[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 26085-26086]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    THE 6-YEAR HIGHWAY AUTHORIZATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. I hope the gentleman who spoke before me in the well 
would be willing to accept one minor thing. I hear a lot from the 
Republicans about they want competition, they want the free market, but 
the problem is that insurance is exempt from antitrust law. Unlike any 
other industry or business, small or large, in America, except for 
professional baseball, they are exempt. They can and do get together 
and collude--collude to drive up the price of premiums, collude to stay 
out of one another's markets and not compete, collude to exclude people 
with preexisting conditions, collude to do a whole host of 
anticompetitive things to stick it to the American people. So before I 
hear any more from that side of the aisle about supporting the private 
insurance industry, let's hear about having them play by the same rules 
as every other industry in America. But that's not why I came to the 
floor this afternoon.
  I came to the floor because there seems to be a little disconnect 
downtown at the White House with the President's economic team, yet, 
once again. Big surprise.
  The GDP, gross domestic product, is growing, so the economy is 
recovering. We're out of the recession. Whoops. Well, it's a so-called 
jobless recovery, and we're still going to lose about 250,000 jobs a 
month. But they're down there celebrating.
  We need to take concrete steps--not to make a bad pun--here in the 
House of Representatives, in Congress, to put people back to work. And 
one of the things that we could do best would be to ignore the 
President and his advisers who want to delay a new transportation 
policy for America, one that will deliver projects more quickly and 
with less expense, getting people out of congestion, giving people more 
transit options, fixing some of our 160,000 bridges that are either 
structurally deficient--there was a little problem yesterday with the 
San Francisco Bay Bridge--or functionally obsolete, building made-in-
America streetcars, made-in-America modern buses, like the fuel cell 
bus I saw yesterday. But guess what? It's going to take some investment 
and some money.
  This White House, after cutting a deal with Republican Senators for 
$340 billion in tax cuts in the so-called stimulus, which isn't putting 
anybody back to work--ask your neighbor, ask your friend, ask anybody, 
What did you spend your $12 on last week, your tax cut? How did you 
invest it for the future of America?
  We need something that is not consumer-driven. We need a recovery 
that is investment and jobs-driven in this country, and a 6-year 
highway authorization could get that job done. The difference between 
the Obama plan--do nothing, extend current law and current levels of 
expenditure for a crumbling Third World-like infrastructure in this 
country--and what we're proposing here in the House of Representatives 
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is 1 million jobs next 
year.
  Now, apparently, the President's economic team thinks that they can 
tell those 1 million people who won't get jobs, Well, don't worry. The 
GDP's up, and we are losing less jobs than we were losing before. Or 
maybe they could get on board with us, help us write that 6-year bill, 
wake the Senate up from its nap, and put 1 million more Americans back 
to work next year rebuilding America's transportation infrastructure.
  And, by the way, it meets another one of his goals. It will help him 
with

[[Page 26086]]

his goals of reducing pollution, reducing carbon emissions because 
we'll get people out of sitting in traffic as we expand the system, 
deal with congestion and giving them more transit options.
  I recommend that the President look for a new economic team and help 
us to do things that will benefit the real American people, not pointy-
head economists and not Wall Street.

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