Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, this is not a debate about whether or not to fulfill our moral obligation to continue to work in Iraq. It is a debate about how to do it. It does not matter how we got into Iraq. We are there now. Americans of all stripes, those who supported the war and those who oppose it, know in their hearts that we are united in our desire to support our proud troops in the field and to continue our work in Iraq.

I will be joining the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) and others in an attempt to increase the pay of those men and women who are making such a sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow. But we owe these proud Americans in the field more than just that. We owe them a willingness to make some measure of sacrifice at home that is even the smallest fraction of the sacrifice they make overseas.

The bill before us takes the irresponsible road and fails to truly call upon us at home to actually pay for the costs of this war. This bill proposes to avoid any sacrifice at home by stealing every single dollar it spends from the Social Security trust fund to wage this war. Every single dollar proposed to be

spent will deplete the very funds that will be depleted by the forthcoming retirement of the baby boom generation. Every single dollar spent will be new debt foisted upon the shoulders of our children. Every single dollar that will be borrowed could hinder our economic recovery.

Why is this? Why is this short-sighted way being taken? Well, it is the addiction to the credit cards and it is wrong. It is a multi- billion dollar moral wrong to our children who have this debt put on their shoulders. And there is a better way.

We ought to ask for the smallest sacrifice at home to match that of our troops and reduce just a portion of the tax cut that people who earn over $300,000 will otherwise receive to pay for this war.

Do you know anyone who thinks that is unfair? Now, I remember the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) urged us to fight. Well, we will do that, but we cannot just fight the war in Iraq. We have got to fight the war on the Federal deficit too. And this bill will only fight one of those wars. We ought to have the courage to fight both.

If it is important enough for us to ask our troops to pay for this war with their lives, with their limbs, then it ought to be important enough for us to pay for this war without passing the cost on to our children, on to our soldiers' children.

This bill guarantees defeat. It runs up the white flag in the face of the deficit. It cuts and runs from the war on the Federal deficit and we should fight both.

Today there are men and women standing up for us in Iraq and we ought to stand up for them and say yes to supporting our troops and stand up for their children and say no to $87 billion in debt.

Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, I appreciate that segue and why I came to the floor tonight to talk about the sad fact that we, and I am from the State of Washington, are hearing story after story after story about how our troops are not getting the tools they need to do the job and how their families are not receiving the benefits they need to keep the home fires burning while particularly these reservists and Guard men and women are in these extended duties, and that is what I wanted to focus on.

Every Member of Congress I think has heard from mothers and fathers of troops. I met with a group of reservists, wives and mothers and fathers and husbands last weekend, and the story I heard about was of a mother who is a nurse who had to go out and herself buy medicine for the troops that her son, who is a medic in the Army, the Army simply was not providing. She had to actually ship over medicine disguised as brownies or food or something to her troops to get this kind of stuff to them. We heard story after story of that.

In a grander scale, on a macro scale, as the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) indicated, we need to have a significant restructuring to provide the health care and benefits. We are going to have to improve or we are not going to have a reserve force. We are not going to have a meaningful National Guard force because the families that I have been talking to are going to be making some different career decisions if we do not start to cut the mustard.

Now, as a result of that, I offered an amendment today in the Committee on Rules to significantly improve the health care situation for reservists so that they could buy into TRICARE or Uncle Sam would essentially continue their employer-paid programs for at least 6 months after their deployment. This would be a significant benefit to families in the reserve because they will say at least we are going to be able to continue our existing level of coverage for the whole family during these extended family deployments. It is not just a year anymore. It is 18 months for a lot of these folks because they changed the rules on what is an in-country deployment.

This is a Democrat offering this amendment. We are going to hear a lot of people suggesting we are not supporting the troops because we are raising issues about this policy, but this amendment was not allowed for a vote on the floor here. I offered an amendment that would allow us to vote on this floor to give reservists better health care, and the Republican majority would not allow even a vote on this effort to improve reservists' health care, and I think that is a failure not only for the families which have a big dog in this hunt but in our military security force structure. We are going to have to do these kinds of things or we are just going to have people leaving the reserves and the National Guard in significant numbers.

