Date: 2005-12-08
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. just to piggyback on what the gentleman from Florida was saying. when we are talking about the costs and the impact of the decisions that the Republican leadership is making in this country. let me just highlight for a few minutes exactly what this tax cut package that passed off this floor today is really going to mean for Americans. We have given yet another round of tax breaks to our wealthiest Americans. Now. when you hear the term "wealthiest Americans." there is a lot of different ways that people might think of that. What we are talking about when we are referring to the wealthiest Americans is the top twotenths of 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans in this country. people who are making more than a million dollars a year. The Republican bill that we have passed off this floor today will raise taxes on more than 17 million middle class families by as much as $3.640. while millionaires would get tax cuts of as much as $32.000. These tax breaks for the wealthy few will be paid for directly through the spending cuts that we passed a couple of weeks ago in the Budget Reconciliation Act that we just adopted. We are talking about budget cuts that impact people who need child support enforcement. We are talking about food stamps that provide school lunch funding for thousands and thousands of children across this country. both school lunch and school breakfast funding. We are talking about cuts in financial aid. We are talking about cuts to programs for senior citizens. for children. for rural families. The Republican leadership here. Mr. Speaker. has pushed a tax bill and adopted a tax bill on this floor that will increase the deficit by $81 billion. $81 billion because when I do the math. and I spend quite a bit of time doing first grade math with my first graders at home. I see this as pretty simple math. If you have $50 billion in budget cuts and you try to call the Budget Reconciliation Act. the Budget Deficit Reduction Act. which is an obvious misnomer when you hear what I am going to describe next. and then 2 weeks later you pass a tax cut package that adds $70 billion in tax cuts. well. the difference is another $20 billion on the deficit. I mean. that is just unbelievable that the Republican leadership here would have the nerve to call this bill from 2 weeks ago a Budget Deficit Reduction Act. And to add insult to injury. the kind of money that. we are talking about. the kind of fiscal impact that we are talking about. really boils down to a direct impact on individual Americans. Every newborn that is born as I am speaking owes $27.000 that adds up to the $8 trillion deficit that we have in this country. We have difference in terms of our views on what is considered fiscal responsibility. Obviously. there are differences of opinion when it comes to the approach that Democrats and Republicans take. But layered on top of those differences is the culture of corruption and cronyism that exists in this country and in this Congress and in this administration. Just over the last several months we have had details of that. I mean. we have layer upon layer of cronyism. of corruption and of incompetence. To me it smacks of incompetence when you continue to pass tax cuts and budget cuts and balloon the deficit bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean. we are not going in the right direction here. There should not be any delusions that we have reduced the deficit in any action we have taken in the last several weeks. Then you add that to the fact that we had a nightmarish. disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was clearly the result of indifference. There was an opportunity in the previous fiscal year before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region to put the money and keep the money in the budget. to fund the levees in New Orleans and the administration took it out. They took that funding out. So where it was possible to stave off the disaster that struck New Orleans. instead the adniinistration put tax breaks for the wealthy as a higher priority. Let us move on to. we have covered incompetence briefly. now we can talk about cronyism. The cronyism that exists in this administration is just absolutely rampant. It runs deep. It is not occasional It is not an anomaly. You have example after example. Let us take Michael Brown. for example. who was formerly the director of FEMA. Not only was he absolutely unqualified for the job and had little to no emergency preparedness or disaster response training or professional experience before taking the job at FEMA and being offered the job at FEMA. what his specific qualifications were prior to becoming FEMA director was to be head of the Arabian. excuse me. Let us give credit where credit is due. He was head of a national organization. The National Arabian Horse Association. I am not sure what type of emergencies or disasters occur with Arabian. horses. but there does not seem to be much of a nexus between that type of experience and the type of experience that you need to run the largest disaster response and preparedness organization in the country. An organization where the director is expected after a disaster to have the command of every agency at his fingertips. to be able to direct each of those agencies in a particular direction to respond as quickly as possible. Yet. not even that was possible after Katrina because. unfortunately. FEMA has been brought under the Department of Homeland Security and is no longer an independent .agency directly responsible to the President with an independent secretary. Now we have so many layers of bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security that by the time the FEMA directors request gets all the way up the food chain. many lives have been harmed. a lot more damage has occurred. And if there is any organization that needs to be lean and clean and responsive in this government. it is FEMA. And we have. unfortunately. hamstrung FEMA and FEMAs director to such a degree that we have seen the results after Katrina to that disaster and the disaster response. We saw the nightmare traffic jams when the folks in Texas and the wester part of the gulf coast tried to get out of their homes and community on the roads to get away from Rita potentially. And then in my home State. when Wilma hit 2 months after Katrina. one would think that after Katrina hit that maybe a couple of lessong would have been learned and we would not be repeating the same mistakes. Yet. even today we still have victims of Wilma in South Florida who are without housing. who are not evep in temporary housing. who are still in shelters. That is the type of person we put in charge of an agency that has that much responsibility. Let us look at Julie Myers as we continue on with the subject of cronyism. Julie Myers was nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. The responsibilities in that job were that she would have been in charge of the second largest investigative agency in the Federal Government with over 20.000 employees. including 6.000 investigators and an annual budget of more than $4 billion. