Floor Statements

I appreciate the gentlewoman yielding to me to finish my remarks.

Section 6 of H.R. 3309 calls for a limit on discovery when we are talking about patents. Just so you will know again, one of the results of these innocuous things is hard to understand. What it means is that if you limit the discovery when someone says, ``I invented this, and I am trying to have discovery with a huge corporation to find out how they infringed on my patent,'' if you limit that discovery and that little guy has to have more motions, it costs a lot more money and, thus, the little guys can't afford to bring a suit against the big guys.

So basically what we have got is a list of things in this bill that make it extremely more difficult for the little guy to afford to support and defend his own patents. And on top of that, then we have this attack on patent trolls who are there to try to assist anybody that can't afford to enforce his or her own patent. This is a boon to the huge corporations, the multinational corporations, and perhaps foreign corporations who also get involved in this.

Let us note that section 7, Small Business Education, Outreach, and Information Access, says that the Director of the Patent Office will create a database on ``patent trolls,'' thus creating a strategy to teach businesses how to defend themselves against patent trolls. You know what we have got here? We have got the creation of an enemies list. That is what we have here. Justification for people to be put on an enemies list if they are out trying to help small inventors enforce their patents.

And finally, let me just note here, section 9, Improvement and Technical Corrections to the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, states it eliminates section 145 of title 35. Again, this is one of the most important things they are trying to slip through this process. This would, again--and I am repeating this because it is so important-- eliminates the independent judicial review of patent applications, which has been the law of the land since 1836. A huge emasculation, a cut in the rights of people who are seeking patents, inventors, the creative people in our country. This would eliminate their right-- if the Patent Office is not treating them fairly or has made a mistake--for a judicial review that has been a right of the Americans since 1836. This is horrendous.

This bill that is being considered next week by the House Judiciary Committee is not reform. It is an antipatent bill consistent with decades-long antipatent attacks by multinational corporations who want to emasculate America's patent system. And these multinational corporations may or may not be headed by Americans, but they are not watching out for the interests of our country; and especially, they aren't watching out for the innovators and inventors of our country.

I ask the American people, the patriots, to call their Members of Congress and oppose H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act.

And I would add one last element, as my colleague was just talking about the ObamaCare issue that we have been discussing here. One of the things that I have found most objectionable about the Affordable Care Act, they have a provision in that bill that gives a 2.5 percent tax on the gross receipts of anyone who invents a medical device.

Our inventors have helped increase the standard of living of our people, have improved the chances for survival, survival of people's families by inventing new technologies that have enabled us to fight diseases, that have taken millions of people throughout the history of the planet, taken them away in horrible agony. We have our innovators and our inventors now creating these new things.

I have a personal situation where a loved one is suffering from cancer, and that loved one has had implanted in her a little--it is a portal, they call it. It is under the skin, and it permits this person to have chemotherapy and blood transfusions without having to go through the vessels, the blood vessels.

This invention has saved this person's life, because 20 years ago, that young girl would probably have had collapsed blood vessels or died of some type of situation from infection from putting the needles in one's arm. This is what happened 20 years ago and why the survival rate now of such cancer patients has gone up.

I feel like hugging the person who invented that device. That person deserves our love and gratitude. This administration has seen fit to punish this person for this creativity and this innovation.

This administration put a 2.5 percent tax not on the net, not after all the expenses that this inventor went through to invent this, all the expenses to go into producing it, all the expenses that go into distributing it, making sure people knew how to use this new device. No, no. This is a 2.5 percent tax on the gross income. It is a horrendous penalty on the person who has saved the lives of all these people. That is what this Affordable Care Act is all about. That is what ObamaCare is all about.

In some misguided idea that we are going to redistribute the wealth and take care of everybody through government, we are now doing things that are of great harm to the people in this country, not just to the infrastructure, the financial infrastructure of our health care which is collapsing under the incompetence of this law that is foisted upon them with lies, no, but also we are now facing a situation where the very heart and soul of human progress, medical technology, is being punished through this law.

I join with my colleagues and say that this is something we should all join together, repeal, and start again and try to do a better job next time.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that the American people have fully understood what has been going on here for the last 6 weeks.

The Republicans offered what? The Republicans offered to delay ObamaCare as a compromise position in order to have the continuing resolution to keep our government going. That compromise was rejected. We were called all kinds of names, and then we were told we were the ones that closed down government.

Take a look at what has happened. ObamaCare, this disaster that is taking place, the glitches, all of the problems, we know now ObamaCare wasn't even ready. The President and the country needed the extra time in order to perfect ObamaCare, but he would rather have closed it down--our government--rather than reach a compromise with the House of Representatives.

That is what this is all about. We had arrogance on the part of our Chief Executive unwilling to negotiate with the House. What was the House offering? Time to delay ObamaCare so it could work.

