Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the long string of abuse of power is continuing in the U.S. Congress, most unfortunately. The most recent of this long string of abuses of power is we will see an attempt in the U.S. Senate next week to strip Americans of a protection, a protection against the tyranny of the majority, by eliminating the long, 2- century-long right to a filibuster in the United States Senate, a bastion of democracy.

We already have one House of Representatives. We do not need another one. We need the ability to have the checks and balances in the U.S. Senate. And this is not a matter of academic pursuit.

Last night, I was in the Mall walking quite late at night and I saw a group of folks from New Jersey who had driven all the way down from New Jersey and at this moment are filibustering on the Mall against the efforts in the Senate to remove this basic checks and balances. They drove what they called the ``Filibus.'' Well, we should not have to have a ``Filibus'' to stand up for the American concept of checks and balances. These abuses of power should stop. The U.S. Senate should maintain this American tradition of a filibuster for the right time and for the right reasons.

Mr. Speaker, Tuesday morning I gave a constituent a lift to the airport in Seattle going to the airport on my daily commute to Washington, D.C. I asked him what his feelings were, if any, about what is happening in Washington, D.C.

He said he is bothered by what he perceives as the abuse of power that is going on here in Washington, D.C. I asked him what he meant by that. It was very interesting because sometimes we do not know if people are paying attention to what is happening here, but he itemized a list of things that he was concerned about.

He was concerned about trying to do away with this checks and balance system that we have in our Federal judicial system. He was concerned about the attack on the independence of our courts. He said he was concerned about the attack on one of the checks and balances we had in the U.S. Senate in the filibuster that was so successful in keeping a stable democracy.

And he said, and this really surprised me, he said he was concerned about the abuses going on in this Chamber in trying to change the ethical rules just to protect one Member. He basically said, something smells.

Mr. Speaker, he is right; and I urge my colleagues to stop this long train of abuses of power in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, I have enjoyed listening to this story of the tapestry of the Asian American Pacific Islander community in America; and that tapestry, of course, consists of quite a number of threads. I would like to add one thread to this great story of this important part of the American tapestry.

And that story began on March 30, 1942, on Bainbridge Island, Washington, actually the island where I live. On that day, a young 2\1/ 2\-year-old named Frank became one of the first Americans of Japanese descent to be rounded up by our military and forced to leave his home. We have a picture here. Actually, it is a pretty historic picture. These were the first Japanese Americans to be interned during World War II. They left the dock on Bainbridge Island en masse, surrounded back up here, though we do not see them in the picture, of soldiers with bayonets; and they were marched down into a boat and taken to Seattle and eventually to Manzanar.

Obviously, at that time, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, our Nation was really living under a cloud of uncertainty when, along with Frank, 226 other men and women, families left

the dock at Bainbridge Island, and they were the first imprisoned at Manzanar. Eventually, 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were stripped of their very basic rights and freedoms guaranteed to every American under the Constitution, and most spent the duration of the war in these camps.

It took a long time for Americans to come to grips with this, come to grips with these injustices as part of our history. But it is important to remember them lest we forget and allow fear and anxiety that is understandable ever to push us over the edge again to darkness that occurred to those people in those years.

Frank is now known as Dr. Kitamoto, a great dentist on Bainbridge Island. Frank is a grown man. He carries the story of this internment with a very quiet strength and courage. And he knows that while we regret those decisions that were made 63 years ago, he does not cast blame. Instead, Dr. Kitamoto has transferred his personal experience into a living history to try to share the wisdom that comes with such a searing experience. He shares his story so that others can learn from this mistake so that we are reminded not to let that happen again.

Frank has a 45-minute slide presentation that he presents to schools throughout the State of Washington, and California, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Idaho, wherever he is invited, and he makes the trip on his own dime. Frank wants to make sure this story is told and told by someone who knows the story.

For over 20 years he has lead the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community as President, and he has worked to create a memorial, a remembrance to this event in our community's history. The Bainbridge Island community put a lot of effort into selecting a name for this memorial and, with care and deliberation, selected a Japanese phrase, ``Nidoto Nai Yoni'' or ``let it not happen again.''

I am proud that the history of Dr. Kitamoto has become part of the American story, and I was proud to sponsor legislation that will hopefully make the ``Nidoto Nai Yoni'' memorial at Pritchard Park an officially recognized part of our national heritage. That bill passed this Chamber last year, we are in the planning phases now, to make this a national memorial. Most of this dock is not here now, but we have just a beautiful memorial planned so that this story can remain part of our national tapestry.

It is my honor to join efforts with Dr. Kitamoto and sit beside him at the dedication ceremony for the memorial. It is my honor now to remember and share this story of a group of Americans whose quiet strength and sacrifice and courage and patriotism of the many sons who served in World War II while their families were in these camps. Their story really is an inspiration for everyone everywhere, and I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) for convening this important discussion.

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons the majority does not allow us or Americans to read this bill before we vote on it is because there is some little nasty surprises in it. One of those little nasty surprises buried on page 30 is a provision that allows through congressional skullduggery getting around the rules to try to drill in the Arctic that could not pass the other Chamber on an up-or-down vote.

On page 30, they essentially try to work around on a midnight deal the right for checks and balances and a filibuster in the other Chamber that could not pass under regular rules in the United States Senate.

Those who believe that we have better options than drilling in the Arctic and destroying a provision set up by Ike Eisenhower and defended by every President since should vote ``no'' on this budget. No matter what you think of the fiscal issue, vote ``no'' tonight.

Take out this legislative flea on the back of this bill and preserve the Arctic. Vote ``no.''

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

This amendment is part of our continuing effort to diversify our supplies of energy by increasing the amount of wind power we can generate off of our Department of the Interior lands, principally, our Bureau of Land Management lands. It will do so by cutting in half the royalty that is scheduled to be applied under the BLM criteria. We are actually quite high, probably in the neighborhood of almost twice sometimes what the private sector and private lands charge. Reduce it from about $2,300 on average to about $1,100 per megawatt.

This is very similar to a provision we passed last year in the energy bill, and it really follows the tremendous

growth of wind energy we are experiencing.

Well, actually wind energy is growing about 30 percent a year, which is rather a Herculean growth rate that we are having, and that is because we have abundant wind energy, thankfully, in this great land of ours.

Now, we want to maximize it on our public lands. I know in many places we are having success with wind. In Washington State we are proud of the largest wind farm in the North American hemisphere, at State Line, Washington, which has about 263 megawatts, powers about 25,000 homes. We have several projects in Washington State, in fact, on public land in Washington State we have at least 600 acres very eligible for economically efficient production of wind energy.

So we think this is a way to help boost wind because what we have found is that every time we increase the number of units of wind energy we use, we decrease its price. There is a very clear correlation. Every time the number of units go up by a factor of 10, prices come down by 20 percent. Actually, wind energy has been reduced in price this decade by 80 percent. It is a pretty spectacular success story.

Wind is not without any impacts. It has aesthetic impacts, of course, but we think this is one way to give a boost to an infant, nascent industry that can go up to a place where right now is very close to market-based, really is market-based rates at this time.

The gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo) was good enough to agree to an amendment in the Resources Committee to state a national goal of generating 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy from our Federal lands within the decade. This is one small step in that direction. So we hope that we will continue the growth of wind.

This is one very small part of a larger project I am championing called the New Apollo Energy Project, which really will spur the development of high technology.

Let me lastly state that other countries are having successes as well. Denmark hopes to have 50 percent of their electrical content generated by wind and other renewables in 2025. They are at about 30 percent now.

This is not pie in the sky; it is very achievable. We want to grow those jobs here in America, eventually have a domestic wind turbine job base, industrial base; and we have a lot of jobs to create, hooking up those wind turbines.

We hope that we can pass this amendment.

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

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

I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton). We cannot measure contribution by number, we have to measure by weight. However, Mr. Chairman, I think you are still going to win the debate.

By the way, I am a new member of the Commerce Committee. I want to thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), the chairman, for the very fair-minded way that he handled this in committee, in giving both sides an adequate degree of leeway to argue their positions. We all appreciate his leadership.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, over in Baghdad, we are attempting to establish a democracy which will require an

independent judiciary. Iraqis will learn that to have a society of laws, you need an independent judiciary to enforce them. But here in Washington, D.C., we have a majority leader who is attempting to demagogue and abuse the independence of our American judicial system, to intimidate them to one particular ideological position.

This is undemocratic, it is unhealthy, and it does not respect the democratic traditions that require an independent judiciary in this country. It is a case of an abuse of power and it needs to stop.

We see today in the energy bill a provision to ignore the independence of the law to give immunity to a polluter. We need the majority leader of the U.S. House to understand that our freedoms come from an independent judiciary. The freedom of speech, the freedom of religion that would be taken away in one single moment from the U.S. Congress stands because of an independent judiciary.

This arrogance and abuse of power needs to stop.

Madam Chairman, the best way that I can characterize this bill is that it is a Jurassic Park bill in that it is about dinosaurs, of dinosaurs, and in a sense by dinosaurs.

It depends on the hope that somehow dead dinosaurs will appear underneath the continent of the United States where they just do not exist. We consume 25 percent of the oil; we have only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. If you drill in Mt. Ranier National Park, the Arctic and Yosemite, the oil is not there; the dead dinosaurs decided to die somewhere else.

