[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1420-1423]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1700
                         THE FUTURE OF AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Walz) is recognized 
for 30 minutes.
  Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Over the past several weeks, I have had the incredible privilege and 
honor to be traveling up and across my district, the First District of 
Minnesota, from the plains of Worthington to the Mississippi River 
Valley at Winona, listening and holding grocery store stops and hearing 
what the American people are talking about. They're not talking a lot 
about ObamaCare. They're talking a lot about jobs. They're talking a 
lot about moving the country forward. And this is a place that, I have 
to tell you, it was 18 below zero yesterday when I left. These are 
hardy folks. They're used to weathering tough times.
  They're also the place that gave root to, in a collective effort, the 
Mayo Clinic. They're also a place that is one of the top leading 
producers of food in this Nation in feeding the world. Also, a place 
where we generate--the fourth largest of any State in the country--the 
fourth largest amount of wind power and innovating down that road. To 
be able to walk those streets, to go to those grocery stores--and in 
Mankato, where my office is located, you hear a lot of people talk 
about Main Street. That was the Main Street Sinclair Lewis was talking 
about. That's where he lived when he wrote his famous novel about what 
it means to grow up in rural America and what it means to collaborate 
together to grow this country.
  And listening to those folks talk about things like the national 
debt, talk about how we invest in our infrastructure, how do we keep 
our schools strong, how do we make sure we care for our veterans, how 
do we keep this Nation safe by adhering to our ideals of freedoms and 
liberties and being that beacon for the rest of the world, those are 
things that people are talking about while we're seeing improvements in 
the economy that no one would argue by early 2008 was the worst economy 
we had seen since the Great Depression. And for those who said, I guess 
we should have done nothing, I'm here to tell you today I'm glad we're 
not repeating the Great Depression. I'm glad we're not seeing our 
markets collapse all the way. And I'm proud of the work we did to move 
back.
  Now we're seeing exports grow. We're seeing GDP grow. We're seeing 
consumer spending strong over the holidays. But I have to be very 
honest with you. The people who came to see me in those groceries 
stores in Owatonna and Worthington, Minnesota, those don't really 
matter if you don't have a job. If you don't have a job to pay for 
groceries, if you don't have a job to pay for the gas in your car to 
get to work, those are the things that matter.
  So I have to tell you these people know something about struggling 
through tough times. Their ancestors went to those plains of Minnesota 
and carved out not only a living, they carved out world-class 
agriculture production, world-class delivery of health care, world-
class innovations in manufacturing and energy on the premise that this 
country provided incredible opportunities. But we couldn't do it alone. 
We needed to do it in a collective effort to view the future and to 
bring the best out in individuals.
  So as we face these challenges and as we pay down debts that have 
been generated for decades, and when Dick Cheney sat in the Vice 
President's office and said, We proved deficits and debt don't matter, 
he couldn't have been more wrong. They do matter. But we can't be penny 
wise and pound foolish with our children's future. It makes no sense to 
talk about paying down the debt if we're going to collapse our 
education system, our investment in science and technology. If we're 
going to let our infrastructure deteriorate, we will never pay the debt 
down, because what's happened is the revenues have shrunk. The pie has 
shrunk.
  Instead of trying to figure out how to carve up a smaller and smaller 
pie, let's bake a bigger pie. Let's get a handle on our energy needs. 
Let's create homegrown energy and quit sending a billion dollars a day 
to foreign nations who hate us. They will hate us for free. We can keep 
the money at home and create jobs. We can create the security we need 
to make sure that when great revolutions on democracy rise up in Egypt, 
we're watching it based on what's best for human rights, what's best 
for the stability of the world, not worrying about what the price of 
oil is going to do when we can get that right out of the Midwest with 
our innovation.
  I do think there's lessons to be learned there. Going out and getting 
back to traveling throughout my district, the one thing I can tell you, 
the countries watch this, and the folks who sit in this institution we 
get even enamored with.
  I had no illusions. When I was elected in 2006, with no elected 
experience--a high school teacher; never ran for office, didn't know my 
county chair, and I think most of my students didn't know my political 
affiliation. What they knew was I cared for the community, I served in 
the National Guard, and I wanted to get things right. I wasn't under 
any illusion that people elected me based on Democratic ideology. They 
elected me because they wanted to hear about solutions; they wanted to 
hear how we work together to solve things.
  And when they did that in 2008 and expanded that, and then when the 
country swung back in 2010, I think my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, need to 
recognize the American public wasn't talking about critiques on 
ObamaCare. And I heard my colleague mention we need to rip that cancer 
out by its roots. The cancer being treated is a young boy who sits in 
New Hope, Minnesota, who didn't have care before and now is seen at the 
Mayo Clinic and is actually having a real cancer treated with the best 
quality care. And the Mayo Clinic said this bill was a step forward and 
we should not step backwards.
  So I think what I'm hearing from my constituents is, Can't we get 
beyond the partisanship? Can't we focus on those things that aren't 
imagined

