The Continued Misdirection of the Country
THE CONTINUED MISDIRECTION OF THE COUNTRY -- (House of Representatives - May 10, 2006)
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Mr. CLEAVER. It is good to be here. We were sworn in together to this Congress, and I have often been asked, what has surprised you the most?
In fact, today, a group of students from the Bloch School of Business at the University of Missouri in Kansas City was here, the Bloch School named after Henry Bloch, the founder H&R Block, who is a Kansas Citian; and the question they asked was, what has surprised you the most?
Having served as mayor of Kansas City for two terms, I have seen a lot in the political environment. So they were obviously wanting me to describe what I saw here as opposed to and what was different from what I saw as mayor.
The number one issue I always report is the incivility. I don't think any of us who were sworn into the 109th Congress expected the incivility to be at the level that we have witnessed.
I have gone to some of the long-time Members of Congress from the Democrat side and asked, for example, when we were in the majority, did we do mean-spirited things? Did we leave the vote open for 3 hours? Did we lock the door to keep people out from the other side?
And they said, we did shamefully some things. We never left the vote open for 3 hours. We never locked out people from a markup. And I cannot tell you how upset I became to find out last year, that just before Christmas, many of us sat here all night for a vote on the defense bill, and the American public probably does not know that there is not a single human being on planet Earth who read the bill, because the bill actually was a compilation from a number of committees. And so while there may have been one group familiar with one part of the budget, there was nobody, no group familiar with the entire budget. And I sat on the front row, and I actually fell asleep about 6 a.m. and I got up and I said, I am not going to vote for this.
And then a number of my colleagues came over and said, yeah, this is wrong, they should not have done it. But you have to vote for it because if you do not vote for it, they will send e-mails throughout your district saying that you were opposed to the troops, you were against supporting the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I said, will they do things like that? And so I wondered if they were overstating it. I voted for it like most Members of Congress. And then 1 week later, e-mails were sent all over the State of Missouri, in fact I received a phone call from a constituent in Congressman Carnahan's district because I voted against a bill to protect the symbols of Christmas.
I could not believe that the Congress of the United States, the 109th Congress, with $4 billion being spent every month in Iraq, with No Child Left Behind not receiving full funding within my State, and in Congressman Carnahan's State there have been 97,000 people kicked off Medicaid. When you consider the fact that we do not have an energy policy in this country, at least not one that makes sense, I could not understand why the Congress of the United States needed to protect Christmas. As if, you know Christmas was in danger, and if we did not vote, if the people in here did not vote, Christmas was not going to occur.
And so I voted against it, because I thought it was ridiculous then, I think it is ridiculous now. I have a master's degree in theology and never read anything which would suggest that God needed the help of the 109th Congress.
But it gives you an idea about the civility or lack thereof. And so it causes me a great deal of pain to see many of the things that are occurring. I do not want to suggest that we do not have some people on our side who may also from time to time contribute to the vitriol that I see. The difference, of course, is our vitriol means very little because we do not have the power and the ability to bring legislation up.
And so when I go home and tell people, they say, well, why do you not introduce a bill to do such and such? And I said, you do not understand. I can introduce 1,000 bills. If I introduced a bill that would cure cancer, it would never get a hearing. And it is always a surprise for the public to hear that because they do not understand that you cannot introduce legislation no matter how great the merit, if you are not with the majority party.
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Mr. CLEAVER. May I inquire of the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania, Congressman Carnahan and I are from Missouri. We are in the middle of the country and we are not prone to extremes, so we believe you are supposed to balance the budget. Congressman Carnahan's father was the Governor twice in the State of Missouri; he balanced the budget. I had to do the same as Mayor of Kansas City.
In fact, there is a State law in Missouri that you must balance your budgets. There is no such thing as you did not do it this year. You must balance the budget.
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Mr. CLEAVER. Maybe as a member of the Budget Committee you can help me understand why the money for the gulf coast reconstruction and the money for Iraq was not budgeted. I mean, we do not have two of the most costly items in the U.S. budget factored in, and as a new Member that troubles me.
It would trouble the American public if they knew. You mean you do not put in the cost of the war in Iraq? You mean you do not add in the budget the rebuilding of the most devastated region in the history of the United States? Well, how are we going to do it?
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Mr. CLEAVER. As I raised the question earlier, my concern was and I knew we would eventually get to this point, was that the money that we do not budget we borrow. And most Americans are outraged over the U.S. debt which is rising even as we speak here tonight.
When we borrow the money for the rehabilitation of the gulf coast and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are borrowing those dollars. And right now we owe Japan $683 billion. And then next to them we owe China $249 billion.
We even owe OPEC $67 billion. And at a time when we are talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, it does not make sense to me, I am from the middle of the country so there are some things maybe I do not understand. It does not make sense to me that we are talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil while at the same time borrowing more money from OPEC.
There is a scripture, Proverbs 22:7 which says that the borrower is always at the whim of the lender. And when we are talking about owing OPEC $67 billion, I am not sure that we are in any kind of position to be influential with folks to whom we owe billions of dollars.
And the debt continues to rise with even our neighbor to the north, Canada. And most Americans cannot understand that debt because we have to pay our bills each month. And with the gasoline prices reaching $3 a gallon it means that someone who is earning minimum wage, $5.15, works the first hour of their week to buy 17/10 gallons of gasoline. That is obscene.
And so it means that the first day they work, the first day they work of a 5-day work week, 7 hours of that, of that first day goes to fill up that tank of gas at the minimum wage of $5.15, which means that wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. And so it continues to roll on when you look at the average price per gallon today which is just under $3; and of course in many cities on the East Coast it has already reached $3 a gallon, and people are hemorrhaging with this kind of gasoline cost.