This is a doomed policy of searching for dead dinosaurs. And it is a dinosaur-like philosophy that we should decide to subsidize technology being developed in the late 1800s in 2005. We should be giving these subsidies to the nascent wind, solar, wave power, energy-efficient cars so we can build energy-efficient cars here rather than in Japan.

You do not give mother's milk to a 65-year-old person; you give it to the nascent infant industries that need it. That is not what happened to this bill, where 94 percent of the subsidy goes to an industry, the most profitable in American history; one company had $8 billion profit in the third quarter last year on your $55 a barrel oil.

That is what is going on in this bill. What we should be doing is hearing lessons from our successful past, where we showed where we increase the efficiency of our cars; that is an energy future. We need the new Apollo energy plan, a visionary high-tech plan, not a dinosaur- like plan.

Madam Chairman, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) asked a very important question: Where are the technologies that we can use to avoid having to destroy the character of one of our most pristine areas in America?

And the answer is that we have technologies today that we simply stopped using 20 years ago.

If you look at this graph, it shows the mileage of our cars that we have. You see, starting in 1975 it went up dramatically because we had a bipartisan consensus to demand to use existing technologies to improve our automobile efficiency. It went up dramatically, almost doubling, almost doubling by 1985.

And then what happened? We fell off the wagon, and since that time, our average full economy shown by this middle line has absolutely, absolutely gone down since 1985.

The fact of the matter is, these are not future techno dreams that someone has dreamed up in their garage somewhere; they are technologies that exist today. I drive a car that gets 44 miles to the gallon. I am 6'2", 200 pounds; it is totally safe and comfortable.

We need to get back on the fuel efficiency wagon as we were in the 1980s on a bipartisan basis and not put a mustache on the Mona Lisa. You say 2,000 acres? It is still a mustache on the Mona Lisa for our most pristine areas.

Mr. Chairman, I would, just in support of this amendment, report how successful our country has been previously with this experience. I want to point to a graph showing our fuel efficiency in 1975, that when we were adopting fuel efficiency standards, rocketed up and almost doubled to 1985, then stopped when we lost our commitment to fuel efficiency.

And subsequently it has plateaued; it has actually gone down. The average fuel efficiency today is less than it was in 1985. I want to point this out, because it shows an American success story. We were successful in driving safe, efficient, fuel-efficient cars. And we got off the fuel-efficiency wagon.

It is time to go back. We cut a deal with Canada the other day. We can do it in America.

Mr. Speaker, I come to address the Chamber today on Earth Week. This is the 35th anniversary of Earth Day, something that is quite a significant event and something that has been very successful in American history.

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes. I think it is appropriate once in a while to reflect on success in our Nation.

I live in the Seattle area and on an August day in Seattle, you look south where on a clear day you see Mount Rainier. It is quite a beautiful 14,600-foot peak. In August, it was invisible. You could not see it through the yellowish haze, except maybe the top 1,000 feet or so. As a result of some bipartisan efforts to reduce particulate matter and others in our air, we have been successful and I report you can see Mount Rainier very clearly as long as it is not raining, which once in a while it does in Seattle, of course.

We have had successes all over the country in improving our air quality as a result.

Just another little story: When I look out at Puget Sound just in front of my house, 35 years ago you may not have seen any bald eagles. They were an endangered species and had considerable problems because of some pesticides in our food chain. Now, just yesterday before I flew out here, I saw a great bald eagle soaring. It is a real joy to watch him fishing, they are joined by the ospreys frequently, and we have had success with the bald eagle and now people are enjoying and our grandkids and great grandkids are going to enjoy. We have had success.

The third success: I want to point to some of our policies that this Congress has adopted have been successful in bringing more efficiencies so we do not waste as much oil and have the pollution associated with oil.

In fact, if you will look at the graph here, this is a graph of the auto efficiency that we have had over the last several decades, and the top line here is for cars. The bottom line is for trucks, and the middle line is the average of both. You see back in 1975 our trucks were getting about an average of 12.5, 13 miles a gallon. Our cars, on average, were getting about 14.5 miles per gallon.

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency. If you look at these rising lines both for trucks and cars, very, very steep curves going up, so that in about 1984-1985 we got our cars up to an average of 24 miles a gallon, our trucks up to about 17 or 18 miles a gallon.

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.

In sort of one of those ironies of life during Earth Week, we are going to have the energy bill up here before the House, which has major, major environmental impacts as well as security impacts and job and economic impacts.

I wanted to address tonight the impacts on our jobs, on our security and on our environment of the energy bill that the House will consider this week. I would like to start with some of the difficulties of that bill and some of its failures, and then I would like to move to the good news about the vision that we have to create a new energy future, a visionary energy future for this country. In fact, what we call it is the new Apollo Energy Project, and many of us believe we need an entirely new visionary, over-the-horizon plan for energy efficiency in this country that will do three things: first, break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil.

The security needs of this Nation to do that are obvious. The need to help spread democracy and the ability to do that will be much greater if we break this addiction to oil, which gives the oil princes and sultans the power in the Mideast. The security need for this is obvious. This is the first goal of the new Apollo Energy Project.

The second goal is to stop global warming. We have real problems with that. I will address that later. We need to have an energy policy that will stop this freight train right now that is building to significantly change our climate.

The third goal of the new Apollo Project is to grow jobs right here in the United States rather than allowing job loss to go overseas. Many of us feel that we should be building fuel-efficient vehicles here and not just in Japan. Those jobs, building fuel-efficient cars, should be here in America and not overseas by necessity. We think the solar cell technology, which was originally developed here, those jobs building those solar cells ought to be here, not Germany.

We feel that the people who are building the wind turbines, those jobs ought to be here, in Washington State and other manufacturing centers around the country, rather than in Denmark, that is now leading the world in that technology.

So we think we can bring those high-tech, visionary jobs home, and that is the very package of the new Apollo Energy Project.

I want to contrast that just for a moment with what the bill that will be voted on the floor consists of. Basically, the best way I can describe the bill that the majority party is bringing to the floor is pretty much a large transfer of taxpayer money to the oil and gas industry, and it is nothing more and really nothing less.

It is about $7.5 billion out of the $8 million that will go in direct subsidies in one form or another, sometimes through the Tax Code, some through direct subsidization to the oil and gas industry. That is over 85 percent of the entire amount to be invested in this that will go from taxpayers to the oil and gas companies.

It is interesting; I read a quote today by a gentleman who may surprise you, who said this, commenting on the relative wisdom, or lack thereof, of transferring $7.5 billion from taxpayers, who just got done filling out their tax reports, to one of the most profitable industries in America. In fact, last week I just read that one of those companies, I will not name their name, they are a fine company, good people work for them, but they had $8 billion in profits the third quarter last year, the largest quarterly profit of a corporation in American history. Yet, the bill the majority party is bringing to this Chamber will take $7.5 billion, roughly, of taxpayer money and give it to the oil and gas companies.

It was a very interesting quote I saw in this morning's newspaper. I thought I might share that. I thought it was a very sage comment on whether that made sense. This gentleman said, I will tell you, with $55 oil, a barrel, we do not need incentives to oil and gas companies to explore. There are plenty of incentives. What we need is to put a strategy in place that will help this country over time become less dependent.

That quote was by a fellow who knows the oil and gas industry quite well. That was a quote from President George Bush, who I think very pointedly asked, What are we doing giving the oil and gas industry $7.5 billion of taxpayer money when they have got $55, $56, $57, maybe $58 a barrel of oil now? If that is not an incentive, what else would be needed?

As President Bush pointed out, what we really need is some more technological solutions to deal with a way to break our addiction to oil of any nature, foreign or domestic, so that we can move forward and no longer be a slave to big oil. I thought that was an interesting comment, one that I hope some of my colleagues can ask when we debate this issue.

I was talking to one of my constituents the other day, and I told him this; and he just looked at me and said with incredulity, he said, That cannot be true, Congress could never do such a bizarre thing as to hand over taxpayer money like that to an old technology. A mature industry does not need that sort of pampering to get out of the crib of technology and get on its feet to become market-based. It has been around since the late 1800s. What are we doing with a $7.5 billion subsidy to an old industry?

Good question. I do not have an answer for it, but we will have a debate on this floor in this regard.

So the bill that is now before us is sadly lacking. It is a perfect energy policy for the early 1900s. In the early 1900s it might have made sense to help subsidize an industry just developing new technology, beginning to grow, a huge burst in the industrialization of America; but not now, not here. And we think we need a significantly different approach.

So we believe that we need an approach that will really use America's creative genius to develop the technologies to break our addiction to oil. And by the way, let me make sure people understand. As long as we are dependent on oil, we will be subservient to the international oil marketeers even if we increase our domestic production, and the reason is geology.

We consume about 25 percent of the world's oil every year, but we only have reserves, including that which has not been pumped, of about 3 percent of the oil reserves in the world. The simple fact is we cannot plant dead dinosaurs underneath our continental United States to create oil. It is simply not there. We are dependent on foreign oil, and even if we increase our domestic production to some degree, if we doubled it, if we doubled our domestic production, we would be at capacity. We would be having 6 percent of the world's oil, but still be consuming 25 percent of the world's oil.

