Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing legislation that, if passed, will once and for all protect our unborn children from harm. Over 1.3 million abortions are performed in the United States each year and over 38 million have been performed since abortion was legalized in 1973. This is a national tragedy. It is the duty of all Americans to protect our children--born and unborn. This bill, the Right to Life Act, would provide blanket protection to all unborn children from the moment of conception.

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, refused to determine when human life begins and therefore found nothing to indicate that the unborn are persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. In the decision, however, the Court did concede that, ``If the suggestion of personhood is established, the appellants' case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.'' Considering Congress has the constitutional authority to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment, coupled by the fact that the Court admitted that if personhood were to be established, the unborn would be protected, it can be concluded that we have the authority to determine when life begins.

The Right to Life Act does what the Supreme Court refused to do in Roe v. Wade and recognizes the personhood of the unborn for the purpose of enforcing four important provisions in the Constitution: (1) Sec. 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting states from depriving any person of life; (2) Sec. 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment providing Congress the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provision of this amendment; (3) the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which concurrently prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life; and (4) Article I, Section 8, giving Congress the power to make laws necessary and proper to enforce all powers in the Constitution.

This legislation will protect millions of future children by prohibiting any state or federal law that denies the personhood of the unborn, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade. I firmly believe that life begins at conception and that the preborn child deserves all the rights and protections afforded an American citizen. This measure will recognize the unborn child as a human being and protect the fetus from harm. The Right to Life Act will finally put our unborn children on the same legal footing as all other persons. I hope my colleagues will join me in support of this important effort.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and honor Caroline Strickland Bryson upon her retirement after 20 years of loyal and dedicated service to the United States Congress.

Caroline was born on December 10, 1943, in Columbia, South Carolina. She attended the University of South Carolina in 1962-63 and the Institute of Financial Education in 1978. Before coming to work for Congress, she worked for 14 years with Lexington County Savings & Loan and served for four years on the Lexington Town Council.

Caroline began working on Capitol Hill in 1983 with my good friend, the late Honorable Floyd Spence of South Carolina as his Executive Assistant and Office Manager, in which she served for 18 years. In this capacity, Caroline supervised the office staff, managed a million- dollar annual budget and served as the public relations liaison for Congressman Spence. For six of those years, Congressman Spence served as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. As a result of her position and responsibilities in the Chairman's office, Caroline regularly interacted not only with Members of Congress, but with foreign dignitaries, the press, and the President's Cabinet as well.

Following her tenure with Congressman Spence, Caroline served briefly as a Staff Assistant with the House Armed Services Committee and later as the Executive Assistant for Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio. In each of these capacities, Caroline's professional experience, warm charisma, and friendly attitude led her to excel at all levels.

Caroline's southern charm has always been a trademark of her personality. I know from my personal conversations with Congressman Spence that he held Caroline as an invaluable member of his staff and was always impressed with her dependability, loyalty and patriotism. In a place where many people come and go, Caroline is a symbol of commitment and dedication from which many of us could learn. I congratulate her on her retirement and thank her for two decades of honorable service to this Congress and her country. On behalf of the House Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Congress, I wish you the best of luck as you begin this new and exciting chapter of your life.

Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing legislation on behalf of my friend, Mr. Frank Dokter, to right a past error by the Department of Interior in designating the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge. In the last Congress, similar legislation that would have adjusted the Refuge boundaries to allow a family business to continue, was passed by the House, but unfortunately did not see similar outcome in the Senate.

Mr. Dokter and his family operate Walter's Camp, a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) concession on land near the lower Colorado River in Imperial County, California, near and within the Cibola Refuge. The facility provides visitors with a family-friendly outdoors experience, which includes camping, hiking, canoeing, fishing, birdwatching and rock-hounding. In an increasingly crowded Southern California, Mr. Dokter and his family have provided a welcome diversion from city life to many of the region's outdoors enthusiasts.

Walter's Camp was first authorized in 1962, and in August 1964, Public Land Order 3442 withdrew 16,627 acres along the Colorado River to create the Refuge. The withdrawal erroneously included the 140.32 acre Walter's Camp, but neither the BLM nor the Fish and Wildlife Service immediately recognized the mistake. The BLM continued to renew the original permit, allowing the recreational concession use to continue unbroken until the present time. However, given the discovery of the past mistake, the BLM does not have the authority to continue issuing the concession contracts to Walter's Camp.

The Fish and Wildlife Service and the BLM agree that the land has ``insignificant, if any, existing . . . or potential . . . wildlife habitat value,'' as stated in a Department of Interior memo. Therefore, I have introduced this legislation to correct this mistake and allow the BLM to continue to issue contracts to Walter's Camp.

Again, Mr. Speaker, I offer my sincere recommendation that this land be taken out of the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, and that Mr. Dokter's family be allowed to continue their valuable and productive service to our region.

