Make It In America

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I had intended to talk about this subject, rebuilding the American manufacturing sector, and I will. But I just heard the most remarkable 1-hour debate in my life--not a debate, but a whole slew of accusations and incorrect facts. I guess a fact shouldn't be incorrect. But I've never heard such gobbledygook and misstatements in my entire life.

The last one--I'm absolutely delighted the gentleman's father is healthy, but to think that a 2 percent tax on medical devices is somehow going to stop medical technology when those devices are extraordinarily profitable to these companies is just lunacy. I know nobody likes to pay taxes, and certainly the manufacturers of those devices don't want to have to pay a 2 percent tax. But come on, you think that's going to stop medical technology from advancing when there's so much profit in it? I don't think so.

Okay. Thirty-seven times now, 37 times this week the Republican majority is going to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act--37 times--when Americans are already benefiting from the Affordable Care Act. Is it that my friends who spoke here for the last hour want to tell every 22-year-old or 21-year-old in the entire Nation that they can no longer stay on their parents' health insurance? Because that's exactly what the repeal would do. Those young men and women who are counting on being able to have health insurance--no, repeal ends that part of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Are they to go out and tell 40 million Americans that they're not going to have health insurance at all? That's what the repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act will do, 40 million Americans. Are they to say that somehow this is costing more money to have an insurance policy where you can stay healthy, where you can get care before it becomes a crisis and wind up in an emergency room, that that's going to be cheaper when you repeal the Affordable Health Care Act? Sending people to the emergency room is going to be cheaper? What planet are you from? That's not the way it is. The most expensive care in the world is the emergency room, where somebody does not have the continuity of care that an insurance policy provides for them.

Or maybe they want to discriminate against women as existed before the Affordable Health Care Act. Every woman in this Nation faced insurance discrimination, but the Affordable Health Care Act ends that discrimination.

And how many families out there, how many families out across America have a member of that family--or maybe many members of that family--that have some preexisting condition--high blood pressure, onset of diabetes, maybe some incident in their past? I will tell you, I was the insurance commissioner in California for 8 years, and I know exactly what the health insurance companies will do if the provisions that prevent insurance discriminations are eliminated with the bill that these gentlemen and ladies intend to take up later this week.

Insurance discrimination has harmed millions upon millions of Americans--many of whom came to me as insurance commissioner in California pleading for some justice in their insurance program. Justice was to be found at least in California because I knew that the insurance companies had an obligation and they had a contract. But you eliminate the Affordable Health Care Act and you'll see insurance discrimination reemerge in the United States in a way that will harm millions upon millions of Americans because they will not be able to get insurance. And if they did, they will have to pay far more simply because they are a woman.

Thirty-seven times. Thirty-seven times you've attempted to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.

Seniors--every senior in this Nation that's on Medicare is able to get a free annual checkup. And ladies and gentlemen, you need to understand in your arguments that that free, affordable annual checkup has reduced the cost of medical care in Medicare programs. And the inflation rate in Medicare has come down since the Affordable Care Act has gone into effect.

The statistics you toss around about the extraordinary cost, you need to understand that we have been plagued by health care insurance inflation for decades. The Affordable Health Care Act has built into it the very first opportunity this Nation has had nationwide to bend the cost curve on health care, and we're seeing it happen today. We're seeing it happen today in the Medicare program because seniors are able to get prevention. They're able to get that drug that brings down their blood pressure, or the advice on how to deal with diabetes and avoid the extraordinary cost. Oh, yeah, 37 times repealing the Affordable Health Care Act.

You talk about jobs in America. Okay, let's talk about jobs in America. Let's talk about the fact that there's not been one significant piece of legislation out of this House since the beginning of this session to create jobs. President Obama stood here on this dais and talked about creating jobs, but this House has not brought forward one significant piece of legislation.

The President called for an infrastructure program--$50 billion--to put people back to work, to create the infrastructure--the streets, the roads, the bridges, the water systems, the sanitation systems--not just to put people back to work, but to build the foundation for future economic growth.

So where is that legislation? Has it even been heard in one committee controlled by our friends in the opposition party? No. No. Well, we will take up a transportation act soon, but will there be adequate funding for infrastructure? Probably not. Probably not.

The President called for an American Jobs Act, not even heard in committee here. Americans want to go to work. They want jobs. They want to go to work, and we have a program on the Democratic side to do that.

We want to deal with the big problems facing this Nation. We want to deal with the fact that we have millions of people that want to work in America, and we have serious problems to solve.

We ought to put aside this business of repealing the Affordable Health Care Act. Change it? Yes. Make a reasonable change and let's talk about it. Make a proposal about how to make it better, and we'll talk about it; but we're not going to talk about repealing it. We're not going to go there.

Maybe we ought to go with some things that are really important. Maybe we ought to go with something that was in the news today.

