The 30-Something Group: The Democratic Budget Proposal

THE 30-SOMETHING GROUP: THE DEMOCRATIC BUDGET PROPOSAL -- (House of Representatives - November 03, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Davis of Kentucky). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, first I want to thank the Democratic leader (Ms. Pelosi) of California for the opportunity to spend some time talking about the issues of concern to Americans across this country, and as a member of the 30-something Democrats, and I know I will be joined by my colleagues in a few moments, we have appreciated hearing from the literally hundreds of Americans both in our generation and across the generational spectrum over the last weeks since we have been talking about those issues on the floor here.

My good friend from Pennsylvania, I cannot help but spend a few moments talking about some of the matters that he has just addressed, being that I am a Representative of the State of Florida; and I had an opportunity to engage in a very interesting and informative and timely dialogue with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) just yesterday.

Unfortunately, the industry organization that he just cited, which he also cited in our debate the other night, Associated Industries of Florida, that is not an organization, if the Members are familiar with Florida politics, that is at all representative of the average business organization in our State. Associated Industries of Florida is primarily made up of the most major corporations in Florida. Every major oil company is a member of Associated Industries. So it makes quite a bit of sense that the opinion of Associated Industries would reflect what Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania just described.

Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania advocates for more drilling off the coast of Florida, California, all around the coastline of our country. He particularly focuses on natural gas and professes that natural gas is a clean-burning gas and that there would be little to no risk to expanding that drilling. Well, when one is a representative from the State of Florida, and we have 77 million people who visited our State just last year alone and $56.5 billion in taxable sales is generated by tourism, most of which is the result of our beautiful beaches and our pristine coastline, one can clearly see why most Floridians would have a significant problem with the possibility of there being oil rigs off our beaches within the eyesight of tourists or our residents.

And Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania has continually represented that natural gas is a potential alternative energy source. Well, just off the Florida coastline, the Minerals Management Service, which is a government agency under the Department of the Interior, has documented that there is only about a 70-day supply of natural gas off the coastline of Florida in the gulf under current consumption rates in the United States. That to me does not appear to take us into the rest of the century in terms of dealing with our energy needs.

What we should be doing is uniting as Members of Congress representing this country and dealing with our long-term energy crisis by exploring alternative energy sources, not going to the same old energy sources and trying to drill our way out of this problem. Drilling is not the solution. There is far too much environmental risk to drilling, whether we are drilling for natural gas or drilling for oil; and the proposal that we will be considering that is attached to the budget reconciliation bill, the budget-cut document that we will be considering, at the earliest, next week, includes a terrible proposal that would expand drilling off the coastline of Florida and bring drilling within 125 miles of Florida's coast on the gulf.

That is a totally inappropriate proposal. It makes absolutely no sense. It would jeopardize our environment, and I am hopeful that my colleagues from Florida and other colleagues who represent coastal communities which will also be in jeopardy if this provision passes will join us in opposing this budget reconciliation bill, not the least of which, because there are many other reasons why it should be opposed because of the dire cuts that are in the budget that are going to rain terror down on Americans across this country; but to add insult to injury, it also has a terrible provision in it that would allow drilling off the coastline around our entire country.

So with that having been said, I want to talk a little bit about what we talked about in the previous hour and turn the conversation back to the budget reconciliation bill. There are a number of significant problems with the budget cuts that the Republican leadership is proposing. But one of the things that I wanted to turn to is what Democrats think we should be doing in terms of the budget.

Democrats want to bring the budget back into balance. What we proposed in the Budget Committee today included a proposal that would bring the budget back into balance by 2012. The Democratic budget also has a smaller deficit than the Republican budget every year and would accumulate less debt and waste fewer resources on interest payments that are needed to service the national debt. We would include budget enforcement measures to protect Social Security.

We would do more for education. The Democratic proposal provides $4.5 billion more for appropriated education and training programs than the Republican budget for 2006 and $41 billion more over the next 5 years. We also reject the $21 billion in cuts that the Republican budget requires the Education and Workforce Committee to make over the next 5 years. Those are cuts that could fall on students loans and school lunches.

