Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, this is the most pathetic rule since I have been here, and I am not the only one who believes this. Last weekend I was on a walk. I met an old friend of mine who told me his son, as we were speaking, was landing in Mosul, Iraq with the United States Army. And my friend and his wife were raising their grandson, a 2-year-old because this soldier is a single parent.

And while he is over there fighting with courage, this House doesn't have the courage to debate Iraq. And every single amendment that was offered that would offer a strategic vision that questions George Bush's decisions in Iraq was denied.

The Abercrombie amendment to say we should have some plan to leave by 2010, denied. The Cardin amendment to have some plan, denied.

This House basically today has said it is only going to do one thing and that America should do only one thing, and that is trust the eminent judgment of President George Bush, who is apparently infallible, unquestionable, and nothing that this U.S. Congress should challenge.

My friend begs to differ, whose son landed in Mosul. This House should challenge George Bush on Iraq. We should have a debate on it. We should not ignore it. While our soldiers have courage enough to fight, we ought to have courage enough to fight George Bush's misguided policies in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, the continued violation of Americans' privacy by illegal spying cannot be tolerated. Today we found that this administration is building a database of millions of Americans' phone calls to know who we called and who called us. This is a privacy right that needs to be protected and respected, and we have now seen multiple violations of this principle where illegal spying has occurred.

The U.S. Congress must hold hearings. It must stop illegal spying. I will be offering an amendment on the defense appropriations bill to assure that no taxpayer money can be used for illegal spying to violate the privacy rights of Americans.

The excuse we may hear from the administration is that, no, these conversations may not be taped. But who Americans called is a privacy right and is protected by the law, and who calls us is a privacy right and it is protected by the law. It is protected by section 222 of the Communications Act, it is protected by the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution, and it is protected by the common sense of the American people that we ought to protect our privacy and democracy at the same time we are protecting our security. And both can be protected.

The fact of the matter is that the FISA law builds in the ability of the Federal Government to in fact crack down on terrorism, something we all want to do. We want to have an aggressive program of electronic eavesdropping on al Qaeda and other terrorists, but we want to make sure that that is done within the law on the simple proposition that when the Federal Government does electronic eavesdropping, there is another set of eyes overseeing that program: our judges, our judicial system.

What the law demands and Americans demand and the Constitution demands is that there is a review through the warrant process so that a warrant is obtained when this eavesdropping occurs. And if there is not time for that, under the FISA law, warrants can be obtained 72 hours thereafter retroactively.

So what we are saying, and I think the broad swath of the millions of Americans who have to know tonight, is that somewhere in this country there is a database sitting with your records that belong to you that is subject to your privacy that has now been violated by the Federal Government, without any review whatsoever by a judge and without review whatsoever and oversight of the United States Congress. That is wrong, and it has simply got to stop.

The U.S. Congress has an obligation. It is an obligation to stand up to an administration that refuses to abide by the law. This is a precious thing, democracy; and democracy is most precious when it is threatened. When we are currently involved in a war, it is most important to rise to the protection of our privacy.

We have been involved in these fights for our privacy now for some period of time. We have fought to protect the private records of our cell phone records from being sold to telemarketers; we have fought to prevent our tax records being sold to other people who will market to us; and now we need to fight to make sure there is a review and a warrant given before, or at least after, our phone records are put into some master database with the privacy of millions of Americans violated.

The reason we found out about this today is that the journalists have reported on this. Unfortunately, the administration has not been forthcoming to tell the U.S. Congress what they have been doing; and the U.S. Congress, the folks elected by people from 435 districts in 50 States, ought to have access to this information so that there can be oversight. There is not a review of this.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Congress needs to stand up and be counted, stand up and be counted for the privacy rights of America, to stop the violation of privacy that we have in our phone records. Who we called and who called us is a private matter. It ought to be protected, and we are going to ensure that it is.

I do, actually. There is only one person that the Bush administration has fired involving Iraq policy. There is one single person. And that person was General Shinseki, who was right about Iraq.

He had the huge error in this administration of being truthful, forthright and accurate when he said we needed 400,000 to 500,000 troops to provide security in Iraq so it would not degrade into anarchy as it has done.

And as a result of that, the President, in the way they do this with the military, effectively fired him. He is the only person who the Bush administration has removed from office in Iraq, not the people really responsible for the problem at Abu Ghraib, not the Secretary of Defense, not Paul Wolfowitz who came to us and told us the incredible falsehood that this whole operation was going to be paid for, because Iraq was going to pump more oil, and it would not cost a penny to the American taxpayers. And you know how many billions of dollars now the taxpayers have suffered.

None of those people who have gotten almost every single thing wrong in Iraq that you can imagine. If you were going to design a train of errors, misjudgment, inefficiency, incompetence, acceptance of outright fraud in the contracting procedure, it would be hard to design a more inept train of abuses than this one, yet this President has sat there and done nothing.

Now, I have to admit he has not said they have done a heck of a job. He has not used that language. But he has failed to hold anybody accountable. And one of the things that I am very pleased that you have been a leader on, is holding the administration accountable for this, is accountable for U.S. tax dollars.

You know, there was a Democrat, Harry Truman, during World War II, who convened the Truman Commission in the U.S. Senate, and he insisted that during war time, even during war time, it is important to not allow the abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars. And he ferreted out some of the fraud and abuse in military contracting that was going on in World War II even when our whole Nation was in jeopardy, in an existentialistic sense was in jeopardy, but he still said we need to be careful with these dollars.

We have had umpteen billions of dollars disappear into the sands of Iraq with nothing to show for it, no meaningful reconstruction, but tens of billions of dollars gone. We have seen multiple GAO reports, Inspector General reports.

