Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the leadership he is providing on this very important, I would say, issue, but it is not an issue, it is the question of the day, the question of our time. Will the people of the United States stand tall in this time of crisis? Will we meet our responsibility? Will we overcome those who hate our way of life? Will we remain the last best hope for all of humankind for a better world.

Let us look back and make sure we understand it. The American people have a heavy responsibility, because we do represent every race and every religion. We are a mixture of all the people of the world who have come here to live in freedom and show the world that there is a better way.

That is why groups like the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists back in the last century knew they had to deal with us. We were attacked at Pearl Harbor because the Japanese knew that we were the only thing that stood in their way to the domination of Asia. The Nazis knew we were the only thing that was going to thwart them from creating a black evil empire over Europe, and much of Asia. Americans of that day stood tall and strong and did what was necessary to make sure that we saved the world from that evil threat.

After the war, after that war, when our fathers and mothers, my father in particular, and I know the fathers of many of the people here in Congress today, fought so hard and risked so much, and saw their loved ones lose their lives, they thought they deserved a break. Instead, what we saw was the rise of another menace, another evil force that would have conquered the world, would have turned the world into a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, the proletariat. They would have imposed on all of humankind their dream, their proletarian dictatorship, and they would have snuffed out the freedom our people had just fought so hard to maintain.

Yet, during those days of the Cold War, Americans stood firm. And it was difficult to stand firm during the Cold War. In Vietnam and in Korea, we lost well over 100,000 people, together in those two conflicts, not to mention hundreds of thousands who were wounded, but it was also a matter of hundreds of small conflicts that were going on. Yet our people stood firm. It was difficult, but we had the leadership that we needed there at the end.

We just heard last week how Ronald Reagan saved the world from communism. But do not think that that was done without a great cost to him personally. There was no bipartisanship that I saw that helped end the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed, he was undermined, he was back-bitten, and there was partisan politics played throughout his administration. Because no one predicted that the Cold War would be over and that our enemy would collapse. But Ronald Reagan stuck to his guns. He was tenacious, he was unrelenting, he was strong, he stood for principle, and he reached out to those other people in the world and put them on our side of the battles against communism.

Well, today, we know that communism, yes, collapsed and we thought we were due for a break. There will never be a break for those people who are the champions of liberty and freedom and justice, because there will be evil forces in the future. We face another one today. It is not terror. People say the war on terror. They are trying to be a little bit diplomatic. It is a war with radical Islam which has declared war on the American way of life.

Radical Islam believes that we are a sinful group of people because we permit people the freedom to make decisions on their own lives. Radical Islam would make chattel out of our women, out of women everywhere. Radical Islam does not believe in those things that we hold dear in terms of personal freedom. And radical Islam has declared war on us. And let us not make a mistake about it, 3,000 of our people are dead today in those towers in New York and here in the Pentagon because we did not recognize that they were at war with us.

Well, we have recognized that, and there is no escaping it. Today, we have the same challenge as our forefathers and mothers did in the war against the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists, and as we did in the Cold War against the Communists. We have to win this fight or it will be a far worse world. It will be a dark world of chaos and despotism and fanaticism if we do not. Nowhere is that battle more important today than what is going on in Iraq.

I say, thank God that we have a President who was willing to take this stand. What we are seeing in Iraq is an historic strategic move to outflank the radical Islamists. We are turning a dictatorship in the Muslim world into a democracy. And we are, thus, pointing to this so that the young people of the Muslim world will have an alternative to radical Islam. We are doing what Ronald Reagan did. We are cutting our enemy off from its source of strength. If we do what is right and we stick to this, our enemy will collapse, just as communism collapsed, just as that other evil force collapsed.

Again, we are having to go through the pangs of partisan politics, the back-biting, the nitpicking, the let us cut and run. The people who ask, why should we risk anything; why are we losing these lives, they know if we would leave Iraq as it is today and the radical Islamists, especially the Iranians, then become a dominant force in Iraq, it would be a disaster for the future, not only of that region but for the people of the United States. We would have a future filled with fear, a future of knowing that the radical Islamic creed would have been gathering strength because we had demonstrated weakness.

No, we have a President who is just as unrelenting as Ronald Reagan. We have a President who is a visionary, who is taking a positive approach, trying to establish a positive alternative to radical Islam. We have a President who has courage and is moving forward, but we also have a generation of young people who understand that strength and courage and commitment is the way to a better world.

Those people who are giving their lives for us in Iraq know they are doing it to build a better world. They deserve solid support from this Congress. We support them because they are risking their lives for us. They are building a better world, just like those people who stormed ashore on D-Day over a half century ago. And just like those young men and women throughout the Cold War, who gave their lives, these are the heroes of our age.

We have a President every bit as important to the future of mankind as was FDR when he provided the political leadership necessary to win the Second World War; and Ronald Reagan, who provided the leadership to help us win the struggle against communist tyranny. And now, with President Bush, he is a man who will not retreat, will not cower, will not turn his back and run. We have a man who has drawn the line in the sand and said we are going to win because the whole world depends on us.

This is what is happening in Iraq. There is no option in terms of defeat. Defeat is not an option. If we walk away, it will only mean further bloodshed and further aggression, and not only terrorism here, but attacks on our friends throughout the world if we would retreat from Iraq today. We should never dream of emboldening our worst enemies. We should, instead, stand tall.

That is what this is about tonight. That is what many of us are committed to here in the House. I hope the American people listen and take a look at the long run, take a look at what happened in the past, take a look at what will happen in the long run unless we

have that same sense of purpose and courage that those who came before us had in these same type of challenges.

We are building the world of tomorrow and it will be a world where we will be friends with the people of the Muslim faith because we will have helped them defeat the radical Muslims who hate our way of life. We will have a world that does have peace between the religions, whether they are Christians, Jews or Muslims, because we will have a world in which we have not permitted the fanatics of one faith, the Islamic faith, to superimpose their will on the rest of the world by force.

We will not be cowards. We will do our duty. And God bless President Bush for the stand that he has made, and God bless the United States of America and those who defend it.

Mr. Speaker, the American people need to know that the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York and Washington D.C. was not predestined nor was it unavoidable. Unfortunately, the commission investigating 9/11 seems uncomfortable with fixing responsibility, branding such attempts at accountability as the blame game or pointing fingers, or so some of them said, early on in their hearings.

So instead of looking for policies that were dead wrong or people who were incompetent, we have heard about all glitches in the system, about a lack of communication, a lack of a shared database. So expect recommendations from this commission and this task force to be consistent with this thinking. Changes will be suggested in flow charts, organizational restructuring, and, of course, you can expect them to recommend the creation of a new central authority and intelligence czar.

Sorry. 9/11 represented a dramatic failure of policy and people. A number of insane policies led to the creation of the hostile radical Islamic movement we face today. Policies that enabled weird, feudalistic religious zealots to become a major threat to the Western world, and especially to the people of the United States.

Yes, the origins of this frightening reality go back a ways. In the 1980s, for example, the CIA permitted Pakistan to channel America's support to those Afghans who were fighting against the Soviet troops who were occupying their

country. Much of that support that we were giving the Afghan freedom fighters ended up in the hands of Pakistan's favorite Muslim fanatics Golbadin Hekmatyar, a fiend who, in his college days, threw acid in the face of young women who refused to cover themselves totally with a burka.

During the war, I hiked into the Afghanistan, that is the war against the Soviet's occupation of Afghanistan, I hiked into Afghanistan with a small mujahadeen infantry unit. On our way to the south of Jalalabad, which was the last major battle in which Soviet troops fought in that war, we came across an encampment of Saudi volunteers. In stark contrast to the spartan living conditions of the Afghan fighters, this camp site was complete with large safari-style tents, cots and even SUVs. I was told not to speak English because the Saudi crazy man who led this bunch would rather kill Americans than Soviet troops. His name, you guessed it, was Osama bin Laden.

So by the end of the 1980s the presence of a potentially dangerous whack element in Afghanistan was well known. And contrary to leftist cliches, the roots of our current terrorist problem lie not in the support that we gave the Afghan people in their gallant fight against Soviet occupation, but in America's willingness to let Pakistan distribute war supplies and our unconscionable decision after the retreat of the Soviet Army to walk away ourselves and to leave the poor and wounded Afghans to live in the rubble and suffering and to leave them there in their own history.

Milton Bearden, a senior CIA officer who oversaw American support, has suggested that his job was beating the Soviets and that he should not have been expected to keep our weapons and our support out of the hands of those who might pose a long-term threat to the United States. Nonsense. Put this man, the head of the CIA operation overseeing our aid to the mujahadeen, put him, the CIA officer, Milton Bearden, on the list of people who helped bring about 9/11.

I can assure you that complaints were made at the highest level about America's support ending up in the hands of these crazies. I personally made such protests while I was working in the Reagan White House.

Furthermore, it was a policy decision that let Pakistan distribute our supplies and it was wrong. To fix responsibility on this one, I look to the list of senior foreign service officers at our embassy in Islamabad in the 1980s and 1990s. Up to this day, there are State Department geniuses who still tow the Pakistani line, who still seem unable to call Pakistan to task for its transgressions of omission and comission. These State Department pros who ran our policy from Islamabad, Pakistan, in the 1980s and 1990s, these are the ones who also helped give us 9/11. Look at the list of the people who worked there.

Furthermore, it was a policy decision to walk away and abandon our Afghan allies even after psychopathic killers like Golbadin Hekmatyar rose up as the Soviets departed. President Bush, father of our current President, has to accept a lion's share of the blame for this cowardly, arrogant, and selfish policy. There would be no Marshall Plan for Afghanistan nor anything else because, like during the war itself, we left post-war reconstruction and assistance up to the Saudis and up to the Pakistanis, which was, again, another indefensible policy decision. These countries predictably had their own agenda which included the creation of a radical Islamic state in Afghanistan.

The Saudis and the Pakistanis were not upset that the violent extremists were so well armed. The Saudis and the Pakistanis supported the arming of these violent extremists. Predictably, what followed was a period of havoc and bloodshed. Hekmatyar Golbadin peppered Kabul with American rockets that were stockpiled during the Soviet occupation. Well, thank you, Mr. Bearden.

There was a way out of this, of course. We did not need to have our support going to the radicals who hate us and hate our way of life. Instead, there was the king of Afghanistan who had been exiled in Rome for many years he was able and willing to return. King Zahir Shah was, and is, the most beloved man in Afghanistan, a pro-Western force for stability, a moderate Muslim.

Instead, our State Department opted to have the creation of a third force, this new force to be made up of religious fanatics educated in the madrases, the so-called schools that were in Pakistan, schools that were financed and built by the Saudis but taught nothing but hatred towards the west.

I pleaded with Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki to at least give the old King Zahir Shah a chance to lead an interim government. No way. Again, our State Department let the Saudis and the Pakistanis take the lead rather than having us lead them. Rather than go with a pro-Western alternative we ended up supporting the Taliban, the creation of the Taliban as a means to bring stability to Afghanistan. And make no mistake about it, the Taliban's ascent to power as well as their ability to stay in power was a Clinton administration policy decision promoted by professionals in our State Department.

Let me just note that I fought that every step of the way, trying to push to get the king of Afghanistan Zahir Shah recognized as a moderate alternative. Unfortunately, once the Taliban came to power, yes, I gave them the benefit of the doubt for about 2 weeks before it was quite evident that our worst fears would be recognized and would come to reality under the Taliban.

Again, who to put on the list of those who blame for 9/11? The policy of the State Department and the Clinton administration in collusion with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to create and support the Taliban control of Afghanistan, there is a huge cause of 9/11. They obviously did not learn, the Saudis and the Pakistanis and our own people, did not learn a thing from the horror that they created by backing Islamic fanatics like Hekmatyar Golbadin, and instead, went with the Taliban over the moderate alternative of the king.

Of course, our government's support for the Taliban was never publicly acknowledged. But for those of us engaged in that region, and there are darn few of us that were engaged in that region after the Soviets left, it was clear what our policy was.

But what is more poignant is the Afghan system believed the Americans were behind the Taliban. Why should they not? Our aid was channeled disproportionately through the Taliban controlled areas. I remember trying to clear the way for a shipment, private shipment of humanitarian relief for a non-Taliban area in northern Afghanistan only to be blocked by assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth.

If there was any doubt about my suspicions, they were laid to rest and my suspicions were confirmed in 1997 when high level executives from the Clinton administration saved the Taliban from total defeat and extinction. This is long after it was clear what type of regime the Taliban had, the Nazi-like fanatics that they were.

What happened was this: In April of 1997 the Taliban launched a major offensive aimed at taking control over the northern third of Afghanistan, which to that point had remained free and under the control of regional leaders who were commonly referred to as warlords.

One of those regional leaders, General Malick, tricked the Taliban and managed to capture almost all of their frontline troops, along with most of their heavy weaponry. It was an utter disaster for the Taliban. The road to the capital, Kabul, was wide open. The Taliban were totally vulnerable and could have easily been wiped out.

I sent a message to Commander Masood and to others that Kabul should be liberated and that the King should be brought back to oversee a transition government, which then would hopefully evolve into a democratically elected government, perhaps like what happened in Spain where the King returned and it evolved into a democratic government; but before the anti-Taliban forces could strike, Assistant Secretary of State Rick Indefurth and American U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson flew to northern Afghanistan and convinced the anti-Taliban leadership that this was not the time for an offensive. Instead, they insisted this was the time for a cease-fire and an arms embargo.

This clearly was a statement of U.S. policy. Two top foreign policy leaders in the Clinton administration flew to northern Afghanistan to convince the anti-Taliban forces not to take advantage of their one opportunity to soundly defeat and, thus eliminate, this enemy.

These Clinton appointees saved the Taliban; and let me underscore, by this time the evil nature of these Islamic Nazis was clearly evident. Right after the cease-fire and the release of prisoners brokered by these Clinton administration geniuses, the Pakistanis began a Berlin- like airlift to resupply and re-equip the Taliban, obviously financed with Saudi money. If I knew of this massive resupply effort, certainly the Clinton administration officials who had set up this scenario knew about it.

So why were the anti-Taliban leaders not notified of this situation? Why did we continue an arms embargo on the anti-Taliban forces, even as the Taliban were rearmed and resupplied? Well, the answer is it was U.S. policy.

So add Clinton appointees Assistant Secretary of State Rick Indefurth and United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson on the 9/11 blame list, and I say that with great hesitation because Bill Richardson is a friend, and I enjoyed serving with him in this House; but this particular action did great damage to the United States of America's security and, as I say, led to 9/11.

To be fair, they were obviously carrying out the policies that were made elsewhere and approved higher up in the administration, but how much higher can we go than the Assistant Secretary of State for the region and our United Nations ambassador? Well, I can tell my colleagues, it goes all the way up.

Last year, the current foreign minister of Pakistan visited California. Furious by my repeated accusations that Pakistan was responsible for the Taliban, the current foreign minister of Pakistan blurted out, and this was a well-attended event, that America was part of the Taliban deal from the first day it was created. I have been trying to prove that. I have been trying to prove the Clinton administration was covertly supporting the Taliban for a long time. Now, at last, I had confirmation by a nationally and internationally respected leader.

As a member of the Committee on International Relations, I have had the responsibility of overseeing such policy. During the last 2 years of the Clinton administration, I made numerous requests with the support of committee chairman Ben Gilman for Taliban-related documents. I wanted to find out what the genesis of our policy toward the Taliban was and try to expose exactly what our policy was. I asked for the cables, for talking points, meeting notes. This was part of my responsibility, as someone who is a senior member of the Committee on International Relations, to oversee the foreign policy of the United States.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a commitment to me in an open congressional hearing to provide my office and Chairman Gilman with all the related documents concerning our policy toward the Taliban. Well, to make a long story short, years went by and we kept asking for them. We were stonewalled. They sent us meaningless documents that included innocuous news clippings. Well, this was about as arrogant as anything I had ever experienced as a Member of Congress, and it still is: unelected State Department careerists dismissing the request of elected officials for security-related information. One wonders if the current independent commission examining 9/11 has asked to see these documents.

Is it not important for us to know if our government policy actually helped create the Taliban and protected the Taliban in power, even as they used Afghanistan as a terrorist base, which eventually was used as a staging area for an attack that cost the lives of 3,000 Americans on 9/11? In some ways, it is hard to characterize the administration's support for the Taliban as covert. Anyone looking closely would have to assume that that is what it was; but over and over again we were told this was not the policy. Yet something stunk.

Covert or overt, it was a disgraceful policy, and that policy led to 9/11 by creating a base of operations for bin Laden and a training base and staging area for al Qaeda. By the way, what we know now is bin Laden is not just some voice in the wilderness. He is from an enormously wealthy Saudi family; and while our petroleum dollars flowed into Saudi Arabia over the years, by the hundreds of billions of dollars, the Saudi establishment not only turned a blind eye but also attempted to buy off this violent, anti-Western, Islamic fringe which included bin Laden. This fringe was in their country. They spent billions of our petrol dollars to try to buy off these radicals. So billions of our petrol dollars now have come back to bite us in a big way. It obviously continues to this very day.

The first Gulf War in 1990 did nothing but expand bin Laden's hatred for us. Our presence in Saudi Arabia, he has piously proclaimed, is an insult to his faith. Well, considering that the mass slaughter of unarmed people is perfectly consistent with his faith, perhaps we should quit taking seriously all of this self-righteous, Islamic rhetoric used by bearded, psychopathic killers. Most people who believe in Islam are total opponents to this type of murderous behavior in the name of their religion. It is our job to reach out to those people, those Muslims, those moderate Muslims, who want to live in freedom and want everyone to respect each other's faith, to reach out to them and to make them part of our coalition, to make sure that the radical Islam, just like Communism and every other ism that attempted to murder tens of thousands and hundred of thousand get their way just as we have defeated them in the past.

In the mid-1990s, bin Laden and his cohorts began to set up a terrorist underground army for a war that he intended to wage on America and on the Western democracies. In the mid-1990s, he operated not out of Afghanistan but out of Sudan. America's official position was that bin Laden was a terrorist, and he was on our Most Wanted List. In fact, CIA Director George Tenet declared him America's and the CIA's number one target.

Inexplicably, while designated as such, the CIA's number one target, the self-aggrandizing monster organized, financed, and implemented attacks that caused tens of billions of dollars in damage and the death of thousands of innocent people, not just in the U.S. on 9/11 but worldwide over several years: the World Trade bombing back in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and then an attack on the USS Cole. All of these were all organized by bin Laden's monsters and bin Laden's conspirators, a man recognized as the number one target of the CIA. Yet with all of the CIA's money and power and technology and other assets, with a track record like that, knowing what they are capable of, the CIA could not thwart 9/11, nor did they warn us of 9/11.

So, remember, 9/11 was a major operation, planned and carried out by the CIA's number one target, as well as the number one target, as well as hundreds of others, I might add, who had to be involved in this, with millions and millions of dollars being spent on communication over large areas. Yet we were not warned, and it was not thwarted. If this is not incompetence, then what is?

Furthermore, there were mind-boggling missed opportunities to get bin Laden before 9/11. Either intentionally or as a matter of policy or through incompetence, bin Laden was never stopped, even though there were numerous opportunities to stop him. The Government of Sudan, for example, played close attention to bin Laden. That is why he was operating in that country in the early 1990s. I am told they actually cataloged the people to whom he spoke on the phone and the people who came to see him in person.

The former ambassador for the Sudan to the United States, Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, told me personally that he had offered our government this terrorist catalog which would have been a silver bullet for the total destruction of bin Laden's terrorist network, al Qaeda. Vanity Fair reports that the Sudanese Government's offer to provide us this information was abruptly turned down by no one else other than Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. That is right, the Secretary of State. Vanity Fair reports that she instructed that no one look at a copy of the material.

It just reconfirms, I might add, what the Sudanese ambassador has told me

personally. So in bold print let us add to the list of those responsible for 9/11 the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

It should be noted that former President Clinton is denying that he turned down such an offer from the Sudan. Just even last night, I understand, he was being interviewed and denied that he had turned down this offer. Well, it is not unreasonable to assume that the wording of this denial has been crafted so we really do not know what is is, and, unfortunately, we have to look at the words very carefully to see if someone's trying to leave us with a false impression without actually telling a lie.

While we are at it, let us add the name Dick Clarke, and look at Dick Clarke. Now, this is a man who got much attention for criticizing George W. Bush when he criticized him before the investigating panel. Clarke was a senior foreign policy official. While all that I have been describing to my colleagues, while all this was taking place, he was a senior policy person in the Clinton administration and even before. He either approved of what was happening, or he did nothing during this period. He either approved it, or he did nothing. Whichever, he is certainly on the 9/11 blame list and has no credibility in blaming President Bush who, as we know, was sworn in as President after the 9/ 11 plot was well under way, and it was well under way and started and conceived of at a time when Dick Clarke was a senior official in the administration of this previous administration.

So now we have him attacking our President? From the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the bombing of U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, to the attack on the USS Cole and the destruction of our embassies in Africa, the response from the last administration was so tepid, so weak, that the perpetrators thought that we Americans are cowards.

That is why they went ahead with 9-11, which was aimed not just at killing 3,000 Americans. Let us remember this. It is God's gift to us that only 3,000 Americans died at the Pentagon and in those towers in New York. Tens of thousands of people could have died. This we have learned.