Madam Speaker, 6,500 chemical bombs, which is roughly 1,000 tons of deadly chemical; 2,000 chemical rockets, 8,500 liters of biological agent or medium, and that is enough to produce some 5,000 liters of anthrax; these weapons are the weapons which Chief Weapons Inspector of the United Nations Hans Blix says the Iraqi Government has failed to produce for the inspecting teams. In other words, Iraq has not disarmed.

Now, we have heard in the last several months lots of statements from the administration, and we have heard statements from proponents of the President's policy and from opponents of the President's policy. But these are the statements from the United Nations weapons inspector whose job was to go to Iraq, confront the Iraqi Government with their own statements, their own declarations and documents, some of which we had captured, others which they had produced during the 1990s, list the items line by line saying, here are weapons that you listed; where are they? And, in fact, Iraq has now failed to produce those weapons, meaning Iraq has failed to disarm.

This is an exercise in disarmament. That is where the country which is being inspected is supposed to make a declaration as to what weapons they have, just like South Africa did with its nuclear program, and then offer up the locations of those stockpiled weapons and that machinery that produces the weapons for destruction by this international body. In fact, Iraq has done what we predicted it would do, and that is that it has hidden these weapons, which it heretofore had proclaimed it had. We know they have them, we know they have them buried somewhere, and they are failing to produce them. That is, they are failing to disarm, and those are the words of the Chief Weapons Inspector.

Madam Speaker, let me just go to a couple of particulars once more. I am quoting Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix. He says, ``The document indicates,'' and he received the document from the Iraqi Air Force as to how many bombs they had had at one time, chemical bombs, because we know they use chemical bombs on their own people and on their neighbors, and he said, ``The document indicated that some 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of some 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.''

So, Madam Speaker, we know what they had, we know what they have. Incidentally, Chief Inspector Hans Blix goes through each one of these circumstances where they have failed to come forward and produce the weapons or show evidence that they were destroyed. And in these cases that I have cited, there is no evidence that they have destroyed any of this stuff. We know it is still there, and we know it is there in most cases not by evidence that we received through a third party, but by the statements of Iraq itself at a previous time.

In turning to biological weapons, Mr. Blix said, and I quote, ``I mentioned the issue of anthrax to the Council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.'' So Iraq claimed that they had gotten rid of this in secret, and he says, ``I find no convincing evidence for its destruction.''

He goes on. He says, ``As I reported to the Council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq's submission to the panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December, 2002, declaration, Iraq resubmitted the Amorim Panel document, but the table showing this particular import of media,'' and this is the media from which you grow anthrax, extremely deadly anthrax, he said, ``The table showing this report was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.'' Meaning that Iraq pulled out this 650 kilos of anthrax media, simply tore that page out of the report, renumbered the report, and handed it to the weapons inspectors. That 650 kilos, incidentally, is enough growth media to produce about 5,000 liters of anthrax.

So we know now that Saddam Hussein has maintained and kept both biological weapons and chemical weapons, and he has failed to turn them over. He has failed to disarm.

Does he have a method to deliver these weapons? Yes, he does. They include the AS-2 and the AF-2 missiles, which are illegal missiles, because these missiles have been tested for ranges beyond 150 kilometers that Saddam Hussein is limited to.

He has also refurbished his missile infrastructure, that means his capability to develop and build missiles to carry these chemical and biological weapons to their targets. He has also acquired, very recently, some 300 rocket engines.

So the point is, Mr. Speaker, that when the smoke all clears, at least with respect to the work that has been done so far, I think what has happened is pretty predictable, because we on the Committee on Armed Services in the House had in open session an Iraqi engineer who appeared before us who was part of Saddam Hussein's weapons development program. He said to us that even in the 1990s when we had inspectors on the ground and those inspectors were being shown the insides of big empty buildings, a few miles away Saddam Hussein's program was going at full steam and the inspectors did not know anything about it.

So take this country, which is twice the size of the State of Idaho, and take this small contingent, roughly the size of a police force in a small American city, and spread them out over a piece of land twice the size of Idaho. And having given the other guys literally years to hide their weapons, it is no surprise that no weapons are found. In fact, if some of our inspectors walked into the middle of one of these big

empty buildings and actually found a large quantity of biological weapons sitting there in the front of one of those big empty buildings that the maid had somehow forgotten to clean up the night before, the Iraqi bureaucrat who was in charge of that particular deception process, and they have a whole agency devoted to deception, would be two things: he would be considered to be the dumbest bureaucrat in Iraq and, shortly thereafter, the deadest.

So the idea that somehow we are going to stumble upon a large number of weapons is not realistic. That is what we have been saying for a long time.

The message to us is very clear: Iraq has not disarmed. They have no intention of disarming. The documented proof of their weapons systems that they have maintained, when matched against what they have produced, shows that they still have enormous chemical and biological weapons on hand, along with the means to deliver them.