Now the American people have not only suffered a closure, but now are suffering from an ObamaCare that is not ready to be launched.

Mr. Speaker, in the words of my former boss, President Reagan, Well, here we go again.

Over the last 25 years, I and a small band of ``just refuse to go along and get along'' types here in Congress have engaged in a constant fight to maintain the intellectual property of American inventors.

The intellectual property rights of our inventors is something that has been a great treasure to our country. Our Founding Fathers felt so strongly about technology and freedom--and, yes, with the profit motive--that that was the formula that would uplift human kind, and they believed in it so much that they wrote that into our Constitution.

Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of

science and useful arts by securing for limited times to

authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective

writings and discoveries.

I might add that this is the only place in the body of the Constitution in which the word ``right'' is used.

The Bill of Rights comes in during the amendment process of the Constitution, but our Founding Fathers thought so highly of technology and technology advancement that the right

of inventors was included in the body of the Constitution.

This provision has served America well. It has led to general prosperity that we would not have had otherwise. It has led to national security where we have faced foes that have outnumbered us so heavily, but what were heavily relied upon were the technologies that were developed to help our Armed Forces defend themselves and, thus, defend the country. Of course, this has served us well because the technology and the freedom we have has created a society in which ordinary people--decent people--can live very fruitful lives and can enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Americans work hard, but this wasn't just created by hard work. That is the important thing to remember. Without hardworking Americans, it wouldn't have worked; but it was the technology that they used that made the difference. People work hard all over the world. They work long hours, and they live in poverty and deprivation, but we coupled the hard work of our people with technology; and, thus, what we have had is a success that has uplifted the common man and has served as a light of hope for all human beings in that we can produce the wealth needed for regular people to lead decent lives. So that is the secret of America's success--technology and freedom--and, yes, perhaps we could include the right values.

It was our strong patent system and a respect for law that made the difference in that technology and freedom. Yet, today, multinational corporations run by Americans want to diminish patent protection in the United States. We have had the strongest patent protection of any country in the world; yet we have had for these last 25 years major, major efforts to diminish the patent protection that we have and to harmonize it with the rest of the world. It just happens that the European and Japanese patent systems are much weaker and offer less protection for the inventors. Over the years, we have had to fight back and have had to turn back efforts to weaken the patent system a number of times, and I have been part of that effort and part of that struggle.

I remember when, for example, they had a bill--it was so blatant that we defeated it--called the Patent Publication Act. They said, after 18 months, if someone hasn't filed for a patent, even if he were not going to get his patent, they were going to publish his patent application, meaning all the secrets would be out in the world. They tried to push that over on us. We just barely defeated that, but we defeated it in a bipartisan effort that was led by Marcy Kaptur and me, Chris Cox, Tom Campbell, and others at that time.

Then there was the effort, of course, to say that, as soon as one files for a patent application, after 20 months, the ticking of the clock starts, and you could end up then with maybe 5 years of patent protection by the time it was issued.

Here we had always said 17 years after you are given the patent you then lose control, but you have 17 years where you own your patent. They tried to change that and could have changed it in a way that somebody, if it took the Patent Office 15 years or 10 years to develop a concept of a new idea and to figure out how to patent it, well, then that person would only have 2 years left.

These were the ways that they were trying to destroy the patent rights that our people have enjoyed. Sometimes we turned those efforts back, other times we had to compromise, and other times, like last time around, we lost. For example, over our objection this body changed the fundamental principle that patents were to be given to the first to invent. If someone has invented it, they should be given the patent. That has been the fundamental guiding post ever since our country was founded. We changed that last year. We changed that to say, not first to invent, but the first person who files for the patent.

Of course, at an age when you have people who are able to sneak in on your computers and there are hackers around, that could turn out to be a catastrophe. Already we could hear rumblings of that from China where patents are being churned out and patent applications are being put in. And, yes, if they can prove they were the first one, and even if they found out about it some other way and can't explain it, no, they get the patent over the people who have done the work.

Well, once again I find myself fighting for the small inventors and struggling to defend the patent rights of these people to own and control their own invention. What we have got now is a bill that has been introduced and that is just making its way. There will be a hearing on it tomorrow in the Judiciary Committee.

There has always been an excuse to change the fundamentals of the way our system works, because we have had the strongest patent system in the world and they have always tried to find some excuse of changing it and there is some sinister force at play that demands that we change the fundamentals of our patent system. Well, we have heard it before.

For example, they claimed there were ``submarine patents.'' That is a derogatory term. A submarine patent, that must be undercover or something suspicious about that. They used that as an excuse to try to limit the time people owned their patent. They used that as an excuse to publish everybody's patent application even before it was issued.