And what we have learned is that that plan to kill tens of thousands of Americans moved forward because the response that we had, our government had to these attacks on us before, during the 1990s, made these terrorists think that we were weak and cowardly. And so those we have captured since have told us that it was the weakness of the 1990s that led to the attacks on us and led to the war that we are in today.

By the way, after one attack it is reported that Richard Clarke, who was a White House official at that time, when they were looking for how to retaliate--it is reported that Richard Clarke insisted that the retaliation take the form of a bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, an aspirin factory which had nothing to do with terrorism. Yet that was the target that he insisted that we use as a retaliation to the attack upon us.

This while still helping the Taliban stay in power. Meaning the policy of the administration at the same time was letting the Taliban stay in power, even after we had been attacked. So here we are, we are attacked, but we still have not changed our policy of keeping the Taliban in power. We were still not working with those people who were anti-Taliban in Afghanistan. Something stinks about this whole situation.

Then, in an even more personal incident about bin Laden, which again clarifies whether or not we were doing what we needed to do, in April and May of 1999 America had an incredible opportunity to capture bin Laden. I personally was involved in this one. It is, unfortunately, yet another example of incompetence of those we trusted to protect us from an attack like 9-11.

In April 1999, a long-time friend, who had been deeply involved in the Afghan fight against Soviet occupation contacted me. My friend was, and is, an American. He has impeccable credentials, and he was widely known and admired among the Afghan people. My friend called to tip me that bin Laden was outside of Afghanistan and could be easily captured. I told him I would pass this on and pass on his name and phone numbers to the CIA.

The very next day, I was at a CIA briefing and I passed on my friend's name and phone number; explained his credential and told them we could have bin Laden on a platter. A week passed, I called my friend, and the CIA had not contacted him after a week. So I went back to the agency. This time they were adamant they would contact my friend. There was still a chance to get bin Laden.

Another week passed, and the CIA did not call my friend. So this time I went to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. When he heard my story, he immediately went into action and arranged a meeting for me the next day. That next day, at the appointed time, I went to a somewhat secret and heavily guarded part of this Capitol, where there in a secure room I met with not just the CIA but also a representative of the NSA and the FBI.

There they were, the bin Laden task force. I complained about my friend's vital information being ignored, and they took notes and apologized for those dunderheads over at the CIA and promised to get it right this time. A week later my friend still had not been contacted.

When I mentioned this to Chairman Goss, he was a appalled. The very next day, and I am sure it was based on him reading someone the riot act, a representative from an intelligence agency finally called my friend. The caller's tone of voice, my friend says, suggested that it was an obligatory inquiry.

It did not make any difference, because then the trail was cold. It was all very strange and very disheartening to see that the CIA and our intelligence people, and this was back during the last administration, did not seem to want to know how to get bin Laden. Then we end up bombing an aspirin factory after he commits a terrorist act against us.

Clearly, however, there was something dreadfully wrong at the CIA. And over at the FBI, it was just as bad, if not worse. It is widely known now that 2 months before the September 11 attacks, Phoenix FBI agent, Kenneth Williams, sent a memo to the FBI headquarters in Washington and New York warning that bin Laden disciples might be training at U.S. flight schools, and asking for a review to determine if this was happening in other parts of the country. The Williams memo was ignored by David Frasca, the supervisor special agent in Washington. David Frasca.

One month before 9-11, Minnesota FBI agent Colleen Rowley asked FBI headquarters to issue a warrant allowing agents to search the computer of a would-be terrorist, part of a gang, for information regarding Mr. Massaoui, who we knew was linked to the terrorist groups in the United States. She wanted to make sure we could check his computer. The FBI ignored her warnings. The FBI actually prohibited her from telling anybody else.

When she went to the CIA to try to warn them, she was rebuffed for her efforts. There was something terribly wrong with the culture of the FBI when they were upset that one of their people had gone to the CIA to warn them of a terrorist in the United States.

Clinton appointee, Louis Freeh, headed the Bureau for almost 8 years. The new director, Robert Mueller, took over just 2 days before 9-11. The Bureau, obviously, needed a major overhaul, as became painfully evident shortly thereafter when the World Trade Towers crashed to the ground before a shocked Nation.

The FBI, again like the CIA, had not done its job, for whatever reasons. The troubles in the FBI were not just an organizational mindset but also the restrictions and the mandates that were put upon the Bureau. So individuals there were at fault, the mindset was at fault, but there were also restrictions put on the Bureau, and restrictions that were put on many people who were responsible for protecting us from terrorism. This was put on them by the political powers of the 1990s.

A case in point, Jamie Gorelick, who now passes judgment on the Bush administration as part of the 9-11 investigation. In the 1990s, Gorelick was a Clinton administration official who basically oversaw policies for our domestic terrorist law enforcement and intelligence operations.

In a memo she wrote, while a Clinton lawyer--in that memo it forbade any cooperation between intelligence organizations and law enforcement agencies. Now, get this. A lady now in the committee investigating 9/11 wrote a memo, and that policy was put in place that prevented the cooperation between our intelligence organizations and law enforcement at a time when there were numerous, numerous terrorist attacks going on throughout the world and even after the terrorists had tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993.

So right on the 9/11 investigating panel is an example of why we had 9/11. Her presence on the investigating panel represents a massive conflict of interest. This is well known, and she should be removed.

The panel is, again, demonstrating the same inflexibility and aversion to corrective action that it is now investigating. Gorelick's directives reflected a hindsight in the last administration, even in the middle of terrorism restricting our intelligence people, even in the middle of terrorism making sure cooperation could not happen. It was a hindsight reflected even by career high-level intelligence officials.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, is supposed to provide the Pentagon with the detailed information necessary for it to deal with any and every potential threat. With all that is spent on the DIA, the Pentagon, like the rest of the United States Government, I mean, think about it, all this money we spend; but yet, we were caught off guard and the Pentagon was caught off guard and unprepared for 9/11.

The Pentagon's lack of information and analysis had disastrous effects. The counterattack strategy almost implemented after 9/11 would have been to send American military forces to Afghanistan from the southern part of Afghanistan. The goal for that plan was occupying a few major cities after sending in maybe 100,000, 150,000 American troops, but to capture a few cities like Jalalabad and Kabul, leaving the Taliban in charge of the countryside; and then we would negotiate with the Taliban and offer to withdraw our forces when they turned over bin Laden.

The Taliban would have us, thousands, tens of thousands of our troops, surrounded in a few cities in Afghanistan on the other side of the world; but the Taliban would be left in power even if they did not give us bin Laden, which of course they would never have given us bin Laden. That is as insane a policy as you can imagine, but that was a plan that was being seriously proposed. That would be the plan that would rely on our troops being supplied out of the bases on the western Pakistani frontier, which we now know is an anti-American stronghold.

Now, an alternative plan, based on cooperation with the battle-tested troops of the Northern Alliance, took a long time to develop, because the Pentagon did not know who the players were, much less what the anti-Taliban forces in the north could do. So it almost had disastrous consequences, that we did not know exactly what the strength of the anti-Taliban forces was.

My staff ended up providing the Pentagon with the names and strength assessment and the satellite telephone numbers, cell phone numbers of significant Afghan leaders who opposed the Taliban. That the Pentagon was unprepared was no surprise to me, however.

In early 1999, a DIA, that is, Defense Intelligence Agency, analyst came to me for help. She was in the process of being fired, and her story tells us volumes of why 9/11 caught America off guard and ill- prepared. Julie Sirrs was one of a small number of Afghan analysts. She took her job seriously, as she should have. She in fact visited Afghanistan, but only in those areas controlled by the Taliban. After returning, she realized that this was a one-dimensional view of Afghanistan and there were gaping holes in the DOD's understanding of the situation.

She requested to officially go back to northern Afghanistan, especially to the areas controlled by anti-Taliban Commander Masood, and she was turned down. She was denied the permission to go there, but realizing the danger posed by this lack of information, Julie Sirrs took the initiative and took her vacation, paid her own way, organized her own trip to the Panjeer Valley, which was the bastion of Commander Masood, the last Afghan holdout who was resisting the Taliban.

I had met with Masood in one of his mountain strongholds 2 years before. I had dinner with him and strategized with him. He was a friend. He was a hero. He was courageous. But he was not perfect. There is no doubt. All Afghans have made mistakes over their many years of conflict, but he was a wonderful man and a person who would have done great things as a friend of the United States.

But what I did was somewhat risky, to go into the mountains and see him, but what Julie Sirrs did was far more dangerous. What Julie Sirrs did was heroic.

When she got to the Panjir Valley, she found her assumptions were right. Something vital to America's security was happening, something she was not really able to discover when she visited the Taliban- controlled areas before. Commander Masood told her that he was facing a new enemy in Afghanistan. Masood's militia was finding itself in fire fights with some kind of fundamentalist foreign legion. Apparently, bin Laden, who was making Afghanistan into his base of operations, was importing Islamic radicals from all over the world, training them as terrorists and killers and then sending them up against Masood's troops for combat experience.

Masood offered to let Julie or other Americans interrogate the foreign prisoners he had captured. This again was an intelligence bonanza, but a missed opportunity. Julie Sirrs was uncovering the creation and organization and training of bin Laden's terrorist army, al Qaeda. She only had a short time, but she collected enough information for a preliminary report, and she headed home.

The minute she got back, she found herself under severe restrictions at the Defense Intelligence Agency and restricted to whom she could brief or show any of her reports. So her report was kept close hold rather than distributed as it should have been, a report that indicated that a terrorist army was being formed in Afghanistan that could and was threatening the United States of America. The commanding officer of the DIA labeled her as insubordinate, he fired her; and when she fought her dismissal, he set out to destroy her.

Amidst the fight to save her job, the DIA commanding officer told her what really upset him most was her contact with Masood, who, according to the DIA general, was one of the bad guys. This general was sending his people to be briefed by the Taliban, but any contact with Masood was a cause for dismissal. This was a mind set during the Clinton administration. It was a mind set of the man who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. Something is terribly wrong with this picture. The vitriol and the attack against Sirrs was shockingly harsh. Patently false charges were brought up against her to overwhelm her defense and intimidate her and force her to go quietly, which she did not do.

She was charged, for example, with lying, even though an agency lie detector test, which I have looked at, proved that she was telling the truth. She was charged with misusing equipment, having borrowed an office camera to take with her to Afghanistan. The charge was nonsense. Even her superiors agreed it was a reasonable thing to do; yet they pushed that as if she was stealing, even though she brought the camera back right after the trip with pictures so people would understand what was going on in Afghanistan.

The attacks on this sincere and responsible intelligence analyst were arrogant, nasty, malevolent, and loathsome. The brutal treatment of Sirrs sent a negative message to anyone and everyone in the DIA who had any idea of taking the initiative or thinking creatively. Julie came to me because she had no one else to whom she could turn. I was the one elected official with experience in Afghanistan. I requested a meeting with the general in charge of the DIA and right off the bat he insisted to me when he came to my office that she was insubordinate. I told him from my view she was a hero, risking her life and her job, spending her own money, all to get information that she believed was necessary for our country to be prepared in case something happened in Afghanistan.

After hearing each other out, I recommended to the general that we compromise. He could give her back her job, and she would end up neither a hero nor a scofflaw and I would back off and he could use political pressure from me as an excuse to bring her back. After the general left my office, he not only reaffirmed the firing of Julie Sirrs but he later stripped her of her security clearance as well, thus eliminating her ability to earn a living as an intelligence analyst. He demonstrated how he could destroy anyone who would deviate from his program or the mind-set of the day or defy his directives. Insubordination was the ultimate challenge to his authority; and in reaffirming his authority, he said it was more important to reaffirm that authority than was the security of the United States of America.

A few months later, the general retired. All of this would be a regrettable, but forgotten, incident, except for the resulting 9/11 tragedy, except for how terribly unprepared the Pentagon was for the war in Afghanistan. It is my sad duty tonight to inform my colleagues that the general to whom I am referring is Lieutenant General Patrick Hughes, who is today one of the top officials running the Department of Homeland Security. I am certain that over his long and distinguished career he made many contributions, but his indefensible conduct in the Sirrs case cast serious doubt over his judgment. I have notified Secretary Ridge on this side of General Hughes's character and recommended that he should not hold the high-level position that he holds in the Department of Homeland Security.

When George W. Bush took office in January 2000, the 9/11 terrorist operation, as I said, unbeknownst to any of us in government or in the outside, was already under way; but the threat posed by the radical anti-Western Islamic regime in Afghanistan was well known. An aggressive new policy to counteract this threat was needed. After Bush came in, we expected some changes. But having worked in the Reagan White House, I understood that it took time for a new President to appoint staff and set new policy and to begin to take control of government.

Nevertheless, during that brief interlude, and it was brief, between Bush's inauguration and 9/11, I met with the new national security staff on 3 occasions, including one meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss Afghanistan. There were, in fact, signs noted in an overview story in The Washington Post about a month ago that some steps were being made to break away from the previous administration's Afghan policy. And the previous administration's Afghan policy was a pro- Taliban policy, a policy of not supporting the opposition to the Taliban, even as Afghanistan became the base of operations for bin Laden, who was conducting terrorist activities against us.

One thing was certain to me at that time. George W. Bush, unlike his predecessor, would have a bold and unmistakable response to bin Laden's terrorist attacks.

As I stated earlier, we know now that those who planned and financed the 9/11 attack did not believe the United States would act forcefully and as unrelentingly as we have. This calculation resulted from the tepid American response to earlier al Qaeda attacks from Africa to New York City. But here again was an example of a rotten policy where we let these terrorist attacks happen and did not retaliate with our full strength that led to 9/11.

And, yes, had we retaliated more aggressively, had we retaliated more aggressively when our embassies were blown up in Kenya and Tanzania, the terrorists we have captured now tell us had we done that, had we responded more aggressively, they would have had second thoughts about taking this plan to fly their planes into the buildings in New York, they would have had second thoughts and might have pulled back.

I took pride in those days as being one Member of Congress, and this was before 9/11, who maintained an interest in Afghanistan, which I saw even then as a major national security threat to our country. It was an American calamity waiting to happen.

Then just a few days before 9/11, the news came that Commander Masood had been murdered in Afghanistan. I felt as if I had lost a close friend. And as I mourned his loss, I struggled to fully understand the significance of his death. Then it dawned on me. It dawned on me why Masood had been assassinated. America was going to be attacked. It would be so monstrous that bin Laden's gang in Afghanistan wanted to cut us off from a means of counterattacking them in their base of operations in Afghanistan. We would have turned to Masood if we were attacked. That is what we would have done, and they were cutting us off from turning to Masood, but now Masood was dead.

Perhaps his death was a signal to set the planned attack on our country in motion. So on September 10, after I had figured that out a few days before 9/11, on September 10 I tried to alert anyone and everyone who would listen to me. I tried to give my warnings of an imminent terrorist attack. A few people listened as a courtesy, but for most people their eyes simply glazed over as I tried to warn them. The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood) stood behind me in an elevator and overheard me lamenting that something horrible was about to happen and that I could not get anyone to take my warnings seriously. It was like being in the Twilight Zone, I said. And as I got off the elevator, he lightheartedly patted me on the back and with a smile told me not to be so melodramatic and certainly not to be so apocryphal.

Undeterred, I called the White House and asked for an emergency appointment with Condoleezza Rice in order to warn of an impending terrorist attack, a major attack. Her office apologized that she was incredibly busy that day but she respected my opinion and would see me the next day at 3:00 p.m. The next day was 9/11. The planes began flying into the buildings at 8:48 a.m.

I tell this story for one reason. We must ask how is it that one Member of Congress, with the help of one staff member, was able to analyze the situation and determine that the terrorists based in Afghanistan were about to launch a major terrorist attack on the United States when the CIA and others failed to do so? We spent billions of dollars on our intelligence apparatus. With one staff member, I was able to figure it out. Why were they not?

Yes, George Tenet should have resigned a long time ago, and he is certainly at the top of the list of those who should be held accountable for 9/11, for not thwarting the attack or not even warning us of the attack that was coming.

On 9/11 there was another incident that underscored this about the CIA. Shortly after the attack, I called King Zhir Shah in Rome. He was now America's greatest asset for any action that would be taken against the terrorist forces in Afghanistan. Masood was dead, but the Afghan people would rally behind the king. Well, if I could figure that out, that the king of Afghanistan exiled in Rome was our greatest asset in this war that we were in because thousands of our people had just been killed before our eyes, the Taliban certainly could have figured that out.

So I was shocked to find out that King Zhir Shah in his villa in Rome had no protection. He was totally vulnerable. So I told the king to stay put and went to work. Among others I called the CIA and managed to speak directly to one of Tenet's top lieutenants. I explained the situation, and he acknowledged the importance of the king, assuring me that he would take care of it.

A few hours later, I happened to talk to this gentleman again, and I will never forget the response, his response, when I asked if the king was under protection at that moment. This was 5 hours later. ``You don't expect us to act that fast, do you?''

Just like the FBI, there was something wrong with the mindset at the CIA. Yes, we expect them--our people in the CIA--to act at a time when we have long-distance telephone calls and digital communication to act that fast at a time when thousands of Americans are losing their lives and we had no idea how many more would be losing their lives. And that mindset of ``you did not expect us to act that fast,'' that blame must be placed on George Tenet. So his name is to be on that list and underlined.

By the way, late in the day on 9-11, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr.

Greenwood) came running up to me when he saw me and said, ``How did you know? How did you know?'' Well, the question is why did any of us not know? Why did we not know? Why did those whom we have hired to protect us not know?

It is time for those who made possible the rise of the Taliban, the rise of bin Laden, and, yes, the tragedy of 9-11 to be held personally accountable and for us to understand the policies and the people that caused 9-11. It was not something that was ordained by God to happen. It could have been stopped had we been responsible and had people done their job.

The list stretches over both Republican and Democratic administrations. Through the failures of the CIA under Ronald Reagan when the CIA fellow in Islamabad channeled our money to fanatics when there were other people fighting the communists, the Soviets, who would have been happy to get those supplies. We could have built their strength up. So from that failure to the blunders of the State Department under George Bush to the incompetence and disingenuous posturing of the diplomats under Bill Clinton, accountability requires that their names be given.

Retired General Patrick Hughes, who as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, fired Julie Sirrs and today holds a high position in the Department of Homeland Security. He must accept responsibility for something he did that was just demonstrably wrong. Former ambassador and now Governor Bill Richardson, a man who was our ambassador to the United Nations, a good person, a good human being whom I personally like, he, under orders from who knows who, saved the Taliban from defeat when they were vulnerable. He personally did, along with Former Assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth.

Had the Taliban been defeated as they were in a position of being defeated, 9-11 just would not have happened. There would not have been a staging area for bin Laden to operate out of, and, as I say, the former CIA Officer Milton Bearden, who armed the most fanatic of the Afghan forces who struggled against the Soviet occupation.

The former CIA Director George Tenet, whose culpability I have mentioned several times, he resigned. He should have done so long ago. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, she was the point person for the policy of covert support for the Taliban, and she was the one who detailed the opportunity for us to receive information from Sudan that would have permitted us to eliminate bin Laden's terrorist network. Of course it was not the policy. She was doing something that was consistent with the policy of that administration.

Then, of course, Dick Clarke, who has criticized this President for the few months he had in power before 9/11, was, along with a few others, in a high level position to argue against, if not to change, the grotesquely mistaken policies of the eighties and nineties, but he failed to do so. In fact, we know a few of the things that he did were exactly in the wrong direction.

If another 9/11 is to be avoided, we need accountability. We do not need the rearranging of a bureaucratic organizational chart. There is nothing wrong with our system that brought on 9/11, and there is nothing wrong with our system which will not be corrected by having different policies in place and different people in positions of authority.

Let us now, if nothing else, be honest with each other. We have Ms. Gorelick, who is on the panel investigating 9/11, when she herself issued mandates that undercut our ability to fight terrorism back in the 1990s. Let us be honest with each other. Let us have an honest accounting. We can start right there by relieving that person from her responsibilities and looking at that role that she played that undercut the ability of our departments and agencies to do their job.

So, let us be honest with one another, have an honest accounting, and then let us join together and let us commit ourselves to defeating this murderous enemy, this enemy that would destroy our way of life, who hates everything that America stands for, and let us defeat this enemy so completely that no one will ever again miscalculate about the power of the American people or the courage of the American people.

Today, we have a chance to make a better world for tomorrow. We saw where people and policies of a decade ago have left us in this turmoil and this bloodshed that we face today. But if we have courage, and our President has this courage, and he is unrelenting, and if we get behind him, and if the American people are unified in our commitment, this threat, just like the threat of Nazism and Japanese militarism in the 1940s and 1930s, we defeated that threat to mankind, and then we defeated the threat of communism.

But if we are honest with ourselves and we move forward, correcting our mistakes, and there will always be mistakes, there were mistakes in World War II, there were mistakes in the war against communism, but if we correct our mistakes and insist that people be held accountable, we will build a future for our children that is secure, and we will build a country that can live in peace and prosperity and in friendship with others.