We have seen multiple contractors, many of whom have been very closely

aligned with this administration; there is no secret about that. What we are saying as Democrats is real simple. The U.S. Congress needs to do its job to ferret out these abuses, find the people responsible, relieve them from duty, and hold these contractors responsible to the American taxpayers. That is not too much to ask.

This Congress has been a lap dog. It has been a see-no-evil, hear-no- evil group, while one of the greatest abuses of the American taxpayer ever happened in the sands of Iraq, despite the tragic loss, which of course is a thousand times worse of our men and women in Iraq.

So the Democratic Real Plan for Security is that it is the job of Congress to hold the administration accountable to the American people, and the American taxpayer, and we will do that job at the right moment. So I am glad that you have brought this issue up.

I certainly will. I will point out that Democrats do not claim to be the sole source of genius and wisdom in America. Republicans have great ideas too, and they did in the 9/11 Commission, chaired by ex-Senator Kean of New Jersey, a Republican. He was one of the co-chairs of the commission.

A group of Republicans and a group of Democrats got together and did an evaluation on what this country really needs to do. And they have since then, they have made their recommendations, have issued this score card to evaluate the administration's performance to see whether those bipartisan recommendations have been implemented.

And if it was your son or daughter's score card, the kid would not be going to any movies or watching any television, because it was full of Ds and Fs. The most amazing part that is important, I represent the area in Seattle, we have a huge port. And when I tell people that despite this bipartisan Republican and Democrat recommendation to do screening of all of our containers coming in, of radiological materials, either a dirty bomb, the makings of a dirty bomb, or worst case scenario, a fission bomb coming in through our containers, and we know the proliferation that has gone on in the last few years, when you report to people that despite that foreknowledge, the administration can only tell us a tiny little percentage of those are screened for radiological material, that is a sorry state of affairs. And there is no excuse for that failure. We have had a bipartisan consensus, at least on the commission, to get that job done. And the job simply has not been done.

And the administration has had its eye off the ball of this major league threat. This is the big threat, by the way, at least in my estimation, and I think of the 9/11 Commission, of a dirty bomb or some day a fission product coming into this country. That is the real threat.

By the way, it is probably 1,000 times more likely to be delivered in a container coming through Los Angeles or Seattle or Boston or Gulfport, than coming in from 10 miles up in space in an ICBM that none of these countries have, at least at the moment. That is where the real threat is.

But, instead, the administration has been off spending billions of dollars on the Star Wars Project, and refuses to do more than 3 or 4 percent of the containers, which is a known threat, which is a known vector of radiological material; and they refuse to act.

That is unconscionable. We Democrats intend to implement a bipartisan approach to this, which is what was in this 9/11 Commission. And people can look it up. It is on the Internet. You can look at the report card. You know, I thought, I was hopeful after that report card came out that the President would get his Cabinet together and hold that report card and say, what is going on here? This is absurd. I am President of the United States, the most powerful Nation in the world, and we are getting Fs on securing our ports, when we have got the technology to do this.

I thought that he would do that. Instead, you know what he did? He walked around handing out Medals of Freedom to Paul Wolfowitz who got every decision you could possibly imagine wrong on Iraq. He told his homeland security people they are doing a great job, when 95 percent of the cargo is not screened coming into our ports. That is not a heck of a job. And he has failed to respond to that report from this again bipartisan commission in any way that I can fashion.

That is one of the reasons Congress needs to act. There is a reason the framers set up a couple branches of government, so that when one branch was not doing the job, which right now is the executive, Congress can act.

Well, I would agree with you. You have to ask, why has this happened? And I think it comes from an attitude of unbridled rose- colored glasses and feel-good politics. The administration wanted to have a war we could all just kind of feel good about, not have any personal sacrifice associated with it, not have any concern on our tax policy about that whatsoever.

It was feel-good politics, and the attitude is that we try to all feel good over here, and the only people who would be suffering are the men and women in Iraq. That is a wholly irresponsible way to fight a war, and that is what has gone on.

I wonder if I can address a little different issue of our Real Security plan, and that is what I like about the aggressiveness of the Democratic Real Security plan, because as you know, you have been a leader on this, we Democrats feel we need to be aggressive in disarming our enemy.

The most effective effort is offensive. And we want to be offensive, not meaning disliked, but offensive in being aggressive and assertive to disarm our enemies. And I want to mention two ways, one short and one not so short.

The short way we want to disarm our enemies, we want to make sure that they cannot get access to fissionable materials, which frankly are as loose and insecure tonight as we speak; it is roaming around places around middle Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, which is still secured with maybe a bicycle lock. I pay more attention to my Chinelli bicycle than some of these old failed States in the middle part of Europe to fissionable material.

And we need to secure that. And as numerous reports have indicated, the executive branch of this government has failed to secure the number one threat to this country, which is that fissionable material. And we will get that job done. We will make the investment it takes to do that, because that has got to be an extremely high priority for this country.

So one way you disarm your opponent is you take away their fissionable material that is laying around all over the world right now. And we will get that job done.

But the second thing is even bigger. We need to disarm our enemy from their financial resources to attack us, and that means that we have got to be energy independent and stop sending our dollars to the Middle East. We have got to start sending them to Middle Western farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks, in this regard.

Because of that $3-plus, one of my staffers paid $3.35 this morning, that $3.35 gallon, a good part of that goes to the CEO of Exxon, who just walked away with $400 million in a bonus package, and the rest, a lot, goes to the Middle East to arm our enemies.

And we know that many of those regimes have been playing footsie with al Qaeda and various other groups. We know that our money we are spending is going to arm our enemies, and so we believe what we need in this country is an energy independence program that is not just rhetorical, but is real. And I was pleased to have the President give us some rhetoric during his State of the Union speech.