This time, the new word, the new bugaboo that they are talking about and the scary word for the day is ``patent troll.'' ``Patent troll'' is being used as a word--and they probably hired a very sophisticated public relations company to come up with that ``patent troll'' term-- they have been used to fundamentally change our patent system, again, in order to diminish and damage the rights of small inventors. They can't say that that is their purpose, so they have to come up with a scary word like ``patent troll.''

These so-called patent trolls are patent holders or they are companies which represent patent holders, meaning people who own patents. They are engaged in defending the rights of those patents that they own. They purchased these patents or their companies purchased these patents basically from small inventors who didn't have the resources to defend and to enforce their own patent rights. These small inventors are now the partners of some of these companies or some of these individual investors. But it comes down to this: the inventor or the investor owns those patents. If you buy a piece of land or a patent from someone, you have that right. These patents that they own are just like any other patent granted by the Patent Office.

But huge corporate infringers would have us believe that these patents are in some way unfair or evil. So what makes these patents different than the good patents that these very same corporations own? There are no differences. They are the same patents, the same kind of patents. Some of these multinational corporations have bought patents from small inventors. They own that and they enforce them through a type of legal action when they are infringed upon. The multinational corporations have coined the scare terms ``patent assertion entity,'' or PAE; they have coined ``nonpracticing entity,'' NPE; and, of course, all of that means ``patent troll.''

The PR blitz, as I say, which was obviously created by a public relations company who made a lot of money coming up with that boogeyman, is used to change the basic legal protection of American inventors and, yes, change the legal protection of people who have bought the legal rights and own the intellectual property rights that they bought from the inventor.

I suppose Halloween is the proper time to talk about scary trolls. How frightening. The so-called patent troll has been identified as being out for a profit from technology that he did not invent. My, my, someone who is trying to receive a profit by making an investment into something that they didn't build themselves. Huh? Doesn't that describe banks and insurance companies and everybody else who puts investments down and hopes that they are going to have a return from those investments? But they, themselves, aren't making anything. They are using money and paper and contracts and helping people who need help.

I have consulted with a number of outside individual inventors and groups, and they have reaffirmed that

the legislation being proposed by the Judiciary Committee further disadvantages the little guy against the deep-pocketed, multinational corporations. This is achieved in the guise of targeting the so-called patent trolls. Pay attention to the patent trolls, but don't pay attention to how this weakens the small inventor.

This means that persons or companies who have contracted with inventors who really need the help to see that his or her patent rights are respected are going to be undercut. How horrible it is of making business out of helping small inventors see to it that their patent rights are enforced.

Proponents of this legislation are covering up the fact that they have stolen someone else's patent rights and now want to change the system so they can get away with it so that someone whose patent rights they don't own, that they have blatantly just arrogantly grabbed and put into their own technology projects, that they don't have to pay for it. When they are challenged in court, they complain, Oh, this is a patent troll. No. What we have here is large companies who are willing to take from the little guy which will in the end, yes, maybe be of short-term help to those companies, but it will undermine the progress of the United States of America, undermine our ability to create a wealth in our society that will make sure that our people can out- compete foreigners. Most of the corporations who are complaining about this are multinational corporations run, of course, by Americans, sometimes not.

Often the only way that a small business inventor can enforce his patent rights is by hiring a patent assertion entity as an advocate, meaning a patent troll. Sometimes the big guys want to simply steal the idea and say, sue me, because these little guys, these small inventors, the mainspring of so many ideas, they don't have the money to fight the big corporations. Now the big corporations want to make it impossible for them by changing the very law that protects them and protects what they have created in their invention.

One of the biggest alleged crimes of these nonpracticing entities is that they don't actually make anything, but just shift money around. Like I say, how horrible that is that some people make money in our society although you can't really see what they actually make with their hands. Banks, lawyers, investment companies, insurance companies, well, they make money, but they don't necessarily make things, but they are important to our economy. Even more important to our economy are those inventors. If we change the rules so that big companies can steal from them, those inventors will not be there in the next generation to come with the creations that uplift our people and defend our country and permit us to have security and prosperity.

We are told that trolls are different. Well, let's put it this way: the trolls are different. They are trying to make money off something they didn't actually make themselves. They aren't trying, as our multinational corporations are trying to do, to infringe on other people's property rights. Look who is pointing the fingers. The arrogance of these megacompanies warning us against small investors having the help of some investor is nauseating.

These attacks on the rights of patent holders are seen as valid and virtuous, but if they happened against any other rights, they would be identified as the problem they are.

Remember the big groups that are angry because they used patented technology without paying the owners, justifying it on the idea of the lack of the owner's enforcement. These companies say, Well, the patent wasn't being enforced, so we can use it. Now they are really upset when someone wants to enforce that patent. Now the rights for the patent are being enforced by someone who paid the inventor to sell him that property right.