More than that, we will live in friendship with all people, especially those moderate Muslims who do not share in the hatred and are appalled by the hatred of bin Laden towards the West. Let us build a world where Christians and Muslims can respect each other's faith. But we need to take the leadership. We cannot depend on the Saudis or the Pakistanis or anyone else to provide the leadership. It is up to the people of the United States and our leaders here to lead the way, and I have every confidence that our President will do and is doing just that.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 34 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned under its previous order, until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 22, 2004, at 9 a.m., for morning hour debates.

Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order.

I would like to inquire of whether or not if someone makes an allegation against a former Member that race is being taken into consideration by his decisions, whether or not that is, in fact, calling another Member a racist and whether or not that is just what our colleague just did to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo).

Mr. Chairman, so if our colleague just indicated to

that the gentleman from Colorado's (Mr. Tancredo) consideration was because of the way people look and their race, that is a reason to have our colleague's words taken down? Is that right?

Mr. Chairman, we have a monstrous threat to our well-being, and it is not just the terrorism that comes in forms of people flying airplanes into buildings. We have millions, millions of people crossing our borders illegally; and if we do not come to grips with this challenge, with this threat to our people, it will dramatically decrease and hurt the standard of living of our own American people. We know that. There is no doubt about it.

We are proud to be a Nation where we allow more legal immigration into our society than all the other nations of the world combined. But illegal immigration in the form of millions of people coming into our society, consuming resources for education and health care, making a mockery of our judicial system and tearing down the police protection that we have got for our own citizens is damaging the well-being of the people of the United States. It is out of control; and unless we do something about it, our people are going to suffer. They are suffering right now in California. Their children are not getting as good an education and health care available.

This amendment simply says that the law needs to be enforced, and that all Americans, all Americans, especially those in law enforcement in local communities and throughout the country, have an obligation to enforce the law.

This has nothing to do with legal immigrants. It has everything to do with people who have broken the law. If people were robbing stores throughout the country and the police were not enforcing the law because local city councils were in league with the criminals, we would say that the local police have to enforce the law.

I will tell you this much: the billions of dollars being drained out of our health care system, the billions of dollars being drained out of our education system to take care of people who have not contributed, not contributed because they come over and in the same year they are on those social benefit programs, this is the same kind of crime; and it is a crime against the people of the United States. All people involved in law enforcement should be enforcing that law.

Mr. Chairman, I support the Tancredo amendment.

Mr. Speaker, it is a blessing that Ronald Reagan did not die immediately after leaving office in 1989. In these last 16 years that we have had Ronald Reagan with us, it has given America a chance to take a look at who Ronald Reagan was and what he meant to our country. And now, with 16 years that have passed, we can look back and see what an enormous difference Ronald Reagan made not only to our lives as Americans but to the entire world.

Let me note that Ronald Reagan was 56 years old when I first met him, and that was when he was running for the first time for public office. He ran for public office for the first time when he was 56 years old. And all of these things we are talking about, a man who accomplished so much and changed the world for the better, happened after he was 56 years old. He had already had a successful life, a full career.

And he did come from a relatively poor family. I know his first job was being a lifeguard. That affected his way of looking at things his entire life. He saved 77 people's lives as a lifeguard. And having gotten to know him as President and also during his campaigns, I think he always had that consciousness, that he was there to save the day for the people who were in some type of a crisis.

He was a sports broadcaster, and he was a moderately successful film actor. But all of that seemed to be over when he was 50 years old. And then, when he was 56, he jumped into political life. Now, why did he do that? Because California was a mess in 1966.

And he came and stepped forward because he felt he had a contribution to make. He jumped into the political waters to save the day.

I was a youth volunteer in that first campaign, and I got to meet him personally, and it was one of the joys of my life.

Let me note that years later after I got finished with school, I became a journalist, and I covered Ronald Reagan's last 2 years as Governor as a journalist. I remember that he had a press conference one day, it was near the end of his term, where he was announcing the findings of his law and order task force. One of their findings was an expanded use of the death penalty. And just as I am now, I was then always trying to get to the heart of the matter and ask the tough questions, and I asked President Reagan, who was then Governor, well, how can you be in favor of expanding the use of the death penalty when you are a committed Christian? And, you know, he sat forward, and he leaned forward to the mike, he says, I take that question very seriously. I prayed about this, about using the death penalty more frequently and taking people's lives. I have sought help. I have read the scripture, and I have talked to other people about this, and I have come to the conclusion that if we are executing people for revenge, that it is inconsistent with the principles that Jesus Christ taught us, but if we are executing murderers in order to deter people from killing other human beings, we are doing it then to save people, to save innocent people, and that is totally consistent with Christianity.

At that point Evelle Younger who was the attorney general of the State, reaches over and grabs the mike and says, oh, this religious and philosophical stuff does not mean anything. The voters of this State voted for the death penalty, and they are going to get it. Well, my opinion of Ronald Reagan's sword, I knew that he was a man who did not take these things lightly, a man of strong conviction, but a man who deeply cared about people enough to think about it and to pray about decisions like this. He was not just a great communicator, and I worked for him as a speechwriter for 7 years in the White House. He was, yes, someone who understood the fundamentals of communication, but that is not what made him great. He was not the great communicator. He was America's great leader. He had ideals that helped direct his decisions.

We have heard about his strong convictions. We know today that most people with strong convictions are not very pleasant to be around. When they talk about people with philosophies, there is a saying that you cannot change somebody's mind, and he will not change the subject. Ronald Reagan was a person who taught me that you can have strong principles and have a solid philosophy, but be a pleasant person and care about people at the same time. It was that type of humane approach that permitted Ronald Reagan to capture the hearts of the American people and inspire us.

When our country was in such terrible peril economically and in retreat internationally, and our spirit had been destroyed, people were not even waving the American flag back in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan dove into the political waters again to save the day. And he saved us. He was the lifeguard who saved us, and he saved the world.

Jim Bruelte, a political person in California, noted on D-Day the American soldiers liberated half of Europe. Ronald Reagan liberated the other half of Europe and did it without firing a shot.

We live in a more prosperous country, a safer country, and hundreds of millions of people now live in relative freedom than if he would not have been here. We are so grateful to Ronald Reagan for having dove in to save us, and he did. He saved America, and he saved us personally.

I am now 56 years old, the same age Ronald Reagan was when he first entered politics. I am so grateful that he spent those years of his life making this a better world for my children. I just had three children just 6 weeks ago today, and I am so grateful that he made it a better world for them.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.J. Res. 83. I support this constitutional amendment not because I believe this is the best proposal or a perfect proposal but because I believe we need a constitutional amendment to assure the continuity of Congress, and the Baird proposal is the only option that we have been allowed to vote on.

I agree with the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird) that this subject deserves better treatment than it has gotten so far, and I will be voting for his motion to recommit with instructions to the Committee on the Judiciary to hold hearings on several proposals.

One of those proposals, House Joint Resolution 92, is mine. I asked the Committee on Rules yesterday to make my proposal in order as a substitute and was turned down. So I am taking this opportunity to explain my substitute to our fellow colleagues today.

My amendment would provide for a temporary acting successor, actually, a choice of five in case any of us become deceased or incapacitated. That would go for senators as well. I want to stress this point because there has been some misunderstanding. What we are talking about is the proposal on the floor today or my own proposal. The debate is not whether or not a seat should be filled by an elected representative. We keep hearing that. No. Elected representatives are certainly the best option to go whenever you have that opportunity.

The choice that we are talking about today is whether the death or incapacitation of a representative or a senator should result in a State or district going unrepresented for months or whether representation should be continued during this period by someone who has been appointed or been selected by us, by those of us who were elected, and that selection is made known to the voters prior to the selection so that the voters will approve not only the representative or senator but the choice of an alternative in case that senator or representative becomes incapacitated or killed.

We are not talking about not having an elected official or elected officials here. That is a bogus argument. I am sorry. We are talking about the 45 days in which, before there would be a special election, whether or not that our country will remain vulnerable because we do not have people representing the people of the United States or, in my proposal, whether or not during those 45 days the American people will have a chance to vote for an alternative when they vote for us to get us elected in the first place.

This makes all the sense in the world. We elect a Vice President of the United States that way right now. Is that to say if the President is incapacitated or dies that we have someone who is unelected when the Vice President steps up? No. He is elected even though his name is not on the ballot.

There is no reason why we should not have this in the legislative part of the government as well as the executive. This goes to the heart of whether or not we are going to be prepared for an emergency.

Let me note that on September 11, when we were in our desperate situation, I remember when we met on the steps, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird) and I, I grabbed him and said, look, we have got to sing ``God Bless America'' right now because the American people need this. We are in a crisis, and they need this.

Today, the American people need a constitutional amendment to come to grips with this challenge that terrorism threatens to bring upon us. We need to make sure we are ready in case of an emergency. The Republican proposal is to leave us totally at risk for 45 days. That is ridiculous. Let us amend the Constitution and take care of this problem, and the people's right to vote will be taken care of as well.

Mr. Speaker, today we will vote on H.R. 3722, and we have heard a lot of bogus arguments that are based on just total misrepresentations of this bill. I would hope the people go to the basics of this.

We cannot be the HMO of the world and expect to take care of our own people. And if Congress does not act, if H.R. 3722 is not passed, illegal immigrants will have priority in America's emergency rooms because the Federal Government will be picking up the tab for illegals, but not for U.S. citizens. That is a travesty.

Furthermore, we all know we have limited dollars here to take care of our seniors and our children. Those limited dollars should not be squandered on illegal immigrants.

People have come here illegally and thumbed their noses at our law. Why are we spending billions of dollars to take care of their health care while we cannot provide any medicine to our seniors? This is a travesty.

H.R. 3722 will help correct the situation, at least get us back to going in the right direction rather than allocating more and more resources to the care of illegal immigrants. Vote for H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, today the American people should pay close attention to the debate when the House takes up H.R. 3722. If one is concerned about the flood of illegal immigrants pouring into our country, this is the debate to watch. And H.R. 3722 is the vote on which to judge your Member of Congress.

There has obviously been a conscious decision made by certain powerful people that massive immigration into the United States, legal or illegal, is good for America or at least good for certain friendly interest groups. This vote on H.R. 3722 is clear-cut. The American people can determine who is on their side and who will channel our scarce health care dollars to illegal immigrants, thus encouraging even more illegal immigration into our country.

H.R. 3722, which will come for debate here later today and will be voted on tomorrow, is designed to undo the harm done by an amendment that was slipped into the Medicare bill that was passed just a few months ago. That surprise and somewhat covert amendment established a $1 billion fund to reimburse American hospitals for the emergency care they provide illegal immigrants.

The perverse, unintended consequences of this are easy to predict. Americans and legal residents who lack health insurance will be sent to the back of the line when seeking help for a medical emergency because the hospitals will naturally give primary service to those illegal immigrants whose tab is being picked up by the Federal taxpayers. This is a travesty.

Anyone voting against H.R. 3722 is voting to put our kids, voting to put our seniors, at the end of a long waiting line moving the illegal immigrant to the front of the line. At this time when we cannot afford the money to pay for prescription drugs for our seniors, we are going to be spending $1 billion to treat people who have come here illegally.

Those against H.R. 3722 are voting to spend our limited health care money to make America the HMO of the world. And then they act surprised when even more tens of millions of illegals flood into our country.

Watch the vote on H.R. 3722. Listen to the arguments. The other side will claim that the legislation causes hospitals more paperwork. That is a bogus argument. However, the public will decide when they are listening to the debate whether they are hearing legitimate arguments or whether it is simply noise being generated to confuse people so they will not know who is ripping off their health care dollars and giving it to strangers.

The flood of illegal immigration has already had horrible impacts on our society, on working Americans and middle-class Americans in particular. Wages are being kept down. Our educational and criminal justice systems are deteriorating. And, yes, our health care system is failing.

A government's first responsibility is protecting our citizens and, yes, our legal residents, not to provide benefits and services to anyone in the rest of the world who can get here. Our responsibility is to the people of the United States and the legal residents here of the United States. Our responsibility is not to the rest of the world and to provide any benefits that we can't provide to our American people, to provide them to anyone in the world who can get here. That will break our bank. If we are going to try to do everything for everybody, we are not going to be able to do anything for anybody, even our own people.

H.R. 3722 is the litmus test. There is always a good sounding excuse for voting against any bill that tries to come up and tries to come to grips with the out-of-control flood of illegals coming into our country. But the issue is clear in H.R. 3722: Are America's limited health care dollars going to treat illegal immigrants rather than being used to treat our own people?

Members of Congress need to hear from their constituents. H.R. 3722 is a first good step in stemming the tide of illegal immigrants into our country. It will be debated here in just a few hours. America should pay attention.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Today, Congress has the opportunity to reassure the American people that there are elected representatives on their sides. No vote could be more indicative as to the priorities of a Member of Congress.

Is America to have a policy of unrestricted health care for illegal immigrants at the expense of American citizens and legal residents? That is the issue we are discussing today. Voting for H.R. 3722 means that my colleagues are not in favor of spending our limited health care dollars in an unrestricted way to give illegal aliens all the health care that they need in terms of today's standards.

Those Members of Congress voting against H.R. 3722 are draining limited health care dollars that should be going to our own citizens and legal residents.

H.R. 3722 would put some common-sense controls over the $1 billion fund that was created by a rider that was added onto the Medicare bill that passed just a few months ago.

What does H.R. 3722 do? One thing it does not do is add a burden of paperwork to the hospital emergency rooms, and that is a bogus argument. I would warn my fellow constituents that that lie has been spread around this body in order to get people to vote in the wrong way. It is a bogus argument.

To be reimbursed, the hospitals will be asking questions. To get part of that $1 billion fund they will be asking questions anyway. This legislation does not add considerably to any major degree to those questions. It simply adds a following question: Who was the immigrant's last employer or his current employer? Plus, the hospital must then take a photo or a fingerprint, which may be required to get that fund money in the first place. This information would then be available to the Department of Homeland Security and the INS.

This legislation does not require any reporting by the hospitals or the doctors or anyone else to the Department of Homeland Security. That, too, is a bogus argument that is going around, only we will hear it in the debate, I am sure. The hospitals do no investigating, no reporting; they simply have the information that is given to them when the patient is put into the system and that is made available to government agencies. It is the government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and INS, that do the investigating, that do the rest of the work. Do not fall for bogus arguments.

Our hospitals today feel compelled to provide extensive and even long-term treatment to illegal aliens. That is what our bill, H.R. 3722, does second. It makes sure that our hospitals are relieved of this enormous burden of trying to provide unlimited health care to any illegal that comes into an emergency room.

We have been giving heart bypasses, even transplants. A young girl from Mexico had $5 million worth of expenditures in heart transplants just a few months ago, and then when the transplant did not work, her family, who were here illegally and actually had emigrated here with a $5,000 fee to a coyote, then sued the hospital because the transplant did not work. Well, this cost us billions of dollars a year.

If someone has a genetic disease or something like that, our emergency rooms should not be treating this in the first place; and the fact is, this bill will alleviate that burden by saying that only if a person's life is imminently threatened by that malady do the hospitals have to focus on that and treat someone whose life is immediately being threatened rather than provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of long-term cancer care, genetic problems, et cetera.

This alone will save billions of dollars that should be going to the American people. The doctor will only determine how much treatment is necessary to get this person to a transportation source that will get them back to their home country so their home country can pay for the health care costs, rather than our senior citizens and our young people being deprived of the resources for their health care.

Number three. If it is a life-threatening emergency, the illegal alien will be treated. There is no doubt about that. This bill does not change that. But if he has no insurance, the alien's employer or former employer will be given the bill. Businessmen will be given the bill if they hire illegal immigrants who end up draining away our health care dollars. This makes all the sense in the world.

Now, the businessmen are coming out against this, saying how can we judge? In 2005, there is a system already being worked on and being established that with one phone call they will be able to determine if they are hiring an illegal immigrant. If a businessman has not made that phone call and has hired someone without checking it out, then he will pay for the health care costs rather than having the taxpayer pay for it.

We will hear a lot of people trying to tell us there are a lot of other things in this bill that are not. But it comes down to this: Whose side are we on? Do we care about our own senior citizens more than we care about strangers from overseas? Do we care more about our own people than we care about strangers from overseas?

If we keep trying to provide everything for everybody, our system is going to break down, and it is doing so right now in California. I would urge my colleagues to support 3722 and prove to their constituents just whose side they are on. We could have corrected this a long time ago, but we hear people all the time, and we will hear it today, with every excuse for not doing something. But the fact is some people in our country are benefiting from illegal immigration. They are very powerful. But it is hurting American citizens, and this bill tries to put a stop to that, or at least turn that situation around today with H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on each side?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds and just note that this fund of a billion dollars that was created that we now have to put some controls on, and that is what 3722 is trying to do, creates a perverse incentive. If we let this go through as it stands, what is going to happen is this: people who come to the emergency rooms who are American citizens or legal residents who have no insurance will be put behind and at the end of the line and the illegal immigrants will be put to the front of the line because the Federal Government is picking up the tab.

This is a perverse priority. We should be taking care of our own citizens before we take care of illegal aliens.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

What is shameful is how shameful some of my colleagues are getting the facts totally wrong and do not know what they are talking about. Someone must have briefed them with the wrong information.

This bill does not require our hospitals to gather any significant more information. The information that is being gathered that my colleague is complaining about, what we just heard, the great condemnation of all the questions that must be asked and all the information that must be gathered from this U.S. citizen, who might be an illegal, is already required of the hospital in order to get the funding, the billion dollars, that was set aside for them. It is not required by my bill. It is required in order to get reimbursement.

My bill simply says that if they are going to ask those questions, and they are going to expect to get reimbursed, they also have to ask who the employer is and get a fingerprint or a picture, which they are probably going to have to get in order to be reimbursed in the first place. So the gentleman's complaints are not against 3722. His complaints are that the Federal Government is now going to have an unlimited reimbursement for illegal immigrants and they are going to ask some questions for it. Do not blame 3722.

And let me note this also: we have had an example given to us of an American citizen who is there, and he is being threatened because he has to answer whether or not he is an illegal immigrant or not. The greatest threat to the treatment of American citizens and legal residents is that we are going to spend all of our available health care dollars taking care of illegals who should not be getting that money. The greatest threat to our senior citizens, to our young people is that we have a limited amount of health care dollars and my colleagues want to spend it on people who have come here illegally.

My colleague pointed out this will bring tens of millions of more people here and even a greater drain until the system breaks down.

The bottom line is the people who are in favor of spending our limited dollars on American citizens and a very doable system here that is no more complicated than what the hospitals are

going to have to go through to get reimbursement in the first place should be voting in favor of H.R. 3722. If they want to spend their money on people who came here illegally, rather than our own citizens, waste those dollars, make sure more illegals get in, go ahead and vote against H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, again we hear this bogus argument that this bill is going to create more paperwork. The paperwork and the questions that we are talking about are required by hospitals who are going to be trying to get reimbursement through this billion dollar fund, which was snuck into the Medicare package with a back room deal, I might add. It is not required by my legislation; it is required to get reimbursement. If a hospital does not want to be reimbursed, they do not have to ask any questions, they can do whatever they want.

Let me note, all contagious diseases have been exempted by this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Let me note that if we really want to have the spread of disease in this country, let us set ourselves up as the HMO for the whole world. Let us make sure that everybody in the world knows that if they can get their kids to the United States, we will take care of them, and see how many diseases we are going to get.

That is what is happening in California right now. Diseases are beginning to materialize because people have brought their children and brought their seniors as well to come to the United States to be treated. We have got to end that syndrome because the money is coming directly from the health care dollars that should go to our own citizens, and it is luring more people with disease into our country.

This is a catastrophe. The best way to prevent it is to vote yes on

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

We keep hearing the bogus arguments. This requires the doctors to ask so many questions; we know now that is not true. Only the people who are trying to get reimbursed from that billion-dollar fund are going to ask the questions. This bill has minimal added questions. Two. Who is your employer and then taking a picture or getting a fingerprint which might be required in order to get reimbursed in the first place.

Do my colleagues on the other side of the aisle really believe in unlimited treatment for illegal immigrants without asking any questions? Is that what we are going to do? Who benefits from that? Certainly the illegal immigrant does and the tens of millions of other illegal immigrants who come into our country seeking health care, yes, they are going to benefit.

Who else benefits? The employer who does not want to offer health care to his employees. That is who benefits. That is who is being subsidized here. Behind the scenes when you get to the Chamber of Commerce and these other people opposing this, that is what their motive is. They do not want to offer health care to their employees. This gives the government the subsidy to subsidize them hiring people at below minimum wage level and, in fact, off the books at times. If you want to combat illegal immigration, this is the way to start; and it does not add any new paperwork or any new questions for the doctors.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. This bill does not require the first order of business to ask questions. This bill says if you want to be reimbursed from that billion dollar fund, yes, you are going to have to ask some questions, anyway, and adds one other question: Who is your employer? It does not require the doctors to turn anybody into the INS, although we have heard that over and over again in this debate. It does not require that. It requires their files to be available to the INS and to the Department of Homeland Security. It is those agencies that then follow through. The doctors do not have to report anything. It just has to be available on a computer.

Communicable diseases, we keep talking about that, that also is wrong. The bill exempts communicable diseases. Let us talk about the real issue, illegal immigration. How many services are we going to give people until we get tens of millions of more immigrating into our country?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson).