He said, we have an addiction to oil. Well, welcome to the land of recognition, Mr. President. We have been waiting 6 years, but, nevertheless, it is good to hear the rhetoric. But the problem is we are not seeing the reality.

The week he talked about breaking our addiction to oil, he fired 100 scientists at our renewable lab in Boulder, Colorado. When the press suggested that seemed somewhat inconsistent, those pink slips were pulled back, and those scientists were back on the job.

But we think we need something as bold as John F. Kennedy about in the 1960s, we need an Apollo project, we are going to go the moon, we will invest in the capital and wisdom and technical brilliance in this country. We are going to take a big step forward, one big step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

We need now a giant leap in energy policy in this country to depend on the technical prowess of this country, because Kennedy knew, and he stood right behind you right there. We are in an historic place here. He stood there March 9, 1961, and he said, we are going to go to the Moon. That was an amazing point. Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a little softball into orbit. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.

A lot of people thought that was an absurdly ambitious goal, but he understood a central tenet of the American character is that when challenged, we respond, number one. Number two, we are the greatest tinkers since, you know, whoever in Space 2001 invented the bone as a weapon. We are the people that can invent our way out of this.

We need to make the investments to do that. If you look at what the President has done in his budget, it is a pathetically insufficient commitment to this goal. We got so far two words from the President. We got energy independence.

We got two words, but we have no funds to do the job from him, no bold strategic challenge, no commitment to science, no commitment in our academic institutions. You look at the money, he came out, and I was listening carefully to the State of the Union address. He had this bold rhetoric and he said, therefore, I am committing a few million dollars to this project. He has committed to this budget for biofuels less than we spend in Iraq in about 18 hours. That is what we have committed to this project.

We have men over there fighting a war now for 3-plus years at about $80 billion a year, and he is committing less than 18 hours of what we are spending in Iraq to try to disarm our enemies. That is not a wise strategy. We need a significant energy plan to solve this problem.

We have it in the new Apollo energy project, H.R. 2828, that I have introduced and others. That is a bold step, leap for mankind that we will get this job done. So I am happy that the Democrats have embraced real policies and not just rhetoric.

Well, I appreciate your words, but in a sense it is easy in contrast to brand X. If you look at the energy bill that the Republican-controlled Congress that was promoted by this President, it is hardly a secret that this President had substantial history in the oil and gas industry, and it would not be surprising if that affected decisions, just like the secret meetings that the Vice President had when he designed the energy independence. In the secret meetings the President has always refused to tell us about, I doubt that they were hatching a plot to create biofuels and energy independence from the oil and gas industry. I suspect that was not a discussion, had we been a fly on the wall to listen to what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about a way to increase the profits of the oil and gas industries that led to $3 a gallon of gas and the largest profits of any corporation in the solar system history in this quarter in the oil and gas industry. Maybe that is what happened. Can't be sure.

But in any event, the policy that this Republican-controlled Congress came out with that was promoted by the President of the United States, according to the Department of Energy, this is the Bush's own governmental agencies, will increase our imports of oil from the Middle East. I want to say that again because I think it is very, very important.

The President, in his State of the Union Address, said, I want to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. That is the White House, the President of the United States. The Department of Energy, which works for him presumably, their analysis of his policies have concluded that the imports from imported oil from the United States will increase after full implementation by a significant amount. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I was shocked at how much they would increase when I looked at this report, under their policies.

Why is that? First off, to me it takes a little chutzpah to talk about it up there and out there in the real world have a policy that will increase your imports. But why is it such a grand failure? Well, it is because they refused to do the things that we know that works.

You know, we know it works. Brazil is now energy independent. Last week, actually, they achieved total domestic energy independence. The way they did it principally was to develop a biofuels industry. They didn't mess around. The President of Brazil didn't just give some nice speech and say, I believe we are going to break our addiction to oil. He actually did some policies.

What they did is they made sure that consumers in Brazil when they bought a car would have a car that would burn either gasoline or ethanol. They freed Brazilian consumers to make sure that you get to decide what you burn, not the oil companies and not the automobile manufacturers. They insisted that every consumer when you buy a car, you get a flex-fuel vehicle that can burn either gas or ethanol.

When they did that, that immediately created an enormous demand for an ethanol industry. Without subsidies for the Brazilian government, boom, 40 percent, 6 years later, 40 percent of all the transportation in Brazil is run on ethanol, which does not feed the Middle East and the sheiks, has zero emissions of global warming gases, because it is circular, it has no net increase of global warming gases.

Brazil achieved that not because they are smarter than we are, not because they have better natural resources than we do. We have got the Midwest, we have got Microsoft, we have got Intel, we have got Google. You know, they have got some smart people, too. But what they had was leadership that had actual policies rather than just rhetoric. That is what we need.

The second thing I just want to point out, we have had experience in achieving this in the United States. It was during the late 1970s. We improved the efficiency of our cars by over 60 percent in 5 years. We were on a path of doubling the efficiency of our cars while increasing safety, I might add, while increasing safety for 5 years in this country. Then those policies were stopped under a Republican President.

The fact of the matter is that had we continued on that path, if we had simply continued to improve the efficiency of our cars, as we did for those 5-year periods, today you and I would not be having this discussion because we would have been free of Middle Eastern oil today. That is the opportunity cost that we experience when we got off this bandwagon at doing smart things in energy.

I just point this out; you know, we have a history of success in this. We just need the policies to get it done.