The fact is that we cannot drill our way to independence. We cannot drill our way to freedom, and we cannot drill our way to create jobs in this country.

We need to largely invent our way out of this pickle. We need to use American ingenuity, the kind of ingenuity that created the software system, the Internet, the aerospace industry, biotechnology, putting the man on the moon. That is the kind of technology we need. In fact, that is why we named this project the new Apollo Energy Project, because President Kennedy stood right there actually May 9, 1961, and he spoke to America and he said America needs to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely within the decade.

That was a dramatic thing to say at the time. I mean, we could hardly launch a softball into space; we had not even invented Tang yet. It was a dramatically bold, audacious challenge. He made it because he understood how good we are at invention in the United States of America, and we need that same kind of spirit now, a new Apollo Project that will call on the innovative spirit of Americans to solve these technological challenges.

This is not going to probably happen this Wednesday when we debate this matter, but I can say optimistically that the planets are aligning to really come up with a new energy policy in this country. Let me suggest some of the reasons here.

One is that the people are starting to understand that we can be very successful. This is a note of optimism. We are optimistic, and the reason we are optimistic is because we have already understood how we can achieve success. And if we will go back to this graph for a moment, we will take a look at this graph that showed what we did in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when we set ourselves on a course to improve the efficiency of our cars, we almost doubled the efficiency of our cars and some of our trucks by using new technology that we developed here domestically in America. With a bipartisan effort in Congress, we called for a higher fuel efficiency and we got it.

And we got all the way up to about 1985, when you see something happened. We had this just absolute cessation of any progress in efficiency in our cars. You see, we had this very rapid buildup for car efficiency that literally stopped and became a plateau from 1985 to 2005. On trucks, we saw it stop in 1985 and plateau and absolutely go down a little bit. So today the average fuel efficiency of our fleet is actually less today than it was in 1985.

So you have to ask yourself, what happened in 1985? Did we just get

dumb? I do not think so. Since 1985, we invented the Internet, we mapped the human genome, and we have built several new generations of jets at Boeing, in my neck of the woods in Washington State. We have had all these tremendous technological advancements, but in the efficiency of our cars we have actually gone down.

Why is that? We just forgot how successful we could be, because Congress and the White House, for reasons I never agreed with at the time, stopped calling for more fuel efficiency in what are called our corporate average fuel economy standards, and so they stopped progress. So we are now still dependent on foreign oil, have a problem with global warming, and are losing jobs rapidly to the Japanese in fuel- efficient vehicles as a result of that very shortsighted progress.

Now, that is bad news; but it is also good news because it shows what we are capable of if America sets its mind to it to use its creative genius to move forward, and that is what we need to do today. And one of the things the new Apollo Energy Project will do is to call for new improvements in the efficiency standards of our fleets. But the project also recognizes that we need to help our manufacturers achieve that. So we dedicate a significant sum, several billion dollars, to our domestic manufacturers, people who manufacture cars within the United States, of whatever manufacturing company it is, to assist them in retooling their factories to build these new fuel-efficient vehicles.

And that is an important part of our package, because it recognizes that we need to help our domestic industry find a way to finance the changes to continue improvements like that which we know we can obtain. We think that there is going to be enormous money made and jobs created in fuel efficient vehicles. Today, I must say, a car that gets 42 to 44 miles a gallon, one of these hybrid cars, in Seattle, Washington, now you can sell it for more than you bought it for because of the attractiveness of this fuel-efficiency standard. Safe, comfortable car. We can do this in this country. We need to set our minds to it, and that is one of the things we have suggested to do in the new Apollo Energy Project.

Coming back to this idea about an alignment of the planets, about why we can achieve this, I think what we are seeing in this country is a rather unprecedented combination of people who normally might have some different viewpoints on various policy matters who are coming together to understand why we need a visionary high-tech future for our energy world. I want to read some comments by these folks who sort of suggest we need to go in that direction.

Dealing with global warming, for instance, I think you might be surprised at some of the statements that have been made. The CEO of British Petroleum, Sir John Browne, who has provided remarkable leadership on some new high-tech solutions to global warming said: ``There is a discernible human influence on the climate and a link between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature.'' That is the CEO of British Petroleum.

He is not alone. The CEO of Shell, Sir Philip Watts, on March 12, 2003 said: ``We cannot wait to answer all questions on global warming beyond a reasonable doubt. There is compelling evidence that climate change is a threat.''

You then have James Baker, former Secretary of State for the first President Bush, who said: ``When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen. I think we need to go forward with some sort of gradual resourceful search for alternative sources.'' This is a gentleman who was intimately involved with the first Bush administration, who recognizes that many people in corporate America are seeing a need for a real visionary change.

You see folks in the faith community who are now addressing the view that we have obligations to the Earth that are spiritual as much as aesthetic. Reverend Rich, and I am sorry if I mispronounce his name, Cizik, who is Vice President of National Affairs For the National Association of Evangelicals, said just this last month: ``There is a feeling that global warming, or climate change, is real and the result of human impacts that impact other humans.'' The association itself issued a statement that said: ``We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the Earth, and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are part. We are not the owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to `watch over and care for it,' '' citing Genesis.

You are starting to see a parallel thinking of folks from the fossil fuel industry, from former members of the Bush administration, from James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, from a group of the neoconservatives, many of whom supported the war in Iraq, from members of the faith community that we have a constellation of challenges that we need to have a new approach to; that demands us to use the asset above our shoulders, namely our brains, rather than just the assets below our feet, namely our fossil fuels. This is a gift from the creator, and we need to use it.

If I can turn for a moment about why we need to use this in regard to global warming, I would like to refer to a graph that is pretty unquestioned evidence of why we need to have a new energy on policy that will address global warming. You heard the comments from the Shell and British Petroleum CEOs, and they are doing some hard-headed thinking because we are facing some hard-headed facts.

There are some uncertainties about global warming: the extent to which it will occur, how it will affect the specific climates of regional areas. There is much uncertainty. But there is also much absolute clear facts, and I want to go over a couple of those. As folks may know, global warming is caused by carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide works like a pane of glass: it traps heat, just like a greenhouse. Hence the term ``greenhouse gases.''

Now, I actually had a scientist explain this to me a while ago. The way it works is that glass, like carbon dioxide, will allow ultraviolet radiation to come through it. When radiation comes from the sun, it is largely in ultraviolet ranges. And as you recall the spectrum of frequencies, this energy comes in at the ultraviolet frequencies. That can pass through glass. When it bounces back, when that energy is reflected back, it comes back at a different frequency. It comes back in infrared ranges. A different frequency. That cannot pass through glass, and it does not pass through a layer of carbon dioxide as much as it would in the absence of the carbon dioxide. So you have ultraviolet rays coming in, they bounce back as infrared rays, and they are trapped.

And that is a good thing, because if we did not have a CO2 layer, we would be on a barren planet. You could not exist here no matter how thick your down coat was. So we need that layer to some degree of heating gases. The problem is if you have that CO2 layer increase in density.

So has it? Well, the facts are very, very clear. This is a chart that shows a red line that goes back to the year 1000. It comes up in 100- year increments, coming up to zero, which is today, showing our concentrations. On the left of the chart are the concentrations in parts per million that are measured. And these are absolutely unquestioned measurements. Scientists do an assessment of the parts per million of the molecules in the air, and it is a direct measurement. Nothing speculative about it. No hypothesis. Every scientist in the world will agree to this.

And we know what the records are because we have air bubbles trapped in glaciers and ice cores that we have taken out thousands of feet down in the Antarctic, in Greenland, and other places. So we know what the CO2 layer was back in the year 1000, which is pretty amazing, with just as much as we know it today, because we had the air trapped a thousand years ago in these air bubbles. We knew it was 278, maybe 280 parts per million, and it was very stable for just under a thousand years. Then you start seeing it going up just over 100 years ago, which of course coincides with the Industrial Revolution and burning coal and oil and gas. And then it starts to come up at a fairly rapid rate over the last 100 years. And during the last 50 years, it has gone up approaching a vertical level of increase.

So we are now up to, and I should have the number specifically, but in

the 370 parts per million range. There is no doubt about this. We can see that we have gone up a factor of at least a third over preindustrial times, and the scary thing about this chart is you will notice the rate of incline. It is almost vertical. So at the end of the century we will be at twice the levels of carbon dioxide as we were in preindustrial times. That is disturbing when you know carbon dioxide traps heat.

We know it has a close relationship to Earth temperatures, as these blue lines mark Earth temperatures. And of course for about the last 200 years, they are observed temperatures, and you can see they are going up with some deviation up and down during the last 150 years. Now, before that, they are not observed temperatures. They are worked out through a formulation of using a variety of mechanisms. If you go back for geological times, the temperature is gradient. It matches fairly closely this CO2 curve.

So we know without a doubt that we are causing a spectacular increase in the CO2 levels of the planet. The planet has never seen this before, ever, as far as we can ascertain through looking at these old air bubbles. We are doing something to the planet that has never happened before, and we are the ones responsible for it. The question is what is this Congress going to do about it.

