Issues of Concern to the American People

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, Mr. LaMalfa from California. I have heard him often speak on the floor. I have invited him several times to speak and do 1-minute speeches because I am the person in charge of getting people to the floor. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to hear him speak in a little longer time because I found out how much we agree on issues.

I am particularly keen about the water issue that he spent some time talking about. I grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water. I grew up carrying water. Water has always been a precious, precious commodity to me.

We are the most fortunate people in the world in the United States that we have the greatest resources available to us. Many times I think we don't appreciate the scarcity of some of those resources or the need to husband those resources in a way that protects them not only for ourselves but for future generations.

I have always felt that people who are farmers are among the most eloquent speakers for our environment. As Mr. LaMalfa said--and I completely agree with him and said it many times myself--farmers are the best stewards of our land. They believe in sustainability. They believed in sustainability long before sustainability became a catchword in the community because if they didn't keep the land sustainable, then they wouldn't have the land in order for their own livelihood.

I am a person who also grew up farming, sometimes on a very small scale. My husband and I still have a garden every year. We certainly understand the importance of taking care of all of our resources, but particularly our natural resources. I think so often Republicans don't get the credit that they deserve for being good stewards and for looking after our land and all of our resources.

I also am very keen on the fact that we have a diversity of people serving in Congress. Again, I think it is very important that we have people from all walks of life serving in here because it is the diversity of experiences that are so important to us in terms of having the different points of view as we consider legislation, so that there are people who grew up in cities who have no idea what it is like to farm, have no idea where food comes from exactly, and it is important for us to get the different points of view. We need farmers, we need educators, we do need some lawyers, but we need people who have had all kinds of experiences. We need people who have driven trains, train engineers. But every kind of diversity that is at all possible here. I think it is very important, though, that we have particularly a large share of farmers. Our numbers of farmers have gone down over the years, obviously, as we have left the farm and as farmers have become so incredibly productive in this country. They provide so much more than they have in the past. So I really appreciate the eloquence of my colleague from California in presenting the issues that he has presented.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the other things that he talked about. He talked about our need for jobs and for, again, maintaining what we can in this country, improving the economy. I want to talk about the three focuses that we in the majority have in this session of Congress, the three initiatives that we are going to be working on: energy, jobs and the economy, and regulatory reform.

This week already we have already passed two bills that we think will help us with the creation of jobs and the economy. On our first day here on Tuesday, it got very little attention, but we passed a bill, the Jobs for Heroes Act. The idea for it came from a constituent of one of our colleagues from Illinois. The constituent said: Look, I was a veteran, couldn't get a job because the employer was concerned about going over the 50 limit, or hitting the limit of 50, which then his company would be subject to ObamaCare, and companies are avoiding being subject to ObamaCare.

So we passed a bill introduced by Congressman Rodney Davis that said veterans don't have to be included in the 50 persons in a business requirement and then be forced to go into ObamaCare; that if they are covered by TRICARE then they don't have to do that. That is a positive bill to help create jobs.

Today, we passed another bill that we think will help with employment in this country. As many people know, ObamaCare has told employers if people are working 30 hours or more then you have to cover them with ObamaCare. So we changed the definition of full-time employment from 30 hours to restore the traditional 40-hour workweek. As I have said in other comments that I have made, from adjunct professors to hourly workers, I have heard from constituents all across North Carolina's Fifth District who have one thing in common: their work hours are being reduced. ObamaCare has placed an undue burden on employers and their employees by undermining the traditional 40-hour workweek, which has long been the standard for full-time work.

This legislation will help protect the estimated 2.6 million Americans at risk for lost hours and wages at work under this destructive rule. The employer mandate in ObamaCare defines a full-time employee as someone who works an average of at least 30 hours a week. But H.R. 30, the Save American Workers Act, which passed the House today by a vote of 252-172, changes that definition, and that is a good thing for American workers.

As I said, we have three big initiatives: energy, jobs and the economy, and regulatory reform. So the American people are going to see us passing bills all this year and next year focused on these three issues, in addition to the other things that we work on. We work on a plethora of subjects here.