We have seen some pretty amazing rhetorical epiphanies here in this Chamber. For the last year Democrats on three separate occasions have attempted to pass a bill to make sure that the Federal Trade Commission has the explicit authority to investigate and punish price gouging by the oil and gas industry. We wanted to make it real clear that we wanted that investigation, and even when there is a lack of complicity, where there is price manipulation, that should be shut down. I think Americans are with us 100 percent on that. Three times we tried to pass that. The Republicans blocked us every single time.

Now, last week I heard the Speaker of the House say, we demanded an investigation of price gouging in the oil and gas industry. Welcome, I guess; better late than never. But we will see if we really get that law passed here. It will be interesting. We heard the press conference. If we had the vote, we could have done that today. It will be interesting to see.

I just want to preface my comments about the strategies and tactics, about the people we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think any discussion needs to center on them, at the point of the spear, at our request.

When I think about these issues, I think about the soldiers I met in Landshtul, Germany, just before Thanksgiving, where most of our badly wounded go after they leave Iraq. We have an amazing medical system, which I am happy about, taking care of our men and women. By the time they get to Germany, a lot of them are conscious, and so I had a chance to meet these folks. I met a couple of young men from Bremerton, Washington, just south of my district, both of whom had very severe injuries. Their legs were up and pins were sticking out and tubes coming every which way. One guy had both arms shattered, up and attached to pieces of metal. They were very seriously injured guys. I just wanted to say thank you to them and asked if there was any way we could help them.

I asked both, What do you have in mind? And both of them said, in fact all of them I talked to, said one thing: I want to get back to my unit as soon as possible.

Whatever you think of the Iraq operation, whatever you think of the strategy, I think anybody who met these people would be incredibly proud and reach one bipartisan conclusion, that they deserve the best that America can provide.

And you have to ask the question: Have they gotten the best that America could provide? And the answer is a resounding no, they have not. They have not gotten the personal body armor, they have not gotten the armored Humvees, they have not gotten basic equipment, on occasion, that we have talked about. The National Guard in particular has been shorted some important equipment. They simply have not gotten the best that America can provide.

And when you ask the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, why we sent these people in, not in cardboard, but essentially thin-skinned Humvees with no protection, his answer was, and I am paraphrasing, well, we didn't know anybody was going to be shooting at us in the rear. We have the armor up in front. But, geez, the guys in the rear? Who could have imagined that an Iraqi would be unhappy that a Western occupation army of 150,000 people roaming through might be unhappy about that, and might be shooting at our people, and might be doing improvised explosive devices? That was beyond our comprehension.

Just like it was beyond their comprehension that the levees could be topped during Katrina. Those two failures of obvious common sense I think have to go down in the top 10 of ineffective, incompetent, uncaring, rank mistakes, and that is too easy a word to use, in American history. Levees won't be topped and people won't be shooting at us back in the streets of Baghdad for the years we were going to be there. That was the working assumption of Donald Rumsfeld and the President of the United States when they sent our troops into harm's way.

I can't think of a possible excuse for that bone-headed assumption. As a result, our people aren't coming home, a lot of them. And the anger I feel is matched by a lot of my constituents who feel this way, whether they are for or against the Iraq war. They deserve better than they are getting.

And the Democrats are going to insist that when our people go into action they are going to be fully equipped, and we will not go in there

with sort of a hallucination that it is going to be like the film clip of the Champs Elysees in 1944. They should have anticipated that. So I wanted to get that off my chest.

But I want to say one thing about intelligence, if I can.

Well, I agree. And I want to, if I can, talk about intelligence for a moment because I think that in the nature of the warfare we are involved in with terrorism, intelligence, if not everything, is most of our ability to stop a terrorist attack.

What I want to point out is that we have an enormous shortfall of HUMINT, or human intelligence. We have an enormous shortfall of human agents around the world. And Democrats have committed to ramping up that capability in this country because we recognize that in the new threat environment we have, the new threat is much more likely to come from an al Qaeda ring personally delivered by a taxi cab and bus than it is by an ICBM from some particular other place on the planet.

You wonder why this administration is not ramping up the human intelligence around the globe. There are a couple of reasons. One, is they would rather put the money in the Star Wars projects by the tens of billions of dollars. That is number one. And number two, frankly, because this President worked so ineffectively with the rest of the world leading up to Iraq that we have had some difficulty in having as many alliances around the world as we need in this war on terrorism.

We are certainly experiencing that in Iran right now, when we are trying to rally the world on a sanction policy against Iran, and we are not getting as much cooperation as we should. And, frankly, one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is not particularly pleased that the President refused to work with the rest of the world in Iraq.

So what I would say about the Democratic approach to intelligence is there are two things we believe are the most effective in intelligence work, or at least two things we are vastly short in: electronic surveillance, very important, and we can talk more about that in a minute; but we have to boost the human intelligence, the number of effective agencies that have penetrated these cells around the world and can work with other governments in that regard.

Two, we have to rally the world to a global alliance that is against us. And when we have a chief executive officer that tells the rest of the world to go fish on Iraq and global warming and on the land mine treaty, and you name it, it doesn't make you a very effective rallier of troops. And that is a problem.

I don't think it was Yogi Berra.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 1, 2006, at noon.

Madam Speaker, if you liked the administration and the Republican Congress' response to Hurricane Katrina, you are going to love the response to this gas crisis. Because while folks said they could not anticipate that the levees would be topped, when you do what the administration has done, you should have been anticipating $3 plus, $3.25, and $3.35 gasoline at the pump.

When you go into secret energy meetings, as the Vice President did, to devise an energy strategy and come out with a giveaway to the energy industry; when you have a President who refuses to act when Enron was stealing billions of dollars from the economy,

telling the oil industry you can go ahead and do the same thing because I will not act; when three times Democrats stood proudly to have a bill to allow the FTC to investigate this price gouging and the Republicans voted in lockstep against it, you could anticipate the levees would be topped, and you could anticipate that the oil companies would run rampant with the price of gasoline.