Unfortunately, this Congress has done absolutely zero about this problem. It has wallowed in the fog of indifference and ambiguity and has refused to show any leadership whatsoever. And it is disturbing to me because, as you know, the consequences of this carbon dioxide is trapping energy in this Earth, and we are experiencing global warming already, and the vast majority, and I reiterate, the vast majority of the Earth's meteorologists and geophysicists believe that this is now causing and will continue to cause an increase in the general temperatures of the Earth.

Now, there is some variety as to how much that is predicted to be; but all of them, even the lower estimates of 2 to 3 degrees can cause very significant climactic effects. The differences between us and the last ice age were just under 10 degrees, even just Fahrenheit. So we have some very significant issues to deal with with global warming.

We have seen it already affecting our lives. Glacier National Park is predicted not to have glaciers in the next 50 to 70 years. When you want to take your grandkids there, you will say, This is where the glaciers used to be, Johnny. We are seeing melting tundra in Alaska. My son only had 3 days' work as a ski patrolman this year because there is no snow in the Cascade Mountains, a condition which is predicted to be much more frequent when this spike goes up higher. We need to deal with this problem.

So we have suggested, and I will introduce shortly and have introduced an amendment this evening to the energy bill to adopt the substance of this new Apollo Energy Project. Because we believe we have to reduce our contributions of carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere. And we can do that. The clearest most short-term things we need to do are to improve the efficiency of our cars, and we need to have a limitation on the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere.

Senators McCain and Lieberman have introduced a bill in the Senate, I and some of my Republican colleagues have introduced a bill here in the House which will set a cap on carbon dioxide emissions from the United States.

It is a cap that we know we can meet. In fact, it was absolutely amazing to me, the Department of Energy last week issued a report that concluded that the cap that we set could be met by the United States without any significant economic harm. This is issued by a gentleman who is actually appointed by George Bush.

The Department of Energy has concluded that we are fully capable, using existing technology, of dealing with this issue by adopting a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere, which will help spur some of these innovations.

What will we do to achieve it? Our energy and power bill takes a broad-based approach. There is not one panacea to these challenges we have, but it does take the approach that we should be optimistic about it and we should recognize that we can have the same success in the new industries that will spring forth to deal with global warming to grow new jobs, as has happened in the software, biotech, and aeronautical industries.

For example, number one, the United States needs to embark on a research and development project akin to the original project that got a man to the moon, the original Apollo Project, because we found when the Federal Government invests in basic research and development, amazing things can happen. We would invest significant sums in these emergent technologies, technologies that sometimes seem obscure but have tremendous capacity.

There is a company in my district called Neah Power that is developing a fuel cell battery, which runs on ethanol or methanol. It will be four or five times as long-lived as a lithium battery with no emissions, completely safe, and will help to spur the development of fuel cells that we hope to become a significant part to the solution to this puzzle. They are small now, but tend to grow over time. A small company, but here is a place we can help, and we hope that this company is going to help the American military pack less wieldy, safer, and more effective batteries to fuel our communication systems.

But the point is, we need to continue the research and development of the nature and scope that got us to the moon. Not every invention is going to work out and not every idea is going to come home, just like in the space program, but it is a worthwhile investment.

Second, the Federal Government needs to use its procurement power to inspire these new industries. We need to have Uncle Sam order some of these new products to inspire these new products.

Third, we need to use the power of the government to recognize success. I want to talk about some success and what the Federal Government ought to be doing. For instance, solar power.

If I can share a success story in Virginia, this is a picture of a home just a few miles from here in Hillsboro, Virginia, built by Alden and Carol Hathaway. They built this home for $365,000, which is not that much more expensive for a home in this neck of the woods, and it is a ``net zero'' home, ``net zero'' meaning it does not use any energy from the electrical grid. But it is comfortable, it is nice looking, it is warm, and it is nonpolluting. They did this by using existing technologies.

They used an integrated solar cell built right into the roof of their home, which creates electrical current. They used an in-ground heat pump which is tremendously efficient. They used very high insulation values in the walls and windows, and some passive solar in how they aligned their home; and their home has a net energy consumption of zero.

That does not mean it is never using juice off the grid. At times there is electricity coming into their home, but other times they are generating more from the sun and they are feeding it back into the grid so the net is zero. They did this on a fairly economical basis.

I point this out for the reason I want to show success today. This is not just tomorrow's sort of futuristic world from the Jetsons, if anybody is as old as I am and remembers George Jetson. This is today's technology.

An amendment that I believe will be in the bill tomorrow or Wednesday does allow and call for the Federal Government to start a program to equip Federal buildings with solar cell technology. The reason that this makes sense, solar cell technology is much more economical. The more you buy, the price of solar cells comes down dramatically. Every time we increase the number of solar cells we buy by a factor of 10, the prices come down 20 percent. It is still more expensive than buying electricity from a gas turbine, but it has its place.

We believe if we increase dramatically the number of units, we will continue to see a decline of that cost curve so we will be able to enjoy what the Hathaways are enjoying tonight in Virginia.

Now, we have to do some things to get that done.

I am a supporter of a bill called the Net Metering bill, which will require

utilities to buy back your power from you so your meter runs backwards when you feed electricity back into the grid. Unfortunately, that will not be in the bill Wednesday. It is one of those long-term things that we have to do.

Third, we have to give incentives to Americans to help them make these choices. For some of these technologies that are still just a little bit above market base, we need to increase the amount of a tax break we give to Americans who drive fuel-efficient cars. We need to do the same thing for the manufacturers of fuel-efficient vehicles. For the retooling investments, we need to give an assist to our domestic auto industry when they do the retooling that they need to do for fuel- efficient cars.

We need to have better tax breaks when you buy an energy-efficient home, and a way to get a better mortgage lending rate for energy- efficient homes. We need to use all of these multiple tax levers to help Americans when they take that step up to better fuel- and energy- efficient appliances. Unfortunately, that is not in the bill that we will have Wednesday.

Instead of helping Americans move forward to these new technologies, technologies that we have today, fuel-efficient cars we have today, the energy bill we will consider Wednesday will go backwards to give the subsidies to these old industries that started to reach fruition in the late 1800s. That is most unfortunate.

Fourth, we need to do some things on the regulatory side, one of which is the CO2 cap that I talked about. Another is the CAFE standard to improve the auto efficiency of our vehicles. Those are all measures that, together, could have a significant impact. We have already seen some successes, such as what we have seen in the Hathaways' home.

So let me talk, if I can, about the job creation aspect of this. We have a real problem with manufacturing industry job loss in this country. Since 2001, we have lost 2.8 million family-wage manufacturing jobs. We have had a significant number of losses in a host of industries, but now we have an opportunity. This might be one of the greatest job creation opportunities that the country has right now.

We know, as the Creator makes little green apples, jobs are going to be created by the millions in the new industries that, by necessity, are going to be built to deal with the shortage of oil, to deal with global warming. And the shortage of oil, folks ought to read this book about the peak of oil production that is now on the market. It will make you very concerned about your future oil prices because it suggests that our oil production globally has plateaued and will go down in a decade or so, together with China having a demand that is astronomical. China will be equivalent to America's demand for autos in the next decade and a half. We have to find some alternative mechanisms of energy, both in efficiency and new systems.

Somebody is going to get jobs doing this, and we think it ought to be Americans. We do not think we should give these jobs away to our friends in Japan, or give the wind turbine jobs to Denmark. We think those jobs ought to be here.

And a very conservative estimate of our new Apollo Project, done by an economist in Waco, Texas, concluded that our program would create 3.3 million good-paying American jobs in the next 5 years. That is a significant step in the short term to help rebuild our manufacturing base. It would increase $1.4 trillion in new gross domestic product, add $953 billion in personal income. This is an assessment done by a reputable economist from Texas.

By the way, Texas has done some good things in wind energy. Wind energy is having some spectacular success, growing at 30 percent a year. In southeastern Washington, in my district, we have the largest wind plant farm in the United States. And we have five new wind farms under construction in the State of Washington.

The other interesting thing about energy efficiency is, it creates more jobs than the fossil fuel-based industries. It creates 21.5 jobs per $1 million invested compared to 11.5 for natural gas generation.

This is a job-creating technological solution to an old, dinosaur- based fossil fuel-based economy. This is our destiny as Americans to fulfill it. We are the inveterate tinkerers. We are the best people at inventing solutions technologically to problems of any people in human history. This is now our moment when the U.S. Congress ought to be seizing this opportunity, just like Kennedy suggested we do in 1961, and bring those jobs and that bright light of creativity to our country.

The environment demands it. The glaciers and national parks demand it. Our children, who should not be living under slavery to Middle Eastern oil, demand it. We should not have to worry about Middle Eastern politics again when we break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. We should not be wrapped around the axle of the Saudi Arabian royal house and whatever difficulties they have. We are slaves to whatever is going on in Saudi Arabia, and it is not a place that we deserve to be.

Lastly, we ought to use our technological prowess to make sure we are the number one job creator in the world for these emerging industries. That is our destiny and that is why I will be joining some of my colleagues in introducing the new Apollo Energy Project in the next week or so. We know at some time it is going to get done, maybe not this week, but the stars are aligning and those who share my view, I welcome you to share you views with your Member of the U.S. Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order today.