But I introduced a bill on the first day which will help us deal with regulatory reform. It is a bill I am proud to say has passed the House before with bipartisan support. I am very proud to say that when I introduced the bill on Tuesday, it had bipartisan original cosponsors. I am very pleased that Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, from Mr. LaMalfa's State of California, joined me in introducing legislation to shed light on how Federal policies impact the budgets of State and local governments and private sector employers.

The bill is called the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act--H.R. 50--and it would fix loopholes within the bipartisan regulatory reform act, known as UMRA, which passed in 1995. I introduced this legislation in the past four Congresses, and it has successfully passed the House with bipartisan support on three separate occasions.

Every year, Washington imposes thousands of rules on local governments and small businesses. Hidden in those rules are costly mandates that stretch State and city budgets and make it harder for North Carolina businesses to hire. While Congress cannot create prosperity, we can work to ensure entrepreneurs and employers aren't crushed under costly regulations. This legislation will help restore transparency and hold Washington bureaucrats accountable for the true cost in dollars and in jobs that Federal dictates pose to the economy. Americans are better served when regulators are required to measure and consider the cost of rules they create.

The bill ``increases transparency in the regulatory process and protects State and local governments from the burden of unfunded and often unnecessary mandates that waste time and money,'' is what my colleague Loretta Sanchez said. H.R. 50 would increase transparency about the cost imposed by unfunded mandates and holds the Federal Government accountable for considering those costs before passing them on to local governments and small businesses. The legislation would make it easier for people to determine how much these regulations are going to cost and make sure that we are not imposing

unnecessary rules and regulations on both State and local governments and the private sector. So I am very pleased that that bill has passed. It is going to be a part of the regulatory reform package that passes this House.

I encourage people watching this to contact your Member of Congress if you are aware of unnecessary rules and regulations that are out there that we could do something about. Obviously, we need rules and regulations. We want to make sure that we have safe food, that the airlines are flying correctly and safely, we want to make sure the railroads are operating safely, we want to make sure our cars are safe to drive in.

But as we all know, often bureaucrats in Washington, and sometimes at the State and local level, look for ways to create jobs for themselves, create a reason for their being, and pass along rules and regulations that are simply unnecessary for the health and safety of the people in this country.

So what we want to do is reduce those rules and regulations. That reduces cost, that helps with our emphasis on jobs and the economy. I believe that is going to be very important to us in getting our economy going again.

As I mentioned, we are going to be working hard on our third initiative: energy. We will be passing another version of the Keystone XL pipeline. We will do that tomorrow. That bill will then go to the Senate. The Senate is already holding hearings on the bill, but the Senate does work a little bit slower than we do here in the House. We hope very much that the President will work with us in a bipartisan fashion and sign that bill.

We are all very happy about the cost of gasoline having gone down in our country in the past few months. It, of course, doubled under President Obama, and now it is coming back down. It is because in many cases we have been able in the private sector to create more energy supply, and that's been helping bring down the cost. We know that the economies in Europe and Asia have slowed down considerably so there is less demand. We are all very grateful for the price of gasoline going down. I am very grateful for it. Every Member of Congress is very grateful.

So what we hope is to help that cause even further by passing the Keystone XL pipeline and have more energy available in this country. We want to do everything we possibly can. Republicans have always believed in all of the above. As Mr. LaMalfa said, we want solar, wind, and all those other things, but they are primarily operating now because of giant government subsidies. What we would like to see is renewable and sustainable energy that doesn't require government subsidies, and we believe Keystone XL pipeline will help us along those lines.

I am looking forward very much to our passing that legislation, the Senate passing that legislation, and our being able to send that bill to the President for his signature. I am hoping that he will sign it.

I oftentimes get people quoting the Constitution to me and talking about what the Constitution says. Particularly, I hear from people a lot about the role of the House of Representatives. I want to talk a little bit about that in terms of our work in appropriations.

In particularly the last few weeks, many people have expressed genuine concerns to me about the appropriations bill that passed Congress in December. Unfortunately, many Washington-based special interest groups are confusing the matter of what happened in December with the omnibus bill that we passed with incomplete and sometimes, frankly, false messages aimed more at fundraising for themselves than uniting behind our shared goal of stopping President Obama's executive overreach on immigration.

One of the most misleading and commonly circulated suggestions is that the Constitution grants the House of Representatives alone the ``power of the purse,'' or giving the House exclusive authority to withhold funding for targeted initiatives.