A landowner who chooses not to develop a farm or land could be described as a nonpracticing entity. Should we make it simpler and easier for others to take or steal the land because that owner isn't using it? Should we make it harder for him to continue to own his land simply because he doesn't use it or isn't using it like others would want him to? How about a music lover who purchases the rights to a song or an entire catalog of an artist's songs, should we make it hard for him to defend his ownership rights because he wasn't the musician, he didn't make the music himself?

This campaign by multinational corporations and some of the world's richest men is an attack on the little guy's right to sell his intellectual property or to partner with someone else who can help him defend what is rightfully his.

While I don't have time to go through all of the problems of this legislation point by point, I will refer to several problems brought up in this bill.

The claim that this legislation is designed to go after patent trolls, to make these patent trolls more accountable, that is what they claim, but how are they doing it? They are doing it by making it harder for every patent holder to defend his patent rights, every ordinary American. They claim they are making it easier and less costly to defend baseless claims of patent infringement. Well, they claim these are bad patents that should never have been issued. They claim many things.

Section 3 of this bill, for example, makes it easier to defend against false charges of patent infringement, but it also adds significant new burdens onto a patent holder who seeks to defend, rightfully seeks to defend, his patent rights. In addition, this section increases the potential downside risk of suing to defend one's own patent rights.

We should be doing everything we can to make the system quick, cheap, and simple to defend, both to defend patent rights and to defend against baseless charges of infringement. But this legislation is primarily geared toward making it harder, more costly, and more time intensive to file claims of infringement. That is exactly the wrong direction to take.

The added pleading requirements will also require a very thorough and expensive prefiling discovery processes, again, discouraging underfunded patent holders from defending their patents. While there are limitations on a fishing trip type of discovery that may hold costs down and also protect patent holders from discovery IP, those protections don't overcome the provisions which make it more difficult to defend perfectly respectable patents.

In addition, by moving to what is essentially a ``loser pays'' system, which is what this legislation is attempting, the little guy is once again put at great risk when suing a big corporation for infringement. So now the inventor who is being victimized may have to risk everything that he owns to pay the legal fees of his much better financed corporate infringers.

This concept of fee shifting is alien to this country's history but very common in Europe. It has been demonstrated to have a chilling effect on litigation at the expense of the rights of those who can't afford to sue because they can't afford to lose.

The corporations, they can afford to lose. They are not personally having to pay anything; but the small inventor, he will lose everything in his life if he loses. He will owe them that much money. The big corporations, of course, are very capable of handling their own legal fees.

Section 4 requires a patent holder who believes they are being infringed upon to disclose all of his partners, assignees, and other information to court and to the Patent Office as well, and to the accused infringers. Well, what we have then, if you sue somebody because they are stealing your intellectual property, you have to give up all of your privacy rights and from that point on, you are an open book to anyone who is your competition, anyone who is your adversary, and they will probably, as we see happen with large corporations, you now are wide open to victimization by the corporates.

Section 5 seems to repeal a current provision that guarantees a patent holder's right to sue a State, for example. If a State or the government infringes on your patent, there seems to be a provision in the bill that could say that you can't sue to get paid for what the government has stolen from you. That, of course, has to be looked at, and looked at by the court.

Section 9 claims to make technical corrections to the bill, but they make

sweeping, wholesale changes to the way patent applicants and patent holders are allowed to pursue their rights. One of these so-called minor corrections entirely removes section 145 from the law, which allows patent applicants to bring suit in civil court if they are not getting due consideration at the Patent Office. In other words, if the government employees at the Patent Office are blatantly not doing their job for some reason, whether it is corruption or incompetency, the patent applicant now by this rule, by this bill, will not be able to seek justice in the court system. This is totally inconsistent with what our national tradition is all about.

Removing section 145 concentrates all decisional power within the Patent Office, with the exception of an appeal to the circuit, which is required to give deference to the Patent Office through that process. That is exactly the opposite of what we want to do. We want to make sure that people have a legal right, if our government is off base, to appeal it to another branch of government. That's why we have the judicial and the legislative and the executive branches of government. Here again, part of the bill is going in exactly the wrong direction.

A review of this legislation titled ``A Small Business and Startup Perspective on the Goodlatte Patent Bill,'' this is an analysis of the patent bill that we are talking about:

would gratuitously repeal 35 U.S.C. section 145, which has

long protected patent applicants' fundamental right of de

novo judicial review of adverse patentability determinations

by the Patent Office.

They note here that since 1836, anybody could repeal a decision within the Patent Office, but now they want to take that away, diminish the rights of our inventors, which will mean that we will not have the same type of innovation and creativity that we have enjoyed in this country.