Mr. Speaker, some time ago the majority leader of the House, in response to the Schiavo decision, said, ``The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.'' The majority leader yesterday rightfully apologized for those comments, and I think that we should respect that apology, because we are all capable of saying something that we regret that was misunderstood.

But it is most troubling that at the same time the majority leader again threatened the independence of the judiciary. He threatened them with taking away their jurisdiction, he threatened them with breaking up their districts, and he basically threatened this organ of our government that is responsible for our freedoms, for protecting our freedom of religion and protecting our freedom of speech. We have what Russia did not have, an independent judiciary; and I am most troubled that the majority leader, when it comes to their independence and our freedoms and the importance of both of those things, just does not get it.

Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful that he will reconsider his comments yesterday and follow his first apology, if not with a second, with at least a clarification.

Mr. Speaker, I heard an earlier speaker refer to class actions as a game. Try telling that to the 9-year-old son of Janet Huggins, a 39-year-old healthy Tennessee mother who took Vioxx and died in September 2004. Tell her family that the effort to protect her family is a game. This is not a game. This is flesh and blood, the ability to protect your family when something happens to you that you did not have anything to do with.

This bill is the Vioxx Protection Bill. It is the Wal-Mart Protection Bill. It is the Tyco Protection Bill. It is the Enron Protection Bill. Anyone in the State of Washington who saw what Enron did to us, stealing $1 billion, should not be voting for this bill, because this bill in many ways is the Just Say No Bill to People Who Are Injured By Rapacious Wrongdoers.

In three ways it says ``just say no'' to consumers who were hurt by Enron, because in the Federal courts, if you happen to be in a plaintiff's group of multiple States and the laws are a little different in the States, do you know what the Federal courts do? They throw out the class action.

Do you want to know why the Chamber of Commerce is spending $1 billion to lobby on what seems to be a procedural issue? Because they throw out class actions where there is any difference in States, meaning you will not be able to have a class action anywhere, anywhere, Federal or State.

Why is this so important? I liken this to right now you have two arms to protect Americans, the State judicial system and the Federal judicial system. This reduces by half the resources that are available to Americans to get redress when Enron steals from them or when Vioxx kills them.

On 9/11, did we respond to September 11 by taking out city police officers and only having the FBI? On 9/11, did we respond by not having local fire departments and only having the Coast Guard or Army fire department? No. We recognized that in our system of federalism, Americans deserve the full protection, not just half the protection.

This cuts the available judicial resources in half. Why is that important? The second reason it just says no to injured Americans is the Federal courts cannot handle these class actions. They do not have enough courts and judges. You go down and ask how long you will wait today to get into a Federal court. Then add about 4 or 5 years after this bill if this bill were to come into effect. You just say no because it takes the keys away from the courthouse.

The third reason it just says no to good American citizens is it takes from the State attorneys general their ability to protect people. That is why the States attorneys general, Republican and Democrat alike, are adamantly opposed to this bill, because this bill takes cops off the beat; attorneys generals whose job it is to protect us from what Roosevelt called the ``malefactors of great wealth'' are off the beat.

Mr. Speaker, we should reject this bill.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, let me add just to what the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) was saying. He was asking why this administration cannot make veterans a priority, but I would suggest that we are not so much even asking the administration to recognize veterans as a priority, but just asking them to give them a decent kind of regular order priority, because the fact of the matter is this administration, and it is sad to say, has not only failed to give the veterans priority. They have really treated them like about second- or third- class citizens.

The administration really has decided to put veterans, some of whom have lost limbs and health and their lives in Iraq, on a second or third tier below other folks that the administration values more highly. That is a fairly dramatic thing to say, but let me back up what I mean by that.

The administration has decided to put people who earn over $400,000 a year and got about almost a third of the tax breaks that the President handed out, the President refuses to ask any of those folks to contribute in any way to the Iraq war, and so basically the administration has put veterans behind those folks on a lower tier. He has not just put them on a lower priority. He has put them on a second- class tier, but it is not just folks earning a high income.

The President has also put Halliburton on a higher tier than the veterans who have actually fought the wars. We have not seen this administration really get aggressive about the misuse of funds in Iraq.

We Democrats had to hold sort of a rump hearing. The gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and the Senator from North Dakota had a hearing to find out what happened to all this money that disappeared into the financial swamps of Iraq.

Exactly, Mr. Speaker. And if the gentleman will continue to yield, three times, three times the amount of money it would take to fix this problem with veterans so they would not have to stand in line for 6 months to get treatment when they come back from Iraq, this administration lost three times as much money in the financial netherworld of Iraq, and they refuse to do anything about it because it is embarrassing.

Mr. Speaker, let me mention maybe one of the most embarrassing things, and I read about this today. When I said that this administration has put veterans on a lower tier of value, let me tell my colleagues the sort of icing on the cake. Today, I read that a group of veterans from the first Persian Gulf War who were tortured by Saddam Hussein in the Abu Ghraib prison brought a lawsuit in the American courts against Iraq, the Iraqi Government, and they were granted a significant judgment, several millions of dollars for the abuse, and it was horrendous abuse. These were fliers who

went down in the first Persian Gulf War, were captured by Saddam's forces, and were terribly tortured; and they won a judgment that seemed to me to make the right decision considering what they went through. They now are attempting to enforce that judgment against Iraq and against the oil revenues that are generated in Iraq.

So what did the administration do? Did it come to the aid of these veterans who were so terribly tortured at Abu Ghraib? No. This administration went to court to refuse to pay these veterans the judgment they had received against the Iraqi oil field money, essentially, which is now pouring into Iraq.

And the irony of this is pretty amazing because our Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, has said we are going to pay damages to the Iraqis who were subject to the abusive conditions in Abu Ghraib by our forces. The same defense Secretary who said we ought to pay the Iraqis who were abused in Abu Ghraib, unfortunately, in our situation, in our custody, now steps in and refuses to allow our Americans to get payment when Saddam Hussein tortured them. What kind of convoluted cockamamie, knuckleheaded policy is that.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, there is an explanation, and it is very clear what the explanation is. The explanation is that this administration puts on a higher tier of value the Iraqi provisional government in dollars than these American veterans who were tortured. They put them on a higher tier, number one. Number two, the administration puts Halliburton on a higher tier than veterans because they refused to give this $9 billion back that could be used to finance veterans, number two. Number three, this administration puts people who earn over $400,000 a year and got a tax cut that the administration refuses to even talk about now, it puts them higher than the people who went to Iraq and came home sometimes without legs.

I do not believe that is consistent with American values on how we ought to look at respective contribution by Americans to our freedom, which was the ultimate contribution of these veterans. But it shows a skewed value judgment by the administration. That explains why this administration takes the position.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I think I know, if I can posit a hypothesis, in general how the President would answer, perhaps in more diplomatic terms than I will offer, but I think he would say: Mr. Strickland, with all due respect, you just do not get it. Our administration has made a decision for the first time in American history to fight a war, but the only people we are going to ask to sacrifice are veterans. Nobody else is going to have to sacrifice.

And the soldiers that are active duty.

And Reservists, some of whom are going to have to go back for a second and third deployment. These are the only Americans that we have asked to suffer and sacrifice because I, as President of the United States, do not think this is worth fighting enough to ask any other Americans to sacrifice rather than that small, less than \1/2\ percent of the population. So as a result, I, as President, have made a decision that if the veterans get in my way by needing health care or if the veterans get in my way by having a judgment because they got tortured by Saddam Hussein and if they get in my way because they want to get Halliburton to pay the 9 billion bucks back that was fraudulently used by at least somebody over in Iraq, then it is just tough.

They are not going to get in my way, because I as president am not going to touch tax cuts, I am going to do deficit spending, I am going to continue to cut these veterans off from getting payment, because if I get away with it, that is good enough for me. That is the only answer I can think of.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, I want to tip a hat to these veterans groups, who are really one of the least demanding groups of people I have ever worked with, considering how they have been mistreated since this Iraq war started and since this administration started to cut health care. Incredibly, they have been respectful in bringing this to our attention. But, frankly, if they were yelling at the top of their lungs and circling the White House with pitchforks and torches, I think that would be, frankly, understandable.

I was talking to somebody the other day saying if you are a World War II veteran right now and you have a urological concern and you want to get an exam, you have to wait like four months in the State of Washington to get in for an examination. That is just not right. Those lines are getting longer, and they will continue to get longer because of these cuts in the general VA budget.

The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) has talked with some eloquence about raising the deductible that individual veterans have to pay. Now they are also trying to soak veterans for $250 up front before you get your first dollar of health care payments, if you make the enormous sum of $22,000, which puts people right up in the Donald Trump category, I am sure.

They are also cutting the general budget, or not raising it to the level it demands, for the whole hospital system, which means these waiting lines get longer, just as the number of people who need them get larger. So it is a multiple. It is like a death by a thousand cuts.