[[Page 1421]]

about ourselves and find the 90 percent of things that we share in 
common? And we should never give our passions on differences. We should 
never compromise on our core principal values. But we should always 
recognize the interesting thing about this great country is the 
previous Speaker's district--and is a good friend of mine--borders 
mine. You might, when you hear us speak, think we're on opposite sides 
of the world. We are not. Neither are our constituents. But we need to 
come together with a recognition that the things we do here are meant 
to lay the framework, and that framework is the thing that's always 
made this country great--opportunity.
  Yes, there's safety nets when we're down. Yes, those things need to 
be there. And we talk about those things in a tough economy. But what 
the middle class cares about is opportunity. No one guarantees you 
success in this country. But we should guarantee the opportunity to 
achieve success on your own. And the way we do that is by ensuring we 
have world-class educational institutions. That no matter if you're in 
Windom, Minnesota, New York City, or Tampa, Florida, that child has 
access to it. Not only is it the right thing to do; it strengthens our 
Nation.
  We can bring those things today. We can continue to innovate. The 
can-do spirit that has been here since the inception of this country 
understood that's how we needed to move forward. We need to find those 
common grounds. We need to lay the groundwork. Unfortunately, that rung 
of opportunity, that ladder of opportunity by having safe and quality 
schools, by having transportation systems that serve all, by having 
affordable housing, by having access to basic health care, those were 
the rungs that allowed a person to pull themselves up and achieve 
success.
  I think of my own family in this case. When my father died and my 
brother was 8 and I was a young man out of high school, Social Security 
survivor benefits were there for my mother and my young brother. When 
people say in this country you should pull yourselves up by your 
bootstraps, I agree. We just didn't have any boots. They were lent to 
us by Social Security. And we have paid it back ever since--my mother 
going on becoming a nurse, my younger brother going in and becoming a 
teacher like myself. I used the GI Bill that was afforded that was not 
just about enticing people to serve their Nation. It was the idea that 
those who are willing to serve are going to be assets to our community 
and to our country.
  At this time of tough economic solutions the easy thing to do is say, 
Posture. We're going to have spending freezes. Well, here, that's fine. 
We have to get a control on spending. But don't leave the other side of 
the ledger out. The economy shrunk. And don't tell people this. If you 
freeze those numbers, be honest. You have just frozen programs that 
should be cut to zero, and you've just frozen programs that provide 
opportunity.
  We've got people now that seem to think after they climb that ladder, 
after they believe they built that ladder themselves, they want to pull 
it up behind them. What we're talking about here is creating those 
opportunities, unleashing the American spirit, and winning the future. 
And I have seen it. I heard it in my district.
  There's a company called Angie's Kettle Corn. Somebody might have 
seen it--my colleagues here, Mr. Speaker. It's sold in Costco and sold 
across the country. It started as a mom-and-pop business literally in a 
garage in Mankato, Minnesota. And this last week they were on with 
Martha Stewart. They sold it at the Twins Stadium, and it's selling 
across the country now. That started with a passion, with a dream. It 
started with the ability to have local input and local ability to 
entice businesses to be there. It started by investments in 
transportation that allow you to move goods made and manufactured in 
Mankato, Minnesota, to the coast as efficiently as possible. That's how 
we've always competed. That's how we've always out-produced the rest of 
the world.
  And at this tough time when people are saying, We can't spend any 
money now because we have a national debt, I agree we need to get a 
handle on the debt. I have been saying it needed to be paid down for 
years. But if we make the mistake and don't invest in infrastructure, 
don't invest in the correct ways in the future of providing 
opportunities, we are going to make drastic mistakes that will be hard 
to overcome.

