macleginn/stanford_congress_record_longer_speeches huggingface dataset:
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Let me thank the distinguished ranking member and the manager of this bill. I want to associate myself with Mr. VAN HOLLENS analysis and add some other thoughts. We are on the floor today. April 4. and might I make mention of two points that are not particularly related. but I do want to. again. acknowledge the men and women at Fort Hood. Texas. I was there in 2009 to mourn with those families. Today. I mourn as well with those families whose loved ones have lost their lives and those who suffer. It is important for us as a Nation to be responsive to their needs. I know that we will do so in a bipartisan manner. I also want to make mention that today is the date of the assassination of one of the greatest peacemakers in the world. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. Besides his concern for those who did not have equal rights. he was also an economist. to the extent that his advocacy was to extinguish poverty. The last days of his life were spent planning the Poor Peoples March in 1968 to raise incomes and the quality of life of men and women across America. So I raise the question of where we are in 2014. This is not a conversation that we easily engage with our friends on the other side of the aisle. As you are passing the budget resolution. the process that you are in. to my knowledge. there was no effort to include an increase to the minimum wage. There was no effort to ensure that 164.000 persons in the State of Texas would get an unemployment insurance extension. thereby ceasing them from losing their homes or being evicted from their rental properties or literally not being able to support their families. Now. we have on the floor of the House legislation that simply exacerbates the circumstance of those who are aspiring to be in the middle class. It is a push toward dynamic scoring. Dynamic scoring is an attempt to measure the microeconomic effects of policy changes before they happen and continue to pop up everywhere. In fact. it was even in negotiations of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. also known as the supercommittee. which. by the way. with no condemnation. did not work. It could not get a common ground. You would wonder why Republicans are pushing this dynamic scoring bill. It is because they claim the traditional cost estimates prepared by the CBO are not enough. when we have used the Congressional Budget Office for decades. and it has been an effective tool to balance between revenue and tax. So you wonder why the dynamic scoring comes in because it breaks the backs of poor people and the middle class. We believe that it is simply an attempt to force Congress and the CBO to accept this concept of dynamic scoring and promote the efforts of the Republicans to. again. give more tax cuts. We know that tax cuts did not work. In the good intentions of the Bush administration. those tax cuts put us in the predicament we are in. after leaving the Clinton administration with a billiondollar surplus and the ability to invest in infrastructure. I remember the smiles on those citizens during that timeframe that the economy was turning.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman. I just ask one more time. if our Republican colleagues want information to make informed decisions. why did they specifically exclude one whole category of information based on legislation coming out of the Appropriations Committee to make some important investments that can help our economy grow? They say they want all this additional information. but apparently. they didnt. Again. I say it is not surprising because some of the changes that the Republican budget makes in that area do. according to the Congressional Budget Office. create a drag on the economy in the coming few years. So. again. you are going to have an amendment later on offered by Mr. CONNOLLYand he will talk about that pointto find out if our Republican colleagues really do want full information. but at least in the current form of this bill. they dont. With that. Mr. Chairman. I reserve the balance of my time.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. The CBO provides lots of information right now. I hope all Members of Congress will take advantage of the information they provide. We have now heard. for the second time today. that the Affordable Care Act has cost the economy jobs. Well. the CBO looked at that. They studied it. They gave the Congress information just like our colleagues are asking for. They didnt say that it had any negative job impact at all right now. Now. they said. in the outyears. that now that people are able to go into exchanges to afford health care. that people may decide to not go to a job where the job had been the only way to get taxpayerbenefited health care. Under our current system. if you want a tax benefit for your health care. if you want preferential tax treatment on your health care. where do you go? You go to a job. That is where the tax benefit comes from. As a result of the Affordable Care Act. people now can get a tax credit and go into the exchange. So they can decide to launch a business from their home and get health insurance without having been locked into another job which had been the only place where they got taxbenefited health care. So I encourage my colleagues to read the CBO reports that have already been issued on the Affordable Care Act. I also urge them to read the CBO reports that have already been issued on the recovery bill because the Congressional Budget Office has indicated that. as a result of the recovery bill. the economy actually saved millions of jobs. that that helped the economy from falling farther and farther. Remember. when President Obama was sworn in. we were losing 800.000 jobs every month. and the recovery bill helped stop that free fall and turned that around. That is what the Congressional Budget Office said. the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. So it is great our colleagues are asking the Congressional Budget Office for more information. and we welcome that. It would be great if they read the information the Congressional Budget Office has already issued. I just want to make one final point. Mr. Chairman. I have made it before. but it is important because we keep saying we want more information. more complete information. and if you read this legislation. it says that. Then it says: except. We want information except. We dont want any information on the job impact of those parts of our budget that invest in jobs and our economy. like R&D at places like NIH. National Institutes of Health. like our kids education. We want all the information. but dont tell us about the benefits of those investments. And I wonder why. It is because the Republican budget slashes our investments in those areas. So dont tell us about the impact of that. Congressional Budget Office. Mr. Chairman. I reserve the balance of my time.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia . who will be offering an amendment a little bit later.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I was glad the last speaker mentioned the CBO report on immigration reform. I just wish that. if they really wanted to have a progrowth policy. they would adopt the bipartisan immigration legislation that the CBO wrote about. because what the CBO report said was that would be a great boost to economic growth in our country. It would create more jobs. It would create more economic activity. As I said. because it would generate more economic activity and more progrowth revenue. it would actually reduce the deficit over the next 10 years by $190 billion. and almost a trillion over 20. So. great. I havent really heard a response to this. Mr. Chairman. but we want more information. CBO does reports all the time. But they have this big except. We want more information. except we dont want information about this part of our budget that deals with important investment in our future. As Mr. CONNOLLY said. a lot of our economic competitors have been copying successful models from the United States. For example. the Chinese are trying to hire more scientists in the areas of biomedical research. yet the Republican budget. if you apply it across the board. cut 24 percentcutover the next 10 years from the amount for research at NIH that was in the RyanMurray document. Again. not surprising they dont want the Congressional Budget Office to look in detail at that. When the Congressional Budget Office looked at the budget that just came out of the Budget Committee the other night. which will be on the floor next week. they said. over the next couple of years. these fiscal policies would reduce output and employment below the levels projected in CBOs baselinetranslation: it would reduce economic activity and reduce job growth over the next couple of years. So. again. not surprising that in the legislation before us. progrowth budgeting. our Republican colleagues dont want the CBO to tell us about the progrowth benefits of those important investments. Mr. Chairman. I reserve the balance of my time.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I know I sound like a broken record. Our colleagues keep saying they want more information. but the bill specifically excludes a major portion of information. I now yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from New York . a terrific new member of the Budget Committee.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland . the ranking member of the full Budget Committee and thank him again for his leadership.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I thank my colleague Ms. JACKSON LEE. We have heard from our colleagues all morning that they want more information. a more complete picture of the impact of legislation on our economy. Well. the legislation before us. as we have pointed out repeatedly today. exempts the part of the budget that deals with investments in discretionary spending. From the start. it does that. Then they said no to amendments on the impact on jobs. They have said no to getting more information on the impact on State and local governments and local taxpayers. and now. they are saying no to getting more information on vital portions of our economy. This doesnt say the CBO cant look at other things. It just says that it is important that they look at this part of the economy. There are HUBZones in every part of the country. and they are an important part of our strategy that a lot of us are working towards to try to make sure that everyone in this country has an opportunity to move forward and succeed. So it is discouraging to hear our colleagues reject a request for more information on jobs. local taxpayers. and now in this particular area.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