Let me suggest one reason why we do not hear as much as we should about this issue. If you look at the pictures of our Iraqi veterans who are coming home, and we in Congress on both sides of the aisle have visited with them and know how courageous these mostly young and not- so-young people are, if you look at pictures of them, they are a lot of times alone. They have gone back a lot of times to a small town and are living in somebody's basement, and you see them sitting on the edge of a chair with a missing limb. They are kind of alone. There is not a big group around them except maybe their immediate family. They do not have a blaring group of bugles and a press corps to advocate their cause. Maybe that is what we ought to be doing here tonight, and in some small way I guess we are.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, when they stripped the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) of his chairmanship, he was sort of politically decapitated, if you will, because he had a dissenting voice in the Republican caucus. He wanted to bring to the country's attention the fact that veterans were not getting their due. That was a courageous step by him. As a result, the leadership essentially lynched him and excommunicated him from the leadership position he held, after 25 years.

Think of what that message is to Iraq. We saw Iraqis really courageously go to the polls. That was amazing. They had a 58 percent or 60 percent turnout, almost 82 percent in a lot of the Shiite areas. There were people who walked through violence to get to the polls. This was a lot of personal courage there that we should respect in a lot of ways. One would think we ought to honor that and send some messages to Iraq about how to run a democracy.

Well, look at just three examples, how under the leadership of the current House, what our lessons to Iraq are. Number one, to the Sunnis, we want the Sunnis to come into the Iraqi government. We want the minority group to participate in the government, because if we do not get the Sunnis involved in the Iraqi government, this insurgency is going to continue to bloom. So our message is to the Shiites, embrace the Sunnis. Let them come in and have a voice in your government. Let dissent have a voice. Reach a consensus through embracing the minority.

What do they do here in the House of Representatives? To their own Member, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), who had a dissenting viewpoint, kind of the position the Sunnis are in as a minority, boom, off with his head, silence him. Take him out of the political discourse here by removing his chairmanship. That is not a good message to the Iraqis about how democracy ought to run.

If the gentleman will yield further, the President had some eloquent language about freedom around the world, which is something we all aspire to. I guess we are saying people ought to have freedom in the House of Representatives to stand up for veterans, and not be punished as the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) was. That is wrong, and we are going to continue to be a voice for veterans so this administration does not cut their health care.

Mr. Speaker, for some time now, several of my colleagues and myself have come to the floor of the House to address issues surrounding our national policy in Iraq, and tonight we intend to have a few comments in that regard, particularly in regard to the budget and how the budget refers to our ongoing efforts in Iraq. And I was thinking about that in combination with the President's suggested budget the other day.

That same day I was looking at the President's budget, I was reading a story about 3 GIs who were walking through a town in central Iraq, and they were trying to alert people about essentially the polling activity and the election activity that was going to go on, but they knew they were in a very hostile environment when they were doing so. And a group of them, about nine soldiers were walking through an area, and they were just sort of handing out leaflets to folks about the election activity to let them know where they could vote and what kind of security was going to be provided, and a shot rang out. The leader of the platoon was shot and went down, and they immediately started to receive fire from all points of the compass.

The thing that struck me is that it said what immediately happened is two of the soldiers who were near the fellow who was shot immediately, instead of taking cover, jumped up and sort of literally sort of shielded the injured GI with themselves as they returned fire. That is just one of the many acts of heroism that our troops have been involved with in Iraq.

What it made me think about was, to ask the question frankly, whether back home we are matching the responsibility and the values and the heroism that are going on in Iraq. Because whatever you think about the Iraq policy, and I voted against the Iraq war. I thought the President's assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was overstated, that his assertion that Saddam was responsible for September 11 was inaccurate, and I voted against the war. But, nonetheless, all of us respect what our GIs, Marines, and other service personnel are doing in Iraq.

And the question I was just thinking about is whether or not their courage and responsibility and the values, American values they are displaying in Iraq are sort of met on the domestic side here in Washington, D.C., particularly in regard to the budget that this administration has just proposed to the people in the U.S. Congress.

I was thinking about how you would test the budget that the President has proposed against the values that we are seeing by our troops in Iraq. And in thinking about it, it became pretty clear to me that there are some real questions about that, about whether this budget really is up to snuff and up to the level of character that we have seen of our people in Iraq.

Let me give the first example that comes to mind. We now have literally thousands of our sons and daughters, husband and wives coming home injured from Iraq, some very, very seriously. In fact, one of the most disturbing things about this war is, because of our excellent medical care, we are actually having people come back from Iraq with more devastating injuries than other wars because we have been successful in saving lives. But people are coming back with very, very debilitating injuries. And they are coming back to a system that we would like to see is eminently successful in treating them, the veterans health care system.

The first question I think we ought to ask about the President's budget is does the President's budget in the veterans health care system meet the heroism and the commitment and the sacrifice that our troops have put on the line in Iraq?

So when I looked at the President's budget I was absolutely flabbergasted to see what the budget proposal from this administration has in mind for our injured people coming home from Iraq. Now, one would think that an administration that took our country into war in Iraq, sent our sons and daughters

into combat, knew they were coming back by the thousands with missing arms, shattered faces, difficult trauma to deal with, one would sort of think that the budget would rush to their aid and embrace them with the arms of Americans who so much have embraced our troops and their spirits and their prayers since the war began.

One would think that the spirit that I saw at an old car wash being organized in Redmond, Washington that people had to send money and gifts to troops to help them through their trials, one would think that that same spirit would be imbued in the budget put forth by the President. I must sadly report that in looking at the President's budget, this budget stiffs our heroes coming back from Iraq. It cuts their benefits. It increases what veterans have to pay to get medical care they should have for free. It reduces our national commitment to veterans in meaningful ways. And I can reach no other conclusion than that the budget falls well short of our national commitment to our veterans.

This President who started a war in Iraq, a war that has caused such debilitating injuries, has proposed to make our veterans coming home from battle pay more out of their pocket for prescriptions and to get medical care. How is that consistent with the values of America? How is that consistent with what we expect when we want to honor our troops, to dishonor them by cutting the veterans health care system and making veterans pay more out of their pocket, a co-pay for their health care?

Where is the honor, I ask the White House, in cutting the benefits available for our troops coming home from Iraq? Where is the honor in requiring our veterans to pony up $250 who are in certain categories even to get their health care? Where is that family value?

It seems to me that there ought to be a bipartisan consensus, that there ought to be family values, that if you send your son or daughter into harm's way for the benefit of your national family, that when they come home, if anything, you ought to increase the benefits that we have available to these folks. But that is not the case in this President's budget, because this President really had to face a choice in this budget. It was pretty clear.

We have over a $400 billion deficit today, and this President really had to face a choice between two competing values. One value would be to provide for the health care of our veterans. One value would be to preserve the President's favored tax cuts for people who earn over $400,000 a year.

Now, in order to at least staunch the red ink which, by the way, this does not do because this budget still does not decrease the deficit. It increases it. But one way to do it, this budget had to make a choice; this budget had to choose between two values. It had to choose between the value of honoring our veterans or the value of honoring those folks who earn over $400,000 a year and to make their tax cuts they got permanent. The President chose to honor that less than half of a percent of Americans to make those tax cuts permanent and abandon the value of honoring and embracing the health care needs of our veterans.

Budgets are not just monetary issues. They are statements of values. They are statements of what we believe in as a country. They are statements of what you hold most dear. And it is clear that this budget says that the most dear value that this budget reflects is the value of keeping those permanent tax cuts for people earning over $400,000; and the people who are coming home from Iraq with missing eyes and shattered bodies and shattered psyches and missing limbs, who are coming home trying to rebuild their lives, they can just go fish according to this budget because they are going to have to pay more to get basic health care now.

Now, I do not think those are the values of America, the values that my constituents have, my neighbors have, Republicans or Democrats. Because I have to tell you, the Republicans and Democrats that I talk to and I represent in my district in Washington State, I think if you ask people on the street if it comes to a choice between those two things to reduce the deficit, what should you pick, I think it is about 95 percent would pick to give health care to veterans. But that is not a choice this White House made, this administration made; and it is sad.

I hope that we in this Chamber in a bipartisan way can join to preserve, defend, and protect those who preserved, defended, and protected us, which is our veterans. And it is not being done in this budget, and this is a symptom of an illness of this budget in total because it has sacrificed numerous values on the cross of making these President's tax cuts for people who earn over $400,000 a year, that that value trumps everything. It trumps health care for veterans. It trumps reduction of the deficit. It trumps cleaning up nuclear wastes that are going into the Columbia River in my neck of the woods. It trumps cleaning up other Superfund sites around the country. It trumps enforcing our clean air laws so that our children do not get asthma.

This President puts that value above every other value that we have, Americans now have to have a chance to express in this budget; and it is sad and it is wrong and it is not consistent with the American values, I believe, on a bipartisan basis are held.

Now, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) has joined us, who has been an absolute stalwart talking about the importance of maintaining veterans benefits.

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask if the experience in Ohio is the

same as it is in Washington. The gentleman has just read quite an extensive list of multimillion dollar cuts to the services that the VA system can provide for veterans. That may seem like abstract numbers, but I want to ask my colleague about this.

In Washington State, veterans now, in the existing budget before the cuts, are waiting months and months and months to get in for basic health care because even the existing budget does not allow them to get help. And so I talked to World War II veterans who literally are waiting months, and these are people in their upper 70s, to get basic health care with the existing budget.