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE. is .comprised of five divisions that form a. 21st century law enforcement agency. It is an agency that my office at home contacts every day to help people with their immigration problems. Her resume includes that she is currently a special assistant handling personnel issues for President Bush. She was. of course. recently married to the chief of staff to Michael Chertoff. Secretary Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security. She is the niece of General Richard Myers. the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I am not sure what qualifications she has for a job of that size and scope. Her only previous experience was that of being a special assistant handling personnel issues. I do not really see the nexus or the connection from that job to the job that she was nominated for as the head of an immigration division. Hi1276 Right now. basically. even Republican Senator VOINOVICH told Ms. Myers at her nomination lAearing that he would really like to have Secretary Chertoff spend some time with the committee. telling them personally why he felt Ms. Myers was qualified for the job because he said. based on your resume. I do not think you are. Let us move on to David Safavian. if we are going to continue the examples of the culture of corruption and cronyism here. Let us continue in the cronyism theme. David Safavian was the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in OMB. His responsibilities included being in charge of a $300 billion budget and ensuring fair competition for Federal contracts. His job also included setting the procurement policies for the Office of Management and Budget. including funding for Hurricane Katrina efforts. Let us detail some of his experience. He is currently out on bail after being arrested and charged with obstructing the criminal investigation into indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He is also married to Jennifer Safavian. who is also a person who has numerous ties and connections to Republican leadership. That also includes lobbying partnerships with the likes of Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff. I could go on. Mr. Speaker. but that is just a smattering of examples of people who were appointed or recruited or nominated for major positions within the administration with not so major qualifications. Now. let us talk about the culture of corruption that has existed. I can tell you that as a freshman Member of this body. and as someone who served in the Florida legislature for 12 years. I can tell you that I am not naive. We are obviously a representative body and there are going to be instances of ethical lapses. We are all human and that does occur. especially in a representative body the size of this one. But when you get to the size and scope and proportion of ethical lapses and of corrupt activity or at least people who have been accused of that corrupt activity. it becomes deeply. deeply troubling. We have a former Member. only recently former as of last week. who admitted guilt to bribery. I mean. this is a person who was a ranking member on an appropriations subcommittee in this body. and someone who absolutely violated the trust of his constituents and the trust of the American people. I know we have other Members in this Chamber. in this body. who have been accused of ethical wrongdoing. and there have been quite a few of those who have been accused of ethical wrongdoing in the administration. as well. The bottom line. Mr. Speaker. is that America deserves better. We can work together and give America a better government. a government that stands up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. A government who understands that we are not all of the problem and we can be part of the solution to the problems in America and to the problems in peoples individual lives. EJ 1730 That is unfortunately not what it appears are the priorities that are shared by the Republican leadership in this institution or in the administration. We have got to move this country in a new direction. Mr. Speaker. We have an agenda on the Democratic side that would do just that. I want to spend a few minutes talking about that agenda. This is the 30something Working Group. and in the 30something Working Group. one of the things that we try to do is help our generation understand. What happens with our generation is that often they feel less in touch with the inner workings of government. They do not really see. for example. how Social Security reform could potentially alter their future. The 30something Working Group comes to this floor each night and tries to help demystify a lot of the government programs that maybe our generation does not feel the impact of directly. I want to talk about Democratic leader NANCY PELOSIS innovation agenda. which is the innovation agenda of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Caucus. She rolled that out just last week. and it is an agenda that appeals and speaks directly to our generation. We have a challenge today in this country that in years past countries around the world would follow the United States in terms of our innovation and our future technological advances. One has only to look back to when I was 3 years old in 1969 and we put the first man on the Moon. That was something at the time that no one thought possible. I heard my parents and I heard Leader PELOSI talk about it just the other morning where it was so foreign a concept. something completely unfathomable to my parents generation. not something that they ever thought possible. and yet when President Kennedy talked about it. I think it was accomplished in 9 years. America was previously a country that the rest of the world looked to as innovators. and now because of the direction that this Republican leadership and the Republican administration have taken us in. the anvil of Washington has stagnated our ability to be innovators. What we have done is we took a process and went outside of Washington. We went to the technological centers across the country and sat with CEOs and the leaders of technological companies across the country and asked them what they think. Let me just give you a few examples of the type of leadership and the differences and the changes that have occurred. America now ranks 16th in the world in broadband penetration. That is the difference between when I was a child in 1969 and where we are today. America ranks 16th in broadband penetration. broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants on January 1. 2005. You look at the countries. we are not at the top. Korea is at the top. Hong Kong and China are at the top. Iceland is doing better than we are in terms of broadband penetration. What happened to America leading the way on innovation? We are 16th in penetration. We have an agenda. that would change that. We have an agenda that would put broadband access in every household in 5 years. That is a goal that we absolutely should strive for. We have got to make sure that our generation raises their kids. that we raise our kids to be first. to have the attitude that it is America first. That is how it was when we were kids when President Kennedy was in office. and that is how it should be again.