Now, how has this President responded? He wants to do this thing with a slow one-half of one-third of 1 percent increase in production to do something about it. If your house is on fire, the President would bring you a thimbleful of water, and that is the only assistance we are getting. We need real action, not these baby steps.

Thank you. And I have a simple message. We Democrats want to strike a preemptive blow against our enemies in the Middle East. And the single, most effective preemptive blow we have is to starve them from resources with which to attack us. We know where the money came from to finance the attack on September 11. It came from our addiction to oil that must stop.

And we now have a President who said he wants to break our addiction to oil, and we welcome his language about this. But we cannot run our cars on rhetoric. We cannot run a national energy independence program on rhetoric. We need real policies. And we are offering them. We have offered to the country the New Apollo Energy Act, H.R. 2828. That is H.R. 2828. If folks want to look at it, they are welcome to see the most comprehensive plan that will really deliver a situation where we send less money to Middle Eastern sheiks and more money to middle- American farmers. That is a policy that we will embrace, and we will be more secure than we are today.

I thank you for letting me have my few words today.

Mr. Speaker, I want to echo my friend Mr. Kingston's remarks and urge Members to take a look at his and Mr. Engel's bill for another reason besides national security, that is, it has the additional benefit of dealing with the climate change that the globe is now experiencing. This is kind of a two-fer, the bill that Mr. Kingston just described.

One, it can free us from our addiction to Middle Eastern oil or help in that direction; and, two, it can deal with a problem that you can read about in Time magazine. The cover story in Time magazine is about global warming. It says: be afraid, be very afraid.

I hate to think it is from fear. I like to think it is from hope. We ought to have the hope that we can free ourselves from our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, and we can stop global warming if we do some of the commonsense things that Mr. Kingston and Mr. Engel have proposed.

For those who have been paying attention to the science in the last month, we have learned that the Greenland glaciers are accelerating at a factor of two. The Arctic has lost 36 cubic miles of ice. Polar bears are drowning due to a lack of ice. It is time for some action. Take a look at this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to be certain that I understand the requirement in the bill that State food safety laws be identical to the ten sections of Federal law that are listed in section 2(a)(6) of the bill. Am I correct that each of these ten sections provides a basis for determining whether food is adulterated?

If the gentleman will continue to yield. ``Identical'' in this context does not mean that every word has to be exactly the same, does it?

If a State's basic adulteration law is identical to the Federal adulteration law, can a State apply that law as it determines to be proper?

I thank the gentleman for this explanation, and I have a further inquiry.

I understand that if a State law is identical to the Federal, that State regulators can apply State law to particular circumstances where FDA has not.

Suppose a State enacts a law that applies to State's basic adulteration requirement to a particular substance or circumstance. So the law would say, for example, that the State has determined that any food that contains more than X amount of Y poisonous or deleterious substance adulterates the food within the meaning of that State's food adulteration law, would that be permissible?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for those clarifications.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you mentioning this little small business that has had a little success, it is called Microsoft, in my district that has been one area that has recognized the power of innovation. There are many others in my district.

I will just tell you, I want to mention a couple of my favorite constituents, about why they believe this Democratic Innovation Agenda makes sense, that we should seize the creative powers of Americans and put it in harness.

One of my favorite constituents, my mother, I talked to her today, and she was brimming with laughter. We had a great talk, and it was great to hear her laughing because she went through a tough patch with some health problems about 6 months ago, and it was a tough time for her.

Since then, she has got on a medical technology that was developed in Seattle by some brilliant doctors doing research in basic and applied research; and because of their work now done over a decade ago, my mother was laughing today and probably is alive today. The reason that she was laughing today is that someone had the wherewithal and the foresight to make an investment in basic research medical technology involving the blood system over 10 years ago.

We have rolled out this idea to increase and accelerate research in medical technology because we belief there

are a lot of people that can use this; but unfortunately, the budget the President has submitted to Congress today, we had Mr. Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services today, he let us know that they are proposing to cut blood research by $20 million. At this time of the most rapid time of potential scientific growth, when we have mapped the human genome, when we could be looking at the dawn of medical technology, that we could make penicillin look like a small investment, they want to cut medical research.

Mr. Speaker, I will just mention my other constituent who is a friend of mine. I will just call him Bill. He is a 55-year-old guy, great guy, plays basketball. He had prostate cancer. He is being treated now with new technology developed, again, in Seattle, bragging about the hometown team a little bit here, about three or 4 years ago. We hope things are going to go well.

We have rolled out saying we should accelerate our budget for research into cancer because we are on the cusp of some major breakthroughs, principally because of our genetic development to map predisposition and risk factors to this regard. But what does the President's budget want to do? They want to cut $40 million out of the cancer budget for research this year, $40 million. They want to cancel 634 grant programs now existing for research in some of these emerging fields.

Mr. Speaker, just on that note about the difference between rhetoric and reality, it can be pretty stunning here in Washington, D.C.

The President said something that was a profound shift from his policies of the last 5 years when he said that the Nation had to break our addiction to oil during his State of the Union speech, which was amazing for him to say because every policy that he has championed up to now has continued that addiction to oil. Nonetheless, we welcomed it. We always welcome him to take lines from our speeches, and we hope that it could be mean a real shift in policy.

Unfortunately, the very week that the President said we needed to break our addiction to oil and said we needed to do more research into new energy technology, the same week he said that, his administration gave the pink slip to 100 researchers at the Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, the very sort of warriors that we expect to help us develop these new clean energy sources. In his budget, he laid off I think it is something like 20 percent of the researchers at the very lab that we want, as Democrats, in our proposal to beef up. The reason we want to beef it up is we have seen the incredible productivity gains that have been obtained already.

