acknowledged that that is at the forefront of 
our thinking. There is a recognition that demands for racial justice, 
long overdue and now widely acknowledged, is more than just law 
enforcement and criminal justice reform.
  Racial justice means addressing the dramatic health disparities that 
have been put in the spotlight as a result of the COVID-19 disaster. It 
means they must address the housing defunction in this country, the 
lack of affordable housing, a crisis of homelessness, people on the 
verge of losing their homes to eviction, and foreclosure that is 
looming on the horizon.
  We need more affordable housing and we need more of it if we are 
going to deal with those demands for racial justice. We need safer, 
sustainable communities and economic justice and opportunities.
  Luckily, the House this week is dealing with ways to advance a vision 
that addresses all of those. The climate blueprint that has been 
acknowledged, the hard work of the Select Committee on the Climate 
Crisis to protect the climate, protect the planet, also has embedded in 
it: opportunities to improve the quality of life in every community, 
new economic opportunities that will be widely shared, reducing costs 
for families, and strengthening the capacity of local government to 
meet their climate challenge.
  H.R. 2, the handiwork of my friend and colleague, Peter DeFazio, the 
chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is a modest 
1,067 pages. It is full of opportunities to rebuild and renew America 
in a sustainable fashion, to share economic opportunity, to have a low-
carbon future, energy efficiency, and electrification of the 
transportation system. Part of it rescues the post office, replacing 
hundreds of thousands of their vehicles with electric cars which will 
help build the platform for further electrification.
  These are a variety of elements that, woven together, is a new vision 
for Congress and this country. It can start yet before we adjourn this 
Congress. I hope that we will have some bipartisan cooperation to 
embrace these critical principles and move that forward.
  But the extent to which there is delay, we are setting the stage for 
the next Congress, for the next administration being able to engage 
people around the country with a new way of rebuilding and renewing 
America, making our families safer, healthier, and more economically 
secure.

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