This budget purports to cut multiple millions of dollars to reduce that, to increase the waiting line so when a person needs to go in to get various body parts checked, from their urinary tract to their cardiac function, they are in a waiting line. The people who went on the sands of Iwo Jima, they did not want to go to the back of the line. They went out the front of the boat. Now this budget is going to make the waiting longer.

That is the experience in Washington. I just wonder what the experience is in Ohio.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bit of an unusual thing that a Democrat is praising the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the former Republican Chair of this committee in the House, and I want to just ask this:

My perception of this is that here we had a Republican Member who is stalwart in attempting to preserve and improve the veterans' health care in our country, who was willing to rock the boat to do that, had the moral fiber to do that, and was in a sense excommunicated because he had the willingness to stand up to people who stood up at Guadalcanal and the people who stood up in all of those places whom we have had harmed, and he was a bit of hero I believe myself, and I am just going to ask my colleague to categorize this.

I think what the Republican leadership and, by extension, the White House, which I have to believe had some knowledge of this, was a slap in the face of every veteran in this country. Do you think that is a fair characterization?

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I think what is disappointing about the President not putting it in his budget, is that we probably have over 160 or 180 cosponsors of this bill to raise that benefit for the families, yet it is still not there. And it is really just one of a whole suite of insults for the people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do not forget the contributions of our people in Afghanistan who are suffering and still dying in Afghanistan.

What is so troubling to me, and I think a lot of my constituents, are two aspects. You have to ask yourself: How could an administration in the middle of two wars even think about cutting benefits to veterans? How could you possibly do that? I am trying to think, how could there be any possible rationale to do that when you have these people coming home in such dire straits?

I think there are two things going on here: One, I suspect that the people who are coming up with these cockamamie, unfair, inequitable, I am going to call them un-American ideas, maybe that is a stretch but I am going to say that, when we are talking about heroes of the American Nation? How can you deign to raise copayments, charge them $250, make them stand in line longer, make them wait longer to get cardiac care? How can you even think about doing that?

I think one of the things is that these folks who are making a pretty good salary, who are in the agencies and working at the White House, who are driving a decent car, kind of think, Oh, it is $250. Big deal. What is $25 extra for a prescription? Big deal. That is just pocket change. Falls out of crumbs or tips at lunch around here in Washington, D.C. On K Street, where lobbyists hang out, that is just tip money.

I think people forget when they try to stick injured GIs with this, they forget these folks are just absolutely scraping when they come back.

I saw a story about a family who lost a young father and husband in Washington State, and they interviewed the widow, who had four children, and they were living in the basement of their parents' house. She was trying to get enough to get back to community college to try to earn a living to support these four children. It was really a matter of feeding and clothing these kids. And $250 is the difference between making it and not making it to these folks.

I think people making these decisions forget that. They just are not in touch with that, number one.

Number two, and this is the basic flaw of the entire budget, I think, is that the folks who drafted this budget have a view about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their view is that there are only a certain very small percentage of Americans who should bear all of the burden of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the view of this administration that only those select individuals should take the entire weight of this conflict, not only in their physical health and whether they live or die but in their fiscal burden as well, and those are the people actually serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody else in America should have any bit of sacrifice associated with this war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I do not think that is the American way. And I do not think Americans really expect that. Americans believe that it is not only the GIs who should be the ones bearing some sacrifice from this endeavor. Yet the President wants to take every single dollar we spend there and make it deficit spending.

The part he will not make deficit spending, that he is too embarrassed to put on his debt on our grandchildren because he has a deficit that has blown through the roof, and it is terribly embarrassing, the part he will not make a deficit to put on his debt on our grandchildren, he will put on our veterans by cutting their health care.

These are the very people who lost their limbs. He wants them to bear all the burden. He does not want to ask anybody else in America to be associated with this. And that is wrong.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, let me add that it is not just the veterans of this country that we think should be rightfully outraged about this insult to veterans. It is also those of us who have our liberty because of veterans.

I did something a little unusual for me; I actually watched the Super Bowl this year. It turned out to be a good game. It was very, very unique in Super Bowl history. I think the wrong team won, but still a good game. And the most telling commercial to me, which they always talk a lot about, the Super Bowl commercials, was the scene where you are like in a train station waiting room or an airport waiting room and you see people milling about, and then they all of a sudden somebody started clapping. You cannot see what they are clapping at, at first. Then the clapping rolls and pretty soon everybody in the room is clapping. Then you see these troops coming by, we assume coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan, and pretty soon the whole group is clapping.

I think that commercial really did encapsulate how Americans feel about our sons and daughters and husbands and wives who serve there. This is really deep and touching and it is good for America.

During Vietnam, there were a lot of disagreements. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) and I had enormous disagreements with the President about Iraq, and a lot of my constituents, a big majority of my constituents had a lot of disagreements. But to a person they felt the same way about our GIs coming home; the Marines, soldiers and sailors. That commercial showed people wanting to applaud them as they came home.

That is the spirit of America, yet this administration draws a budget that reduces the protection that these folks ought to have after coming home from the front line. That is just totally out of touch.

The veterans are a very uncomplaining group. I find veterans to be the least demanding group, perhaps, of any people I work with. It is just not in touch with the spirit of America of wanting to embrace these people.

It is denigrating their contribution. It is not understanding how deep people feel about the sacrifices that these folks have made in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is why we will have a very vigorous effort to restore this funding.

If my colleague will yield once again, it seems to me our goal ought to be a policy that we can be proud of. This is not a budget to be proud of on behalf of our veterans.

I just want to reiterate, and continuing along the same vein that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) has, I want to read from what Mr. Thomas Cadmus, Director of the American Legion, said in questioning this budget. He said, ``Is the goal of these legislative initiatives to drive those veterans paying for their health care away from the system designed to serve veterans? The President is asking Congress to make health care poaching legal in the world's largest health care delivery system.''

Health care poaching, instead of assisting the veterans, is not a budget America can be proud of. That is why we are going to continue this effort, and we hope others will join us to make sure that the sacrifices of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are honored with a budget that America can be proud of and can stand up and defend. This President's budget falls way short and it must be changed.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose the language in this Omnibus bill that significantly restricts a woman's access to health care services. This year, 2,500 Washington State residents traveled across America to march for this right protected by the U.S. Constitution. As the 108th Congress comes to an end, I am disappointed to be faced again with an omnibus piece of legislation containing political poison pills that attack constitutional liberties.

I regret that Congress must pass this appropriations bill to keep our Government running yet simultaneously approve a bill that encroaches on a woman's right to make private medical decisions with her doctor. Embedded in this legislation is a Federal Refusal Clause which creates an impossible situation for women in my State that are protected by local pro-choice laws--laws that these citizens time after time support--which ensure women access to reproductive health information and services.

This provision would break contracts that Washington State has with Medicaid providers to prohibit the local healthcare facilities participating in Medicaid from referring patients to abortion services--even when medically necessary, even upon patient request and even though law entitles it. This provision is a blow to the right of a woman and her doctor to make private healthcare decisions and I urge my colleagues to correct this outrage.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel) but not just for this evening.

The Iraq Watch, which has been trying to bring a responsible voice to Iraq policy now for many months, was the brain child of the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel), and he really did lead this effort, and we are very appreciative of him, and I know his constituents are, too.

I have to tell the gentleman, he has a lot of fans out in the State of Washington that I hear about, why can you not can be as good as Mr. Hoeffel. I hear that many times.

But seriously, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel) did something that does not happen all the time around here. He really led, and he led in an important issue to make sure Americans heard a voice about Iraq other than just from the White House, and that is important we have that debate. This was a creation of his and I think has been useful, and I know a lot of people have appreciated it, and I appreciate his leadership on that. We look forward to when the gentleman is back in public service. So we hope within 2 years, maybe even shorter. Who knows?

But with that, let me turn to the subject here which is a tough one tonight. I have to call a mother and father who lost their 19-year-old Marine in Fallujah this week tomorrow, and it is very difficult because all three of us here this evening voted against this war, and we have all had this experience of talking to families. It is very, very difficult.

What I am going to say is, what I know what we all have said, is no matter what you think of the policy, these are all good Americans who served, and no American has died in vain while serving under the flag of the United States. I am going to do my best to make sure parents appreciate that. No matter what you think of the policy, they died as heroes, and the people who are sitting tonight in Fallujah, that is how I think of them, no matter what you think of the policy. I know we all share that view.

It is difficult because it does inspire some anger sometimes I think in all of us as to what has happened in Iraq, where a war was started based on false assumptions about weapons of mass destruction and false assumptions and statements by the White House about Saddam's connection to 9/11.

The trouble I have tonight is that the same type of source of the mistake was made unfortunately is being perpetuated by the White House. In other words, one would think after the White House started a war based on two major falsehoods, that was given to him by certain people, that the President would be doubly diligent to endeavor to get people who would not perpetuate that same kind of mistake, but in fact, what we have seen since the election on November 2 is sort of like a green light for hubris, a green light to go ahead and actually make stronger in the administration the very voices that fouled up in giving us bad information about this war and making repeated misjudgments about how to perpetuate it.