Eighty percent decreases in the cost of solar cell technology in the last 12 years, 80 percent. While gas and oil have gone through the roof, solar cell technology has gone down 80 percent.

Well, that is what we call in the business a rhetorical question, and we were just optimistic. We all walked down the steps 6 inches in the air when the President said this the other day; but the next morning reading the budget, it was just a slap in the face. It was a slap in the face to anyone in America who believes that we truly do need to have new technological advances.

What we are proposing is that we should grab a hold, as we did in the new Apollo energy project or the original Apollo energy project, we need a new Apollo energy project that will have the same type of creativity and challenge to the American people that Kennedy had in his State of the Union speech on May 9, 1961. He said we are going to the Moon in 10 years. We did it. We now need a budget that will say we have the same degree of aggression and optimism that we had in that to wean ourselves off of foreign oil. Nothing else will do.

We Democrats are proposing to take a major step forward in that regard with flex fuel vehicles, which are on the street today. We just need to get more of them by using cellulosic ethanol which increases the return per acre of biofuels by a factor of three to four above existing ethanol levels. That is what we need to do.

Under the current control of the Federal Government, if China invades Taiwan, we will have to borrow money from China to fight the war. That is a very sad irony, if not a joke.

I wanted to point out one thing before we finish, an aspect of the Democratic Innovation Agenda that we have not talked about, and that is our efforts to help small businesses innovate because Democrats recognize that small businesses are tremendous engines of innovation. That is where a lot of our creative genius comes out. I want to point out a few things that we have proposed to make sure that small businesses are successful in innovating, and one is we have a constellation of proposals that will help small businesses across what is called the valley of death which is where they cannot get financing when they have a good idea but cannot quite get to commercialization. We would make sure that the Small Business Innovation Research Program is held up and supported. This administration is actually cutting the availability of small businesses to use the innovation grant program to get their innovations to market. They purport to believe in the power of business but will not help them with that.

Second, we propose that we will help reward risk taking and entrepreneurship by promoting broad-based stock options, and not just for top dogs in corporations but for the rank and file.

Third, we want to protect intellectual property by making sure that patent fees go to help the patent process so these businesses can get their patents.

Fourth, we want to help specially tailored guidelines for small businesses to help with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement in accounting.

I point these out because I think it is fair to say that the Democrats have put forth four very concrete proposals to make sure small businesses can thrive in a challenging environment. That is important because we know that government is not the source of all great ideas in our society. We want small businesses to achieve, and we have good proposals for that to happen.

Mr. Speaker, we have another concern today arising about the administration's potential abuse of the scientific process in making policy.

Today, the Associated Press reported that the Bureau of Land Management under this administration has suspended funding for the final year of a study from Oregon State University on the impact of logging in national forests burned by wildfires.

Findings of these studies were published last month in the magazine Science, and they suggested that the administration's stance on salvage logging runs counter to the real goals regarding forest regeneration and fire prevention. I am concerned in this case that we have seen yet another situation where funding may have been frozen to punish scientific results legitimately conducted at Oregon State University, and that is why I have called on the Interior Department's inspector general today to investigate whether or not this in fact has occurred.

Did Daniel Donato and his research team from OSU lose funding because of this cause? Is this another punishment situation? We need to find out. We have got to respect science and use it accordingly.

Mr. Speaker, if absolute power corrupts absolutely, so does oil. And the continued lust, the continued rapacious grab for oil in one of our most pristine areas in this country has corrupted this body absolutely. We stand here in the middle of the night tagging on in this scheme, something that could not pass this body tonight in any other way other than through this subterfuge. And yes, those artificers who tried to run this scheme recognize it is difficult to ask Members to vote against any defense bill because all of us, Republican and Democrat, stand for our troops. But I hope we take a little bit of inspiration from our troops. Mr. Cole and I went and visited Baghdad a few weeks ago, who are standing late night sentry duty, and it does get cold in the desert this time of year. Alone, away from the holidays, they are doing a little tough duty. And maybe we can have a few Democrats and Republicans do a little tough duty tonight and call foul and blow the whistle on this corruption of the Armed Services appropriation process on a bipartisan basis.

Whatever you think of the Arctic drilling, and for those who think it is such a great thing I will just tell you, I went out to the Washington Mall. I went for a walk tonight. It is a beautiful night. Saw these beautiful monuments. People were out enjoying the Lincoln Monument tonight, even in the cold. And they feel the same way about the Lincoln Monument as they do about the wildlife, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We should not drill in the Yellowstone, in the Glacier, in the National Mall or the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

Why? Because it is not an answer to our problem. We can solve our problem with 2 miles a gallon fuel efficiency. You can believe in Santa Claus, but you cannot believe the Arctic is a solution to our energy problems.

Vote no on the biggest environmental vote, which is on the rule today. Vote no against corruption of the Armed Services appropriations process. Vote no to restore integrity of this situation and vote no on this rule.

Mr. Speaker, the worst thing a parent can endure is the loss of a child. And it is important for me, in the context of this bill, to share the story of Lane and Patti Judson, who lost their daughter, Crystal, to domestic violence and have turned their sadness into a will to help other families.

Crystal was murdered by her husband, who was chief of police in Tacoma, Washington, at the time. We all know what obstacles domestic violence victims face. But imagine the choices a victim faces when their abuser is in the very profession that is charged to protect her.

Congress today took steps to address these circumstances and, for the first time in the country's history, included a grant program in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to help law enforcement agencies develop procedures for dealing with domestic crimes committed by their own employees as well as train special advocates to assist victims like Crystal and

her family. Women who have been victims of domestic violence should not have to stand alone, and after today, they will not have to.