It's been determined that for the first time in at least 3 million years the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is over 400 parts per million. What does that mean? Climate change? Oh, yes. If you were in Los Angeles this last couple of days, you would have seen record-high temperatures in early May. Reports are coming out about firestorms this summer season. We've seen Superstorm Sandy, and around this world we've seen many super-environmental effects.

The scientists tell us that that climate change will bring more severe weather events and there will be disruptions in our food supply like the current drought in the Southwest. Four hundred parts per million; in the last 3 million years, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has never been that high.

Now, the good news is that this Nation, the strongest economic nation in the world, despite the inability of this House to get things done, we can solve the climate change problem, or at least lead; and in doing so, we can put people back to work.

Here's how it can be done: clean energy. Clean energy is spurring business development across this country and its future is very, very bright. Not a month goes by without some entrepreneur, a scientist, an inventor, coming to me with another idea about how you can improve solar technologies, photovoltaic technologies. One just came up the other day, a very inspired way of doing it, perhaps two times more efficient, or one-and-a-half times more efficient than the current solar panels.

Companies are investing. U.S.-based venture capital investments in clean energy surged 30 percent from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $6.6 billion in 2011, and the trend continues. Jobs in the solar energy industry are in every State, and there are over 5,000 companies involved employing over 100,000 American workers. And wind energy, which is big in my district in Solano County, 75,000 people across this Nation, and many of them my own constituents.

There's great potential out there as we move from coal and oil, the energy of the previous two centuries, to the clean energies of the future. We'll see that in agriculture as we grow crops that can generate energy. We'll see it in geothermal. We'll see it in wave energy in our oceans. There's enormous potential. And the research that goes into this is also jobs.

Our colleagues on the majority side have attempted in the last year to reduce research for energy and agriculture. To what effect? Well, maybe they want to go to 500 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't think Americans want to go there. I don't think the people of the world want to go there. I don't think they want the calamity that will come.

There's many other ways this can be done. Yesterday, as part of our Make It in America agenda, I was in Sacramento, California, on the edge of my district and a remarkable event took place, an event that was actually caused by a piece of legislation that was passed here, the very first piece of legislation signed by President Obama in 2009. It was the stimulus bill, the much-maligned stimulus bill. They said it didn't work. Well, it did work, Mr. Speaker, and it is working today, and it's being made in America. Here's what the American Recovery Act is doing for Americans. Here's what the stimulus bill, in yet one more example of success, is doing for America.

This is the most advanced locomotive built in the world. It's built in Sacramento. The stimulus bill provided $466 million for Amtrak to buy 70 advanced electric locomotives. And written into that bill was a sentence that said these locomotives must be American-made.

So, Siemens, a German company with large manufacturing facilities around the world, certainly in Germany and other countries on every continent except Antarctica, looked at that and said, 466 million? Hmmm. Made in America? We can do that.

They put a bid in. They went to their manufacturing plant in Sacramento that was previously manufacturing light rail cars, set about building a new factory, and that new factory employs 200 people today. Yesterday, the first of 70 new locomotives rolled onto America's rail tracks and will soon be providing service on the Northeastern Corridor. Two hundred new direct jobs in Sacramento at the Siemens factory and hundreds around the Nation--it works.

The climate change issue here is very important. The advanced technology in this locomotive that has 9,000 horsepower has the ability to generate electricity when it slows down, when it brakes for curves or stations, putting back into the grid electricity that it consumed in its previous travel.

Make it in America. Use our Federal tax dollars to buy and to build American-made equipment and supplies and materials. That's precisely what Siemens is doing.

This is a success story. This is the kind of thing we should be talking about here on the floor of the House of Representatives. This is the kind of work we should be doing in our committees: putting Americans back to work, laying the infrastructure for the future growth of this country. But, oh, no, we are going to spend this week dealing with the 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

There's so much more to do. There's so much more to do here in America. Why don't we put our shoulder to the wheel of progress and provide a transportation bill that actually builds the infrastructure for this Nation, that provides these kinds of locomotives and train sets.

In the early days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Transcontinental Rail Act. Little known, but in that Rail Act was a provision, not just to build a rail line across America, but that all of the steel, all of the iron that was to be used in that line had to be American made. Made it in America, creating jobs, connecting the east to the west, 1862. And here we are all these decades later with the same idea: a new locomotive on American rails and American made.

I want to congratulate Siemens. I want to congratulate this German company that is here in America, is providing American jobs, and is providing the most advanced locomotive in the world, and they're building it in Sacramento, California.

So, what else can we do? What else can we do to provide jobs? There's so much. If we had listened to the President when he proposed to Congress the American JOBS Act, perhaps 2 million more Americans would be working today. Construction crews would be putting bridges and dams and levees and flood protection facilities, they would be building the infrastructure. And we would also be working on our energy systems.