I am going to be reading a part of the Constitution in a moment that relates to this, but I want to read another part of the Constitution that I think often gets misquoted to prove this example.

We often hear the quote from the First Amendment, ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.''

This comes oftentimes from groups who protest Ten Commandments being placed in public buildings or creches being placed on public land. They often quote that, but they usually forget to quote the second part of that sentence, which says ``or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''

Congress has a dual responsibility there. It is the same when people, I believe, are attempting to quote the Constitution when it comes to their version of what they call the power of the purse.

As I said, they are, I believe, misconstruing a part of the Constitution. Specifically, it is article I, section 7, clause 1, of the Constitution which states, ``All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.''

I believe many well-meaning people believe that that means the House of Representatives has total control over what happens with appropriations, but they have forgotten that there is another phrase there, and it is ``but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.''

While the House may pass an appropriations bill, it still has to go to the Senate for the Senate to pass. As we all learned in civics, the bill has to pass the House and pass the Senate in exactly the same form and be signed by the President in exactly the same form.

There is another clause that people are often thinking about also. Article I, section 9, clause 7 states, ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.''

Those two are often talked about as power of the purse, meaning that is what people are talking about when they talk about power of the purse. As I said, all bills, including the appropriations bills that pass the House, must also pass the Senate and be signed by the President in the exact same form.

What happened, particularly last year, is the Democrat-controlled Senate could reject a House-passed bill. It could pass liberal amendments and return it to the House, forcing the House either to accept a worsened product or risk a Federal Government shutdown, which would still not stop the President's executive overreach.

What we did last December was pass a bill that would fund the rest of the government, except for the Department of Homeland Security, in a negotiation with the Senate because we needed to not shut down the government. Most of what was in that bill had already been passed by the House.

We passed seven appropriations bills and sent them to the Senate, but the Senate had refused to act. We had also passed four more appropriations bills out of committee, but hadn't taken them up on the floor because they take so many hours to pass, and once the Senate made it clear they wouldn't take any of our appropriations bills, we thought we shouldn't waste additional time.

While H.R. 83 was not a perfect bill, we are all faced here with making decisions on what is presented to us rather than what we would like to be presented. We did have a lot of conservative victories in H.R. 83. It continued our track record of cutting wasteful discretionary spending by $165 billion since FY 2010, but it is no small achievement that the Republican-led House has been able to implement overall spending cuts to save taxpayers more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years since taking the majority 4 years ago. Certainly, we want to do more, but we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

We cut back spending to the Internal Revenue Service to pre-2008 funding levels. We blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating farm ponds and ditches. There was no new funding for ObamaCare, and a host of pro-life and conservative, pro-gun policy ``riders'' were protected in that bill also.

House Republicans have worked extremely hard in the past 4 years to stop President Obama and the Senate Democrats from furthering the damage they did to this country when they and Nancy Pelosi were in control.

In fact, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren both stridently opposed that legislation. However, unfortunately, when people focus on the perfect instead of the good, they don't give credit to us, and we were criticized by the liberal media and the conservative media.

Despite the short time we have had, the obstacles we faced, and the enormity of our task, House Republicans have still managed a number of conservative victories. Last summer, a bill I authored was passed. It streamlined the Federal workforce development system, including the elimination of 15 duplicative programs.

I would have liked to have eliminated more than that, but again, we take the victories that we can get. It is like being on a football team. You get the ball, and you look down field, and you think, ``Gosh, I can't score a touchdown,'' so I just sit down because I can't score a touchdown.

No, that is not what the receiver does. The receiver says, ``If I can make a few yards, if I can make a yard, I'm moving in the right direction.'' That is what Republicans have been doing for the past 4 years, moving us in the right direction.

Occasionally, we are going to score a touchdown, but if we are moving in the right direction totally, then we are going to win this game, and that is what we are doing. We wish we could have done more, but we are going to have greater opportunities over the next 2 years with the Republican-led House and Senate.

This 114th Congress offers us new chances to pass legislation that will lead our country down a road of economic recovery. We are going to work to reduce the size and scope of the Federal Government, protect against executive overreach, reform Federal spending, and keep

America strong.

This is America's Congress, and we are going to be addressing the American people's greatest priority in the 114th Congress. We are going to work hard to build a better future for American families. I believe we will accomplish that.

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

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