Just look at the decisions that have been made in the last week. The man who himself admitted responsibility for putting a false statement into the State of the Union address, where the President told people that Saddam was trying to get uranium to build a nuclear weapon, it was a clear falsehood in the State of the Union address, and the man who himself admitted being responsible for telling Americans and the world that falsehood did not get docked pay, did not get fired. He just got a promotion to the National Security Council. So here we have the guy who is responsible for a major failure of American information that led to a war where 1,200 Americans have died. He gets a promotion. This is a perpetuation of this arrogant attitude that has got us into this pickle in Iraq.

What happens to the Defense Secretary who has had running arguments, as we know, with the Secretary of State Colin Powell about whether to go into this war and how to perpetuate it? Who is the one who leaves? It is the guy who, we are told at least, said let us be scrupulous about this, and the Secretary of Defense stays, the one who has been in charge of this since Abu Ghraib and did not give us accurate information, including the U.S. Congress, leading up to this.

Then what do we see happens at the CIA? Well, here's the capper for me. Here we have a man who left this chamber. He is now heading the CIA. What is the first thing he does, almost first thing he does? He writes a memo to all the CIA employees. I have not seen this memo but it is quoted in the paper. It says, he expects all employees that their job is to support the administration and its policies in our work and as agency employees we do not identify with, identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.

He sent a very strong message to CIA employees: what the White House wants, it is going to get. And that is language that people understand.

The last thing this President needs is unanimity from his intelligence agencies. He needs debate. He needs to be told some information that may not square with his preordained view of the world. And, in fact, they are going the wrong way at the CIA and firing people who have deigned to give the President information that is different from information he believes to be true.

I thank the gentleman for his comments, Mr. Speaker, and let me continue.

Later on in the memo, Goss has language that says ``We provide the intelligence as we see it and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.'' But when you send a memo to your employees suggesting they dare not ever say anything to challenge the President's preassumptions, that sentence does not bear out this memo. The message was sent and I am sure received by the CIA.

And I am very disturbed about something I saw last night, a show I was watching, and I cannot remember the name of it, but a former CIA person who has now left the agency and who was the person in charge of the unit searching for Osama bin Laden was on this program. This was the gentleman whose professional duty it was, for about 6 years, to lead the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In fact, he was so aggressive about it, for about 2 years they took him off the job because he was driving his superiors nuts because he was raising these red flags about Osama bin Laden. After September 11, they put him back on the post because they realized he was right about how serious this issue was.

He has now left the post, but last night he said there was absolutely no credible evidence of a substantive link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The number one guy in the employment of the Central Intelligence Agency last night told Americans there was no link. And for a year or more, the President, the Vice President, you name it, was running around America trying to create this impression in America's mind that there was a link in order to justify this war. That is disturbing to me.

Here is a guy that ought to be in the CIA challenging the White House's political decisions. He needs to be on the job rather than spit out of the agency like a watermelon seed. That is what they are doing. Anyone down there who is challenging the White House orthodoxy is getting kicked out.

This is not a good thing for our future decisions. We have tough decisions to make with regard to Iraq. This offensive in Fallujah, where heroes died, and they were heroic, but it is not the end of the trail. We have some tough, tough decisions.

I yield back to my colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel).

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on what the gentleman said on the failure to successfully pursue any international involvement.

The bad news is that the President's plan is even unraveling with those who originally made some commitments to him. I read in the paper last week that Hungary has just announced that they will withdraw their troops. This was on top of withdrawals, either actual or announced, by Spain, 1,300 troops; Poland, 2,400 troops; the Netherlands, 1,400 troops; Thailand, 450 troops; the Dominican Republic, 322 troops; Nicaragua, 115 troops; Honduras, 370 troops; the Philippines, 51 troops; Norway, 155 troops; and New Zealand, 60. These are relatively small numbers, but I think it is a symptom of some bad decisionmaking. And the reason we talk about the past is the President is perpetuating his decisionmaking that created these conditions. He sees no reason ever to change.

We had a small coalition to start this, and now the small number of troops sent to help us are being withdrawn so our people are having to bear the burden of the fighting.

In Fallujah, this long after the fight, we had token Iraqis with us, and one of the reasons is the administration did not set up an infrastructure for training the Iraqis. Last month, 4 weeks ago, all that time since the original invasion, we still had only 40 percent of the trainers that the plan called for on day one to train Iraqis troops.

This thing has been botched, and the problem is the President is promoting people who are responsible for it, and we are getting deeper. One thing that bothers me, the gentleman mentioned the President knows how to use power. He should not use it in a way that lets politics dictate military decisions. It is pretty clear to any neutral observer that is what happened in Fallujah, because this spring we had an offensive into Fallujah. It was called off. Everybody knew we were going to have to go back in there, and it would seem to me it would make prudent sense to go back in there before we give thousands of insurgents time to build bunkers, accumulate their communications network. What did the President do? It is pretty clear. Not until after the election because there is going to be American blood flow.

One week after the election, all of a sudden we get the attack on Fallujah. Thirty-eight Americans die in the attack. It is pretty clear, and it is sad to say what happened here. There was a political decision to avoid this assault and, as a result, these insurgents had more and more time to fortify Fallujah. That was wrong by a Republican, a Democrat or anybody, to put our men in harm's way, to allow the enemy to consolidate their position, and we had to walk our people into those dens of fire.

Mr. Speaker, it troubles me because I am going to call some parents tomorrow who lost their 19-year-old son in that battle. I am not going to broach this with them. I do not know if the thought has crossed their mind, but I cannot reach any other conclusion. What possible reason was there to wait 6 months to go into Fallujah except the fact that there was an election on November 2, and then do it just a few days after the election. What possible reason could there be other than the fact of the election schedule?

We saw how horrendous the fighting was in Fallujah. Some of these tunnels were reinforced with steel, and we gave them 6 months to do that. People's heads should roll in the administration for that.

Again, what we hear tonight is the people responsible for that have been promoted into higher positions of authority. We are not going in the right direction in Iraq.

Unfortunately, let me note a reality in Iraq, we have to some degree obtained some degree of success over Fallujah, but just read what happened everywhere else.

In Samarra, we had a Fallujah-like assault several months ago, and we thought we were successful there, but this week the Iraqi police stations were raided by the insurgents, and 33 Iraqi soldiers and policemen were killed, injured 48.

In Ramadi, a slew of suicide car bombers wounded 20 U.S. Marines. Guerillas raided three police stations, killing 22 officers.

In Diyala Province, a governor's aide and two members of the Provincial Governing Council were killed, and bombs exploded across Baghdad at a Catholic Church and against U.S. convoys along the main road to the airport.

We still cannot secure the main road to the airport in Baghdad. We still are hiring the people responsible for these debacles and giving them promotions. It is wrong.

I just want to say that there is a future in Iraq. The one thing we should recognize and we are in it together, Democrats and Republicans, whether we voted for this war or not, and we all have responsibilities to try to make tough decisions about what to do now. Our discussion of the past does not mean to suggest that we can walk away in the next 24 hours from Iraq, but I think what we are saying is that we need people that we can trust with decision-making in Iraq, that we will have a rational, decision-making process that is based on the facts rather than just hopes and wishes.

I remember just even 6, 8 months ago listening to the Vice President talking about how things were going so remarkably well in Iraq and we had the Mission Accomplished incident. We had Ambassador Bremer telling us and Wolfowitz telling us that this entire thing was going to be financed with oil revenues from Iraq. He told us, to Congress, I remember this very well. He said, ``There won't be a single taxpayer dollar associated with this project.'' How many billion are we in it now? It is hard to tell.

As the gentleman from Ohio pointed out, the one thing we know about every billion dollars this President has spent, it has been of my grandchildren's money. He has not asked any sacrifice of us. Winston Churchill said, ``All I have to offer you is blood, sweat, toil and tears.'' This President has said, ``Just go shopping.'' That is how he has approached this. So we are asking this horrific sacrifice of our men and women in Fallujah tonight. But this President wants to keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest folks, his friends. That is how he handles it. He is the only President in American history who has insisted that in the middle of war when our warriors are out there risking their lives, he does not want to risk anything except his tax cuts, and he will not even risk that.

He is the only American President who has ever done major tax cuts in a war. I would assert that he is in the panoply of those who are the most economically and morally irresponsible. This is a moral issue to ask our soldiers to go die in Fallujah and go back here in the homestead and try to boost his popularity by giving tax breaks to the rich.

That is a moral issue. And there has been a lot of talk about moral values in this last election.

I want to say, I look at that as a violation of the values that I hold and I think a majority of my constituents hold. We ought to be in this together as Americans, and this President does not want any American to be in it except those on the frontline because he does not want people to know how costly war is. And it is not cheap. And that is a moral failure.

And if we raise our voices on occasion, it is because there is cause for anger here. And there is cause for anger when I hear in the last week that this President gives promotions. There is not a guy who has lost his extra vacation day in this administration as a result of the debacle in Iraq. What kind of message is that to send on personal accountability when a guy who told us that it was not going to cost the taxpayers a dollar is sitting fat and happy as the Secretary of Defense, has never got his hand even slapped, did not even get a memo in his personnel file, and his buddy takes over the National Security Council and had the President tell us something that was a blatant falsehood to start this war? And now we are going to make calls, all four of us, to family members who lost people in Fallujah. That is a moral insult. It is not just bad public policy.