The second issue, I will be joining the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) who will be offering an amendment to take a little bit of money out of the Iraq reconstruction fund and put it where it belongs, which is a pay increase for these folks fighting this battle, and this is appropriate given the extraordinary nature of this extended deployment, and it should have been done in the first instance. I hope the majority party will join us in improving the lot of our soldiers on the line.

The third issue, and I just want to mention this briefly before I yield, there is a huge irresponsibility in this plan that the President has presented. The irresponsibility is while these soldiers are risking all in Iraq, who are sacrificing their time, their limbs, their lives, the President of the United States has not asked folks to sacrifice a little bit to pay for this war and instead wants people on Social Security, essentially in the trust fund, to pay because every single last dollar of this money he is taking out of the Social Security trust fund to pay for this war, instead of asking for a small sacrifice to perhaps delay or defer the tax cuts for people earning over $300,000.

Now, is that too much sacrifice to ask, people earning $300,000, when our kids and our husbands and our wives are serving in Iraq?

Well, Madam Speaker, what has happened is that many misstatements have been laid bare to the American people, and that is why the American people are demanding Congress ask the questions we are constitutionally obligated to ask about this program. And we will not be dissuaded by those who will simply try to demagogue this issue by saying that we are not supporting the troops. We are the ones who want to improve the troops' pay grades; we are the ones who want to make sure that, in fact, this gets paid.

I want to make one point also. This debate tomorrow is not going to be about whether or not we continue to fulfill a responsibility in Iraq, because there is bipartisan consensus that we have some responsibility in Iraq; and anybody who says otherwise, well, that is just a red herring. But what we are saying is, let us not repeat the errors that a Democratic President made in the 1960s of deciding to try to fight a war on the cheap and saying we can have both guns and butter and create these enormous deficits.

Now, it is the same as what happened in the 1960s here. This is going to create enormous deficits. There is a little difference, though. At least in the 1960s it was our butter. Now it is going to be the Iraqis' butter that Americans are going into debt to pay. Now, maybe some of that has to happen by the vicissitudes of fate we find ourselves in, but we should not repeat the mistake of the 1960s that ended up with a horrendous deficit going through the roof in the 1970s.

The way it is is that those of us who are raising questions about this proposal, I will not call it a plan because it does not rise to the dignity of a plan. It is not a Marshall Plan. It is not even a partial plan. We do not have a schedule, we do not have a schematic, we do not have a plan. It is the beginning of a proposal of an idea maybe, but that is why we are here asking these questions. But what those of us who are asking these questions, the one thing we do know is this. The amount the administration has proposed for military expenditures is actually inadequate for the job at hand. We are the ones who are saying that what has been proposed is not enough to fulfill this responsibility. It is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of Reservists, it is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of National Guards, it does not provide some of the basics to the service personnel. It is billions of dollars short on what it is going to take to rebuild the tracked vehicles that get essentially destroyed in the sands of the Mideast. There are billions of dollars we are going to have to spend that are not in that figure that should be ultimately. There is not a method of paying for the interest on the debt they want to rack up to do this.

In a whole host of ways, we are the ones who are saying we actually need to beef up the amount needed for the military expenditure in this mission. So we will not hear or suffer those who would attack our willingness to invest in the military part of this operation.

If the gentleman will yield, I would like to just address how large this blank check is. I mean, it is a large figure. It sounds big. But in reference, it is, for instance, compared to the Marshall Plan, it is 10 times per capita benefit going to the Iraqi folks than went to the German folks. Ten times per capita. This is an enormous sum of money. Speaking as one who has supported foreign aid, even though it is sometimes controversial, there are many circumstances where we ought to support foreign aid. But this is 50 times larger per capita foreign aid to the country of Iraq than the next largest

developing nation. Fifty times per capita. This is an extraordinary amount of money for one country.