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

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my colleagues to seriously consider this vote, and I would remind them that there are people all over the United States, especially their constituents, who are looking at this vote as a determinant as to whether or not we believe that illegal immigration is something that should remain uncontrolled and should continue in the years ahead, or whether we should start doing something about it.

There is a seething among the American people, among the working class and middle-class people. They know that illegal immigration has had a horrible impact on their lives. It has brought down wages. We actually had a policy that permitted unlimited illegal immigration into our country, and because of that, working class people do not make as much money as they did before.

Now we have a situation where illegal immigrants who go for emergency treatment, we are being told that we have to give them unrestricted and unlimited treatment, health treatment, and it is going to be paid for by the Federal Government. But that is not true of U.S. citizens. What about those middle-class, working-class people? They are out of work; they do not have insurance.

In this situation today, we have created the perverse priority that our government is reimbursing hospitals and helping illegals, but we will not do it for our own citizens.

We have a horrible problem in this country with illegal immigration. It is hurting many people's lives. Yes, rich corporations in the Chamber of Commerce, they get to hire people who are not even paying taxes half the time. They do not have to provide health insurance anymore because there are all these illegals willing to work anyway. That is very damaging to the American people.

Also we are spending billions of dollars here already on cancer treatments, organ transplants and genetic problems. We are spending about $10 billion on this every year.

This legislation says the only free treatment that somebody gets at an emergency center, illegal or not illegal, is if their life is under a threatening situation. I think even that is very generous of us in the United States. Interestingly enough, if someone goes through the process of being a legal immigrant, they do not get their health care covered, they do not get it reimbursed by the Federal Government.

Mr. Speaker, unless H.R. 3722 passes, we have set up the priority of helping illegal immigrants. Do not think that will not attract tens of millions more illegal immigrants to this country who have diseases that need to be treated. That makes sense. Think about it. This is common sense.

The American people are waiting to see whether or not we are going to use our scarce health dollars to take care of our senior citizens, to take care of our own people, to take care of our own little kids, or whether we are going to attract tens of millions of new people here and give that money away to strangers.

This is not mean-spirited. This is down-in-your-heart. We love everyone in this country. We have a diverse country, every race and religion. It is that love for each other that keeps us together. We have to care more about our own people, and that is not mean spirited, than we do about people that come here illegally.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my friends and colleagues to support H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, let me first identify myself with the remarks of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) whose very eloquent and heartfelt remarks certainly touched our hearts, and her actions and her activity and all of the diligence that she has put into this, and the hard work and commitment she has put into this project is to be commended. There are those of us that stand in awe of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and all the work she has done for this generation.

I take it as a personal favor to my family that the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) has been doing this because my father, of course, is part of that generation, and everything she said about those brave men and women applies to my father, who served in the Marine Corps during the Second World War and who left a poverty-stricken-type of family background in North Dakota to walk off, save the world, save the world from the dread and the tyranny of Japanese militarism and Naziism. Certainly this heroism is something that we owe such a great deal to.

So, Mr. Speaker, tonight first let me tip my hat to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and those who put such a lot of work into this project.

Illegal Alien Invasion

Mr. Speaker, let me just note that the person who alerted me to the subject I will talk about tonight was a World War II veteran. His name was Frank Casado, a very proud Mexican American, who owned and built Lucy's Restaurant in Los Angeles. Frank later became very politically active. He was a Democrat, I might add, but he was a very close friend, and I would go to his restaurant as a young reporter and then as I worked in Ronald Reagan's staff in the White House; and Frank would always pull me aside and say, ``Dana, you have got to do something about the illegal alien invasion of our country. You have got to do something about it.'' If there ever was an American of Mexican descent it was Frank Casado.

Frank joined the Navy in World War II, and he always prided himself that he had been on the boxing team and been one of the contenders of the championship of the fleet, and he was a very, very proud man. He was proud of his Mexican heritage as well, but he knew that the flood of illegal immigrants into our country was bound to bring us down, and if we can do anything to keep faith with those veterans who have sacrificed so much for our country over the years, it is that we should have the courage to face the issue of illegal immigration and to deal with it, to understand that those people who fought and died in World War II and have sacrificed over the years for our country to create this wonderful country of ours, they would be appalled to know that we are afraid to discuss the issue of illegal immigration, afraid to discuss the issue that perhaps is the greatest threat to America's well-being today, and that is an onslaught, an uncontrolled invasion of, yes, good people but people who will have a dramatic impact, negative impact on the American way of life. They did not give their lives in order to make sure that this country could be taken over by anyone who would thwart our laws and basically massively come into our country illegally.

We need to have the courage to face the issue. Frank Casado, as I said, first alerted me to how this major influx of illegal immigration was changing the nature of California as he knew it and as he grew up, because he was a native Californian. He was a man who grew up in Los Angeles and described for me how this massive influx of illegal immigrants was bringing down the people of his community. People who should have been on the upward path instead were being brought down by a flood, an uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration.

Let us keep faith with those people who defended this country and won our freedom and wanted us to live in a high standard of living and wanted our people to have a good country. Let us keep faith with them.

And certainly let us not do one thing, let us not permit the benefits that we give to illegal aliens to have a negative impact on these very same senior citizens, these very same soldiers, whether defeated Hitler or Tojo.

In fact, today we have a very limited amount of health care dollars. At a time when our economy is moving forward, but not as strong as it was, let us say 10 years ago, we need to make sure that every dollar counts. Because if a dollar is not spent most wisely, the people most affected will be our senior citizens and also will be our children. And so, today, I plead a case for these seniors and these children. Let us not dissipate the funds that are available to take care of our seniors and our children in order to provide services for illegal immigrants who have come here thumbing their nose at our law and blatantly and arrogantly breaking the law to come here.

And, yes, these are generally honest, good people, coming here to improve their lives, but we cannot afford to take care of all the good people of the world if it means, and it will mean this, that we will have to cut back on what we give to our own citizens.

I rise tonight to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken tomorrow on the floor of this Congress, a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or it will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from what I am calling, what I believe to be the greatest threat to our national security and well-being.

Now, again, what am I talking about when I say that? Tomorrow morning, there will be a vote on legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to protect us from a major decline in our quality of life and a decline in quality, I might add, of the health care we have for our seniors and our children due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and into our emergency rooms.

If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy everything which those World War II veterans were fighting for: a decent quality of life for our people, a government that is reflective of our values, and a country in which we can take care of those who are in need because they are people of our communities and of our States and of our country who have also served our country, whether they be Mexican Americans, like Frank Casado, or black Americans, or Caucasian Americans, or Asian Americans.

We have a country of rich diversity, but all of us need to stick together and care about each other more than we need to care about people who would come into our country illegally and dissipate the funds that are needed for these other Americans and even our own families to get the education and health care that they need.

It is unforgivable that our government has refused to act when the evidence is so clear. Millions of people are being permitted to get into our country and then to stay in our country illegally. And this is having an horrendous impact on our standard of living, on safety in our country, and on the quality of life of average Americans.

For tens of millions of Americans and local and legal residents, real wages have stagnated over the last 15 years. We have seen a major increase in our standard of living and in the statistics that indicate how much wealth our country is worth; yet we have a huge number of people, citizens and legal residents, who live here and have not seen their standard of living increase. In fact, they see all the time little indications that their quality of life is going down, whether it is the fact they cannot afford to buy tires for the family car, or their children cannot afford to buy a home, so they have to stay at home now because they cannot afford to get a house of their own, or the fact that their kids are not expecting really to have a good job. They see these indications that something is happening to our country, where the middle class and working class people are not living as well as they did before and, in fact, have been cut out of this huge increase in the wealth that has taken place in our society of these last 2 decades.

Well, the answer is very clear. The factor that is intervening is a massive flow of illegal immigration that is undercutting the ability of our own people to have good-paying jobs because we are holding wages down with an influx of illegal immigrants. And we are also taxing all of the services provided to our people, the people who have worked all their life to pay taxes; and sometimes, what is happening is, illegals will come into our country and they will not be paying taxes. They will work at jobs where taxes are not paid, and they will bring their families in to consume those benefits in education, health care, and otherwise that are meant for our own people.

Our education and the education of our children has been undermined. Real wages have stagnated. Our health care resources that are necessary to take care of the health of our people have been depleted and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods, and thus, yes, the safety of our families, has been compromised. This is not a back-burner issue. Illegal immigration and how we solve it, or if we ignore it, will determine what America is going to be like tomorrow.

This deals with a crisis of today. It seems to me that we have political people here whose only real goal is to prevent a crisis of the moment. Let us not have a crisis now; let us put that off. Well, I say, no, we need to deal with the threats to our country, just the way the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) was speaking about the threats to the world and to our country that loomed there 50 years and 60 years ago when Hitler and Tojo threatened the world. That generation, the Greatest Generation, did not turn its back and simply say let us try to find a compromise and it will go away. They understood that unless something was done, unless the issue was looked at with courage and with conviction that the United States would cease to be the country that they had inherited from their families and their parents.

So, today, this attitude of elected officials that we should do anything to get away from confronting this issue, let us not have a crisis today, let us not have a confrontation on it today, this works totally contrary to the tradition that we have had that has kept our country free and prosperous. Elected officials have basically remained silent about illegal immigration. Every poll that I have seen, and I include the polls of Americans of Mexican descent, indicates that the vast majority of our people are angry and upset with the fact that illegal immigration is permitted to go uncontrolled and that illegal immigrants are pouring into our neighborhoods and destroying our way of life and the quality of life and the possibility for better jobs for a whole segment of our population. The American people are angry that their elected officials refuse to deal with this issue.

The American people need to ask themselves: Why is it, why is it that elected officials refuse to even think about confronting illegal immigration? Well, a large number of American people, as we know, are deeply troubled and enormously concerned about the onslaught of this massive flow of illegal immigration in the United States. So why are our officials not acting?

First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. Now, when I say intimidated, what does that mean? Today, in the debate on my bill, 3722, which we will talk about later, one of the Members came forward and said this represents mean-spiritedness. And, of course, that means racism. That is a little catch phrase for racism. And also I was pulled aside by several people after the debate, oh, you should not bring this up, because they think this is a racist attack.

Racism. The elected officials of the people of the United States are afraid to be called racist. They are afraid to be called mean spirited. Well, I can be intimidated in a number of ways, but I can tell you it means a gun or a knife. They can call me all the names they want, but I am confident in my own heart that I am dealing with this issue and other issues based on a love for humanity; and more than that, and I will admit this, a love for the people of the United States of America, in gratitude for the contributions and the sacrifices that people like those people in the Greatest Generation, people like my father and the others the gentlewoman from Ohio was talking about. The sacrifices they made give me strength and give me the willingness to know that I am trying to do things that are positive.

And I will not be intimidated because people are willing to call me, and try to use the tactic of calling me and others, a racist. I will tell you this, the label of racist and hatemonger has caused fear throughout Republican ranks. The liberal left knows this, and they constantly try to play that card. It is time for the American people to totally reject this type of racism in and of itself, the people who bring up racism in order to defend policies that should be discussed on the merit.

Unfortunately, as I say, when someone says you are a hatemonger, most Republicans just wither away because they are afraid to be called hatemongers. They basically know, as I do, that most illegal immigrants, if not all illegal immigrants, are wonderful people. Ninety-five percent, let us say, or ninety-nine percent of illegal immigrants who come to this country are wonderful people. But this is not a debate about whether illegal immigrants are themselves bad people. We can care about them. They are probably good people. And we can care about the rest of the world. But that does not mean that we have infinite resources here in the United States so that we can provide benefits and goods and services and a place to stay for anybody in the world who can make it to the United States.

If we try to do that, if we are cowed from discussing the issue because we are afraid to be called racist because we know we have to draw a line somewhere or it is bound to bring our people down, if we keep doing that, what is going to happen is that our citizens are going to experience a major decrease in their standard of living. A threshold will be reached and the American taxpayer will be spending more and more, and yet our citizens will actually be living lives that are not as high in quality and filled with opportunity as when the tax rates were even lower.

It is not hateful nor is it being racist to use scarce resources, like the amount of tax money we have, the amount of health care dollars we have, the amount of education dollars we have; it is not a racist thing to say we are going to provide for our own people first, realizing that our own people come from every race and every religion and every ethnic group. That is what makes us so proud to be Americans. But if we do not think of our own citizens first, then we have abandoned the one thing that ties our Nation together, and it is a feeling of love and solidarity with all other Americans.

Let me say that I believe even if we take this down to the family level, and we say some family that works hard, saves their money, and spends their money that they have saved on their own family, on their children and on perhaps their father and mother, are these people actually filled with hate, are they hatemongers, do they deserve to be called that simply because they refuse to spend money on the needy people down the street rather than on their children's education or health care? Well, I believe that it is not hateful. It is not negative to try to take care of your family first. And no one should apologize that that is the policy of our government or that that should be the policy of our government, which is what we are advocating today.

That does not mean you do not care about your neighbors or that you do not care about the neighbors down the street. But first and foremost caring for your family is in and of itself an act of charity and love. And let us never forget that charity begins at home. And for us to be giving away the limited dollars available for health care in this country to people who have come here illegally, and taking the money away from that pool of money that should be going to our own citizens, our own children, our own senior citizens, to that great generation that the gentlewoman from Ohio talked about it, is sinful. It is sinful for us to take it and give it to strangers, many of whom have never contributed anything to the country.

Now, yes, some illegal immigrants have contributed, but let me note that many illegal immigrants who come here do not work at jobs where they take the taxes out of their paychecks. Then they bring their families, and so their families are basically being taken care of by the taxes that come out of our pockets, that we gladly gave to take care of our own families and our own fellow citizens, but these other folks who have come here illegally often do not pay any taxes at all.

To make matters worse, the employer that employs them and gives them a job and then pays them under the table more often than not does not give them any health care benefits. Thus, they do not pay taxes, are taking away the benefits, the health care benefits, that should be going to our own people who are paying taxes.

I say this not because I dislike people, but because I do like people from other countries. Our greatest asset is that we are a country that is made up of people of every race and every religion. But I say this, every person who is an American and who is here and conducting him or herself in a legal way and trying to live their life as best they can, these people are part of our American family, and we need to care more about them than we do to take care of someone, even though he might be a good person, or the family that comes from China or Latin America, that we need to take care of our own people first. It has nothing to do with race.

The people that are involved in the United States of America, they are good Americans who come from every race and every religion, but we cannot take care of every wonderful person in the world. If we try to, we will hurt our fellow Americans. We cannot try to do everything for everybody, especially when we mean everybody in the world, and expect that we will be able to do anything for anybody, and that includes anybody in the United States, because our system will break down.

As Members hear this debate about illegal immigration, whenever we try to draw a line, the other side chastises us for it as if we are being mean-spirited. Where do they draw the line? The Members opposed to H.R. 3722 seem to believe we can give unrestricted and unlimited health care benefits to people who have come here illegally and it will not impact the American way of life or quality of life of our own American people. That seems the height of naivete.

But there are other Members who are not naive at all about this issue. While we are proud of Americans, of every race and religion, these other people have another motive on wanting to have illegal immigrants coming into our country, and it is not just to be benevolent.

But let me get to this issue and that is the idea, and we hear this because it is not just racism that is charged, but those of us who want to do something about illegal immigration, we are being charged with the idea that we are anti-immigrant. I believe around 15 percent of the population are immigrants. They are a sizable force in our communities, and they are doing great things for America, great things.

In fact, one of the things we can be most proud of in the United States is that we permit 1 million immigrants to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees from many of the horrible spots around the world where people live in total desperation. With a population of 280 million people, I believe we can absorb 1 million immigrants a year along with 400,000 refugees. That is our contribution to the world.

That figure represents more legal immigration into our country than is permitted in all the other countries of the world combined. All of the other countries of the world combined do not permit a million immigrants into their country. But just in the United States, we permit a million people to come here, along with 400,000 refugees.

It has worked well for us because people who come here legally must be healthy, they cannot be bringing diseases into the country, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting or they are not permitted to come in. That is a wonderful thing. I think legal immigration is something we can all be proud of because, of course, Americans are immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants, and proud of it.

In fact, every American immigrated here, and that includes Indian Americans who at one point emigrated from the Siberian tundra when there was some sort of ice bridge between Asia and the New World, so we are all immigrants here. But we have come here to prove that we can show people how to

do things and have a better way of life. We did not come here, however, to take responsibility for the health care and the benefits for everyone in the world.

We have people now who are coming and swarming into the United States above and beyond that million people. There are probably 2 or 3 million illegal immigrants that are coming here every year, but that is just a guesstimate. They are coming here without control, so we have no idea whether they are criminals, whether they are bringing diseases to our country, and perhaps they might be terrorists. Perhaps they want to do us great harm because they identify with Islam or some other faith and hate the United States. Maybe they are coming in as illegal immigrants. We do not know. The fact is by bypassing the legal system, they have thumbed their nose at our law and they are putting us in jeopardy because we do not know.

I want to draw my colleagues' attention to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. Every day tens of thousands more illegals arrive in our country. If they are sick or criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life or a major crisis in our country in which our people will suffer greatly.

The American people see what is happening. They know, they can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people are seething with anger, and every poll suggests 60 to 80 percent of the American people are outraged that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from them by an uncontrolled flow of illegal immigrants from other countries. Where is our courage? Where is our tenacity?

Yes, we stood up to the Japanese empire during World War II and the Nazis and the Communists after that, but now we are going to give our country away to other people who come here illegally thwarting our laws, thumbing their nose at our way of life in order to come here and consume the resources that have been put away by our mothers and fathers, and squander all of the institutions that we have invested in for our own children?

I think the World War II generation, and every time I have spoken to them, they are ashamed that we are not doing anything about illegal immigration, and they give the most support of any segment of our society in the demand to do something about illegal immigration.

Every time it comes to a vote, we can see that the American people do not like and are upset about illegal immigration, and they are upset that their elected officials are not doing anything. Elected officials are blowing smoke in the faces of their constituents. They are refusing to be honest about this issue, and we need to have an honest discussion between the elected officials of this country and the American people about illegal immigration.

There was a direct vote by the people about 10 years ago, Proposition 187, in California. Every news media was against it. The establishment of California was totally opposed to Proposition 187. It was going to lose. People were being attacked for being racist. And I know I was attacked as a racist skinhead for supporting Proposition 187. Although you could not tell it from the commentators who were saying what a great disaster it was for the Republican Party, no, Proposition 187 passed in a landslide, a landslide even though all of the major interest groups were against it and all of the major media were trying to bringing it down.

Even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for Proposition 187, it was portrayed immediately thereafter as a loss and something the Republican Party should really worry about. Let me note that 1994 was the biggest year for Republicans to gain seats than in any other election in my memory.

Let me also note, when we examine the issue of illegal immigrants, that Americans of Mexican American descent like my good friend Frank Casado, they are just like other Americans. They believe that illegal immigration is an evil that is doing great harm to our country, and about 50 percent of the Mexican Americans are with us when we want to make a stand because their children and their homes and their families are the ones suffering the most by the negative impact that goes on, economic impact and elsewhere, when our country ends up flooded by illegals.

So the Mexican American community, however, was told afterwards you have to be against 187. That was drummed into their heads. Even today, examine the polls. The majority of people who are Americans of Mexican descent, people who are citizens or who over the years came here legally, those people are with us. A majority of those people are with us.

Let me note that the gentleman from southern California (Mr. Gallegly) has told me over and over again how there are several cities in his congressional district where a majority of their citizens are Americans of Mexican descent, and he is very proud to tell me in those cities Proposition 187 got a very strong showing. It actually won a majority vote in several of those cities. Why is it then that we have conservatives and Republicans who are afraid to lead the charge on this issue and to discuss it openly and bring it up?

Again, they do not want to be called racist, and they do not want to insult their fellow citizens. They actually care about their fellow citizens of Mexican descent, and they are afraid they may be insulting these folks if they bring up the issue of illegal immigration. That is the guilt trip the news media is putting on these people.

Let me just say that Americans of Mexican descent are with us on this. They do not want their families to suffer from being unable to get higher wages for their children or income earners of their family, or education funds to be totally eaten up or health care funds being dissipated by people who have just come here, whether it is from Mexico or anywhere else. These are great Americans and these are Californians.

We Californians understand that. California is itself a name that suggests a past culture, what we think of as sort of a paradise in California.

It is a Hispanic culture. All of us are proud in California of this Mexican heritage. Before our State was a State, there was a proud Hispanic civilization there. California is based on a mythology of an island where there was always milk and honey, and the fruits were always ripe and ready to be eaten. It was a paradise on Earth. We know that. That came from a mythology that was written out in the Spanish language. We understand that, and we Californians are proud of that. We believe we live in that paradise. Yet we will lose paradise if we do not take those steps that are necessary to maintain the quality of life, not just for the upper middle class and the upper class but for all Californians. Illegal immigration is the greatest threat in California to the quality of life of every one of our citizens and legal residents.

Let me note, they know that we are not hatemongers because we are protecting them. We need to join an alliance of all Americans to solve this problem and to speak frankly about it and not worry about being called names. We Americans must stick together. It is our loyalty that creates one Nation, our loyalty to each other; and if we are going to permit half of our population to suffer because we are giving away the benefits that were paid for by tax dollars to people who have come here illegally at the expense of that other half of our Americans who live with us, then we are committing a very sinful act. We are not caring about our fellow Americans and we are showing our disrespect for them by not trying to ensure that someone from the outside, a stranger, does not come in and take away the health dollars and education dollars they need.

