[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16747-16748]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          BAD DAY FOR AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CONAWAY. Today is a bad day for America. We just passed and 
witnessed the passing of a bill that will have dramatic impact on our 
lives and our way of life for years to come if it should ever see the 
President's signature.
  One matter of process. At 3:08, 3:09 this morning the Democrat 
majority landed on the Internet a 300-plus page amendment to the 
already bloated bill that was passed. Apparently, the bragging on the 
thousands and thousands of hours of work and hearings and process that 
had gone into the development of the bill that was filed on Monday left 
it a little short of the mark. In spite of all those thousands of 
hours, they were unable to get it right. So they had to use a little 
fine-tuning with a 300-pager that was dropped this morning. So, that 
issue aside, Mr. Speaker, it is a bad bill.
  Science, Mr. Speaker, is never settled. Take the example of Galileo 
as an example. The consensus science of his time was that the Earth was 
the center of the universe. The Roman Catholic Church believed it and 
all the scientists who you and I have no clue who their names are 
believed it as well.
  Galileo, on the other hand, bucked the system. He said, No, in fact 
the Sun was the center of the universe. He spent the last years of his 
life under house arrest because he bucked the consensus science.
  You and I both know that both the consensus side of that day and 
Galileo were wrong. Most on the other side believe that Washington, 
D.C., is the center of the universe. But that's a different 
conversation.
  Science is never settled. We should continue to ask the question; we 
should continue to ask whatever it is that's out there.
  The sense of urgency that the other side used to try to pass this 
bill the way they have done it evaporates and is quite muted when you 
look at the details: 25-year exemptions for certain energy companies to 
allow them to get their power plants in under the wire to get support 
for this bill. Even the Ag amendment delays for 6 years the 
implementation of some of the provisions that will devastate Ag. And so 
this sense of urgency seems to evaporate as well.
  The cost of this bill will be thousands of jobs, as has already been 
said over and over. The empirical data is the Spanish experiment of the 
last 12 years. A report there on their greening of their economy shows 
that for every single green job created, that two private sector jobs 
were destroyed. Of the green jobs created, only one in 10 were 
permanent jobs.
  Our own President has said that his cap-and-trade bill, which is the 
one that just passed, will cause electricity rates to skyrocket. 
Skyrocket, Mr. Speaker. That does not sound good when you're talking 
about the cost of a product that goes into every manufactured product 
in this country, that every one of us who likes air conditioning use. 
That's not a good idea.
  This bill also, Mr. Speaker, nationalizes the building codes. No 
longer will you be able to look to your local planning and zoning 
commission, your local city council as to how the building code should 
be. You can't go to your State government. You're going to have to look 
to the Federal Government. Some bureaucrat in the bowels of the 
institution in Washington, D.C., is going to decide whether or not you 
can build a house and what those standards should be.
  Congratulations. Thank you so very much, Mr. Tenth Amendment.
  Mr. Speaker, MIT has a study that shows this will cost every family 
in America $3,100 for implementation of this bill. All of the pain 
that's associated with this bill and, quite frankly, there is a lot of 
pain. And we will just begin to see it as the details unfold. So what 
do we get for that pain?
  I've recently asked a climate scientist who feeds his family, 
basically, looking at this issue. I said, If we were

[[Page 16748]]

able to pass the Waxman-Markey bill, can you in fact measure after 40 
or 50 years the positive impact on our atmosphere? If we're going to 
spend $3,100 per family to get this done, if we're going to lose all of 
these thousands of jobs and decrease the standard of living in America 
as a result of this deal, what do we get for our money?
  He looked me right in the eye, Mr. Speaker, and said, Maybe. Maybe 
you can measure the impact? He said, Yeah, maybe.
  The Congress of Racial Equality, not someone you would normally think 
would be doing things that Republicans would agree with, their 
spokesman, Niger Innis, talks about the study they performed that shows 
that should this happen or, actually, should America go to a zero 
carbon footprint over the next 100 years, that the impacts on the 
temperature will be like .07 degrees Celsius over that entire 
timeframe. Again, not measurable. So a lot of pain for no gain.
  Mr. Speaker, I guess the call to action for all of this is for our 
fellow American citizens to get mad. I'm hoping that, Mr. Speaker, this 
next week before they go to their 4th of July parades in their cars, 
which is a limited opportunity because there will soon become a day 
they won't be able to drive those kinds of cars that they want. We will 
tell them the kind of cars they want to drive, not themselves.
  But I hope they get mad, Mr. Speaker. I hope they use this climate 
change bill--global warming bill, because we changed the phraseology 
because the climate is not warming--I hope they use this to incent 
their TEA parties on the 4th of July to go after us on this deal. I 
hope they begin to call their Senators and tell them ``no'' on this 
deal.
  Call your Congressman who voted for this nonsense. There are 219 of 
them. You can go to the Web and find out who they are. Start calling 
them now and tell them they made a mistake, Mr. Speaker.
  This bill is bad for America, it's bad for our economy, and it will 
lower our standard of living. It was done simply to allow our President 
to have a photo op in Copenhagen in December while the Chinese and 
Indian leaders laughed behind his back.

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