Frankly, this is not the only country that presents us problems. Yemen is a potential terrorist site. The Sudan is a potential terrorist site. Somalia is a potential terrorist site. Afghanistan, we are doing lip service to and frankly it is too little in my opinion for Afghanistan given what is going on there with the Taliban perhaps restructuring. Indonesia, throughout that part of the world. We have lots of places where we need to keep stable governments.

The gentleman just provoked a thought. You think about who is really paying for this in financial terms. The soldiers are paying for it with their lives. But in financial terms, it is our young who are going to be saddled with this debt, billions of dollars of debt, and it is our older folks, including veterans, who are not going to get their health care because this President wanted to send this money to Iraq and did not pay for it. So we are hurting the two most sort of vulnerable groups in our neighborhoods, in our communities, because this plan is not a responsible plan that fulfills our mission in Iraq and our responsibilities to our future kids and our current elders. For that reason, we ought to be asking serious questions.

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

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore includes 64 miles of shoreline along the northeastern edge of Lake Michigan. I want to commend the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) for their great work bringing before us H.R. 408, working on this preservation, to acquire 100 acres for eventual addition to the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

I look forward to the passage of this legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), who has been doing stalwart work for 11 years on this matter.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee).

Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, we are just glad that the sponsors of this have not allowed Sleeping Bear Dunes to lie. We appreciate their work.

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

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

(Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding that, in effect, this bill would apply to public lands which are administered by the Bureau of Land Management and have been identified as suitable for tar sand and oil and gas leasing within the State of Utah. The committee report states that no land designation would be changed or environmental regulation modified or circumvented in any way by this legislation. I think that is an important fact to note.

Mr. Speaker, I would have preferred that this bill be considered under regular order with a hearing in the Committee on Resources prior to markup and floor consideration, but out of our continuing efforts in the direction of comity and fair play, and in the consideration that we do not have the votes to change the outcome in any event, we are unaware of any substantive problems and will not object to its consideration today.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 708 would correct a survey error by directing the Secretary of Agriculture to convey 120 acres of Forest Service land to the owner of the Faraway Ranch in California. In exchange, the rancher would pay fair market value for the lands.

We support this legislation sponsored by the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson), who has been a tremendous advocate to get this long-standing issue resolved and has done a great job in his district. We urge the bill's adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson).

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

Mr. Speaker, speaking in favor of the Capps motion, I would like to respond to the inquiry of my good friend the gentleman from Texas (Chairman Barton) as to where other alternatives are.

I would point out that if our Nation had simply continued the rate of improvement in the mileage efficiency improvements that we had made in our fleet of vehicles through the seventies and the early eighties, if we had simply continued that rate of improvement to date, we would have avoided the need for any Saudi Arabian oil today.

If you want to remove the environmental community's objections to some of these new energy sources, some of which I believe we need over the long-term, why not remove their argument to say we have not done conservation first? Take that argument away. Do the conservation and efficiency in our transportation system, and remove that argument. I wish that would happen.

Secondly, I want to talk about this issue about doing the inventory for potential sources, to do a scientific assessment of our offshore. Normally, that would seem to make sense. Science is always good. Knowing more, I suppose, is intuitively is always better than knowing less.

The problem is that every single public policy decision that this administration has made, they have got science, and ignored it. On soot and clean air, they have got science, and they ignored it. They had science that it hurt our health to continue to pollute, but they ignored it. On global climate change, they had science, but they ignored it. On arsenic in the water, they had science, and they ignored it.

Do not come here now and say you need more science, when this administration has ignored science at every single environmental decision they have had to make today.

The third reason we need the Capps motion is this truly would be a radical departure from well-established American policy. I want to stand with the Bush family in this regard, because George Herbert Walker Bush helped establish the moratorium on drilling offshore areas first established in 1982. He established a 10-year moratorium, then extended by President Clinton.