I am happy to yield to my friend, the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. Speaker, I would tell the gentleman, we have documents that were produced by Iraq during the 1990s where they gave us the names of some 3,500 key people in the development of their chemical and biological weapons. Do Members know what has happened to those people? They have disappeared.

We asked them during this round, according to Hans Blix, to produce those people. They only produced 400 of them. Of course, they do not let any of them talk without an Iraqi keeper or bureaucrat standing next to them. Also, they do not even produce the other 3,000 people. Those 3,000 people in Iraq who are associated with their chemical and biological weapons program have apparently disappeared from the face of the Earth. They tell us we may get another 80 to talk to at some point, but the 3,000 have disappeared.

I thank my distinguished colleague, and I thank him for all the work that he has done and for the work that he is going to do as chairman of this new subcommittee on the Committee on Armed Services, which is going to oversee a great deal of this activity.

Let me just end by saying that we predicted that the tours that the U.N. weapons inspectors were given would not result in them walking into a big cavernous building and having a supply

of chemical or biological weapons sitting there on the floor of that particular facility waiting for them to scoop it up.

We predicted that the Iraqi Government, which has devoted entire agencies to hiding this stuff as effectively as they could, will have done just that, that is, to hide it in such a way that we would be more likely to be able to ask all of the drug dealers in Washington, D.C. to amass all of their illicit cocaine and marijuana and pile it in one big area where the authorities could come down and seize it on a given day.

The burden was on Iraq to disarm. That is the key. It is not a game where we have certain rules and if they are able to beat us, if they are able to hide this stuff well enough, we do not find it. We know they have it because the 6,500 chemical bombs, the 2,000 chemical rockets, the precursors for 5,000 liters of anthrax, are weapons which exist according to Iraqi documentation, not our documentation but their documentation that they had produced earlier; also, those 3,000 people who are associated with the programs, those 3,000 technical people who now have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

So they have it. They have it just as surely as Nazi Germany had a weapons program of massive proportions in the mid-1930s, even though they were giving reports to the Allies that the air force that we appeared to see in the skies was actually flying clubs that were organized for recreation; but we knew that they were in fact producing weapons. In this case, we know for a fact that Iraq is still heavily weaponized, with the ability to kill lots of its neighbors and lots of Americans and their allies.

So this report is, I think, more dramatic in what it says they have not produced than what it says they have produced. I think it is becoming clearer and clearer that the inspections are not going to produce a situation in which the inspectors walk into a giant facility and, lo and behold, there are piles of weapons sitting there on the floor produced by the most ineffective Iraqi bureaucrat in history. They will not disarm.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I think it is clear one last time to point out that there are 6,500 chemical bombs that Iraq will not give up, it has not disarmed; a couple of thousand chemical rockets; and 8,500 liters of what is known as biological media for the production of anthrax that is capable of producing about 5,000 liters of anthrax. So they have not disarmed. And facts are stubborn things. Those are the facts.

Mr. Speaker, I would recognize the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Collins), who has a major infantry base in his district, the great Fort Benning, where I have spent lot of time low crawling.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his very eloquent point. Saddam Hussein has not disarmed. We know what he has. He has not brought it forward, and we will continue to march down the next several weeks to see if he brings those weapons out for destruction.

Mr. Speaker, I proudly represent Southern California communities, many of which are along the U.S.-Mexico border. These border communities, by and large, have a good working relationship with their neighbors in Mexico. Unfortunately, their proximity to the border causes them to suffer the consequences of Mexico's more lax environmental requirements, especially with respect to air quality. As we all know, air does not respect the international boundaries we put in place and, as a result, border communities are

often penalized for activities that are actually happening south of the border and beyond their control.

At least partially due to the heavy regulatory and environmental compliance burdens, electrical generation facilities are locating in Mexico. While some companies are building power plants that meet U.S. standards, for which they should be commended, other companies are choosing to operate dirty plants as opposed to incurring the additional cost of installing the best available emission control devices.

As a result, I am reintroducing the Southern Border Air Quality Protection Act. This bill takes an immediate and important step in acknowledging that we must consider air pollution a regional issue that does not respect international boundaries. My legislation will prohibit the export of natural gas to any electricity generation facility located in Mexico and within 50 miles of the U.S. that does not meet the air pollution emission rate requirements in the nearest U.S. air quality control region. In addition, the legislation includes a grandfathering clause so that any plants put in service before December 31, 2002 are exempted from this law.

This bill is necessary to protect our border communities from rapidly increasing emissions from unregulated, substandard power plants that leave U.S. communities vulnerable to Federal regulatory sanctions. If a plant isn't good enough to build and operate five miles inside the border in California, then it shouldn't be good enough to operate five miles across the border in Mexico.

I realize this is a first step and that more work must be done to create cross border air quality zones. I look forward to working with the appropriate U.S. agencies and the Mexican government to implement such binational agreements. In the meantime, this legislation is immediately necessary for the protection of our border communities and I urge all my colleagues to join me in this effort to ensure the clean air throughout the region.