I thank the Judiciary Committee chair and ranking member; my colleagues from Washington; advocacy groups; and, most importantly, Lane and Patti Judson for making this program a reality. Unfortunately, domestic violence continues to be in all of our communities today. And the Judsons' courage and conviction remind all of us that we have more work to do toward finding new solutions to protect families across our Nation. From a family tragedy, the Judsons have forged a strong measure to protect families across the Nation. We honor their diligence and the life of Crystal Judson Brame.

Mr. Speaker, the odds of success in Iraq are not enhanced by Congress continuing to act as a rubber stamp for President Bush. We need a change in strategic vision in Iraq.

This resolution says that setting a timetable somehow is a Communist plot, but, in fact, the President himself set timetables in Iraq when he set timetables to have transitional elections in Iraq. He set timetables for elections because it focused the Iraqis to demand performance, and that is what we should do in setting a timetable to transition to Iraqis true sovereignty for three reasons.

Reason number one, we should no longer provide a crutch for an indefinite period of time to the Iraqi politicians. We need to focus their minds on making the compromises that are necessary if a real government is going to be followed. We cannot fall into the trap of enabling Iraqi politicians to continue their bickering. They need a solution.

Number two, people say a timetable will encourage more violence. Let me ask you this: If there is a young unemployed man who is angry about foreign troops marching on his neighborhood, what do you think will make him more angry and more likely to plant an IED, the fact that we tell him we are going to leave in a year or so, or tell him we are going to stay there as long as George Bush says so? We need to tell them that we are going to come home.

The third reason we ought to think about this is that in our briefings we have received, we have been told that the Iraqi military will be fully trained by next December 2006, and it is realistic, it is commonsense, it is a measure to focus the Iraqi politicians on the necessity of seeking compromise, to say that we should begin transitioning next year and substantially conclude by December 2006.

During that time I have one message for the administration. They need to do a better job arming the Iraqi military forces. They need radios, they need Humvees, they need logistics. We cannot allow that force to fall apart. We need to defeat this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, in the last week there has been a collection of relatively extraordinary events in the future of not only our country, but the entire planet, when it comes to our ability to maintain a climate to which we have been accustomed, and in fact that climate is now threatened by global warming, and during the last week some extraordinary things have happened that demand comment here in the House.

I have come here tonight to suggest that the U.S. Congress needs to act with vigor and vision to lead the world in dealing with global warming. What precipitates my comments is a collection of scientific information that has become available to the world in the last week, together with the recently concluded conclave of world leaders in Montreal, Canada, that just concluded without meaningful participation by the executive branch of the United States, which I think is most disappointing to my constituents and I think much of America.

So what I want to do tonight is address some of the new science that has come forward just in the last week about global warming and contrast that with the abject failure, unfortunately, of the executive branch of the United States to fulfill the leadership role of the United States, which has historically been on a bipartisan basis as the technological leader of the world, which this chief executive has abdicated in refusing to lead the world to a resolution of the problem of global warming.

If I can first just briefly summarize some of the things that have happened in the last week regarding global warming.

The Goddard Space Science Center, one of our preeminent scientific institutions, in the next few days will announce that 2005 remains on track to be one, if not the, hottest year in global history since records have been kept, which continues a trend of many of the hottest years in recorded history being in the last decade. British scientists this week announced that their records are similar to the findings of the Goddard Space Laboratory.

We are in an unprecedented period of increases in global temperatures. This is confirmed by a huge majority of the scientific measurements. The Earth is warming, and it is warming faster probably than it has been ever in the last 1,000 years, at least. This is new and appropriately disturbing evidence.

The same week, if we read the Wall Street Journal, a publication not known for its certainly being far out there on environmental issues, reported on December 14 that scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf. The bears spend most of the time hunting and raising their young on ice flows, but the problem is the ice flows are disappearing.

That leads to the third bit of information that we have received in the last couple of months, which has found that the Arctic ice shelf has melted to an extent previously never seen before in human history and probably never seen before for thousands of years.

These are an amazing continuation, where one cannot open up a newspaper or a scientific journal in any given week and not see a continued cascade, an avalanche of scientific information, nailing down the coffin of any remaining doubt that we are now facing significant global warming as a result of increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, which we all, Republican and Democrat alike, are putting into the atmosphere. We are experiencing this with our own eyes.

If we take a look at a picture here in Glacier National Park, one of our most treasured jewels of our crown of our national park, we have already lost 30 percent of the glaciers in the last 75 years in Glacier National Park. If we look at the Grinnell Glacier, a picture here in 1938, you will see the glacier coming off this cliff band and extending down into the valley. This is 1938, one lifetime ago. In that one lifetime, the lifetime certainly of my mom and dad, we now see the Grinnell Glacier is probably less than 40 percent of its preexisting size. You see this entire area, it used to be a glacier, is now a lake where the glacier has melted.

The sad fact is that when my mom and dad took me to Glacier National Park in my youth, I got to see these glaciers. If this trend, according to scientific evidence continues, at least my great-grandchildren will not be able to go to Glacier National Park and see glaciers because the glaciers will be gone, extinct, period. I suppose some wag would suggest we will have to rename it as ``the Park Formerly Known as Glacier.''

The fact of the matter is that as we speak, the world and the United States is undergoing a significant change from that which we grew up with. Glaciers, polar bears, fields of wheat that support one of the greatest food baskets in the world, where we are going to have significant change in our ability to produce agriculturally in the Midwest.