                              {time}  1710

  There is another great company in my district, a company called 
Peerless Chain. This one is fascinating because I think these are 
things that people forget about, one of which is the idea that you can 
no longer compete in manufacturing in America because other countries 
simply are going to pay their workers less.
  Well, I'm not interested in a race to the bottom. Yeah, we're 
probably never going to be able to pay low enough wages to compete with 
China on its wages, but we can beat them on innovation; we can beat 
them on quality products; we can beat them on moving things to market.
  Peerless Chain is now one of the top producers of all forms of chain 
in the world. In fact, they provided all the chain to the booms after 
the oil spill in the gulf, protecting the gulf coast. This is a company 
founded by immigrant veterans after World War I, a company which is now 
hiring veterans and is manufacturing large, heavy-duty steel chains in 
Winona, Minnesota, stamping them ``made in America,'' and shipping them 
to China.
  That's a future that makes sense. That's a future that creates jobs. 
That's something we can embrace. I've got to tell you, as to the people 
working there, I don't give a dang if they're Democrats or Republicans. 
They don't care either. They have American jobs with American security. 
They are living the American Dream.
  Do you know what that dream is? Having the chance for an opportunity 
to maybe own your own home, to maybe make it and, by the time you get 
there, to be able to buy a boat--or a snowmobile in our case--and be 
able to put your kids through school, and know that those children have 
that opportunity.
  It's not good enough for us in this place to make policies that 
incentivize work to go overseas, to give tax breaks to those companies, 
and to make it harder for Peerless Chain to produce right here. Those 
are the things that we can do together. Those are the things that we 
can agree upon. Small businesses make it. They're the things that make 
it in America. They've provided the jobs. They've done the things that 
need to be there.
  What you're hearing here--and I have to be very honest with you--and 
what the false dichotomy of choices here is that the government can't 
do anything right--the government is us. It's the schoolteacher from 
Mankato. It's the construction manager from Iowa. It's all of us 
together trying to decide. No, we're not going to do everything right, 
but together we can create something that is bigger than any individual 
person here. I think, as we move forward, we're going to have to be 
willing, all of us--myself looking in the mirror first--to be able to 
reach across and find common ground, to be able to find those things 
that create opportunity and to then have the courage to go forward and 
talk about investing.
  I want to give a couple of examples of this investing. When people 
say that the government can't do anything right, the trick is not to 
have the argument about big versus small government. The argument is 
about effective government. Does it do what the people want at the most 
efficient/effective cost available? Anything less, and now the police 
don't respond when you call 911. Now we aren't correctly making sure 
we're managing the ingredients in the food that people eat, and we have 
contaminated food, or we have lead in our children's toys as anything 
more will hamper business growth.
  So, when I watched the President sit right up here underneath where 
the Speaker is and talk about ``let's get smart reforms,'' it's not an 
either/or about getting regulation one way or adding regulation on.
  An example of what we can do together to make things work happened

[[Page 1422]]

