Providing for Consideration of H.R. 5811, Electronic Message Preservation Act

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 5811, ELECTRONIC MESSAGE PRESERVATION ACT -- (House of Representatives - July 09, 2008)

Mr. WELCH of Vermont. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 1318 provides a closed rule for consideration of H.R. 5811, the Electronic Message Preservation Act. The resolution, as you know, provides 1 hour of debate controlled by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The rule makes no amendments in order because no amendments were submitted for consideration.

H.R. 5811 is an important bill introduced by Chairman Waxman that modernizes the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act to ensure that vital government records are preserved for historical posterity.

The Electronic Message Preservation Act will make certain that we retain important Presidential records by directing the Archivist to establish standards for the capture, management, and preservation of White House and Federal agency e-mails. The Archivist of the U.S. will set new standards for tracking Federal e-mail records and annually will certify whether the records management controls put in place by the President meet those standards and comply with the act.

The bill will protect American history so that we will not lose important records in an antiquated record system that exists now, but it will also guide and enforce document retention policies within the executive branch.

The bill is very necessary. Through its investigations, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee discovered that in one instance the current White House had lost hundreds of days of e-mail, and in other instances allowed numerous White House officials, including Senior Advisor Karl Rove, to use Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for government business--improper, obviously. E-mails sent by White House officials over these RNC accounts related to official government business, and potentially hundreds of thousands of these e-mails have been destroyed.

In addition, the White House did grossly mismanage its own e-mail records and ignored concerns that were raised not by Congress, but by the National Archives, about the way it was storing e-mails.

Further, the current print-and-file record retention systems are both unreliable and not in step with modern advances in technology. For example, when President Bush came into office, the White House had an automated system in place for archiving e-mails, but in 2002, the White House decided to abandon this archiving system and replace it with an ad hoc manual system, doing so in an electronic age. White House officials were warned by the technical staff of their own White House staff and by National Archives that this ad hoc manual system for managing e-mails presented an obvious threat and serious threat of losing records. And the White House's own technical expert said the system was, to use the word of that expert, ``primitive'' and carried a high risk that ``data would be lost.'' Yet, despite these warnings, the White House has still not put into place a reliable, up-to-date system for preserving e-mails.

This bill will change that. It will require the Archivist to establish specific standards for the management and preservation of electronic messages, including the capability to retrieve messages through electronic searches. These standards will help prevent a situation like what is happening under this administration. H.R. 5811 directs e-mail records to be stored electronically and removes ambiguity in the current law that was established before we even had e-mail.

The bill and the manager's amendment were approved by voice vote in the committee because it is timely and it's necessary. I urge the passage and a ``yes'' vote on the rule.

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Mr. WELCH of Vermont. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time, and I'm going to approach the podium to use some charts.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is about the preservation of electronic records. The debate has turned into a discussion of our energy policy. And there are two reasons why we would be discussing energy instead of the substance of the actual bill. One is that our friends on the other side don't have anything to say about the importance of the preservation of electronic records. Two is they want to use the opportunity of floor time to make a case, their case, about energy. I intend to respond to both of those issues.

First of all, I want to go back to what this legislation is about. It's about the preservation of the historical record for the American people. It's also about the preservation of the records of the administration so that in the future when any Congress wants to hold any President accountable, there will be documentation of what has happened in that administration.

It is extraordinarily important that this Congress restore its constitutional function of insisting on accountability for the American people. We have three branches of government, and one of them has been asleep for the 6 years going into the year 2006, and that was Congress, the legislative representative of the people of this country, who demand and are entitled to accountability. If you do not have the preservation of the records of their government--these are not records belonging to the President. They're not records that belong to the executive branch. It's not for them to decide ``yes'' or ``no'' that we will preserve these records. This is a right of the American people. It's their property. And what this electronic records preservation does is say that you cannot use the paper system that doesn't work in an electronic age in effect to conceal from the American people what you did. It is overdue. And to take this debate and inject into it another topic, as important as energy is, is to trivialize the fundamentally important responsibility that this Congress has to the American people to restore oversight and accountability.

This government has make enormous mistakes and justified them by concealing information from the American people. What do you need to know more than what happened in the pathway to the war in Iraq? If the truth had been out there for the American people and for many in this body to know what the President knew and when the President knew it, what the administration knew and when they knew it, we would not be in this catastrophe for the American people called the war in Iraq.

So this legislation that says that e-mail records are going to be restored and retained electronically is of profound constitutional importance to the continuation of Congress in its role as the overseer and protector of the American record and the American taxpayer. So on its merits, this legislation should be considered as of absolute vital importance to the people of this country. And we have heard no objections, and, indeed, this legislation was passed by voice vote.

Now, since the issue was raised, since the debate on this profoundly important question of constitutional oversight has been hijacked to turn it into an energy debate where it really doesn't belong, I am nevertheless going to respond to the arguments.

You start by this proposition. Implicit in many of the arguments that my friends on the other side made was that those of us on the Democratic side somehow don't understand the pain that the American consumer is experiencing with these record high gas prices.

I have got to just speak about Vermont. What I hear about from Vermonters is fear. I've never heard this. And gas prices are tough. They are trying to figure out how to get from here to there and pay for it. They've got cars that they don't get great mileage. They are doubling up. They are doing what they can. But, bottom line, the thing they are terrified about and they have real anxiety is how are they going to heat their homes next year.

We have to heat our homes there. And, folks, when they see that gas delivery truck show up, and last year it was like $2.50 a gallon, it's going to be $5 a gallon next year, and these families don't have the money to pay $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 to fill up a tank. They don't know what they're going to do. And we are going to see Vermonters who are doubling up. Generations are going to be living together because they don't know how they are going to pay that bill.

So, believe me, there's not a single Member in this House, Republican or Democrat, who doesn't profoundly understand the impact that this is having on everyday people, on our small businesses, on our economy.

So we can go back and forth with the accusations and we can go back and forth with the slogans, or we can acknowledge the obvious. The obvious is we have to do everything that we can in the short term to try to bring relief at the pump, to try to bring pressure off the small business and the consumer. Anything in the short-term that we can do, we should do, and we should do it together. But we also have to move to a long-term energy policy that no longer allows oil to have an iron grip on our future. That is what Americans know.

Short-term, what are some of the things we can do? We have done them. We stopped filling up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It will reduce demand by 70,000 to 90,000 barrels a day. Second, we are considering legislation for the oil companies to use the leases they have, or lose them.

There's this debate about bringing production online. Obviously, supply is an issue here. In the world, we pump about 86 billion barrels a day. We consume about 87 billion barrels a day. But the fact is that the slogans that I am hearing about just opening up other offshore areas in ANWR totally ignores the current reality, and that is that the oil companies, that are very good at what they do, have leases, existing leases that they pay good money on, on 68 million acres of land. That land, their leases, their leases exceed by 2 1/2 times the area of the State of Ohio, the Minority Leader Boehner's district; 2 times the State of Illinois; 2 1/2 times the size of Pennsylvania. These are leases on Federal lands, onshore and offshore.

What are the oil companies doing? Not much. They are producing oil on a fraction of the leaseholds that they have.

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