Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2021, Jobs and Energy Permitting Act of 2011, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1249, America Invents Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis) for yielding, and rise against this rule and the underlying bill.

The bill is unconstitutional. It will stifle American job creation; cripple American innovation; it throws out 220 years of patent protections for individual inventors; and it violates the CutGo rules, increasing our deficit by over $1 billion. This bill should never have been brought to the floor. Not only is it chock full of special interest legislation for large banks and a handful of corporate interests, what we are voting on today makes a mockery of the openness that the Republican leadership promised in legislative procedures. The bill has gone through a lot of iterations, without sunlight, since it was first reported out of committee. The Congressional Budget Office's score on this latest version of the bill that just came out last night shows that it violates the CutGo rules. That's right. It increases the deficit every year between now and 2021.

Just last week, we couldn't find enough money to provide hungry American children with food. But for some reason, the Republican leadership believes it's appropriate to add hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to the taxpayers and more regulations at the Patent Office. That's the non-partisan CBO's number, by the way. Meanwhile, the bill takes away patent and intellectual property rights of individual inventors.

This is not the bill passed by the Senate. This is not the bill that passed out of the Judiciary Committee. As the details of what we are actually being asked to vote on leaks out, more people, including now those who actually work in the Patent Office, oppose the bill. Importantly, the bill removes the requirement that only first inventors may receive a patent and it creates the monopoly nightmare that the Founders of our Constitution intended to prevent.

The first-to-file patent system will lead the Federal Government to create commercial monopolies and more regulations--exactly what Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders opposed. As opposed to securing to first inventors their property rights, the bill will merely secure unreserved rights to the first to file a patent. The first one to run over to the Patent Office might get the patent. That is not what is enshrined in our Constitution. The authentic, first inventor must not be stripped of their rights.

The very first right in our Constitution, even before the Bill of Rights, is the right to your intellectual property.

Vote "no'' on the rule and the bill.

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