All of this is being done on the notion that these evil trolls are driving up the number of patent litigations. An independent report from the World Intellectual Property Organization, as well as a study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, says that is not true. So- called trolls may be backing up the little guys, but that is not a major cause of litigation.

So we have the experts telling us that their excuse is wrong, and the GAO suggests that there are many things we can do, but what is being suggested in this bill and others is going exactly the wrong way.

The bottom line is these provisions make it more difficult for the patent holder to defend his rights and raises the stakes so that the downside of pursuing an infringement in cases becomes more costly. We are hurting the little guy. We are making it difficult for the mainspring of human progress. The ideas, the creativity of our country and our countrymen can be brought to play to uplift the lives of our people, to create more energy, to create higher quality goods, to make sure that we compete with the hordes of people in Africa and China and India.

Instead, if we are going to do that, we have to have the best technology, and we are taking our great national asset of a Patent Office that has helped our country over the years, has helped us keep our country safe by producing the best defense technology, to keep ourselves competitive so that the average American can outproduce their counterparts overseas--we are now going to take what has given us that ability, which is the genius of our inventors, and we are going to squash it by giving in to corporate interests of multinational corporations that are not owing their allegiance to us, but instead owe their allegiance to their company, which they see now as an international company, not even an American company.

I ask my colleagues to pay close attention to this legislation and to join me in rejecting this attempt to diminish the fundamental property rights, intellectual property rights of the American people in the name of some troll or some scary title that would get us away from the basic fundamentals of what is being proposed. I would ask my colleagues to join me in opposing this legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 51 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, October 29, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate, and we are not coming to grips with what the central issue is.

The bottom line is we understand that on this side we have people who believe the ObamaCare legislation will be very detrimental to the people of the United States. We have people on this side of the aisle who believe it will be very good for the people of the United States.

How do we work this out in a democratic process? We try to find a compromise. This bill is not about whether ObamaCare is going to come in or not. What we are voting on is whether or not you will accept the compromise which we have reached out to offer to say, look, there's apprehension in the private sector and the government people tell us they aren't even ready to enforce ObamaCare; let's postpone it for a year.

That's what this vote is all about: Will you accept the compromise? If this government shuts down, it's because you have not accepted the compromise that Republicans have reached out to you and offered.

We have to understand, in this democratic process it's not like the President says: There will be no negotiations, no negotiations. He will negotiate with foreign dictators before he will negotiate with us.

We have reached out with a compromise. Please accept the compromise and keep the government open.

Mr. Chair, on rollcall No. 428, I inadvertently voted ``yes,'' when my intention was to vote ``no.''

Amendment No. 3 Offered by Mr. Connolly

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I will consume.

I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting my amendment, which would eliminate all American military aid to Pakistan.

Since 9/11, the United States has given Pakistan over $25 billion, with over $17 billion going to their security forces. These funds have been, and continue to be, used to fight an internal war of suppression against the Sindi, the Baluch, and others who reject their corrupt and brutal domination by Pakistan.

Sadly, Pakistan also uses billions of American military aid to support terrorist attacks on its neighbors, including Afghanistan. And in this last decade, our generous gifts to Pakistan have been used to finance the killing of Americans, both military and diplomatic personnel.

We've been acting like suckers. No shame on Pakistan for being two- faced and murderous. Shame on us for being so stupid in financing a regime that obviously despises us and considers us its enemy.

It is a charade to believe that our aid is buying Pakistan's cooperation and hunting down terrorists when the Pakistani establishment not only gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden for 10 years, but jailed Dr. Afridi, the courageous man who pinpointed bin Laden and was instrumental in bringing justice to him for the mass murder of our fellow Americans on 9/11.

Dr. Afridi is an American hero; yet we have left Dr. Afridi to rot in a Pakistani dungeon. Shame on us for letting Dr. Afridi languish in misery and pain for helping us bring justice to Osama bin Laden and those he murdered on 9/11.

Pakistan is not a government to which we should be giving billions of dollars of aid. My amendment would cut off all aid because Pakistan has betrayed our friendship time and again. Any money we send them only strengthens their ability to act against us, to murder Baluch and Sindi and Sikhs, and to undermine moderate Muslims in Afghanistan, even as we withdraw in 2014.

At a time of tight budgets, we should reserve our aid for our friends and our allies and end assistance to a government that targets and kills Americans.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman noted that this is a gray world. It is not a gray world in so many cases. This is not a gray world when people are killing Americans. This is not a gray world when someone organizes the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and then is given safe haven by someone who's claiming to be our friend. No, that's not gray at all.