in a hearing today. One of this Nation's major banks, for whatever 
reason--and it will be determined in time--was foreclosing on the 
houses of servicemembers who were deployed overseas. This Congress has 
determined that one of the things we will do if you're willing to serve 
this Nation is to give you protections while you're there, serving in a 
war zone, against excessive interest rates, foreclosure and things like 
that.
  Since the beginning of this country, we've understood if you're 
fighting in a war zone and if you're worried about your family--your 
wife and child--being thrown out of your house, it's pretty difficult 
to focus on your job. Yet they continue to do it, and they continue to 
make it happen.
  Well, that young marine and his wife came today to testify in front 
of Congress, Democrats and Republicans. They said, no, there need to be 
safeguards over that; there needs to be oversight; and yes--a horrible 
word I'm hearing here--there need to be some regulations enforced so 
that we don't do that to our members. That's not antibusiness. That's 
not hampering business growth. That's coming up with the collective 
decision that, if you're going to serve this Nation in war, then we 
should have a business ethic that says we're going to do the right 
thing since it's law. I have to tell you those are compromises we can 
come to.
  Investments. We have a project in southwest Minnesota. It's in 
combination with the gentleman who spoke before me and with our friends 
in South Dakota. In southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa and southeast 
South Dakota, about 800,000 people altogether in rural areas do not 
have access to drinking water.
  In 2009, I met with a woman who, still today, gets her drinking water 
by collecting it in a cistern when it rains and snows. It's not 
poverty. It's necessity. There is no wealth. So a project was designed, 
an incredible project, of bringing together local municipalities, 
States, and the Federal Government to divert water from the Missouri 
River to the Lewis and Clark Rural Water Project. This is not a ``nice 
to have'' thing if you think it's an amphitheater or something. This is 
drinking water and water for businesses. I have communities in my 
district that cannot add one single home because they don't have the 
capacity for water in order to hook up to the sanitary sewers. I have 
businesses, large ones--some of the largest packing plants in the 
country--that can't continue to expand and create jobs because they 
don't have access to water.
  So we came together on this, and here is what happened: the local 
municipalities and the States agreed in concert with the Federal 
Government to pay their taxes ahead to accelerate a project with the 
promise that the Federal Government would fund the program. Those 
promises were made, and then they were broken.
  What ends up happening then, as a Member of Congress and those who 
posture on this floor that we certainly can't have earmarks, is elected 
Representatives of the people of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa don't 
have the access to redress the grievance that we have invested millions 
of dollars, with our citizens paying ahead, with the idea there would 
be some help.
  Yes, those tax dollars will come from across the country, but my 
State is one that is a net return on tax dollars. We send more to the 
rest of the country, but I understand how that benefits us all. We can 
create food and export it elsewhere. Manufactured goods are created 
elsewhere and sent to my district. That's the idea of the 50 United 
States. That's the idea of federalism. In many cases, I think some of 
my colleagues get confused, between the Articles of Confederation and 
the Constitution, of where we're at. That's a project where people say, 
We can't spend a penny on that. Now we will end up spending more money, 
stopping economic growth, and making sure that people in this country 
don't have access to drinking water, all with the idea that we're going 
to be fiscally responsible.
  It will do nothing but add to the debt. It will do nothing but 
deprive people of a basic commodity in this country, a basic commodity 
that you'd like to believe you have access to, which is water, and it 
was paid for ahead of time locally.
  Those are the types of things that we need to have honest discussions 
about. There is no doubt that we've got budgeting situations. If we do 
not handle the national debt, our children and grandchildren will pay a 
heavy price for it. They will pay a price in some very simple things. 
As interest rates begin to climb, their buying power will become less. 
Their ability with the dollars they make are already shrinking for the 
middle class. As our real wages decline, they will have a lower 
standard of living. It will be harder to go to college. It will be 
harder to buy a house. It will be harder to buy a car. That all 
translates into the American Dream slipping a little further away.
  So we have a responsibility to pay our fair share. That's why, when 
the bill came up in December, asking for changes to the Tax Code or 
whatever, I don't think it was that bad to ask for 140 million people 
to get the tax cut in a time of economic downturn. That had to happen. 
That cost us money. There is no doubt about that. It will add to the 
debt. The idea behind that is that money will be spent. Businesses will 
only grow if consumers spend money and if there is a demand for goods. 
The problem many of us had was that the other half of that money went 
to 6,600 families; $154 million to 6,600 families. Yeah, let's slice it 
down the middle.
  There has always been a sense of fairness in this country. We applaud 
success. We applaud people who achieve greatness. If you have a large 
business and if you're employing a large number of people, we're happy 
for you, but keep in mind we're educating those children in our 
schools; we're getting those people to your jobs on our roads that all 
of us are paying for. There has always been the assumption that there 
would be a fairness to our Tax Code, that you would pay it back.
  All of those things create a balanced budget; they create economic 
growth, and they have done the one thing that America has done better 
than anybody else--provided innovation and opportunity for growth for 
the middle class to continue to be able to achieve.
  So what we're going to see over the next couple of years is a turning 
point in this country. I believe we are going to get it and are going 
to figure out what the American people said on November 2. I'll tell 
you they didn't say in 2006, ``Do it all the Democratic way.'' They 
didn't say in 2008, ``Do it all the Democratic way.'' I can tell you 
they did not say on November 2 of last year, ``Do it the Republican 
way.''
  They said, Solve problems. Get together. Move us forward. Create the 
infrastructure and the opportunities for the middle class. Then get out 
of our way. Stay out of our civil liberties. Stay out of our personal 
business. Allow us to do that and create the type of country that we 
were founded on, one that understood that the Constitution was not a 
static document.
  The Constitution was one about the birth of a new Nation and the 
idea, the audacious idea, that you could take a high school teacher 
from Minnesota and plop him down in the very place where Abraham 
Lincoln spoke and say, Go and speak.
  I will tell you, when you sit down on this floor, Mr. Speaker, and 
when you wonder, how in the world did I ever get here? the good thing 
is you meet all of your other colleagues, and you say, how did they get 
here? Then you understand the great diversity of this country. Then you 
understand that our strength lies in our ability to have different and 
competing opinions with a common goal--a strong, fair country with 
equal opportunities, a country that rewards hard work, that rewards 
achievement, but that understands you can't always control life's 
circumstances.