I thank the gentleman for his astute comments and build on the comments made by the ranking member. Let me put into the record that the Congressional Research Service. in FY2010. the Federal Government awarded contracts valued at $12.7 billion to HUBZone certified businesses. with about $3.6 billion of that amount awarded through the HUBZone program. That is an investment in small business. That is the creation of jobs. Mr. Chairman. the gist of my amendment is jobs and what will be the impact of this type of budget structuring on the HUBZones. Why wouldnt we want that information? Let me quote former Budget chairman Jim Nussle. a Republican witness who testified: It may not be that the budget process is broken. It may not be. in other words. that tools are broken. but it may be the fact that the tools are not even being used. If you are going to add more responsibilities to the CBO. give them additional tools to assess who the jobcreating small businesses are going to be impacted by this bill. Dr. Philip Joyce. former CBO staff member. said: My main message is that most of the tools that you need to solve the budget problems faced by the country are already in your toolbox. Therefore. I am saying if we are putting another tool in the toolbox. if this bill passes. then give them the ability to make sure that we are not killing small businesses that are impacted by the HUBZone funding and assistance. We already see that small businesses create jobs. I would make the argument to my colleagues. and I thank Dr. PRICE for his earlier kind words about the gist of this legislation. and I would ask for his reconsideration. This is a good amendment. and I ask my colleagues to support it. I ask my colleagues to vote "yes" on the Jackson Lee amendment. I yield back the balance of my time. The Acting CHAIR. The question is on the amendment offered by the gentlewoman from Texas .
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I demand a recorded vote. The Acting CHAIR. Pursuant to clause 6 of rule XVIII. further proceedings on the amendment offered by the gentlewoman from Texas will be postponed.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: DANNY K. DAVIS (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Illinois