The Pakistanis decided a long time ago that they consider us their enemy. When they took Osama bin Laden and gave him safe haven from us and took our money while they were doing it and used it to finance terrorist groups that have murdered American soldiers in Afghanistan, no, that's not a gray world. That's black and white. And we should stand up for the principle that people who are killing Americans will not receive American military aid, and we can proclaim this tonight in this resolution.

I ask my colleagues to join me in standing up to make sure that the world knows that when they kill Americans, they're not going to be treated like they're our friends. We're not that stupid.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment offered by my good friend from Texas.

The Chinese Communist Party is a gangster regime that rules over a billion subjects. It is the world's worst human rights abuser and does not deserve the recognition nor the legitimacy that comes with participating in military exercises with the Armed Forces of the United States.

As the greatest threat to world peace and stability, the last thing we should be doing is helping them fine-tune their military and their familiarization with the strengths and weaknesses of America's Armed Forces.

The Chinese military is the armed wing of the Communist Party in that country. For decades, China has occupied Tibet, East Turkistan, and threatened the democratic nation of Taiwan with total annihilation. The Communist Party uses force to control its population. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who do nothing more than promote yoga and meditation have had their organs ghoulishly ripped from their bodies before they were executed so that those organs could be sold. The moral depravity of the Chinese Communist Party cannot be overstated.

China is aggressively using military expansion to back up territorial claims against India, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries. The Chinese military is guilty of even more aggression in cyberspace, as we have just heard from my colleague from Texas. They have stolen dozens of our defense systems. They have vast amounts of intellectual property they've stolen, as well as the business records for many of our companies. The damage has been estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Any cooperation with the Chinese military only weakens our own moral credibility and discourages our allies in the face of threats from Communist China. We should be drawing a clear distinction between us and the Chinese military, not helping them train to become even more efficient.

I call on my colleagues to vote for Congressman Stockman's terrific amendment, again, making sure that we stand up and are counted when there is a threat to the freedom and stability of the world.

Madam Chair, included in this en bloc package is an amendment I offered that relates to Pakistan. It adds,

as a condition of aid to Pakistan, that Islamabad must not use the funding we provide to its security forces for purposes of domestic repression of ethnic and religious minority groups as it has in the past.

The State Department's 2012 Country Report on Human Rights in Pakistan states, ``The most serious human rights problems were extrajudicial and targeted killings, forced disappearances, and torture, which affected thousands of citizens in nearly all parts of the country.'' Members of the Pakistani military as well as police are involved in these lethal abuses of human rights.

Repression of minority groups is systemic. Human rights organizations have reported that many Sindhi and Baloch nationalists were among those missing. Non-Sunni religious practitioners, Christians, Ahmadis, and Shia Muslims, are attacked with impunity.

There are already four conditions in the core bill and my amendment simply adds a fifth requirement to prevent the misuse of our aid. Thank you, Madam Chair, for accepting my amendment.

Mr. Speaker, 20 years ago, Albania was struggling to leave behind its years of repression, dependence, and deprivation, a period when it was a North Korea clone. Now, Albania is a democracy with elected representatives who engage in open debates within a vigorous civil society.

Albania is a member of NATO that continues to contribute troops to the International Security Force in Afghanistan and participated in the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, and it now aspires to have membership in the European Union.

In contrast to the atheist dictatorship it left behind, today, Albanian churches and mosques are full. Similarly, Marxist economics has been replaced with an expanding market economy. America needs to be especially grateful to the Government of Albania and to the Albanian Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, who has been a steadfast and courageous ally of the United States.

Recently, when the U.S. needed countries willing to provide asylum to members of the MEK now stranded in Iraq, Prime Minister Berisha agreed to accept 210 members of that group--far more than any other country. That was a sign of good faith and friendship for America. It will not soon be forgotten, and it took real courage on the part of President Berisha to make this generous offer. We will not forget his friendship.

Keeping our troops in Afghanistan any longer than they have to absolutely be there is a disservice to those people who are protecting our country. They are now doing what we said they would do once we have announced that we were leaving: they're picking our people off. How do we explain to those parents who are losing their children in the next few months?

Let's not send any more over there, and if we do, let's make sure that it's a decision made by the House of the people rather than just by a clique someplace in the Pentagon or elsewhere. We need to make sure that we're watching out for our troops, and I think that this is the best amendment that would do just that.

Mr. Speaker, first of all I would like to thank Lamar Smith and Congressmen McCaul and Lipinski for the leadership that they've provided on this very significant issue.

First of all, I would like to say that I am completely supportive of this bill. This legislation will continue America's path toward greater capabilities on cybersecurity. This is critical to our national security and our future.

And while we are increasing the authorization levels in this legislation for these critical activities, we are aware that every new dollar that we spend is a dollar that we borrowed, probably from China.