Turning one group of honest citizens against another group of honest citizens in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic. We will hear it over and over again. But I hope that the American people are beginning to fine-tune their hearing and their listening of these arguments so that when people start saying, this is mean- spirited, this is racist, that they will know that that

person is insulting them and trying to get them not to look at the issue of the day. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention when they are called names.

The real hatemongers and the racists are the ones who would turn Americans against Americans. They are the ones who do not care about us as a people. We care about each other, and let us demonstrate that. I would suggest today that America is so far down the road towards a disaster that we have got to come to grips with illegal immigration, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country. Already many of our people are suffering, and sometimes they do not even understand why.

What else besides what I just described, this fear of being called a racist, prevents us from dealing with the illegal immigration issue? There is another factor involved. This is also a powerful factor, but it is not quite as visible as the one I just described. Everyone can see that people on the liberal left are calling other people names. They are calling them racist, et cetera. We can see this effort on the left side of the political spectrum to try to unleash and keep the flow of illegal immigrants coming to our country because they want to use them as pawns, political pawns.

But there is another very powerful factor involved and that is there are some enormously powerful and enormously wealthy forces in our society which are benefiting from the massive flow of illegals into our country. Who am I referring to? I am referring to Big Business. I am referring to corporations and Big Business and all those people who would make a profit by keeping wages down. Keeping wages down. That is what is going on. There are some powerful interests in America suppressing wages so that people who are in the middle class and lower middle class, working people, are finding themselves in a trap rather than finding their own standard of living increasing.

As I say, there is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who wants to exploit illegal immigration for their own political purposes. They want to use them as pawns. Then we have Big Business in an unholy alliance with the liberal left of the Democratic Party. These people are trying to exploit helpless people who come to our shores, of course in order to make a bigger profit, so they will not have to give health care benefits, so they do not have to pay as much; and in fact, the wages of all their other employees are brought down because other employees know they can always hire some illegal immigrants from China or from Mexico or elsewhere to do these jobs if we will not do them for this minimal salary that they are offering.

These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that if illegal immigration goes unchecked, everything else being equal, our population in our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades from now. 420 million people. Is that in the interest of the people of the United States? Is that the type of increase in the number of people that we feel comfortable with? Along with that, of course, with this huge increase in our population comes a huge increase in the demand on scarce resources, especially those scarce resources: places to live, good housing, good jobs, good health care, good education. If we let illegal immigration continue, we will have in the blink of an eye a half a billion people living in the United States. Is that what we want? Is that what the American people deserve?

If we leave illegal immigration unchecked, with millions of new people coming to this country illegally every year, if that continues, as I say, we are going to have teeming masses. We will have people who are trapped in situations that are totally inconsistent with the vision of the American dream that has motivated the American people for over 200 years now, the opportunity to dream of a place where people can uplift themselves with hard work, a place where every person willing to work can live a dignified life. If we continue to allow this to go unchecked, all of that will disappear. The American dream will disappear. It will disappear in a mass of faces, of people who are unhappy because they do not have the opportunity that their grandparents had. We will look into the faces of people who are angry. The level of hostility in our society will increase. The America that we know and love will cease to exist.

Were we meant to have an underclass of working people who have no hope for a better life? We are beginning to develop that now. We can see it. Because wages are being held down. There is no doubt about who benefits from low wages. The people who own companies, people who want servants, et cetera, these are people who benefit from illegal immigration. Let me add, there are a lot of upper middle income people, people let us say in the top 20 percent and upper income people who have benefited by illegal immigration. Those people should understand that their whole way of life would not exist if it was not for the people who went out and fought the wars and work hard every day and are honest citizens and are willing to stand up for the principles of America that we respect each other's private property and we respect their rights to live their lives.

These wealthy people would not have that if it was not for all these other Americans who were willing to sacrifice and they do not need as much. They just need a clean and decent place to live. They need to know that their children are going to be educated. They need to have some hope in their lives. This will be taken from them unless we come to grips with a massive flow of people who are coming into this country from every corner of the world and consuming the seed corn necessary to plant the gardens which will give us the food and the benefits and the good life that the American people have worked so hard for.

My dad and mom came from very poverty stricken homes. I used to go there. My dad joined the Marines, but he was there for 20 years. We used to go back to North Dakota in the summers and sometimes in the winters and work on the farm. They were very poor farms. Those people knew that if they worked hard that America had a promise for them. But what about in the future where that promise does not exist because the education level for the children of working-class people, in California we see it, the education level is going down. It is not going down because of anything they have done. It has been going down because our State is being flooded with illegal immigrants, and their children are pouring into the school system, and they cannot even speak their own languages correctly; and thus the teachers are spending all of their time with problem students from other countries whose parents have never paid the price for the education system in the first place. So the working-class families, their children do not get the education they deserve. It is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. We have got to have the courage to face it.

What are we going to say, that every person in the world will be subsidized in their education and their health care and everything else by the American people? Where do you draw the line? If you disagree with what I just said, where do you draw the line? The other side has no answer for that at all except, you are a racist for bringing it up.

Let me note this: we are being told by those captains of industry who are now condemning any effort to try to get illegal immigration under control, we are told that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans just will not take. That is why we have got to let them here, so they can take these jobs that no one else will take. That is not true. The fact is that that is no justification for allowing this massive influx into our country which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. I suggest that Americans are willing to do just about any job, but they are not willing to do any job at the pay level that is being offered.

Yes, if our country was not flooded with illegal immigrants, employers would have to pay more money for the jobs that they need to have done. That is okay. It is a good thing when you have an increasing standard of living or an increasing GNP that working people get their share and that you have higher incomes and that the people are able to own their own home and have a car and treat their kids out to dinner a couple of times a week. That

is okay. But, instead, we are being told, oh, my, we would have to pay them so much money, it would make it impossible. Let us pay 25 cents more for a hamburger if it means that people who work in those shops giving us those hamburgers and that meat have a decent standard of living and can take care of their families.

A good example of what I am talking about and what has happened to our country when we are flooded with illegals who are now living in substandard housing with their whole families and it has sort of brought down the quality of life of whole areas in Southern California, let me mention this. When I went to graduate school, I worked at night as a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets and there was nothing wrong with that type of work. Every person who works and sustains himself or herself as an honorable job and as a dignified person, we honor them. When you are taking care of your own needs and you are self-sufficient, that is what it is all about and that is fine. It has been a long time since I was a janitor. I have to admit I was not a very good janitor, but I worked hard. If you look back, 30 years ago when I was a janitor, the gross domestic product of this country has dramatically increased in those 30 years. Yet the money that janitors make in real dollars is about the same. That is it. Our country has had a major increase in wealth, but the janitors make about the same money. It is because our country has been flooded by illegal immigrants who are willing to take those jobs. The people who run the building say, we could not afford to actually hire all these janitors if we had to pay them more money, the market value, without the illegal aliens there. All that would mean if they were paying more money to our own people to clean those toilets, there would be a toilet-cleaning machine and there would be a fellow there, a man or a woman, who could clean 10 times as many toilets with this technology and they would pay him $50,000, $60,000, maybe $70,000 a year. That is a good thing. That is fine.

But, instead, we have had a flood of illegal immigrants and instead of one American earning a decent standard of living and taking care of his family, we have got seven or so illegals who are living substandard, have brought their families in, they are all totally dependent on government benefits, and it is bringing down the quality of our neighborhoods, et cetera; and we have a teeming mass with no hope instead of an American, a proud American being able to take care of his own family and having a decent standard of living. That is what illegals have done to our society. It is a very sinister impact, but it has happened very slowly.

I had an L.A. Times reporter come to my house this weekend looking around, sifting through everything to find out if I had hired any illegals. I did not hire illegals to do my lawn work.

My wife, who just had triplets, as people know here, we did not hire a service unless that service agreed to guarantee that there would be no illegal immigrants in that service. So I try my best.

I try not to buy products from China, because I believe that China is a slave trade state. They use slave labor. But sometimes I end up buying Chinese things unknowingly, as much as I try not to, and I guess sometimes I buy a hamburger from an illegal immigrant.

But let me put it this way. This fellow came to me and said, ``Who takes care of your lawn?'' It just happens to be that the lady I rent from, and I rent a very modest house in Huntington Beach, her brother, who is a senior citizen and is retired now, takes care of the lawn. That is what he does on the side as a side job.

He said, ``All over your neighborhood, your neighbors are using illegal immigrants to do their lawns. Is that bad?''

I said, well, it really is. I will tell you why it is bad. When I was a kid, I did the lawn work. I actually earned all of my spending money by cutting people's lawns, and a lot of my friends did, too.

I think it has a horrible impact on our society that the young people do not cut their own lawns now and earn their own spending money, but instead we let these slave-like laborers come in from different countries and do our lawn work for us. It would be better for our own children to earn their spending money than to pay someone else a pittance so they can live in destitution in our country and then live off of government benefits.

No, that is not the way to a better country. And we have had this impact, and it has been coming on and coming on, and we have not even noticed it, that our kids do not have the dignity now of earning their own spending money by cutting people's lawns.

So that is why we can be such a prosperous country right now, and there can be so much growth in the wealth that is available in our society, yet there is a whole group of people in our country who are being left out. The illegal immigrants are being left out, but so are those people whose wages are being impacted by the illegals' presence here, and it brings down those wages of our average working people. Their share is being gobbled up.

At one end of the spectrum you have got wealthy people. You have got wealthy people over here, they are gobbling that wealth that should go to the middle-class because they are hiring all the illegals and they do not have to pay as much. At the other end of the spectrum it is being gobbled up by bureaucracy and big government.

You have liberals and leftists basically advocating more and more government programs, and what they do, with more and more government programs, they have to tax you more. So what we are doing is taxing the lifeblood and the way of life out of our people in the middle-class, and we are, as well, keeping their wages down and destroying their way of life. They are being attacked by both sides of the political spectrum.

I would say that if it was not for the influx of illegal immigrants today, many of our college students would be out probably doing these jobs during the summer that they say we cannot get Americans to do. I think Americans will take these jobs, if they are given the right kind of pay incentives.

What we have now is a focus tonight on something that I wanted to bring up specifically about the bill that was debated today. My piece of legislation, H.R. 3722, was brought to the floor for a vote.

This piece of legislation is designed to come to grips with a new issue confronting us on illegal immigration, because something happened a few months ago that very few people saw. What I am talking about is the fact that in the Medicare bill, a bill that passed this House, I guess it was 4 or 5 months ago now, when it passed through the House there was not this provision. But when it came back from the Senate, a provision sort of secretly had been inserted by Senator Kyl from Arizona. It was the creation of a $1 billion fund, a $1 billion fund that will be used to pay for the health care of illegal immigrants, a $1 billion for the emergency health care of illegal immigrants. It is the first time we actually have a budget item to legally pay for the services of an illegal immigrant.

What does that do? That means that $1 billion in this fund will go to emergency rooms who take care of illegal immigrants.

Well, what does that mean? That means that in the future, when this is being used, American citizens who do not have health care benefits, and a lot of them do not have health care benefits because the employers will hire illegals if someone demands a health care benefit, an insurance policy, health care insurance, so if they do not have health insurance and then they have to go to the doctor, to the emergency room, what happens? Unless we do something about it, we have set up a perverse priority.

What is going to happen is that the American citizens who do not have health insurance and the legal residents who do not have health insurance are going to be told to go to the back of the line, because we can get the money from the Federal Government to pay for the health care, the emergency health care, of illegals. We quite literally are taking care of foreigners who have come here illegally at the expense of the American people.

My legislation, H.R. 3722, will ensure that the money that we have, the health care that we have, will not be dissipated dramatically by illegals, because what it does is it states very clearly for the hospitals of America, if an illegal immigrant comes to your

emergency room, you do not have to give them extensive treatment for diseases that are not at that moment life-threatening.

Thus, they will take care of an illegal whose life is being threatened, but they will not have to take care and spend $300,000 or $400,000 for cancer treatments, and this happens, for all types of transplants of organs, for hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars worth of health care that illegals are getting right now.

My bill says they do not have to do that. If they want to, they can, but they do not have to do it. This legislation is vital to make sure that the pool of money available to the American people for their health care goes to the American people and not to illegals.

It also says that if someone is illegal and they come in and they are an emergency and they are taken care at the hospital, when they are seeking compensation from the fund, they just have to make that same information that they are collecting in order to be compensated, they have to make that available in a computer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

What we have heard again are bogus arguments this morning, over and over again, that this is going to increase the paperwork of doctors; it is going to make doctors policemen.

Not true. The bill we are talking about only says the information, that they will collect anyway in order to get compensated by this fund, must be made available to the INS and the Department of Homeland Security. They are not being turned in by anybody, it is just available. The other government agencies at that point have to take over. There is no reporting on the part of the doctors.

So we hear these bogus arguments over and over again, as if people are going to bring some type of contagious diseases into our country if we do not treat every illegal alien that comes into our emergency health care.

Let me note this: If you want to see diseases that will spread in our country being brought into our country from overseas, just make sure that everybody around the world knows that we are now paying for illegal aliens' health care in this country. No matter who gets into the hospital, they will be taken care of. They will bring communicable diseases from all over the world, and that is what is happening right now.

We need to instead come to grips with what my legislation does, that if someone is indeed here illegally and they are dissipating the use and the amount of money that is available for our own citizens or their health care, that illegal alien should be sent home. They should go home to their home country. That is what H.R. 3722 says. The information will be available to the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they will proceed from there.

This is not on the back of the doctors. The doctors are freed from responsibility on that, because they no longer have to treat anything, unless someone's life is threatened at that moment.

Let me add one other thing. If they do treat an illegal immigrant in an emergency situation, my bill insists that we go to the employer, because that is the only question that hospital has to ask, who is your employer? And if that employer has not done due diligence to see if he is hiring an illegal immigrant, that employer has to pay for the emergency health care costs of the illegal immigrant. Do you get that? The taxpayers are off the hook.

What has happened is, this bill, which would be an of incredible importance to the middle-class Americans, this bill, which strives to protect us from having our limited health care dollars being drained away by people who have come here illegally, this bill is being attacked by the Chamber of Commerce. It is being attacked by big business on one end, and being attacked by the liberal left organizations that control the Democratic Party on the other.

I suggest tomorrow the vote on H.R. 3722 is one to watch, and whose side you are on will be determined by how they vote on that issue.

Mr. Speaker, let me note that this President is taking care of the business of our national security; and, yes, it is a tough and hard job to do, and it is a job that requires tenacity and character. Our President is providing that leadership. He is not cutting and running. He is not trying to claim that the responsibilities for defending our country should be put off on the United Nations or other organizations.

In fact, if we have to rely on the United Nations for our national defense, as seems to be the Democratic plan, that means that the Communist Chinese and the security council would have veto power over anything done to protect the United States of America. I do not think we want to do that.

I think our President and Secretary Rumsfeld deserve a recommendation for their courage and willingness to stick out a situation until the victory is won, otherwise there would never have been any victories by American forces anywhere.

Tonight, however, I am here to talk about another threat to our national security, and that is the threat of an uncontrolled flow of illegal immigration into our country. On Tuesday, H.R. 3722, that is a piece of legislation that I wrote, will be voted on here on the floor, probably Tuesday. It is designed to control the flow of illegal immigration into our hospitals that is destroying health care in so many of our States. This legislation, H.R. 3722, sets the parameters for the use of a $1 billion fund for illegal alien emergency health care that was allocated in the Medicare bill that passed Congress a few months ago.

If we do not act, this billion dollar fund will create a perverse priority at America's emergency hospitals throughout our country, that is, we will be using this billion dollars to reimburse the hospitals for taking care of illegal immigrants in the emergency rooms, but not for American citizens; illegal immigrants then whose emergency health care costs will be covered by a Federal grant, and will be given priority over uninsured U.S. citizens and legal residents. This is as perverse a priority as I have ever seen. What is wrong with this picture? We have to act to stop that.

We are literally telling our legal citizens and legal residents to sit in a line while illegal immigrants will be taken care of. My legislation, H.R. 3722, will rein in the cost of illegal immigration on our health care in several ways. Number one, it is minimal in paperwork. It is being charged that my bill will create new paperwork. That is a bogus charge. If anyone wants this billion dollars in funds, they will have to fill out the paperwork anyway. Hospitals that are going to get reimbursed for illegal immigration health care are going to have to fill out a couple of forms, not by my bill, but in order to get that money. My bill simply says that information has to be available to the INS and the INS should start proceedings against an illegal alien to get him out of the country if he is sucking up dollars in our health care system that should go to American citizens. It also requires the hospital to take a Polaroid picture or get a fingerprint and ask the illegal who his employer is.

The reason we ask who his employer is is because H.R. 3722 says that if the last employer of that illegal immigrant has not provided health care insurance, it is not the taxpayers who should be paying for the health care of that illegal immigrant; it is that employer. If we cannot show that he has done due diligence, the employer, in trying to find out that he is hiring an illegal immigrant, they will have to pay for that.

H.R. 3722 also sets a limit on health care treatment requirements on illegal immigrants. Only in life-threatening situations do our hospitals have to give treatment to illegal immigrants. Today we see billions of dollars, heart transplants, 12-month long treatments for leukemia, all of these things, we are talking about billions of dollars are being spent for the health care of illegal immigrants. Genetic problems that they brought into the country with them, that is coming right out of the money that is available to take care of our senior citizens and take care of our own young people.

It is a sin that we are letting that go on. My bill takes care of that. It takes care of the mandate on our hospitals saying they have to treat anybody who comes in their door. We only have to treat them if their life is in danger at that moment, otherwise they get sent back to their native country where they can pay for their health care.

This legislation is being attacked from all sides by bogus arguments. Remember, it does not create new paperwork. This bill will be voted on on the floor next week. Everyone needs to hear from their constituents about whether we believe our limited health care dollars should be going to pay for the health care of illegal immigrants. If you think that the money, the limited money we have available to take care of your family should be spent on someone who has come here illegally, then you need to look at who is voting against my bill. But if you think we should make sure that our limited health dollars are put to use for our own citizens and legal residents, then make sure your Congressperson knows, and my colleagues should know that their constituents support the idea of making sure that our limited resources help our own citizens and legal residents, immigrants who have come here

legally, rather than being used by people who thumb their nose at our law and come here anyway.

Limited health care dollars should be used for our own people rather than providing unlimited care for illegal immigrants. That is the issue of H.R. 3722. We will vote on it next week. If you agree with me that this money and these resources are important for the health of our senior citizens and for the health of our young people and should not be dissipated on trying to make America an HMO for the whole world, then please make sure that my colleagues understand how their constituents feel on this issue.

I believe my colleagues should be judged on whether or not they are concerned about illegal immigration and they are protecting the interests of our citizens and legal residents by this vote, H.R. 3722. No matter what type of smoke can be blown in the air to try to confuse the issue, it is clear: limited dollars should go to legal immigrants and citizens. I ask my colleagues to seriously consider the consequences of letting this flow of illegal immigration dissipate all of our money available to us to take care of our seniors in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken on the floor of this Congress next Tuesday. It is a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from the greatest threat to our national safety and well- being.

What am I talking about? Next Tuesday, there will be a vote on legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to protect us from a major decline in the quality of life and the quality of our health care due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and emergency rooms. If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy the quality of life for many of our people.

It is unforgivable that government has refused to act when the evidence is clear: millions of people are being permitted to stay in our country illegally, and it is having a horrendous impact on the standard of living, safety, and quality of life of average Americans.

For tens of millions of Americans and legal residents, real wages have stagnated. The education of our children has been undermined, our health care resources depleted, and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods and, thus, the safety of our families compromised.

This is not a back-burner issue. It goes to the heart of what America will be like tomorrow and, in some cases, it deals with a crisis of today. Yet, elected officials have remained silent about illegal immigration. Why? The American people need to ask themselves that question, because it is clear that the overwhelming number of the American people are troubled and enormously concerned about this onslaught of this uncontrolled, massive flow of illegal immigration into the United States.

But why are our officials not acting? First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. When I say intimidation, what is that all about? Is that against the law? Well, no, one can be intimidated in a number of ways. I mean that our elected officials are afraid to address this issue because they are afraid to be called racists. They are afraid to be called hate-mongers.

Let me note for the record today that I have been called many names when addressing this issue, and I believe that I have love in my heart for all of, not just our fellow citizens and legal residents, but I have love in my heart for other people. People who are malicious, people who are doing ill and bad things to other people, of course we do not love them. But the vast majority of people, even illegal immigrants coming into this country are wonderful people, and I have nothing but love in my heart for those people. But that is not the question of the day. We can be very caring about the rest of the world, but that does not mean we do not recognize that we have limited resources and that we can deplete those resources to the point that it will be harmful to our own citizens if we do not act responsibly.

Furthermore, it is not hateful to use scarce resources to provide for one's family. If one is taking care of their family, if one works hard and has a certain amount of money, and even if there are needy people down the street, down the block, it is important to care for your family first. That does not mean you have any less love in your heart for your neighbors and the people down the street; but first and foremost, caring for your family is itself an act of charity and love.