With irrigated agriculture, the science shows, we just had a conference of this up in Seattle, Seattle is known for our rain, but in fact we depend on irrigated agriculture for a good part of our agriculture, and that irrigated agriculture depends on snow pack. I just returned from a conference in Seattle

in the last several weeks where the scientists predicted that our irrigated agriculture in the State of Washington, upon which our apple crop, the best apple crop in the world, depends, will be jeopardized because the snow pack is disappearing. It is projected we will have less than half the snow pack we have had historically in the next several decades, which jeopardizes our apple industry in Washington State and many of our irrigated products. So the disturbing fact is that the scientific evidence is becoming overwhelming.

By the way, it is just not Glacier. I will show you a picture of Argentina, one of the large ice sheets. In 1928, this photograph is of this enormous ice sheet down in Patagonia, in the southern tip of South America. You see in the same picture in 2004, and I was there several months ago, where you can see where these glaciers have been. This enormous ice sheet that existed in 1928 is knew essentially gone, replaced by water where the ice sheet has melted.

These are in very blinks of geologic time that we are seeing these changes take place, in one lifetime seeing these changes take place, and this has never happened before at these rates. We have had ice ages and had melts, but scientists will tell you this has never happened before in world history, as far as we know, with this rapidity to have this enormous change.

Very briefly, the reason it is occurring is that we are putting into the atmosphere gasses that trap infrared radiation. Light comes in. As ultraviolet radiation it can pass through the atmosphere. When it bounces back it is at a different spectrum, at infrared frequencies, and carbon dioxide and methane that comes out of our tailpipes and smokestacks trap ultraviolet radiation.

We look at this chart and it shows levels of COG. These are parts per million, the amount of COG in the atmosphere. We go to pre-industrial times in 1000, it was about 240 parts per million. When we started to burn coal and gas in about 1800 it starts to go up, and in the 1800s and 1900s it goes up dramatically. Now in 2000 we see it is going up like a rocket, and it is projected that by the close of this century we will have parts per million in the 780 to 800 range, at least two times higher than it has ever been in human history. It is predicted to continue to skyrocket after that.

This is a fact. No one, no scientist in the world, disputes these conclusions. Global warming is a fact, and it is a fact that we are responsible for and need to act as leading the world to deal with this problem, to adopt energy technological solutions to this problem, which we can do if we have the same vision that John Kennedy had when we had the first Apollo project. I have introduced a bill to do that.

But in light of this science, what has the Bush administration done? In light of this cavalcade of information demanding a response, what has the Bush administration done to fulfill our destiny to be the leader in the world when it comes to technological innovation?

Well, what it did is it sent an emissary named Watson to Montreal last week to basically tell the rest of the world, when the rest of the world is working together to try to find a solution to global warming, to try to come up with a post-Kyoto agreement that is better than Kyoto, that is fairer, that is more effective than Kyoto, what did the President send our emissary to do? The greatest country in the world, the most technologically-oriented country in the world, the country that has led in the growth of democracy, that led in the effort to solve the problem of the ozone layer, which we have done some very good work in on a bipartisan basis, what did the President's emissary do?

He went to Montreal and told the rest of the world essentially to go fish; the United States was not going to participate in any meaningful discussion to come up with a global solution to this global problem. This is most embarrassing for our country, the greatest country on Earth, to refuse to take any meaningful position to advance some global solution to this problem.

In fact, the President sent our emissary to adopt the posture of the ostrich with the head in the sand and the tail feathers in the air. We should be adopting the posture of the American eagle, leading the rest of the world to a solution of this problem by using the technological creativity with which America has been blessed with for centuries. Instead, our emissary went there like this, where over 200 countries agreed to continue discussions about how to deal with this known problem.

Now, I have to admit there was some small success. The President's emissary on the last day of the conference picked up his papers and literally walked out on the rest of the world, literally walked out on the rest of the world, making this comment which no one to this day understands about walking like a duck, and, frankly, it was relatively embarrassing.

The good news is the administration was so embarrassed by the world's reaction to that and by America's reaction to that following an address by President Bill Clinton suggesting that we need to work in a bipartisan fashion on this issue that the next day apparently they got a cable from the White House, I am assuming, and the emissary walked back and said, well, now, we will at least agree to continue some informal talks. Not real talks, not formal talks that could actually lead to an agreement, but something called ``informal talks,'' which would at least not allow the administration to be humiliated.

This is not good enough to fulfill our mandate as the greatest Nation on Earth. This is not good enough. It does not respect the ability of the geniuses in America who are going to adopt the new energy technologies so that we can continue to grow our economy and solve this problem at the same time. It is well below what we should expect of ourselves and it is well below what we should expect of our President.

We are calling on the President of the United States to finally adopt some measure of teamwork with the rest of the world to solve this problem.

Now, why should we do that? Well, one reason is we put 25 percent of all the carbon dioxide on this graph, where we see it is now skyrocketing, we in America put it in the atmosphere. We are a very small percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of all the COG in the atmosphere comes out of our pipes. So that is one reason why we really as a matter of moral responsibility need to be part of this solution, as does China, and we need to demand that China participate in these talks as well.

But as important, we are the country who is going to develop the new energy sources, clean energy, renewable energy, that are going to solve this problem and not destroy the climate of the Earth, because, frankly, we are the great tinkerers. We invented the light bulb, we perfected the Internet, the jet airplane, a man on the moon. The list needs to go on when it comes to clean energy. If we have leadership we will get that done.

So tonight I would like to say the science is clear, the destiny of this Nation is clear. We need to lead the world forward on global warming, rather than hiding from it. This is not a Nation that cowers in fear and from challenges. And this president ought to understand the confidence that this American country has in doing something about global warming. We hope that it will have a new attitude beginning tomorrow.