Mr. Speaker. I rise to commend the mayor of the city of Chicago for initiation of a new set of policies designed to help facilitate the reentry of individuals with criminal records back into normal and productive life. These policies include apprenticeship and job opportunities with the Chicago Transit Authority. city departments. and other municipal agencies. andon a limited basisthe ability to access public housing as a place to live. These are important initiatives for the reentry into community and for the citizens of Chicago. I commend Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: DANNY K. DAVIS (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Illinois

I want to thank the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee. I am pleased to join with him and others of my colleagues as we come to the floor to call for the immediate passage of legislation in the House to concur with the Senate in the restoration of unemployment benefits to the more than 2.2 million Americans who have been cut off of extended unemployment insurance because our Republican colleagues continue to block an extension of the program. Mr. Speaker. it is inconceivable to me that. as a government. as a nation. we would leave all of these individuals hanging. many of them since December 28 of last year. in 2013. Nationally. nearly 72.000 people are losing unemployment insurance. on average. every week. adding to the 202 million people who have already lost their benefits. The Department of Labor estimated that the bipartisan Senate agreement to extend emergency unemployment insurance would benefit nearly 2.8 million people. That is a big part of America. Longterm unemployment wrecks peoples lives. It makes it almost impossible for them to ever catch up because they have gotten behind. They have lost what they had. They have been evicted from their homes. Their children have had to leave college. They just have not known which way to turn except to turn to their government. which they believe has their interests at heart and will do the right thing by and for them. Illinois. my Statethe home of Lincolnis estimated to have lost $296.763.435. just under $300 million. in unemployment benefits during the first 3 months of the year. Any way you count it. that is a lot of money. and it takes that money away from and out of the economy. Those of us who understand a certain kind of economics know that. if you are not able to exchange goods and services. if people are not able to go to the store and get a bottle of milk or to stop at the service station and buy gasoline. there is no point in talking about economic recovery. So. not only is it in the best interests of those individuals who are in need of unemployment benefits. but it is also in the best interest of our Nation as a whole.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

So. to the extent that that is your question on the budget. I am happy to join with you on that. I wish you would join with us now in reconsidering your proposals to change the student loan calculations. but we may be asking too much at this point.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

mentioned. we oppose this legislation and urge a vote "no." With that. I yield back the balance of my time.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: CAROLYN B. MALONEY (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: New York