The piece of legislation that I have introduced would require that tax subsidies for individuals and businesses that wanted to put up a wind turbine or a solar panel would only be available to them if they bought American-made equipment. Spend our tax money on American-made equipment made by Americans: a pretty simple thought. Abraham Lincoln must have had that thought, and the Congress in 1862 had that thought and passed a law that did it.

There is more that we can do.

When we passed the transportation bill, as we should this year or early next year, a new highway bill, we should put into it a proposal by Ranking Member Rahall. That proposal said that the money in this bill will be spent on American-made concrete, steel, trucks, buses--putting Americans to work. The Democrats on that committee think that's a really good idea, and we hope our Republican colleagues agree and that we write into the transportation bill a very strong ``buy America'' provision so that Americans can have the jobs and so that we avoid the egregious and humiliating fact that the steel in much of the new Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge was not made by American steelworkers, not by American companies, but Chinese. It went out to bid. It was supposed to be 10 percent cheaper, so the Chinese company took the bid, built a new highly advanced steel mill, and sent faulty steel to San Francisco Bay, requiring even more expenditure.

So there are things we should learn from the history, and we will if we listen carefully, if we pay attention to what science is telling us about climate change, about the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and if we listen, then we must have the courage to act. I would pray for our children's future and their children's and their children's beyond that that this House of Representatives and the Senate have the courage to act decisively on the climate crisis, and that in the farm bill that we mark up tomorrow we take the opportunity to write into that farm bill serious conservation programs that conserve the Nation's forests and farmland and water and streams. I would hope that we would do that.

I would hope that this House would find the courage to take on the oil industry and the coal industry and move decisively to green energy systems and stop, slow down what is a terrible process underway of filling our atmosphere with ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide. After all, it's about the next generations. My generation will soon be gone, and so will most of the Members of this House. It's the future generations that are going to face our apparent unwillingness and inability to attack the climate change problem. As I said a moment ago, we can do it in a way that builds efficient transportation systems, like this locomotive that Siemens built in Sacramento, California, that builds green energy systems, renewable energy, low carbon dioxide-producing energy.

I've noticed that my colleague from Texas has joined us.

Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you so very much for joining us this evening. We've gone on here about the Affordable Care Act and how we ought to turn our attention to jobs for America, and I'm sure you have some thoughts on those subjects and others. Please join us.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you so very much. You are a leader in all of these issues. You've often and almost always present these issues to the American people on the floor of the House, and you do it with passion and knowledge.

There was an hour spent earlier by our colleagues about the 37th time that they're going to attempt to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. It reminded me that they also have a piece of legislation to end Medicare as we know it. If you go back to when Medicare was put in place in the sixties, 1964, 1965, the Republican Party opposed it then and have often, through those years, to this date, attempted in various ways to eviscerate or to end it as we know it. Apparently they're going to try to do the same thing with the Affordable Health Care Act. It is such a waste of time because these programs are so fundamental to our ability to survive. This is health care for Americans and spreading that opportunity out.

It's a long discussion. We've had that discussion on the floor for many days. What we really ought to be focusing on is putting Americans back to work. This piece of legislation is one of about 30 pieces of legislation that's put in by the Democratic Caucus. This is mine. It deals with your tax money. It simply says that it's going to be spent on American-made clean energy, solar panels, wind turbines and the like. It's not a bad idea to spend your tax money on American-made equipment, American jobs, American businesses.

There's another bill that I have dealing with the transportation system. It's the same thing. That bill is now finding its way into the rewrite of the highway transportation program, the transportation bill; and hopefully it will be there. It's a very strong buy-American provision for our buses, our trains, our light rail, locomotives and steel and concrete for bridges.

We've got a lot of work to do in America. We've got a lot of work and a lot of need; and this House ought to be spending its time on that.

We'll take another night and we'll go into the tax policy side of this, which there is a lot to be said about changing our taxes to encourage manufacturing. Some of that has been done. I'll leave the one example that 2 years ago when the Democrats controlled this House, we eliminated about $12 billion of tax breaks that American companies received for shipping American jobs overseas. We put a stop to that. There's about another $5 billion that needs to be done, but we no longer control this House. But we ought to bring those jobs back home. We ought to flip that over and give a tax break for reshoring, bringing the jobs back to America.

That's another night's discussion. We'll take that up in another evening. But for tonight, it's about putting Americans back to work. It's about focusing the attention of this Chamber, the 435 of us, on what we really need in this country, which is a very strong and growing economy.

We've seen progress every quarter since the beginning of 2010. Every quarter we've seen private sector employment grow. We're not where we ought to be. We have more work to do. And when we finally rebuild the American manufacturing sector, when once again we make it in America, Americans are going to make it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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