Date: 2000-10-27
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. and I thank him for the points that. he raised. both about the legislation yesterday and the CommerceStateJustice bill. which I joinhim in urging the President to veto. As one who represents a coastal state whose district is on the edge of San Francisco bay. it is a tragedy that that legislation did not provide the funding necessary so that we can implement our Coastal Zone Management Plan to deal with nonpoint source pollution. the runoff that comes from our cities. our farmlands. from the logging areas upstream. that are devastating water quality in our rivers. in our bays. and along our coast. Last year. California had beachclosures over 3.000 times. some as long 6 to 12 weeks. and a few that were in fact permanent. The impact of that on our economy and tourism is the same kind of impact where they have had that kind of situation along the East Coast. where beaches have had to be closed because of water quality. The single biggest. polluter at this point is nonpointed source pollution. the runoff. whether it is the Chesapeake Bay or Santa Monica Bay or the Gulf of Mexico. where that runoff is collected in the Mississippi River. sent down to the Gulf of Mexico and has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is thousands of square miles. where simply life cannot live in those sections of the Gulf of Mexico. I would hope that the President would veto that. The gentleman also mentioned immigrants. I find it rather interesting on the front page of the Business section of the Washington Post. it says "Sweet Harvest for Virginias Vintners". for the wine industry in Virginia. a Sweet Harvest. When we open up the paper on the inside and we see who is harvesting those grapes. it is Gerardo Chavez. Gerardo Chavez is harvesting those grapes. Yet the other side decided that they were not going -to provide for the fair treatment of immigrants. they were going to distinguish between those. people who came here from Cuba and Nicaragua and El Salvador. The gentleman quite correctly points out. we now see that they were fleeing governments in El Salvador that not only were involved with fingering. and we were involved with fingering El Salvadorans citizens who then disappeared. were tortured and killed. but now. of course. we see the direct relationship between their involvement and the killing of the religious women from America. Those families have had to live with that tragedy now for over a decade as we have tried to get to the bottom of that case. And it turns out now. of course. high Salvadoran officials and the security police and armed forces knew about that and covered it up all of those years. That is the government that these people were fleeing. Many of those people who fled those governments now are working very hard in the American economy and. yet. we are going to deny them the rights to try to provide for legal and permanent- residency and give them the right to prove their situation. rather than send them off back to the country and let them try to prove that from overseas. That treatment of immigrants is inexcusable. We could not run the economy of this country for a day if the immigrants decided to sit down. We could not run the economy of California for 5 minutes if the immigrants did not show up for work. whether it is our tourism economy. whether it is our -agricultural economy. whether it is our manufacturing economy. that is the simple fact of the matter. We ought to start dealing with these people in a fair and equitable fashion. The gentleman also mentioned the continued attack. Many times people ask. what are we arguing over? What is it? We are just bickering. We are just arguing back and forth. This is about whether or not people who go to the workplace will be protected from damages to their nerves and to their muscles and to the skeletal system from the repetitive motion in the workplace. We are all familiar with this. Members of Congress are familiar with this. Flight attendants now wear braces on their wrists and on their arms and on. their hands because of repetitive motion. The checkers in the supermarket wear braces on their hands and their elbows because of repetitive motion. If we go to Home Depot. we will see people wearing back braces to try to prevent repetitive motion. We will see people wearing braces on their hands. machine operators. lathe operators. people who go to work everyday and work very hard. and. yet. the Republicans are absolutely- committed to not letting those regulations go in place. that not only will save those companies millions and millions of dollars in workers compensation claims. but it will extend these individuals work lives so they can provide for their -families so they will not have to take a job that pays them less. or they will not have to leave the workforce and live on disability. Yet. in spite of what the gentleman from Wisconsin pointed out. in spite of the written promises. they are reneging on that. and they are fighting the President on that matter. We are staying here for very real reasons that impact Americans families. whether it is the kind of schools that their children go to and the failure to provide some help for those districts that want to construct schools but may not have the resources to do it. to provide them some interest breaks on those bonds so they can construct those schools. Because the evidence is very clear. you can take a child from almost any economic or socioeconomic setting. from any background. and you put them with the firstclass qualified teacher. with a firstclass curriculum and in a first class school. and they learn like just about anyone else. We ought to. in fact. make sure that we can carry that out. These fights are real. but they are about the future of the American family. It is about whether or not Medicare is going to be there for them. or whether or not we are simply going to reimburse the HMOs and the insurance companies that overpromised and failed to deliver to the senior citizens or those that just simply closed up shop and left hundreds of thousands of senior citizens in different regions. of the country without a health care plan. Let us remember what the original plan was. The original plan by the Republicans was if we joined an HMO. a Medicare HMO. we could not come back to the regular system. We almost shut the government down over that debate. but we prevailed and President Clinton prevailed to make sure that senior citizens that went to an HMO if it did not serve their needs could come back to the Medicare system. If that law that they wanted then. that we fought and extended to Congress over. was in place. those people would be with no health care. no Medicare. because they would have chosen to go into a system that turned out to be a flybynight operation. I just have one question to the gentleman from Wisconsin . Continuing resolutions. this one for 24 hours or for 48 hours. we had one a few days ago for 4 days. the last continuing resolution was for 4 days and everybody went home. I thought continuing resolutions were supposed to be the President gave us some additional time to get the work done. People are saying now that we are going to pass these continuing resolutions and people are going to go home again. I just do not understand how we go forward with these kinds of continuing resolutions that basically enable everyone to go home. I would hope that we would take that into consideration as Members vote on this CR.