Thank you. and I thank all of my colleagues for this important bipartisan legislation. Mr. Speaker. there is no more important thing a government can do than protect its citizens from violent crime. and todays reauthorization of the Debbie Smith Act. until 2019. does just that. It will protect women. and it will save lives. The Debbie Smith Act has been called the most important antirape legislation ever to have passed this Congress. During Sexual Assault Awareness Month. April. we are presented with the grim statistics that every 2 minutes. someone is sexually assaulted in our country. This bill was first introduced in 2001. after a hearing Steve Horn and I organized on the use of DNA to convict and exonerate. Since first being signed into law in 2004. the Debbie Smith Act funds have provided State and local governments with the tools to eliminate the backlog that exists around this country. It is estimated the backlog is of roughly 400.000 kits that are sitting in warehouses and police departments. and each one of these kits is representing a life of a woman who has been raped. It not only represents a peace of mind for her to know that her rapist will be convicted and put behind bars. but it will prevent future rapes because the FBI tells us that most rapists will attack another seven times. so. if we can convict. we can save seven other lives. I want to recognize two extremely brave women who are speaking out on this issue and have testified before Congress. It is very difficult to do. I have tried to get people to testify. The only person I could get to testify was my good friend. Debbie Smith. who inspired me and others after her wonderful testimony in 2001. She is also joined by Natasha Alexenko. founder of Natashas Justice Project. working to completely eliminate the backlog. Natashas and Debbies stories tell the need of this legislation. My friend. Congressman SCOTT. spoke about his constituent. Debbie. Natasha was raped. and it took 15 years for them to process her kit. During that 15 years. her rapist raped other women. was involved in sex trafficking. selling drugs. and a slew of other crimes across this country. When her kit was processed. he was put behind bars. If they had processed it earlier. it would have prevented all of this other damage to women and to society as a whole. One of the tragic costs of this type of crime is that those who survive a sexual assault carry wounds that are not readily visible. They are 3 times more likely to suffer from depression. 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol. 26 times more likely to abuse drugs. and 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide. Each rape kit that gets tested brings these survivors closer to justice and prevents future rapes. Since I introduced the first version of this legislation in 2001. it has always received wide bipartisan support. I thank Chairman GOODLATTE. Ranking Member CONYERS. members of the Judiciary Committee. Mr. POE. Ms. BASS.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: CAROLYN B. MALONEY (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: New York

By using a national DNA database. it helps them identify criminals. The bill that Mr. POE and I passed earlier this year. the SAFER Act. will direct that 75 percent of this money go directly for the backlog. It is roughly $113 million. It is important. It is a moral imperative to eliminate the rape backlog so that women will not be victimized simply because their government failed to act and failed to process this important evidence. This is an important day. I urge my colleagues to unanimously pass this bill and move it to the Senate and unanimously pass it there.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I have always viewed the budget document that is produced by this House and the Senate and the President as a moral compass of Americas commitment to her people. That is why I rise with such great disappointment on the Republican Ryan budget in that today. as we speak in the Rules Committee. we are gutting investments in education. scientific research. advanced manufacturing. We are cutting from those vital transportation investments by over $52 billion when we have crumbling highways and crumbling dams and crumbling infrastructure. We are slashing $145 billion from the very heart of our childrens opportunity for education out of the Pell grants. providing millionaires with over $200.000 in a tax break. ending Medicare as we know it by vouchering italmost like the privatization of Social Securityand cutting Medicaid by $732 billion. then ending the opportunity for Americans to have access to affordable health care. preventative health care. so as to be able to allow those who need health care to have itto avoid being a third world country. There are 25 million Americans who need access to health care. Lets get a better moral document and reject this present Republican budget.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

As you know. the value meal on that McDonalds menu 10 years ago cost more than the value meal today. This is just to get about math and budgeting in a transparent way.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield 212 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island . a distinguished member of the Judiciary Committee.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would just point out that I think it is useful to look at this through the perspective of history. because the last time we had balanced budgets in this country was at the end of the Clinton administration. and shortly after that. when President Bush came into office. we saw backtoback tax cuts. The theory at that time was if you dropped the top tax rate on highincome individuals. it will trickle down to everybody else and powercharge the economy. The only problem is that didnt work. It did not work at all. The trickledown theory of economics did not work. We didnt get that boost of economic growth. What we did get was huge. huge deficits as far as the eye could see. And so the problem with this budget is that it is a Uturn back to that philosophythe idea that we are going to provide these tax cuts and it will create a big boost of economic activity. But reality has shown that it doesnt work that way. We should be building our economy from the middle out and from the bottom up. The topdown approach doesnt work. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia . a distinguished member of the Armed Services Committee.
Date: 2014-04-08
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman. I think. for the people who may be watching this. and for our colleagues. the question is. how do we achieve the priorities that we hope we all want to achieve. which is jobs growing faster. the economy growing faster. and deal with the long term deficit and debt in a responsible manner? The glaring problem with the congressional Republican budget is that they dont call for any shared responsibility. They dont ask the most powerful special interests to contribute one dime by closing a single tax break. not one. And because they shelter the most powerful and the most wealthy. everybody else has to take a hit in their budget. As a result. the entire country takes a hit because those are investments in our kids education. in basic science and research that are important to help power our entire economy. Mr. Chairman. I yield 21/2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan . a terrific new member of the Budget Committee.