I think it is absolutely obscene that the gasoline cost is rising at this level while, as my colleague, Congressman Carnahan mentioned earlier, the oil barons are reaping the largest profits in history. He said of the world; I think it is of the galaxy. No corporate institution has ever earned that kind of profit.
That becomes even more obscene when you add to that the fact that the CEO of one of the major companies has a retirement package that almost equals $400 million.
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Mr. CLEAVER. Mr. Speaker, the Ford plant in Kansas City is now in mass production of a hybrid, which they are placing on the market because there is hopefully going to be a great demand, and we think that in the middle of the country it makes perfect sense for us to manufacture hybrids because, after all, we produce the agricultural products that were mentioned earlier that can be used for E-85.
We probably are in a situation now where we need to look at the situation with oil as a security issue. It is an issue that digs deeply into the pocketbooks of most Americans, but in addition, it is a security issue, and it is a security issue because the people of the United States, I am sure, do not want to owe this kind of money to China or OPEC or any of the other countries, for that matter, and so we need to think about this issue.
Gasoline is an international commodity, and I think with the increased use of gasoline by China and India it is going to drive the demand up, and so the price of gasoline, in all probability, is going to rise.
However, the Congress of the United States ought to get serious about trying to address this problem in the long run. I introduced a bill today that would require all Members of Congress when their lease expires on an MRA, the Members Representation Account, the money we get to run our offices, that when the lease expires on their automobiles, that they would have to lease or could lease only automobiles that are energy efficient as defined by the GSA.
Now, the reason I have done this is because people are poking fun at Congress. The numbers in terms of our approval rating is always down, and one of the reasons is they think we are hypocrites. I mean, we talk about energy on the floor. We talk about it when we go home with press conferences, but then they look at us and see us driving big SUVs and it does not click. It is the thing that troubles us.
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Mr. CLEAVER. Mr. Speaker, I think that the whole energy issue is quite convoluted because we are never able to address the issues that we want the American public to benefit from because there are always little tricks.
For example, LIHEAP was placed in the energy bill last year, which is money for low-income individuals to get assistance in their heating costs, and so that is placed in there. So that, if you vote against it, it means that you are against poor people, and of course I voted against it because at some point I came to the conclusion that I had to be faithful to who I am. I am not voting for any of those things anymore, where they do what we call the ``got you'' legislation, and I am not voting for that anymore because the American public ends up suffering every time we do that.
But the question that I think is going to be raised here is will Congress make the decision to allow legislation to surface that would require that they give up gas guzzlers when they use government money to do the lease. Now, this is not private vehicles, but what the public may not know is many Members of Congress legitimately will lease automobiles. They can only lease them for 2 years because we are only here for 2 years, and then we must go up for reelection. So we are saying that when the lease expires, if you really believe in energy efficiency, then let us make sure that the public can see us as ones who are embracing what we are preaching. It is a horrible, horrible thing to advocate in a commercial that people should drink Coca-Cola and then people visit your home and you have Pepsi.
So I think one of the things Congress must do, it is a moral thing I believe to stand up and say we are going to drive energy efficient cars. It gives us the right then to begin to talk to the public about some legitimate sacrifices that all of us are going to have to make.
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Mr. CLEAVER. If the gentlewoman would yield, I found some money and I want to announce it right now to the world. If we rescind the tax cuts for individuals with an adjusted gross income in excess of $200,000, the revenue effect of that would be $24.5 billion in fiscal year 2007 and over 5 years it would be $137 billion. The tax cuts that this Congress gave in 2001 and 2003 disproportionately benefited the wealthiest people of the Nation. At the same time we have been unable to increase the minimum wage from $5.15. And we are giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country. The tax cuts that were given would allow the wealthiest Americans with 46.8 percent of the tax benefits proposed in the President's fiscal 2007 budget and extended from 2001 and 2003, it would benefit 4.1 percent of the taxpayers of this country. People who are going to get up early in the morning to drive to their job and most of the money they earn that day is to buy gasoline are not going to be thinking kindly of what is happening to them.
There is a tsunami of frustration rolling across America. People are frustrated with what they see going on here. It is revealed in the polling data that is coming in from every polling source. It is bipartisan. Newspapers, whether they are the conservative Washington Post or the progressive New York Times are coming up with the same numbers, and that is the people of this country are frustrated. Incivility continues. We don't attack issues. We attack people. We don't try to come together and sit down and try to figure out ways in which we can help this country. We lock the doors. We lock people out of meetings. We won't allow a discussion or a debate on issues that are critically important to this Nation.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Cleaver, they do those things. It is the Republicans that do those things. I just want to point that out. When you are using ``we,'' that includes us and we don't do that.
Mr. CLEAVER. That is absolutely correct. The reason that I used ``we'' and it is a dangerous use of the word ``we,'' is that what many people see coming out of this body, they attribute to all of us when the truth of the matter is we don't have, we, those of us on this side, don't have the capacity because we are the minority, to effect the kinds of changes that I think we need to effect.
And so the tsunami of frustration continues to roll across America. Something needs to be done. If not, I think that we are headed dangerously toward a number of crises, some of which this Nation has never ever experienced before.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. Your comments, I think, do speak to the frustrations we hear from Americans. But I hope that as we end this evening's discussion, we can also leave with the understanding that Americans, I hope, will feel hopeful. Because, in fact, you point out that if we use common sense, if we use our political will, if we sit down to work out these issues, we could do that. I think that is what the American people expect of us and it is also something that I think as freshmen we are offering back, that we want to be able to say we can do this, we want to do it, we want to be able to tackle these problems and we want all of the best ideas, and there are so many out there, to be able to offer the
American people the secure Nation that they want, the opportunities for their children economically and educationally and the kind of hope for the future that they all want.
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