I am committed to doing something about the threat of illegal immigration, not because I dislike people and certainly not because I dislike people from other countries. Most people who come here, as I say, even the ones who come here illegally, are wonderful people. But we cannot take care of all of the wonderful people in the world and expect that it will not hurt our fellow Americans, in the same way that we cannot, as individuals and as members of a family, give away all of the family's money to people down the street

who might need some help and not expect if we give away too many of those resources for it not to have a horrible impact on our own family and, indeed, hurt our family. We Americans, of course, are very proud that our country represents every race and religion. So it would not be that we have in some way something against people who are coming here from another country. In fact, we are all descendant from people who originated in other parts of the world, with the exception perhaps of the American Indians. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and we are proud of it. And we are proud also that our country today permits more legal immigration into our country than all the other countries of the world combined.

One million immigrants are permitted to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees. With a population of 280 million people, we can expect that we will absorb this responsible number of immigrants. It has worked out for us well in the past, because the immigrants who come here legally need to be healthy, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting; or they are not permitted to come here. We have no such controls on people who are coming here illegally, perhaps bringing diseases, perhaps criminal elements, perhaps terrorists.

Tonight, however, I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. One can be for a responsible and a sizable legal immigration without then compromising a position that puts one totally against a flood of illegals coming into our country, especially the uncontrolled flood of illegals that we have been seeing in the last decade. Millions of illegal new-comers are arriving in our communities. Every day, tens of thousands more of them arrive. If they are sick or they are criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life, the very way of life that has attracted all of our forefathers and -mothers here and has attracted the legal immigrants who come to our shores legally and come with respect for our law.

The American people, they see what is happening. They can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people see this, and they are seething with anger. Every poll shows that 60 to 70 percent of the American people are outraged that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from them by an uncontrolled flow of people from other countries. Every time it comes to a vote, the American people express this cry for help to elected officials to do something about illegal immigration. Proposition 187 was the first time that that really came to a vote; and let me say, 10 years ago, no matter what people have heard about proposition 187, it passed in a landslide. It passed in a landslide when all of the major interest groups were against it, the major news media. All the name-calling you can possibly imagine was thrown at this little band of activists who put proposition 187 on the ballot. But even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for proposition 187, it was portrayed as some sort of a loss for the Republican Party, because Republicans by and large had supported and identified with proposition 187.

Let me note that there are people in this body, such as the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly), who represents many areas in which there are Americans of Mexican descent who represent a majority of areas in his district, but the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly) tells me that many of the cities where the majority of the population are legal immigrants and where Americans of Mexican descent hold a majority, that many of those communities voted by majority in favor of proposition 187.

Many people are afraid, even with that staring them in the face, the evidence that Mexican Americans, like everyone else, feel that their way of life is being threatened and their standard of living and their families are being threatened by illegal immigration. Many people still hesitate, thinking that they might be insulting our American citizens who happen to be of Mexican descent. Well, there is no Californian that does not respect our Mexican American and Hispanic fellow citizens and legal residents.

California is, by its very name and by the names of our cities and our streets and our culture, deeply influenced by the Hispanic culture and by the Mexican American culture that has been part of our State since before it was a State, and we are proud of that as Californians. We are proud of that. And yet many people are afraid to be called a racist. They are afraid to be called racist or hate-monger; they are afraid that that might make some people who are right down the street from us, our next-door neighbors or others, feel that we have something against them.

Well, turning one group of honest citizens against another in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic; and we will hear it over and over again. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention. The real hate-mongers and the real people who are engaged with racism are the ones who would suggest that we cannot deal with problems like illegal immigration unless we can call each other names.

Well, I would suggest that today the situation has gone so far down the road toward disaster that we have got to come to grips with this illegal immigration flow, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country and to our people.

What else, of course, has prevented us from dealing with illegal immigration? It is not just a fear of being called a name and racist, et cetera; although that is a powerful factor. There is another factor involved, and that is, there are some enormously powerful interest groups who believe they are benefiting from this massive flow of illegal immigration into this country.

Who am I referring to? I am referring to big business who want to ensure that they keep wages down and suppress wages, and I am talking about the liberal left wing of the Democratic party who believes that they will exploit illegal immigrants for their own electoral purposes, that they can politically exploit them.

So we have two groups of people who want to exploit illegal immigrants: big business and the liberal left wing of the Democratic party, both trying to exploit these helpless people who come to our shores.

These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that if illegal immigration is unchecked, and everything else being equal, the population of our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades away. Is that in the interest of any American to have that kind of crowding, that type of incredible increase in the number of people that we have to deal with and the demand on our scarce resources? That is what will happen if we leave illegal immigration, with millions of people coming in every year, and let it go unchecked. If that is going to happen we are going to end up with a half a billion people here in the United States of America.

Why are we letting it happen? There has been a lot of other things happening, and people know this is attributed to this massive flow of illegals. Yet we continue to let those things happen. Wages, for example, are being held down. There is no doubt about it; there are some people who benefit from low wages, the people who own the companies, people who want servants, et cetera. But most people, most Americans, are damaged by the product of illegal immigration, and I might add this keeping down of wages is changing the demographics in our society, thus changing the American way of life.

Let me note, it is a big lie that illegal immigrants are only taking jobs that Americans will not do. No, that is the great lie that is being used to justify this influx into our country, which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. No, no. Americans will do just about any job, but they will not do it at the pay level certain people are offering those jobs at. The pay level in our country for certain jobs, yes, Americans will not take that, but if we did not flood our country with illegal immigrants, those jobs would have to pay more money to get them done.

A good example of this is a job that I held when I was in college. When I was in graduate school, I held the job of a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets, and there is nothing wrong with that type of work. In fact, it is very honorable work. Any work where you are taking care of your own needs and being self-sufficient is honest work and dignified work.

During this time period after I, of course, got done with that job, that was 30 years ago, the GNP of our country has dramatically increased. We have had a tremendous increase in the GNP of our country, in the wealth of our country. This is a much richer country now than it was when I was cleaning toilets as a janitor, but if you look to see what janitors are making today in real terms, in real money, they are making almost exactly the same pay as I made when I was working as a janitor.

So why is it that the country can be so much more prosperous, there is so much more wealth here but the people working in regular jobs and more lowly jobs are not making anymore money? Where is their share of the prosperity we have enjoyed?

Their share is being gobbled up at one end of the spectrum by wealthy people and being gobbled up by government, I might add, and bureaucracy, and who is not getting it are the average working American people.

They say, well, no one would have taken that job as a janitor now. Yes, they would have taken that job had we not had a major influx of illegals in to take this janitorial work. What would have happened? They would have had to pay someone, like myself when I was in college, more money to do that job, and then you can bet that somebody would have invented a janitor machine, a toilet cleaning machine that would have cleaned the potties, maybe 100 potties. A man or a woman might be earning $50,000 a year to do a janitorial job.

There is nothing wrong with paying someone those type of wages for that type of work. As I say, any honest work is dignity, and the law of supply and demand will determine how much wages are paid, but instead of having one man working a machine, working technology to keen up our buildings and our bathrooms, we instead have opted in the society to bring in illegal immigrants, give them the jobs, but there are now five or six of those people and they are living in substandard housing with families that are deprived and are bringing the standard of living of their neighborhood down. These are people who are not living the American dream but, instead, are living the type of nightmare that they left in their home countries where there are very poor people and very rich people.

So what we have done, instead of giving working people in America an avenue of earning enough money to buy their own home, we have created a new class of poor people. Is that working for the interest of the American people of our country? Is that what we want? This is on top of, I might add, of course, the legal immigrants that we permit in, a million legal immigrants and 400,000 refugees every year.

Pressure is being felt throughout our society because of this massive flow of illegals into our country. I am suggesting millions of people are coming here every year illegally, and we are not doing anything about it, and the pressure is being felt. We can see it. The American people can see it. They can feel it, but nowhere is that more evident than in the providing of health care for our people.

Obviously we can feel it in other areas. We can feel it in the area of education. We have seen that in education, the quality of our education in California is going down. Everyone talks about class size in California. They are taking illegal immigrants out of the equation. In California, class size is not going up. You take the illegal immigrants out of the formula in California, education is doing very well, and our teachers would have time to teach our own students and give them a quality education; but no, we are permitting that to be eroded. For the average person out there who depends on educating their children in the public schools, we have permitted illegals to come in in order to help people who live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools. So education is being affected.

Our criminal justice system is being affected. We can see that throughout California as well, and health care is being affected.

Emergency health care is something that all of us depend on at one time or another. We just heard before us a few minutes ago by some of my Democratic colleagues talking about all these uninsured Americans, and there are uninsured Americans who do not have health care in this country. I have a piece of legislation aimed at trying to make sure that we do not put the status of illegal immigrants above our concerns for our own American citizens who do not have health care. My bill, H.R. 3722, will come to grips with an element that has just been put into our system unbeknownst to most American people.

What we did not know and what most people do not know is that a provision was slipped into the Medicare bill of a few months ago that passed through this House, and this provision established a $1 billion fund to compensate American hospitals for providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants. Let us make this clear: $1 billion of Federal money going to compensate hospitals for providing emergency care to illegals. Thus, we have officially opened the door to our own Treasury and to the taxpayers' money of providing services for illegal immigrants into our country.

We are providing this and it is $1 billion to start off with, and you can imagine that 10 years from now we are talking about 10s of billions of dollars, and we are talking about attracting more and more people here to the United States of America in order to get health care for their families.

We cannot spend money providing health care for people who come here illegally and not expect that we are not going to have even more people come here illegally to get that health care. It does not take a genius to figure that out. We have seen what has happened. We have seen this flow continue. We had an amnesty back in 1986. That amnesty was supposed to say there will be no amnesties after that. What happened? What happened was a dramatic increase in illegal immigration into our country.

The American Hospital Association reports that there were $21 billion in uncompensated health care services provided last year, and illegal aliens amount to 43 percent of those who do not have health insurance in this country. So 43 percent of all these people we are talking about that do not have health insurance are illegal immigrants. That is about $9 billion we are spending already for illegal alien health care. Yet we have established a fund that will provide health care for illegal immigrants' emergency health care.

What does that do? What does that mean? That means that we have created a perverse incentive for our hospitals to take care of the illegals who end up coming to their emergency center and treating the Americans and legal residents who come there, who do not have health insurance, as second class to the illegal immigrants. We have got the priorities totally backwards, but that message is not going to be lost on people overseas. They know they can come here and get that health care.

We all remember Jesica Santillan. She was an illegal alien who died after receiving not one, but two, heart and lung transplants in North Carolina. The Santillan family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the border to get here to have care, care that they knew would take a long time to get if they could ever get it at all in Mexico.

There are American citizens who desperately need organs, and they are being knocked out of line by a family who broke the law to come here. Yes, that was a nice, little girl and that family's a very nice family. We hear stories in the newspaper every day about people who come here from China and elsewhere in order to get their families treated by America's health care providers. Yes, that touches your hearts, but let us be fair to the American people.

This is depleting our health care dollars that should be going to our own senior citizens. If we cannot provide medical care for our senior citizens, we cannot provide them medicines, how is it that we can provide $1 billion to treat illegal immigrants and then we are going to get more of them?

My bill will come to grips with this particular issue, H.R. 3722. It is meant to deal with this travesty. If passed, it will signal to the leadership that the American people no longer will stand for this type of providing services for illegal immigrants.

What does this bill do? It requires that hospitals ask questions that they are going to ask anyway. The hospitals are opposing my bill because they said it is going to add all kinds of questions that you have got to ask. No, I have got to tell you this. In order to get those funds to get compensated for treating those illegals, what we have got to do is ask questions anyway. My bill provides almost no extra paperwork. When you hear that argument, it is a lie.

What we have done is we have asked for a photo to be taken or a fingerprint, and one other question to be asked: Who was your last employer?

And I might add that my bill also says that if that last employer of this illegal who is now in the emergency room to get care, if he has not taken the due diligence to even make a telephone call to verify that this employee is here legally or not, and that system will be in place in 2005, well then that employer is required to pay the bill, not the taxpayers. The employer will pay that health care bill for being so arrogant as to try to hire a guy, probably not even paying his taxes and not giving him any health insurance.

So, number one, it suggests the hospitals have to take a minimum of attention to collect a fingerprint or a picture of this person, and enough information, as well as a few minor questions that they ask anyway, and that that information be provided to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and that we expedite deportation of that person who is here taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care away from our people.

If that person is here illegally, they should be deported; and that information should be available. But the hospitals are not required to do anything else than that which is minimal. It will not cost them time or money. And right now, by the way, these hospitals report abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse. That is all reported. They can do this. And, as I said, we require the employer then to pay for it if he has not taken due diligence.

Most importantly, this bill limits the amount of health care that we are going to provide illegal immigrants if they come to the emergency room and expect treatment. This is the all-important provision. Today, we have people coming from all over the world here illegally. They arrive at the emergency room and they say, you have got to take care of me. I just mentioned this young lady, this young girl from Mexico who we spent millions of dollars on, and then her family ended up suing the hospital for heart and lung transplants. No. Under my bill, the hospitals will not be required to do anything except treat anyone who comes in for a life-threatening condition.

If an illegal immigrant is there and they want to have leukemia treatments or treatments for genetic problems they have been carrying all their life, the hospital only has to treat that patient to the point that that patient then can get to an airport or get to a transportation system that will take them back to their home country to be treated for that disease there. That is where they should be treated, instead of having our hospitals being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for leukemia treatment, for example.

There was a fellow in my congressional district who came here from El Salvador, and he was dying of leukemia. He received $300,000 worth of treatment for leukemia. That $300,000 comes from the money available to take care of our children. It comes from the money that is available to take care of our seniors. Imagine, $300,000. It is a crime to permit someone who has come here to this country to deplete our resources like that.

Now, we are going to have a chance to vote on this next Tuesday; but it is not going to happen on its own, because H.R. 3722, which is the bill, is going to be the target of every interest group that you can imagine that wants to keep the flow of illegal immigration coming into this country. But the American people need to know that H.R. 3722, my bill, which will be on this floor next Tuesday, is going to be voted on. And the decision that is going to be made is the decision that we have limited health care dollars in this country; so are we going to spend them for illegal immigrants or are we going to try to get control of this situation so our health care dollars are going to our own legal residents and our U.S. citizens.

Is that hateful? Is that racist? Is that a horrible thing for people who care about other people to do? I say that that is the loving thing to do. I say that you can have love in your heart and try to be responsible. We know that if we try to do everything for everybody, we will end up not being able to do anything for anybody. We have seniors right now that cannot afford their medicines, yet we are talking about spending billions of dollars to take care of illegal immigrants.

Now, the only way that I got this vote to the floor, the only way that this bill, H.R. 3722, was permitted to come here to the floor for a vote was that they needed my vote. The leadership in the House needed my vote on the Medicare bill.

I voted for the Medicare bill because I felt that our health care had evolved now so that a lot of people who depended on operations and the type of things covered by Medicare in the past now took care of these problems by using pills and medicine. So we had to evolve so we could help people get those pills and medicine as they get to be older. Well, that bill only passed by one vote as it went through the House. And I voted for that and I am proud of that.

Then it went over to the Senate and that is where they stuck this provision in, this provision of a billion dollars, which is of course an installment. Ten years from now it will be $20 billion. We know that. So they stuck this provision in, and on the way back they did not have enough votes to pass the Medicare bill. That is why there is a miracle that is going to happen here next Tuesday.

They needed my vote in order to get the Medicare bill passed, and I said I cannot vote for this with this provision in here. I already voted for it when it was not in; I cannot vote with it in here. Unless it is mitigated, I cannot vote for this bill, and the bill was going to go down. The leadership said, what do you mean by mitigated. I said, I need to bring a bill to the floor that will undo the negative impact of the money that we are going to provide for illegal immigrants' health care in this bill. They said, you have a deal. We will let you bring this to the floor and the people of the United States will be able to hear the arguments and your colleagues will be able to vote up or down on the legislation that you have in mind.

That is how this bill came to the floor for a vote. The American people have to be involved in deciding this issue when this bill comes onto the floor on Tuesday. H.R. 3722 is very easy to understand. It means limited health care dollars are going to go to illegal immigrants, or it means that we are going to try in some way to restrict the use of our limited health care dollars in the servicing of illegal immigrants.

As I say, we have a situation in this bill that goes to the cost of illegal immigrants as well by making sure that our hospitals no longer feel compelled to provide extensive services, like cancer treatments and genetic engineering and bypasses and things to help people who are not in a life-threatening situation. We cannot afford to do that for illegal immigrants. We cannot afford to do it.

First of all, it is unfair to our own U.S. citizens to have a fund that will compensate hospitals for taking care of illegal aliens who do not have health care insurance, but then we are not doing that for our own citizens who do not have health care insurance. That is wrong. It is immoral, and it is wrong.

We need to make sure when the illegal immigrant is there that we do not end up spending massive amounts of money. The only money that should be spent is in case that person, his or her life is in danger at that moment. We cannot afford anything else. There are some people who believe that we can do everything for everybody. They never vote against any spending in this body.

They vote for any new government program. I do not know how they can think they are being responsible, but they do.

I can tell you right now, we cannot be the HMO of the world. If we try to be the HMO of the world, and we attract people from all over the world, which we are doing now, and taking care of all their maladies and all their health care problems, we will be doing so at the expense of the American people.

Yes, illegal immigration is out of control. It is dramatically hurting our way of life. We have wages that have been kept down so some of our people cannot afford health insurance, and now we are taking care of illegals and not their health insurance. We have people now who come to this country and will work and not pay taxes, so that means they are not getting health insurance, they are not paying taxes, and that means doubly that we end up paying for their bill.

Who are we really subsidizing? We are subsidizing the employers of these people who are basically not only exploiting them, they are exploiting the taxpayers. The people are getting filthy rich by hiring people who have come here illegally and not providing them any health care and not having them pay taxes to make up for the services they are consuming here. This has to be stopped. It is bringing down the wages of our people and it is destroying the American way of life.

We cannot sustain millions of people coming into this country without harming our own people. Wake up, America. We can do something about this, but we have got to take a stand.

Next Tuesday, it will be very easy to understand, except there is going to be all kinds of rhetoric about the burden of paperwork that we are going to put on the hospitals. By the way, there is no burden of paperwork unless the hospital wants to be compensated. H.R. 3722 will not require the hospitals to do anything if they do not want the Federal dollars to compensate them for taking care of that illegal immigrant.

If they want to opt out, there is no burden. But if they want compensation, they are going to have to ask certain questions to prove this person was illegal to get compensation. My legislation requires a minimal amount, maybe an extra 30 seconds, enough to snap a Polaroid shot and ask who the former employer is. That is it. All they are doing is putting this information into a computer that is available to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and then the legislation requires our government employees at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to look at that information and they will analyze it and they will begin deportation against an illegal immigrant.

Why should we do this? First, some will say it will mean more people are not getting treated in our society. There will be more sickness in our society.

Let me note that if Members want to see sick people coming to America, let everybody in the world know if you get to America, you are going to be treated. You are going to get free health care. They are going to bring their kids here with polio and everything else because they know their family will be treated in the United States of America. If we want to spread disease in our society, let us make our society the HMO of the world, and that is what we are doing here today.

No, this is not an imposition on the hospitals. They can opt out if they want. It is no more bother than what they are already doing. For example, child abuse cases go to the police. They make a report to the police; or some spousal abuse case, they do that already. No one is complaining about that. But let us compare what illegal immigration is doing to those situation.

This illegal immigrant from El Salvador who died with leukemia and taking with him $300,000 of U.S. tax dollars with him, how bad is that? Is that awful? The girl in North Carolina, we spent $5 million on her. Why is that bad?

Today if that guy would have lived and gone into a drugstore or liquor store and stolen a couple hundred bucks, he would be in jail. If one of our people, our citizens, goes into a store and robs it of a couple hundred dollars, that person is going to jail. But instead, we are taking people who have entered the United States illegally or have overstayed their visas and are just here illegally, and we are permitting them to consume hundreds of thousands of dollars, taken directly from our pockets; and the money available for providing services, we are permitting them to take this money. They are stealing from our society, but their accomplices are the people in our government who refuse to come to grips with this grave threat to our society.

We all know that we have a threat here to the institutions, our health institutions and to our schools. We also know that with illegal immigration out of control, we do not know if these people are terrorists, if terrorists are coming here. We have to come to grips with this.

We have to look in the mirror and say we are proud to be a country that is made up of every race and every religion. We are proud to be a Nation of immigrants. We are proud that we have more legal immigration in our society than any other country in the world, but we are not going to be browbeaten and called names in light of our generosity, simply for doing things that are responsible in protecting our own citizens and legal residents.

We have got to watch out for each other. We have to care for our other fellow Americans more than people who have come here illegally. If we do not, no one is going to stand in line and go through the process of legal immigration.

This is a situation that threatens our way of life. We have to proceed with love in our hearts, but we have to proceed with determination to turn the situation around. Next Tuesday, Members of Congress have got to know that their constituents will be judging them on their vote on H.R. 3722. No one should be fooled by any smoke that is blown into the air to try to confuse people on the issue. This is the issue of using scarce health dollars for illegal immigrants versus using those dollars for American citizens and legal residents.