The Communist Chinese regime, of course, is the greatest human rights abuser in the world and potential adversary of the United States.

Furthermore, there has been unequivocal evidence that the Chinese Government is a source of significant cyber attacks on targets within the United States, which leads me to the main point, being, we must take note that there are many students from China and students from other known cyber attack countries attending our universities, participating in our programs, and learning exactly how we are setting up our system and defenses.

We need to apply a little common sense here, which is so often missing from our government, of course; and we need to make certain that we are not funding, enabling, and training our potential enemies.

Section 106 of this legislation clearly limits the Scholarships for Service program to citizens or permanent residents of the United States. But that limitation is not extended to the Graduate Traineeships Program, which is also authorized; nor does it extend that limitation to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program, which has previously been expanded to include computer and network security specializations.

Other cybersecurity programs give funding to and rely upon universities that are now training both sides in a future cyber war.

So here we might end up, if we're not careful on how we approach this battle that we're having for the security of our country, we could end up financing both sides of a potential cyber conflict. We don't need to do that.

The Chinese graduate students that head home, after being trained by the American taxpayers, and they're supposed to head home, by the way, after they go through education here, if they go home, they could end up becoming soldiers in China's cyber war against us.

We need to consider the fundamental questions of how we got ourselves into this predicament, and that was through our policies of technology transfer, trade, and investment that benefited and actually were structured in a way to transfer wealth to China.

We need solutions to get ourselves out of this problem and not be in jeopardy from this Communist Chinese dictatorship that still exists in Beijing. Well, turning off the funding spigot to those who threaten us and potentially could do us harm is the first step.

So I would hope that as this legislation works its way through the Senate and elsewhere, that we make sure that there are limitations placed on it so that no students from countries that

are possible enemies of the United States, but are currently engaged in cyber attacks, should be able to be funded by this program.

But with that said, the purpose of the program is terrific. We need to do it, and we need to do it right. And I congratulate my friends and my colleagues for the good job they've done.

Thank you very much.

First of all, I would like to make sure that those people who are reading the Congressional Record or those people who are watching this presentation on C-SPAN, or our colleagues who are in their offices, watching from their offices, should take note of the courage and the hard work that Congressman King has put into this issue. And it is not because Congressman King or those of us who have worked with him on this issue have any animosity towards anyone else. Congressman King is a strong Christian and knows that hatred and animosity is not a positive virtue.

But to the same degree, what is, then, Congressman King's motive? Why does he put up with this? Why does he work so hard? Because he loves the people of the United States of America. That's our job. We were elected by the people of the United States to watch out for them and to watch out for their families. That doesn't mean that we don't like people in other countries. That doesn't mean that we don't like or have some animosity towards someone who has come here from another country, and even those who come here illegally. But our first loyalty and our first consideration and our heart-felt support has to be for those people who are Americans, whether they were born here or whether they came here as legal immigrants and are now part of our American family.

There is nothing wrong with supporting your family. That doesn't mean you're being selfish by not selling your car or giving away your children's birthright to some other person down the block. No, you should be taking care of your family. And we Americans are a family that's made up of every race, every religion, and every ethnic group.

The people who are the real racists in this whole debate are the ones who want to, first of all, tie illegal immigration with legal immigration. The fact is that they say, well, look, the immigrants, this and that. The fact is, when you want to put those same groups together, that is not what this debate is all about.

Mr. King and I know full well that what's happening here today is an effort to take, not people who have come to our country legally, not to change their status legally, that's not my effort, that's not Mr. King's effort, but the effort that's going on is to take 11 million to 20 million people who are in our country illegally, whose presence oftentimes is a threat to the well-being of people that have elected us to watch out for their interests, meaning the American people in our country, that the only issue is what are we going to do with those 11 to 20 million people.

If we continue to take away from those American citizens, those seniors or those kids in school, with our very limited dollars right now, and we have 22 million people who are out of work, and we continue to take away from them and give benefits and jobs to people who come here illegally, who are not part of our family, we can expect even more and more and more people to come here until it is a disaster, which it already has been a disaster for many middle-income and lower-income Americans. It will be a disaster to them.

What we are trying to do is help secure the well-being of our people. As I say, I think that's done out of love. It's done out of the idea that you don't basically give away everything to somebody who is down the street when your own family needs some food. That's not being selfish.

I recently have been through some hardship in my family, in terms of

medical hardship. I've been able to visit and see what our hospitals are like. Our hospital system in the United States and our health care system is stretched to the breaking point. We're stretched to the breaking point. We cannot afford, if we try, to take care of all of the people in the world who can come here, whether they come here illegally or not. If someone has come here illegally, we cannot afford to take care of all of their health needs without actually hurting our own people. That's what this whole debate is about.

