John Tierney

This is the final amendment to this bill. It will not kill the bill, and it won't send it back to committee. If adopted, we will then vote on the passage of the bill, as amended. When families in my district and across the country sit…

I am. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will report the motion to recommit. The Clerk read as follows: Mr. Tierney moves to recommit the bill H.R. 3578 to the Committee on the Budget with instructions to report the same back to the House…

I think, I would reclaim my time, and I note that he disagreed with him on one quote of that report but agreed with him quite fully on the conclusions of the final report itself.

I think it is a healthy debate and I appreciate everybody's position on that.

These hearings continue to highlight the challenge of protecting the taxpayer funds from waste and fraud in our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I think we have seriously hollowed out a lot of our agencies in terms of keeping at least the personnel on board to oversee and to manage contracts.

I think that is instructive. Do you know what the era was and have you done something to put in place that it won't be happening again?

A lot of people would probably like to be discriminated against like that.

That would contradict the whole underlying premise of this hearing, that somehow this administration is politically predisposed against working with Catholic organizations.

That is what I thought I heard you say. And I suspect you are considering whether or not doing it would have an adverse effect of causing Iran to get enriched by that action, therefore totally disregarding the effect on it and making it…

the best that we can do in terms of that is to try and give some useful and robust assistance from the United States to Iraq

All options to increase the financial pressure on Iran are on the table, including the possibility of imposing additional sanctions against the CBI.

So it seems to me that people that want to be critical first on the one hand say what a great job this administration has done on sanctions and internationalizing them and having it move forward and then they qualify that by saying in the…

I have had graduates come in and tell me about their private loans, which are substantial and the interest rates are significantly high.

We took $10 billion of that, and we paid it down on the debt. With the balance of it, we were able to increase the Pell Grants.

One thing I am hearing is the program is working well. And one thing that I know is we saved over $60 billion by taking away guarantees in subsidies to private lenders who had then relatively high interest rates.

I was very happy to hear Mr. Kline raise it as an issue and Dr. Roe, because hopefully now we can work with them to try and lower that interest rate even further on students.

We were able to cut interest rates on the subsidized loans significantly, in half in some instances.

I can tell you who it has been objectionable to, and there is a whole host of people over to my left over here.

We put some money, invested some money into community colleges, so that they were able to further do their work, improve their facilities, and help people to get trained for jobs.

I think a lot of families don't know it, and they should.

I know that premiums have gone up about 9 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Do you think it is a good thing or a bad thing that the law requires transparency and accountability for insurance companies?

It has created a lot of jobs. Of the 10 million projected jobs--of the four million projected jobs over the next 10 years, we are expecting a lot of them to be in Massachusetts as well.

I think you finally agreed with, after some back and forth, that about 2.4 million private sector jobs have been created since the enactment of the law.