These are not the same old tired complaints. It is insulting to suggest that cutting school lunches and financial aid are tired complaints. If one is struggling to be able to give their children breakfast and lunch on a daily basis and make sure that they are provided with nutrition and they do not financially have the ability to ensure that they can do it themselves, staring down budget cuts that take that opportunity away from them is nothing short of cowardly. This is a cowardly budget reconciliation bill. It does not show any guts at all, and it abandons the American people.

Let us talk about housing. In the previous hour, we talked a little bit about the housing cuts that this budget-cut bill would hand down, and I am joined by my good and close friend whom I had an opportunity to serve with in now three different Chambers, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek). His district and my district were hit badly by a category 3 storm last week, Hurricane Wilma; and we were talking in the last hour about housing and the issues related to affordable housing that our constituents were already facing.

I want to just point out this picture here. Over the weekend I had an opportunity to go door to door in my district because there are so many senior citizens trapped in their homes without power. We still have half a million people who do not have power in south Florida. And, unfortunately, whether it is because of hurricane fatigue or just the fact that there was so much damage in the gulf coast region that it may be difficult to feel the pain that we are going through in south Florida and understand it, but there is not nearly as much attention as we need focused on what happened in south Florida.

When I was going to door to door in my district to try to help some of the folks who have trouble getting out of their houses, and I am talking about people who are in their 80s and 90s, one of the apartments that the building captain in the condominium brought me into included this kind of damage. This is the result of Hurricane Wilma, and this is just one example. There are hundreds and hundreds of condominium units and apartment buildings and homes and mobile homes that look just like this.

There is a perception, whether it was created by the media or created by the lack of attention by the national media on what happened with Hurricane Wilma, that everything is fine in south Florida. Everything is not fine, Mr. Speaker, in south Florida.

This is the third floor apartment, and that is the ceiling of the apartment. And as we can see, we can look right through the ceiling at the sky. This is this woman's master bedroom; and literally during the storm, 1 minute after she walked out of that master bedroom, the roof caved in on her bed. A minute earlier and it would have caved in on her.

When we talk about the affordable housing problem that we already had, now we have thousands of people in south Florida whose homes have been condemned, who are faced with nowhere to go because the average price of a house just in Broward is $348,000 a year. The rental units, the monthly rent is sky high. And FEMA has literally only 300 inspectors in our State going through these homes to determine whether these people are going to qualify for assistance.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, it is worse. It got worse from there. It was not just what he was doing with his attire, rolling up his shirt sleeves, but what he was wearing that they continued to talk about. On August 29, the day of the storm, Brown exchanged e-mails about his attire with Ms. Taylor, his press secretary again. She told him in the e-mail, ``You look fabulous.'' And Brown replied, ``I got it at Nordstrom's. Are you proud of me?''

An hour later he added, If you look at my lovely FEMA attire, you will really vomit. I am a fashion God.''

This is the day of the storm. He is still being paid $148,000 a year to advise FEMA, according to Secretary Chertoff, and change, give or take a dollar or two, to advise FEMA about what they should be doing in the aftermath.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And we are getting lectured to by people telling us that that party on that side of the aisle is responsible? Is this responsible? Is that good leadership? We have not seen good leadership out of this administration yet. Come on.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. The only thing that they are doing here is they have a lopsided partisan committee that is supposedly reviewing the aftermath of Katrina and FEMA's response. You know, I would feel much better about any review, although I strongly believe that there should be an independent Katrina commission, as do 81 percent of Americans, but if they had learned something between storms.

We have had three storms in two months, from Katrina to Rita and from Rita to Wilma. They have learned nothing. After my district and that of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) district got hit by Wilma, and Secretary Paulison now in FEMA is a qualified professional, so at least they have that right now, but unfortunately FEMA still is not getting it right.