                              {time}  1720

  At times, there is going to need to be a safety net, and the idea 
that we're going to rip out ObamaCare, please keep in mind, I don't 
want to go back to the days when 47 million of my fellow citizens had 
no access to health care, for several reasons. One, I don't

[[Page 1423]]

think it's ethically right. Two is I know I'm paying for it anyway when 
they go to the emergency room and it's more expensive. So why not get 
the preventive care in the best possible manner, deliver that care, and 
quit spending twice as much as any other nation, and start using that 
money to invest in innovation and job creation. That's how we pay down 
the debt. That's how we move forward. That's how we start to get a 
handle on what the core values of this country are and the things that 
have always made us great.
  So we're going to have an opportunity to discuss these issues. I'm 
disappointed. When I was back home and I heard people talk about all 
these things, jobs, jobs, jobs, the economy and the future, I came back 
last night to a bill that was never debated. You heard about this new 
open rule. Well, here is the fact: not a single debate on it, not a 
single amendment, not a single minute of discussion on this floor, and 
you know what that bill was? The Patriot Act, determining if you as an 
American citizen, if the government can listen on you. I don't know 
about you, but I hold a lot of those values that I am very, very 
nervous when somebody is listening to my conversation. And I don't buy 
this, you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry 
about. That's nobody's business. There's legal ways to go about this. 
We can keep this Nation safe by doing that.
  But the new majority, who told us about how things have been done so 
poorly, the first time we had the Patriot Act up on the floor, we 
debated it for weeks. We talked about it. It was discussed. Last night, 
it came in on a suspension calendar, and I have to tell you this, I 
applaud the people here who said ``no'' and those people didn't say 
``no'' to national security. They didn't say ``no'' to stopping 
terrorists. What they said ``no'' to was we are not willing to 
sacrifice our liberties for a little bit of false security. We want 
that balance to be struck, talked about here, and agreed upon.
  So as we talk about jobs, as we talk about what's going to be going 
forward, bringing in the Patriot Act on Tuesday evening with no debate 
and voting for it on the floor just that quickly, when a Member of the 
Republican majority, a new Member, somebody who I know because they ran 
against me on this, asked, did you read the bill, did you read the 
bill, said he hadn't read the bill, but he voted ``yes'' anyway, and he 
said, well, we will have time to work it out.
  That's what America was tired of. That's what America, if they were 
speaking out on November 2, was; and here's the thing. We have a choice 
and I say ``we'' being me. We have a choice that's said on this floor: 
Are we going to be part of the solution, or are we going to continue to 
push problems forward? I think the American people deserve better.
  I think that listening to that soldier today who did his duty, he 
needs a government that's speaking for him. It doesn't matter how big 
that bank is to get it right, and then here's the thing. I'm not saying 
that bank can't do good. In this instance, they did not, and I simply 
don't want to leave it to them to make the decision.
  So together we've got some opportunities. We're going through some 
growing pains, but here's the thing. Our grandparents and our 
forebearers made it through civil wars. They made it through the Great 
Depression. They made it through the civil rights movement. They made 
it through there. We are the product of all that struggle. We are the 
ones that now have to rise to that challenge. We are the ones that have 
to get beyond the petty political bickering that can divide us for 
short-term political gain that's not looking towards the next 
generation.
  We have an opportunity. I saw it everywhere across southern Minnesota 
last week. I saw Republican and Democrat come together, and those 
people coming in that grocery store, one man came to me and said, at 
least I got the courage to come up here and tell you, Tim, I didn't 
vote for you. I'm like, well, that's no big deal, almost half the 
people didn't vote for me, but you're here. You're expressing your 
citizenship. You're expressing solutions that can go forward. That's 
how the country gets back together, and we shook hands. We talked about 
things that can be better, and we walked out of that grocery store 
thinking that tomorrow can be a better day.
  That's what the thought in this country has always been. The future 
and the ability for our children can be better than we're at today. We 
can handle our energy needs, and we can create those jobs at home. We 
can make health care accessible, pay for it, continue to innovate. We 
can manufacture and make it here at home and out-compete any nation in 
the world if we choose to invest in our greatest natural resource, our 
people.
  So now is the time to be smart on budgeting, pay the debt down, get a 
handle on things, get a handle on spending, make taxation fair but 
don't shortchange the next generation, invest in education, invest in 
infrastructure, invest in research.
  And I'm looking forward to the next 2 years, and I think the American 
public deserves nothing less than the best that we have to offer here, 
the voices across this country offering up solutions, debating them in 
a fair manner on this floor, voting for them, and then realizing that 
just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they don't love 
this country. Just because they don't vote the way you wanted to 
doesn't mean they're a communist or a socialist or un-American.
  What it means is we have the golden gift of being able to disagree, 
to debate on this House floor, and to take that debate to the American 
public in a civil, respectful manner with the understanding our 
neighbors love this country every bit as much as we do.

                          ____________________