People need to have their voice heard in Washington, D.C. Elected officials need to come to grips on this, and we need to have more votes on this than simply those votes that are required whenever there is some type of arrangement made because votes are needed on another piece of legislation.

There are good people on all sides of this issue. There are good people who are concerned about large numbers of illegals. We have 12 million illegals in this country, but we have to be more concerned with American citizens and legal residents.

Mr. Speaker, just a few thoughts about the controversy concerning the abuse of prisoners by American contractors and military personnel, if accurate. Some of these charges, of course, must be accurate. No American should deny the truth, nor ignore this unacceptable and illegal behavior. In fact, the source of information and photos documenting wrongdoing appears to have come from an investigation, an investigation that was set forth and set in motion by the Pentagon itself. The Pentagon launched an investigation in order to end any abuse of prisoners that may have been taking place. Americans can be proud that we have standards that will not tolerate such abuse, and the Pentagon moved to correct it before it was publicly known.

We Americans should not flagellate ourselves because of a tiny number of American personnel who humiliated or abused prisoners. Certainly, the vast, vast majority, if not 99.99 percent, of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have conducted themselves in a courageous and honorable way. But such abuses and such mishaps and wrongdoing have occurred in every war. From the American Revolution on, we have seen soldiers who perhaps lose a friend and are struck by grief and lash out with revenge, killing a person or killing a prisoner or mistreating a prisoner or, we find, in some cases, a person with sadistic tendencies ends up overseeing the prisoners that have been taken. This happens in every war and conflict. Yes, things like this may have happened in this war as well.

The question, however, is what is to be done? Our government has declared such treatment of prisoners as wrong and illegal. We have thus maintained an honorable standard that we can be proud of.

Many of those criticizing us now or jumping to criticize us have no such standard. They murder their own people. Saddam Hussein, for example, butchered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen. We found the mass graves, and in those mass graves were thousands and thousands of children.

Now, the world, the Arab world in particular, criticizes us over and over again, finding everything that they could possibly criticize us about, for trying to remove this sadist Saddam Hussein from power. Most of those Arab countries who criticize us or Arab organizations that criticize us, well, let us take a look at the criticism. Yes, it is wrong to abuse prisoners, and to the extent that they were, we were wrong. But we are actually trying to correct the problem. But those people, most of those people or many of those people who are criticizing us do not come anywhere close to a humanitarian standard of their own. They should not be pointing fingers at us or at our troops. This is sort of like the drunk down the street who has been arrested for drunk driving and had his license taken away pointing his finger at a neighbor because the neighbor is drinking a beer on the front porch.

Well, this hypocrisy comes from nitpickers, naysayers, and America- bashers. It is a bit too much. We are correcting a bad situation. We are admitting our failures, and we are correcting it. But we recognize that any noble cause, any war that has a noble cause is messy, just like all wars are messy and brutal undertakings. And for Americans, war is usually thrust upon us.

Tonight, I rise to discuss the war on terrorism, a war that was thrust upon us. This great challenge to our generation is the challenge we must face. History records that the people of the United States rose up and courageously defeated the forces of evil that threatened this planet during the last century. First we defeated the combined might of the German Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines. Without the strength, courage, and sacrifice of the American people, this would have been a far different world dominated by the likes of Tojo and Hitler. And, yes, in that war there were some abuses and some mistakes by American military personnel, but does that mean that our cause of eliminating Hitler and Tojo was wrong? Certainly not. And we moved to correct those abuses, just as we have moved in this case when we have found some people who were misbehaving and doing some immoral things.

After World War II, Americans believed they had earned a better and a more peaceful life, only to realize that another evilism, communism, would destroy democracy unless America acted. The Cold War was upon us. Had it not been for the tenacity of the American people, for our love of liberty and, yes, our willingness to bear the burden for a sometimes ungrateful world, a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship would undoubtedly be dominating this planet.

Do our Muslim friends really believe that it would have been better for us not to have won the Cold War? Do they believe that the Marxist- Leninist regimes like they had in Yemen would have been better throughout the Muslim world? Certainly the rest of the world understands that communism was an evil force, and we can be proud of ourselves that we helped defeat that force, and it would not have happened without America.

I am proud to have served in the White House during a pivotal time in that Cold War. For 7 years I was a speech writer and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. It is clear now that it was the tough policies put in place by President Reagan that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union and brought the collapse of Soviet communism and an end to the Cold War, but it was not easy. It was not a historic inevitability, as we are being told now; and it would not have happened on its own.

So please do not tell me also of the bipartisan spirit that enabled President Reagan to rebuild our defenses, that enabled President Reagan to support those fighting Communist domination, that bipartisan spirit that enabled President Reagan to vigorously

expose the immoral underpinnings of Communist power. No, do not tell me that. I can testify to the Herculean effort that was needed to end the Cold War and that I never saw the bipartisanship the Democrats now remember so vividly.

What I remember is that every time we took a stand, as when we opposed a freeze on nuclear weapons production, that freeze which would have permitted the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe, and as when we supported those resisting the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, amplified by their friends in the media, blasted Reagan and blasted those of us on his team as warmongers, as if America and as if we were responsible for the conflict between East and West, and we were, of course, portrayed as the bad guys, even though we were promoting democracy.

The dictatorial concepts that are special to Leninism were just shrugged off. By the way, the Sandinistas, who the American left heralded as the representatives of the Nicaraguan people, have lost every free election that has been held in that country since President Reagan insisted that free elections be part of any peace plan there.

Ironically, one fight in the Cold War that did have bipartisan support was in Afghanistan. There we supported the Mujahidin, local insurgents who fought courageously for 10 years against a Soviet occupation army with all of its artillery, tanks, helicopter gun ships, and a willingness to do anything to destroy its enemies. Here was the greatest victory of the Cold War, which broke the will of the Communist Party bosses in Moscow.

However, the Afghan people paid an enormous price for this victory: millions dead or wounded, families, villages, and a way of life destroyed; people living in abject poverty, with a million babies dying of dehydration and other easily curable conditions and diseases.

The retreat of Soviet troops from the Afghan war marked the end of the Cold War. It was not the German people, let us note, who brought down the Berlin Wall; it was the bravery and sacrifice of the Afghans. And while we celebrated and prospered, the Afghans continued to suffer. Not only now are we helping remove the millions of landmines planted throughout their country, many of which we supplied ourselves to the Afghans; and these landmines, which we are only now helping to remove, kill and maim young Afghan children even to this day.

The roots of our current terrorist challenge lie not in our support, not in our support for the Afghan people and their fight against the Soviet occupation, but in our unconscionable decision in 1990 to walk away and leave them in their rubble and suffer their misery.

Walking away was a policy decision. It was wrong. It was dead wrong. President George Bush, father of our current President, has to accept the lion's share of the blame for this cowardly, arrogant and selfish policy.

There would be no Marshall Plan for Afghanistan or anything else from the United States because when we left, we left everything up to the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Unfortunately, the Saudis and Pakistanis had their own agenda.

This was an unholy alliance doing the bidding of radical anti-western Muslims in their own countries, meaning Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. And while the majority of the Muslims even in a Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are wonderful people, there are large numbers of others who believe they have a right to commit horrendous acts of violence in the name of Allah, or as we would say, in the name of God.

Instead of trying to defeat, control or subdue these elements, the leadership of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has tried to buy them off, compromise with them and as is evident now, the leaders of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, many of these leaders, sympathized and allied themselves with Muslim extremists who would make war on the west and were intent on destroying our way of life, the American way of life.

I first became aware of these vile forces within the Muslim world while I was still at the Reagan White House. One of the worst of these blood soaked monsters was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fanatic who in college was known to have thrown acid into the face of women who refused to cover themselves. It is shameful that a disproportionate share of what America sent to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets went to this beast. Even when objections were registered, and I can assure you that strenuous objections and complaints were made, the CIA and the State Department continued to the policy of channeling our aid through Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, who then passed on much of it to their first choice, to their golden boy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

So we knew crazies were out there and we knew the Saudis and the Pakistanis supported them. Yet, we walked away and left them in charge.

Later, I learned, after I left the White House, that the problem was even worse than I suspected. After I left the White House, I left the White House in 1988 to run for Congress and I won that election in early November of 1988. And while other Members of Congress took vacations during their 2-month break between the time they were elected and sworn in, I instead went to Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan and joined for about a week an Afghan military unit, an infantry unit that marched into the battle, and it was the last major battle with Soviet troops in the war of Afghanistan, the Battle of Jalalabad. As I was hiking into that battle with this Mujahedin unit, we hiked where we could see a group of tents in the distance.

Now, I was dressed as an Afghan and I was dressed as a Mujahedin soldier. I had a beard, et cetera. We could see these tents. They were luxurious tents. It was more like a modern day camping expedition by some rich people with SUVs than a Mujahedin camp, that was for sure.

But I was told immediately that that was the camp of the Saudis and that I should keep my mouth shut and that no English would be spoken until we were far away from that camp because they said there was a crazy man in that camp who hated Americans, worse than he hated the Soviets, even though we Americans were there helping to defeat the Soviet Army.

They said that man's name is bin Laden, and if he finds out we have an American with us, he would come to kill us just as he would kill the Soviet soldiers. So it was no surprise and it should have been no surprise that there was a real potential threat there in Afghanistan, waiting in the wings to take hold of that country. But instead of rebuilding Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia turned it into a mid evil kingdom run by psychotic, religious fanatics.

Now, in hindsight we know the horrific role the Saudis and Pakistanis have played in formulating anti-western Islamic terrorism, and we should also note that many of them today have committed themselves, many of the leaders of those two countries have committed themselves in an opposite course. They are trying to correct what was done wrong 10 years ago which helped create this problem. And we hope that they are sincere when they joined us in our effort in our war against terrorism and the war of the west against this terrorist threat. But, let us note that when this was happening and the Soviet and the Saudi leadership and the Pakistanis were actually helping the terrorist element or the anti-western element within the Muslims in Afghanistan, that part of the world, we should have seen it coming.

But just as the Saudis and Pakistani leaders subsidized and even assisted in this type of insanity, our government stepped aside and permitted the Saudis and Pakistanis to have their way.

So the Saudi and Pakistani leadership either helped or stood aside as these radical Muslims who hate the west and would make war on us began to take control, and then we stepped aside and let the Saudis and Pakistanis have the decision and make the decision. Yes, and we even helped the Saudis and the Pakistanis make that decision.

What was U.S. policy? We need to look at what the U.S. policy was in the 1990s that brought about this situation that we are in today. One of the things that I find most disturbing about the current hearing into the tragedy of 9-11 is that it downplays the importance of American policy in the laying of the foundation of 9-11. They would rather

talk, meaning those people who are conducting this investigation, would rather talk about flow charts and organizational structure and a lack of a shared data base and no central coordination than trying to fix responsibility.

We keep hearing that setting the blame, they call it the blame game, wrong is wrong. It is a bad thing to do. Well, I am sorry, 9-11 represented not an unavoidable tragedy but a dramatic failure of policy and of people. Those who put the policy in place should be held accountable. The individual leaders in our intelligence, the national security system who failed to thwart 9-11 because of their own incompetence and bureaucratic arrogance should be held accountable.

Tonight I will provide a number of examples of policies that led to the empowerment of the hostile radical Islamic movement that we face today and to the policies and to the people who enabled these weird, feudalistic religious fanatics to become a major threat to the western world and especially a threat to the people of the United States.

September 11 was the greatest massacre of American civilians in the history of our country. Yes, we are in the process of hunting down the perpetrators of this monstrous crime and destroying their terrorist network. And I strongly believe our President is resolved to do what is necessary to get the job done and secure our country and our world in the future. He and our military are doing a superb job under the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances and they are being nit picked and naysayed to death every time a mistake is made. People are trying to undermine the general effort and the noble cause in which our troops are fighting.

President Bush has a long-term strategy. That is why we are in an Iraq, for example. We are trying to build a democratic society. Our success will not just be measured in the removal of this vicious and powerful dictator, Saddam Hussein, who hated us, who would have this man had an all-encompassing grudge against us that would have only been satisfied when he inflicted the death and destruction upon our people and the future whenever he had a chance to do so; but getting rid of him was not the only thing we accomplished.

We not only did that but we freed the Iraqi people from their oppressor and we have also provided an opportunity to build in Iraq that will serve as a model for the rest of the Muslim world. We are providing Muslim people, especially the young people, an alternative a choice not to destroy western civilization, but to be part of it and to open the door of a new Renaissance of relations when Christians, Jews and others can live in the same world and benefit from each other. Even though we are distinct from each other, we can interact and trade and we can be friends. That is the better world President Bush is trying to build. But it must start in Iraq. And if we lose in Iraq, the evil forces that would separate the west from the east and would have us fighting among various religious factions, they will then dominate this planet and we will not be able to stop them except at much greater expense of blood.

It is a strong vision that President Bush has. It is a noble vision; and it is the vision of a world living at peace where Muslims, Christians, Jews live together and this vision is stronger than what the radicals are advocating. They were trying to basically obliterate the faith and the culture of others. And our President is trying to make sure that the world is safe for us to live together in peace and harmony, no matter what our faith is. And we must succeed in Iraq. And I am here to today to applaud the President, and there has never been an action that has been perfect, but he is doing a tremendous job, as have our troops. As we support that, if we have succeed, we must hold those in our government, however, when we will hold them and we will make sure that they get the praise for a successful policy when and if we succeed, which I believe we will in Iraq.

But we must also, when we have a failure of policies, recognize what that policy was, what made us vulnerable to the attack on 9-11, for example, and we must hold those people accountable who failed to protect us and failed to put the policy that would best serve the United States and the western world. This is not the blame game that I am talking about. It is holding people accountable for decisions that they have made while in public service and while they have held authority from the people. So when I speak of bad policy, what am I talking about? What is this bad policy that led to 9-11?

Well, chaos and blood shed in Afghanistan, as I said, continued long after the Soviet Army left and America walked away. During this time in the early 1990s, I felt a personal debt to the Afghan people. I had been there when we were fighting the Soviets. I knew the sacrifices they made, so I felt that we owed them something, and I tried to do my best to find a solution but no one was listening. But it was not hard to find a solution. It was not hard for me to come up with an idea, with a plan that would have helped the Afghan people. But implementing that idea and finding that and making sure that solutions became policy was another matter.

So what was the solution? It did not take a genius to determine the best way to restore order and a stable government to Afghanistan was to bring back the honest and beloved former king, Zaire Shah, who had been living in Rome, Italy since his exile began in 1973. He was an elderly man, but he still had a good mind and an impressive stature. He was one person all factions of Afghanistan knew would not seek vengeance upon him if he was returned to power.

After visiting him in Rome and being beaten by him in a chess game, I took it upon myself to promote the exiled monarch as the logical choice to bring normalcy back to Afghanistan. So it is not like there was not an alternative to the policies that were put in place. It was the logical choice. Yes, it was the logical choice except for the opposition of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Pakistanis knew they could not control Zaire Shah.

Zaire Shah had ruled over that country for 40 years. He was independent and a fair and honest man. When he was in a charge of Afghanistan, they lived a relative peace for 40 years. But the Pakistanis were intent on dominating Afghanistan as many of them still are and they ruled out bringing back King Zaire Shah. The Saudi wanted to placate their own radicals. That is why they did not like Zaire Shah, the old exiled king. They wanted to placate the Wahabis who are their radical sector in Saudi Arabia. So they too, the Saudis, nixed the return of the king.

But most disturbing to me is as I sojourned throughout that region on my own, sometimes at great personal risk, promoting the Zaire Shah alternative, U.S. State Department officials would follow me explaining that I was speaking for myself and that I was a lone junior Member of Congress not to be taken seriously.

These arrogant and amoral policymakers of our State Department could have given Afghanistan a chance for a leader who was decent and caring and peace loving, who loved his people and were loved by them.

Instead, they chose to play politics; and they chose the Taliban, make no mistake about it.

It is only when I spoke to the head of the Saudi Arabia's CIA, Prince Turki, that I was tipped off that another plan was in the works. Prince Turki was fired immediately after 9/11. Just keep that in mind, but until 9/11, he was the man who I could say was most responsible for Saudi policy in that region.

He explained to me personally that instead of the former king coming back, that they were creating a third force, and it was being created specifically to go into Afghanistan, and it would be comprised of religious students who had spent most of the war in the Islamic schools in Pakistan. These Taliban, which means student by the way, using their religious credentials, would dominate Afghanistan; and he assured me that they would not be involved in anything outside of Afghanistan.

These Taliban, by the way, with certain exceptions as I say, were not veterans of the war against the Soviets. They were not Mujahedin. A lot of people make that mistake. The Mujahedin fought the Soviets. The Taliban came

in well after the Soviets left; and in fact, when we felt, after we were attacked, we needed to drive the Taliban out, it was the remnants of the Mujahedin who joined with us and also drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

For a long time, I blamed the Saudis and the Pakistanis for creating a force of religious fanatics and putting them in power. It is clear now, however, that it was not just the Pakistanis and the Saudis. Prince Turki, in Washington, when he tipped me off about the creation of Taliban, certainly he was there at the beginning and certainly the Pakistanis were there at the beginning, but other people were there as well.

Last year, I found out about this. Last year, the current former minister of Pakistan visited Southern California; and when he was exasperated by my criticism of Pakistan, that they had created the Taliban, he was upset and he blurted out that Americans were in the room and part of the bargain that created the Taliban as well. There were three parties in that room. Well, that revelation was no surprise to me. I had been trying to get a confirmation of that for years.

During the latter years of the Clinton administration, I charged that the administration policy was secretly supporting the Taliban. After making that charge at a public hearing, I was labeled as ``delusional'' by a senior Democratic colleague. When I insisted, with the support of Ben Gilman, who was then chairman of the Committee on International Relations, that the State Department provide the documents that would clarify America's real position, we were stonewalled, even though Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally pledged to comply with this request. Here we are; that is our job to oversee American foreign policy. We requested the documents on the creation of the Taliban. The State Department thumbed its nose at us, gave us documents that were meaningless, that had a bunch of newspaper clippings, et cetera.

Let us be clear and understandable on this point. I am charging that during the Clinton administration it was U.S. policy to create the Taliban, and once in power, the United States Government supported these Islamic fanatics. It was the policy of our government under Bill Clinton. This policy was fully supported and probably created by our State Department, and if one wants to accept the responsibilities for the policies that eventually led to 9/11, start right here, and those in the State Department, those who oppose the return of King Zaire Shah and undercut anyone who is resisting the Taliban, they have the blood of innocent Americans on their hands, those Americans who were slaughtered on 9/11.

Let us accept that rejecting King Zaire Shah, and that option was dead wrong, but let us accept also it was understandable perhaps that our foreign policy establishment felt that way. They longed for stability, and they could not imagine stability without having the Saudis and the Pakistanis having their way, even though it is America that is supposed to be providing the leadership and not the other way around.

After the fighting stopped and the Taliban were in control, and this is after the third force was then unleashed, the Soviets had been gone for several years, this third force was unleashed. The Taliban swept across two-thirds of Afghanistan, and they took the capital city of Kabul.

Well, I have been trying to fight that for many, many months and many years; and I took a stand back, and just like everybody else, I wished the people of Afghanistan the best and I laid down a marker to the Taliban. I remember giving an interview where basically I said I would have a wait and see, and we expected them not to do things outside of their own country, and we expected them not to be a totalitarian force but a religious force. Of course, I tried to stop them from getting in power in the first place. There was nothing I could do at that point but hope for the best.

After about a month, it became obvious that I had been right all along and that this new force, the Taliban, were Islamic Nazis; and as such, if they were not stopped, they would hurt our friends or they would even hurt us.

So even after coming to power, our State Department, get into this, even after coming to power, our State Department closed its eyes to the increasing evidence of the nature of the Taliban; and they kept supporting the Taliban anyway. For several years, I was a lone voice, helped by Chairman Ben Gilman, then chairman of the Committee on International Relations, warning of the potential consequences of leaving such a fanatical, religious sect in power.

I even went to Afghanistan during this time and met with leaders resisting the Taliban, men like General Dostum, Commander Masood, Abdul Haq, and Ismail Khan. Masood, of course, is the most impressive of the lot, but of course, none of them are pure. Everybody makes mistakes; everybody has made bad judgments; everybody has done things wrong after they have been fighting for as long as these people have been fighting. They all made a certain number of terrible decisions; but unlike the Taliban, they were not totalitarian psychos who believed that God was talking to them and justifying the wholesale slaughter and control of other peoples.

Unfortunately, all of them and the rest of the Afghan people, when I say all of them I mean the leaders who were opposed to the Taliban, and the rest of the Afghan people, believed America was supporting the Taliban. So let us make this straight. Even after the Taliban took power, when it was no longer theoretical, it appeared to everyone, and I suggest that it was the case, America was still supporting the Taliban.

Why should these people not, these Afghans, think that? Was not our aid going to the Taliban-controlled areas? I myself had been thwarted by the State Department under leadership of Clinton appointee Rick Enderfurth in getting humanitarian aid to parts of Afghanistan not under Taliban control. So it is okay for the aid to go to Taliban areas, American aid; but when I tried to get some aid to some of the other areas, that aid was thwarted.