We still 10 days after the storm do not have a disaster recovery center established in Broward County or in Miami Dade County, a permanent one. There are seven mobile units between the two counties. We have more than 136,000 people in Broward alone who have applied for assistance, and they cannot get it yet because FEMA only has 300 inspectors in the whole state and they can do about 10 a day in terms of the inspections.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, we talk in our 30-something Working Group here, I used to say every week; but now it's every night, about third-party validators, and I think it is important to have third-party validators so that we show the people who are hearing us tonight that this is not Tim Ryan's opinion or Debbie Wasserman Schultz's opinion or Kendrick Meek's opinion or Bill Delahunt's opinion; this opinion is shared by many, many others.

The Republican leadership here, they talk a good line about faith and values. In fact, they base almost their entire campaigns, the case they make to the country, about how we need to restore family values, we need to restore values and faith, and there should be more faith injected into every aspect of our government. Well, let us see what the people of faith, our faith leaders are saying about these budget cuts that we are going to be considering next week.

Today, there were leaders from various faiths that joined in prayer at the Capitol. Those leaders included Reverend Dr. Bob Edgar, who is the general secretary of the National Council of Churches; Reverend Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and Convener of Call to Renewal; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism; and Eleanor Giddings Ivory, director, Washington office, Presbyterian Church. They had a press conference before the prayer and they called for a moral budget and urged Congress to stop immoral budget priorities. Let me just outline a few of the things that they said.

Reverend Wallis said, ``As this moral battle for the budget unfolds, I am calling on Members of Congress, some of whom make much out of their faith, to start some Bible studies before they cast votes to cut food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more that hurt the weakest in our Nation. Reverend Edgar of the National Council of Churches said, ``We gather today just days after Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, lie in State here in the Capitol rotunda. Even as we celebrate her life and the strong witness she had for justice, we recognize that justice is hanging in the balance as this proposed budget, if passed, would hurt those who are most in need in our society: children, the elderly, and those living in poverty.''

I just want to quote from the remarks that Rabbi Saperstein made. He quoted the Bible and used the Bible's words to help our Republican colleagues understand the impact that they are making. He urges us to ``deal thy bread to the hungry,'' not ``steal thy bread from the hungry.''

Remember Proverbs' stern warning: ``Do not steal from the weak because he is weak and do not oppress the poor in the gate.''

Listen to the voiceless and to the Biblical imperative: ``Speak out for those who cannot speak for the rights of the destitute.''

These are the third-party validators who are our religious leaders that are urging this Republican leadership not to go down this path, not to pull out the rug and the floor and literally burn the house down that people who are so badly in need in this country cannot afford to sustain.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Our priorities, apparently the priorities of this administration are in appointing unqualified people to run Government agencies like Michael Brown, whose priorities clearly were more on what kind of shirt he was wearing, as opposed to making sure that the people in the gulf coast States who were about to get and then did get hit by Katrina did get taken care of. And about whether to roll up their shirtsleeves and by appointing their college roommates to jobs, to making sure that you have well-qualified people in the Government.

It does not stop at Michael Brown. You have people who have been found to be wholly unqualified up and down the Government. You have corruption, through and through, from the top. At the White House, the first person working in the White House in 130 years to be indicted in 130 years.

You know, we have had quite a few scandals in White Houses past just in my lifetime, but never once has a White House official, an administration official working in the White House been indicted before 130 years ago. That is where their priorities are.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that they do not appear to have any interest in that. Yet again, the cronyism and the culture of corruption continues because one would think that after Brownie they would have learned, who is still on the payroll.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. $148,000 a year.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. $148,000 a year. They may have learned and bring in additional people who are qualified. Yet, the President just picked the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, chairman to run the gulf coast recovery. Let us peruse his qualification. He gave $100,000 to President Bush's Presidential campaign.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Corruption.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. He has 30 years' experience in the financial services industry.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Cronyism.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. It does not stop.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Incompetence.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Because they have no interest in it stopping.

We are approaching the end of our hour, and I want to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and ask him to give out our Web site.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov.

http://thomas.loc.gov