I was down in El Salvador. Ask Congressman King. I was in El Salvador about 3 years ago. And I'll never forget, my wife and I were sitting there at the airport, and in about 20 minutes there's a direct flight between LAX, Los Angeles, and El Salvador and back. We were there in El Salvador waiting to go back to LAX. Twenty minutes before the flight took off, out come the wheelchairs, and about 20 infirm seniors are wheeled into that plane. None of them were Americans. They were, obviously, all El Salvadorans.

Now, no one can tell me today that those people, if they're still alive, are not consuming enormous amounts of health care dollars that should be going to take care of our own people. That doesn't mean that I have any animosity towards them. I wish the people of El Salvador well.

We need to make sure that we are watching out. The fundamental issue today is whose side are you on, or who's watching out for the people of the United States? And I would ask all of us to join Congressman King in making sure that the American people are not damaged by this irresponsibility that we have towards people from another country who have come here illegally.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to acknowledge the accomplishments of Mr. James D. Ruth upon his retirement from the Orange County Sanitation District and from over 50 years of public service. Jim was appointed Interim General Manager of the Orange County Sanitation District, OCSD, in December 2005 for what was supposed to be a six-month role. But instead of serving a short term, his steady management and skill in delivering public services resulted in his six- month assignment turning into a seven-year term of service.

Mr. Ruth stayed to steer OCSD through difficult times, accumulated a number of significant accomplishments, and gained national and international acclaim for the management of the third largest wastewater treatment plant west of the Mississippi River. During his tenure, Jim Ruth streamlined the agency by eliminating waste and duplication and trimming costs without sacrificing service to the 2.5 million Orange County residents that rely on OCSD every day. He negotiated a two-tier pension system and was a leader in implementing reduced employee costs across the board.

Of special interest to me, Jim Ruth oversaw OCSD's participation in the completion of the Groundwater Replenishment System. He also presided over the dedication of OCSD's secondary treatment upgrade. Both of these projects provide for a reliable and safe clean water supply while protecting Orange County's beautiful beaches.

I applaud Jim's service to our community over the years, and most recently, his service to OCSD. While I wish Jim a long and happy retirement, he should know that his accomplishments throughout his career will not soon be forgotten.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 667 as a way for us to honor the memories of Neil Armstrong and Dr. Hugh Dryden.

These two men, these two 20th century frontiersmen, technologists, and, yes, visionaries, these two men who led us and, thus, led our country into a new era of human history, the era of aerospace when the technology of mankind uplifted mankind into the air and then into the heavens, this is an era that we are just now seeing the very

first steps, and these were the men who pushed the frontier and made those first steps.

Neil Armstrong's name will be one of the few iconic names from our era that are found in history books 1,000 years from now. Most people know him as a brave astronaut who commanded Apollo 11; but before those days, Neil Armstrong was an outstanding aeronautical engineer and a great pilot for the U.S. Navy and for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the NACA, a precursor to NASA. Neil flew over 900 missions at the NACA High-Speed Air Station, and that very center is what we seek to name in his honor today.

At the same time, we wish to continue to recognize the major and significant contributions of Dr. Hugh Dryden, one of the world's greatest aeronautical scientists who provided critical leadership to the NACA and is reported to be the man who gave President Kennedy the idea that a Moon landing was the right benchmark for America to set as we worked to catch up with the Soviet Union in space.

Today we honor these great men, and by supporting this legislation, we will continue to support them in every way and continue to support NASA in its test-flight mission.

Let us not forget so many people just associate NASA with space, and Neil Armstrong is one of those people. But as I've just pointed out, their work in developing new technology for aerospace and for jet engines and the design of airplanes has had a tremendous impact on our way of life and made America the great aerospace power in the world. So as we honor them today, we reconfirm our commitment to being the number one space power and the number one aerospace power on the planet.

Mr. Speaker, we join the people of Thailand in commemorating the 85th birthday of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand on December 5, 2012.

During King Bhumibol's 66 year reign, he has continued to foster a strong partnership with the United States. As a great source of tranquility in the country, he has helped Thailand strengthen its friendship with the United States while becoming an example of democracy and economic development in Southeast Asia. Next year, we look forward to celebrating the 180th anniversary of America's bilateral relationship with Thailand since the signing of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce.

King Bhumibol's life work has been dedication to the fulfillment of his coronation oath: ``We shall reign with righteousness for the benefit and happiness of the Siamese people.'' Today we applaud his righteousness and his many accomplishments that have brought peace, stability, and prosperity to the people of Thailand. It is known that His Majesty is a talented musician, and today we recognize he has replaced discord with harmony throughout his life.

It is my pleasure to join our Thai friends in celebrating this important occasion, and extend my best regards to His Majesty for his good health and a happy birthday.