If there were any doubts, my suspicions about U.S. policy were confirmed in 1997 when the Taliban was saved from total defeat by high- level executives from the Clinton administration. What happened was in April of 1997, the Taliban launched a major offensive aimed at taking control over the northern third of Afghanistan. So they had already controlled two-thirds of Afghanistan; but up until that point, one- third of Afghanistan, the northern part, the northern alliance, were free from Taliban control, and yes, they were under the control, you might say, of regional leaders who were called and are called today warlords, but they are regional leaders. We can debate about the title.

An Afghan general named Malik was one of those regional leaders; and when the Taliban attacked northern Afghanistan, General Malik tricked the Taliban and managed to capture almost all of their front line troops, along with all of their heavy weaponry. It was an utter disaster for the Taliban. The road to the capital, Kabul, was wide open. The Taliban were totally vulnerable and could have been wiped out.

We are talking about early in April of 1997. I sent a message to my friends in northern Afghanistan that Kabul should be taken and that King Zaire Shah should be brought back to oversee a transition government that would eventually evolve and inevitably evolve as well into a democratically elected government, perhaps like what they did in Spain when the King went back and Spain, after the Franco dictatorship, evolved into a democracy; but before the anti-Taliban forces could strike, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Enderfurth and United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson, both Clinton appointees, flew to northern Afghanistan and convinced the anti-Taliban forces this was not the time for an offensive. This, they said, was the time for a cease- fire and an arms embargo. This was the United States policy. When the Taliban were vulnerable, it became time for a cease-fire.

These two top foreign policy leaders of the Clinton administration were there to convince the anti-Taliban forces not to take advantage of the one opportunity they had to defeat their enemy, this Frankenstein monster that provided a base of operations to kill thousands of Americans. These Clinton

appointees saved the Taliban. Right after the cease-fire and release of prisoners that was brokered by Mr. Enderfurth and Mr. Richardson, the Pakistanis began a Berlin-like air lift to resupply and re-equip the Taliban. So much for the arms embargo, which just happened as it always does, worked as an embargo against the good guys, but the bad guys, we just turned the other way.

If I knew, which I did, of this massive resupply effort that was going on for the Taliban, the Clinton administration had to know about this. So they just let the scenario happen while still enforcing the arms embargo against the Taliban's adversaries.

Let us note here that Richard Clarke, the man who testified on the hearings on 9/11, who cast aspersions on our President, who is now trying to take care of business, Richard Clarke was then a high-level official in the Clinton administration's foreign policy establishment. He undoubtedly knew about this effort to save the Taliban, was probably involved in all of these things that I am talking about, and probably approved it. So when you consider his self-serving testimony in which Mr. Clarke besmirched President Bush before the 9/11 investigation panel, keep in mind the role that he played in creating and supporting the Taliban.

Dick Clarke has no credibility. By the way, after this episode had run its course, the newly equipped Taliban army launched another offensive. This time they took almost all of what was left of Afghanistan, except the Panjshir Valley, which was dominated and remained the domain of my friend Commander Masood, the only hold-out against the Taliban, and America did nothing to help them, even as a new gang of radical cutthroats moved in and made Afghanistan its base of operations.

What am I talking about? Al Qaeda. What about al Qaeda? What about bin Laden? Where does he come from? So the reemergence of bin Laden.

Nowadays Osama bin Laden is a household name. Yes, he fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. I saw his tents and his luxurious living conditions. No, United States money did not train him or supply him. The Saudis had plenty of money to take care of that. So the United States Government did not train and supply bin Laden, but he was there; and after the Soviets left, this is an important point, bin Laden left. Not only did America leave but bin Laden himself left. He could have financed the reconstruction of Afghanistan. He came from one of the wealthiest Saudi families. He had contacts all over the gulf region where they were swimming in petrol dollars.

He had all of the money and contacts needed for this noble deed of rebuilding Afghanistan. Instead he left, and it was during this time when he was making even more billions of dollars for his family that he began to focus on the United States as the prime enemy of his faith and he committed himself not to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but to the destruction of America. So this is how God talks to bin Laden. Do not help people, do not help rebuild, just kill innocent women and children and try to terrorize a Nation. Bin Laden is from an enormously wealthy Saudi family. And while our petroleum dollars flowed into Saudi Arabia by the hundreds of billions, the Saudi establishment not only turned a blind eye, but attempted to buy off this and other Islam radicals in their country.

Bin Laden's hatred for us grew during Gulf War I. Our presence in Saudi Arabia was an insult to his faith. The slaughter of unarmed people is consistent with his faith? In the late 1990s, bin Laden began to set up his terrorist underground army for a war that he intended to wage on America. In the mid-1990s he operated not out of Afghanistan, but out of Sudan. America's official position was that bin Laden was a terrorist and was on the most wanted list. In fact, CIA director George Tenet had declared bin Laden as America's number one target. While designated as such, this self-aggrandizing monster organized, financed and implemented attacks that cost tens of billions of dollars and the death of thousands of innocent people, and not just in the United States, but worldwide we have seen these attacks.

Yet the same CIA that declared bin Laden their number one target with all of the power and assets that the CIA has, they could not thwart 9/ 11 and they did not warn us about 9/11? If this is not incompetence, what is incompetence? But this everybody knows. Unfortunately, this is mind-boggling evidence. The fact is, the very basis is they did not warn us, and 9/11 happened and he was their number one target. What more evidence do we need of incompetence on the part of our government and CIA in particular.

Vanity Fair has an interesting report about bin Laden and perhaps America's policy toward bin Laden and why he succeeded. Vanity Fair suggested that when bin Laden was in the Sudan, the Sudanese government cataloged all of the people he spoke to on the phone and in person. Here was a listing of all of the members of the bin Laden network, and the Sudanese government was abruptly turned down when they offered to give the United States the entire catalog. According to Vanity Fair, Madeleine Albright made the decision to turn down the offer and instructed no one to look at or copy the material.

The Sudanese former ambassador personally told me that he tried to hand this list to a representative of the United States Government. It would have permitted us to apprehend bin Laden's entire network, but we threw it back in his face. By the way, Dick Clarke had to know about this decision, too. This is the man who cast aspersions on our President. That was back during the Clinton administration, of course.

Then, an even more personal incident happened when we want to talk about our government's ability to protect us and what was going on during the Clinton administration that led to 9/11. In April and May of 1999, America had an incredible opportunity to capture bin Laden. I was involved, and I am here to report yet another example of the incompetence of those we trusted to protect us from an attack like what occurred on 9/11.

In April 1999, I was contacted by a long-time friend who had been deeply involved in the Afghan fight against the Soviet occupation troops. My friend, an American, had impeccable credentials. He had been in Afghanistan, and was widely known and admired by the Afghan people. My friend called me to tip me off that bin Laden was outside of Afghanistan and could be easily captured. I told him I would pass on his name and phone number and that he would be contacted as soon as possible by the CIA.

The very next day I briefed the CIA and I passed on my friend's phone number and name, and briefed them on his credentials, and told them he could hand them bin Laden on a platter. I called my friend after a week. The CIA had not called him yet. I went back to the Agency, and this time they were adamant they would contact my friend. There was still a chance to get bin Laden. Another week passed. The CIA did not call my friend. This time I went to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) who is the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. When the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) heard my story, he arranged a meeting for me the next day.

So the next day at the appointed time I went to a secure room in a secret and heavily guarded part of the Capitol where I went to meet with the representatives from the CIA. When I got there, there was a CIA representative and National Security Agency and the FBI. That was the bin Laden task force. They were all there, and they apologized for the dunderheads at the CIA who had not called my friend to get the information, and they were going to fall up on it immediately.

A week later I called my friend and he still had not been contacted. I mentioned it to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) who was appalled. The next day a representative from an intelligence agency finally called my friend. The caller's tone of voice suggested that the inquiry was obligatory. It did not make any difference because the trail was already cold.

This incident is bad enough, but then there is the episode of Julie Sears. At the same time I watched the CIA stiff my friend who wanted to tip them off about the whereabouts of bin Laden, there was a young woman who came to my office seeking help. Her name is Julie Sears. She was an analyst at the

Defense Intelligence Agency. She knew I was the only one who understood what was going on in Afghanistan, and was seeking my help because she had been fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Julie Sears has an interesting story. She had worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency for 3 years. She was an Afghanistan analyst. That was her specialty. She went to Afghanistan and was permitted to go to the Taliban areas only. When she returned, she did her study and realized there was information in Northern Afghanistan that was vital for the Pentagon to know if they were to understand the threat that might be taking place and building in Afghanistan. Julie Sears was forbidden to go to the non-Taliban areas of Afghanistan, so she decided to go on her own.

She told her boss she was taking leave, then reported where she was going, officially to the Agency's office that approves that. It was approved that she could go, and she went to Northern Afghanistan on her own and met with Commander Masood and others and came back with some information that was vital. That information was that Commander Masood was telling her that he was capturing troops from the Taliban who were from all over the world and that apparently bin Laden was bringing in huge numbers of people into Afghanistan, training them for terrorist activity, and then letting them fight Masood's forces to get wet behind the ears in battle. And when he captured these people, they were from all over the world. He was talking about the creation of al Qaeda.

Julie Sears came back with that information and she was fired on the spot, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency even refused to let her brief other members of the government and refused to have her report be officially put forward, and no one got that information.

I called in the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I called him to my office and he came there. He was a general, and we will not go any further than that. He had been in charge of the DIA for several years during the Clinton administration. I told him General, this woman risked her life in order to get this information. She is a hero.

His answer was, She is insubordinate.

I said General, I think she risked her life and spent her own money to try to get information for the safety of our country, let us compromise at the very least. Give her back her job, I will not call her a hero, you will not call her insubordinate, we will leave it the way it is.

He said, No, I cannot do that.

I said General, do it and if you blame somebody, blame me. Blame this politician who is politically interfering with the way you manage your operation.

He went back to his office and fired Julie Sears. That is the type of arrogant, bureaucratic attitude that ended up with 9/11.

Finally, there are two other instances that have colored my view of how we ended up with this war in terrorism which could have been avoided, but we were ill-served.

A few days before September 11, my friend anti-Taliban leader Commander Masood was murdered by al Qaeda. After the shock of seeing that my friend had been murdered, I figured it out. Bin Laden had sent his people to kill Masood because he knew the United States would rally behind Masood if there was a major terrorist attack against our people. Bin Laden's terrorist army planned to attack us. It was not hard for me to figure out. They killed Masood so we could not counterattack against them by supporting Masood. Bin Laden's terrorist army was going to attack us. Perhaps Masood's death was a signal to move the plan that was already put in place forward.

The day before 9/11, I called the White House and asked to see National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, it was an emergency. The purpose was to warn her of an imminent terrorist attack on the United States. One of her assistants came on the line and apologized, she was really busy that day but she made an appointment to see me the next day. Yes, on 9/11 I had an appointment to see Condoleezza Rice in the early afternoon to warn her of a major terrorist attack that was about to happen.

The question that needs to be asked was how was I able to figure this out. I have one staff member who is my foreign policy military staff member who helps me with foreign policy issues, why I was able to figure it out but the CIA was not able to figure it out. We know why the DIA was not, but why would the CIA, with billions of dollars at its disposal, hundreds of analysts and bin Laden the number one target, that they could not figure it out.

Incompetence. We need to blame people for their failures, and we need to blame the policies that brought about the problem. Finally on 9/11, once the planes started slamming into buildings, I knew right away what was going on. It did not take a genius at that point, but what also dawned on me, without Masood, there was only one person left on this planet who the Taliban and al Qaeda knew threatened their base, and that was the old king of Afghanistan in Rome. The exiled king, they knew without Masood, he was the only man the Afghan people could rally behind in order to launch a counterattack.

I called the king. I was dumbfounded to hear there was no one there to protect him. This is hours and hours after the planes slammed into the buildings. He was totally exposed. Our number one asset in a war that we were just entering was totally exposed.

I called the American Embassy in Rome and then I called one of the top leaders of the CIA who concurred with me that the king was a primary target of the band of terrorists with whom we were now at war. Yes, he needed to take care of that, and the king would be protected. Five hours later, by chance, I had the opportunity to speak with this very top CIA official again, one of the top leaders of the CIA. And when I asked him if the king was now protected, he said, ``You do not expect us to act that fast?''

So there you have it. We are at war. Thousands of Americans were being slaughtered and the CIA official in charge of protecting us does not take the initiative to try to protect our number one asset that we needed to thwart the Taliban and thwart the people who were murdering our people.

Why did we have 9/11? There you go. Let us remember George Tenet was appointed by Bill Clinton, and he is still the director of the CIA. People tell me that since 9/11, he has been doing a better job, and that some people who were not doing a good job over at the Agency are doing a superb job now. Let me note that.

But when we talk about why 9/11 happened and who was responsible, especially when we have a committee who is trying to besmirch our President who is now taking care of business, let us look at the policies that people who created this.

The committee now investigating 9-11 can tell us about lack of information sharing; but we know that within the FBI itself, there were agents who were begging higher-ups to pay more attention to the possible threat of suspected terrorists who were receiving pilot training. No, there was not an obstruction there. There was not lack of communication or agencies did not talk to each other. That was right within the FBI. But, no, someone in that line of command was arrogant and told them to forget it. There was no absolute proof that this was going to happen. This is called bureaucratic arrogance and bureaucratic inertia or perhaps maybe the arrogance of officialdom or just plain incompetence. Couple that with the policies of the Clinton years that created and nurtured the Taliban and turned Afghanistan into a terrorist training base and a staging area for terrorism, take those things together, that is what brought us into this situation that we find ourselves in today.

Those who run our government should be held accountable for the policies that they advocated that created this Frankenstein monster, and they must have the commitment and be held responsible and accountable for their lack of commitment of getting their job done if their job was to thwart attacks on the United States. 9-11 happened because of the actions or lack of actions of certain people with authority and because of fundamentally bad policy.

Today we have a fundamentally good policy at hand when our President is taking care of business in Iraq. He is

not kicking the can down the road like they did during the last administration. He is going to see that the people of Iraq develop an alternative to radical Islam, and by doing that he has a strategic vision that will build a better tomorrow rather than ignoring any potential threats and permitting the Frankenstein monsters that appeared in the late 1990s to reappear.

If America is to be secure, we must do our job, and that is our job in Congress, and that is to hold people who fail accountable, and we should quit whining about it and quit playing politics. That is our job in Congress, to hold people accountable, to oversee what is happening in the other branches of government and to pass rules and regulations and to make sure that our military is equipped and doing the right job.

We too have to be held accountable perhaps in the 1990s for not stepping forward but instead being focused on other things. The United States Congress was not focused on Afghanistan. It was not focused on these problems as well. And today I think we have a chance to make up for that. We have a chance to work with our President and, instead of playing politics, make sure we win this battle in Iraq and help create a better world.

I am very proud of our President, and I am very confident that our children will not have to suffer another 9-11 because we are doing what is right today.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule, but in opposition to the underlying bill, H.R. 2844. This is a very serious issue, and we have heard two sides of the debate. One emphasizes making appointments, and the other emphasizes having expedited elections.

I have a constitutional amendment proposed, H.J. Res. 92, which satisfies both of these objectives and would permit Members when they are being elected by the public to designate a successor in case they are incapacitated or killed during the time they are in office. This would permit the public to vote on someone's successor as well as the person running for office. It seems to me this is the best approach.

The current approach that we are being offered today in H.R. 2844, I do not believe is the best way to go because it would leave the party leaders to nominate who the choices are for the public. In essence, the party hacks are going to control who the public can vote on. Let us give the public a chance to really vote in an ordinary election and oppose H.R. 2844.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule, but in opposition to the underlying bill, H.R. 2844.

Continuity of representation in Congress is a very serious matter. On one side of this debate we will hear that we must have temporary replacements as quickly as possible in a national emergency. On the other side, we will hear that to be legitimate, any replacement House Members need to be chosen through the electoral process.

I happen to think both sides are right in their stated principles, and that's why I've introduced a congressional succession constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 92, which I believe satisfies the core objectives of each side.

Under my proposal, each general election candidate for the House and Senate would be authorized to appoint, in ranked order, 3 to 5 potential temporary successors. For these appointments to be valid, the successful candidate would have to have submitted them in publicly available form at least 60 days prior to the election. In the case of the elected legislator's death or incapacity, the highest ranked person on the list of successors would become the Acting Senator or Representative. Determination of incapacity in my proposal generally follows the precedent of the 25th Amendment, under which the President either declares his own incapacity, or people he has appointed do so.

The legitimacy of a successor designated under H.J. Res. 92 temporarily succeeding a deceased or incapacitated Representative or Senator is similar to that of a Vice President succeeding a deceased or incapacitated President--not separately elected, but chosen by the principal and known well in advance of the election. Primarily to provide the incentive for incumbent and non-incumbent candidates to submit successor lists, state governors would be empowered to appoint temporary replacements only if no such list is submitted, or if no one listed is able to serve.

Continuity of representation, I think we would all agree, means that the death or incapacity of Senators and Representatives should cause as little change in the composition of Congress as possible, which means that replacements should be politically as much like the deceased or incapacitated Member as possible. Who better to determine who fits that bill than the elected official him- or herself?

There is no reason to limit a satisfactory solution to the ``continuity of representation'' problem to a situation horrible enough to kill or incapacitate a quarter or more of the House. Even 50 or 20 Representatives being killed or incapacitated could make a profound change in the direction and control of the House. And the death or incapacity of even one Representative deprives 600,000 U.S. citizens of representation for the several months it typically takes for the vacancy to be filled. Also, the legitimacy of a congressional succession plan is more likely to be accepted in a national emergency if it has previously worked in smaller tragedies.

When State governors use their current power under the 17th Amendment to appoint temporary Senators, they naturally appoint someone who is politically like themselves, even if that appointee is the complete political opposite of the deceased Senator.

We saw this played out most recently in the aftermath of the tragic death of Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) when control of the Senate was in the hands of the third-party governor of Minnesota.

Also, during the last Congress there was a constant theme of speculation about the fact that the death in office of the aged and ailing Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) would allow the Democratic governor of South Carolina to change party control of the senate for up to 2 years.

There is also clearly a democratic problem with the status quo in the House in which we allow death or incapacity to leave the seat vacant and the district unrepresented for months.

But H.R. 2844 in some ways would actually make the democratic problem worse. Although replacement would be sooner than the status quo, the replacement would be someone whose nomination was decided by party bosses, not by a vote of the people. For all the talk about ensuring that this House of Representatives stays ``the people's house,'' that is just not a democratic way of filling vacancies.

By contrast, H.J. Res. 92 gets an immediate replacement already vetted by the voters, and then allows States to get a regularly elected replacement who is both nominated and elected by the voters. It is obvious to me that H.J. Res. 92 is better for both the continuity of Congress and for democracy than H.R. 2844.

I ask my colleagues to defeat H.R. 2844, and support my congressional succession constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 92.

Mr. Speaker, I have just introduced a constitutional amendment on congressional succession. Much has been said over the last couple years about the need to make sure we have a functioning Congress that is perceived as legitimate in the case of a national disaster that kills or incapacitates a large proportion of Members of Congress. So far, none of the proposals that have been introduced have been able to appeal to a broad, bipartisan cross-section of Congress. I believe the constitutional amendment I have introduced today addresses the major criticisms that have been leveled against the ``continuity of Congress'' constitutional amendments that have been introduced so far.

Under my proposal, each general election candidate for the House or Senate would be authorized to publicly appoint, in ranked order, 3 to 5 potential temporary successors. The legitimacy of a successor designated in this way temporarily succeeding a deceased or incapacitated Representative or Senator is similar to that of a Vice President succeeding a deceased or incapacitated President--not separately elected, but chosen by the principal and known well in advance of the election.

The problem faced by other proposals of how to determine when sufficient members have died or been incapacitated to trigger emergency procedures is avoided in my proposal because no such determination is necessary. If a congressional continuity solution is good enough to use when 110 Representatives are killed or disabled, it should be good enough to use when 50 or 20 or even one Representative dies or becomes unable to discharge his or her duties. Continuity of Congress is certainly important, but so is continuity of representation. Death or incapacity of Representatives and Senators (as in the case of the late Senator Paul Wellstone) should not change the control of either House of Congress or the outcome of votes. Also, the legitimacy of a congressional succession plan is more likely to be accepted in a national emergency if it has previously worked in smaller tragedies.

To further legitimize temporary successors, my proposal would repeal the current power state governors have to appointment temporary Senators. Since the adoption of the 17th Amendment, the American people have expected that the members of both Houses of Congress should be democratically elected. When a more democratic solution is available, we don't need to perpetuate the practice of a governor of another party being able to change the composition and control of the Senate just because a Senator tragically dies or is incapacitated.

My proposal would allow governors to appoint temporary Senators and Representatives only if the elected Senator or Representative has not submitted a list of successors or if none of the listed successors is able to serve. This backup appointment authority provides an incentive for Senators and Representatives (and potential Senators and Representatives) to make sure their ``political will'' is in order, since otherwise their governor could appoint someone they may not like. The backup authority of course also provides a further assurance of congressional continuity.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that my congressional succession constitutional amendment would solve the continuity of Congress problem in a way that would appeal to both sides of the aisle. I ask my colleagues for their support.