Governor Bush said, ``In preserving Florida's unique marine resources'' and ``protecting Florida's coastline, by ensuring that the OCS inventory language is not included in the final energy bill.''

We want to stand with Governor Bush and say that the Florida coastline is no less and no more important than the rest of the coastline of all of the other States represented by Governors who are not in the Bush clan. Let us pass the Capps motion and continue the moratorium.

Mr. Speaker, in thinking about the context of these bills, I imagined how we would react if a politician pulled up next to a third grader getting out of school ready to traipse home, came up to the third grader and said, I am taking your lunch money unless I get my new tax break at over $200,000 income, and I am not giving you your lunch money for tomorrow unless I get my tax break, because that is what the Republican position is on this bill.

The Republican House position on this bill is that unless these higher-income individuals get an additional tax break on top of the millions of dollars they have already got, that little Johnny does not get his lunch money, and his parents do not get the child tax credit break that they have coming to them.

We have a bill right here that will get unanimous approval to give this child tax credit to the people who deserve it, but they will not give it to him because they are holding these children hostage. And it is not a pretty sight from either side of this aisle. And when we think about the children who are subject to this, I want to make sure we know who these kids are and who their parents are: 178,000 are children of farmers, good folk; 567,000 are children of nurses or orderlies taking care of our families; 337,000 of them are teachers; and 262,000 are children of personnel, many of whom are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

But I want to make sure the record is really clear, the Republican party is telling the Army, for example, in Iraq today that their children do not get a tax credit unless the millionaires of America get another tax break for their income. And when you come home, you will be coming home to an America where your kid still does not get a tax credit unless our millionaire buddies who participate in the political process get their tax break first.

That is not the message I want to send. That is not the message the Democratic party wants to send to the soldiers and sailors who are proudly serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

I also want to point out another glitch that we need to fix that the Republicans refuse to fix. Today an E-5 sergeant with 6 years of service and two children, who is paid $29,000, who is serving in Iraq today would normally get the $1,000 tax credit, but because they are in combat, under existing law, this is pretty incredible, because they are in combat, they only get a $450 break under the House bill. So what the Republican House bill did is to say people who go to Iraq and get combat pay get a less child credit.

We want to fix that problem. I think probably the Republicans want to fix that problem too, but they just refuse to do it because you want to hold it hostage to the tax breaks for their rich pals, and that is wrong. And the reason we have come down here is we are not going to give up on this until these kids and their parents get this tax credit, and we are going to make sure America knows about this travesty to get this done. I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley) for sticking on this.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

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

Mr. Speaker, I advise other Members we do not intend to take our entire allotted time. We hope to go through this fairly expeditiously.

This is a motion brought to assure that nothing happens in the conference report that could jeopardize completion of our statutorily- mandated mission for the Department of Energy to complete the cleanup of about 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste now at various sites in the United States.

As Members know, we have created by an act of 1982, the obligation to complete a cleanup of those wastes that have been created by the Department of Defense activity, and this does refer to waste that is not commercial but rather through the Department of Defense.

In my State, for instance, there are 53 million gallons at Hanford, at Savannah River, there are several million gallons, in New York State, in Idaho, and we need to complete this cleanup. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons the concern has been expressed that in the conference committee there could be an attempt to essentially give unfettered discretion to the Department of Energy to reclassify this waste, essentially give it a different name, rather than to complete with the certain rigor and completion of the type of cleanup that is now mandated in Federal law.

We think it is very important to clean up this waste rather than just to rename this waste. So we are bringing this motion to essentially move in that direction in this conference report.

I may note that we consider this a bipartisan effort. Attorneys general from the States of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and South Carolina, both Democrats and Republicans alike, have written to the Department of Defense urging that we work together with the States and the Federal Government to find a technological solution to these last remnants of the 100 million gallons, rather than try to end run through the conference committee.

So we look forward to working on a bipartisan basis. My friend, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Hastings) certainly has knowledge of Hanford and others to work through this, but we want to make sure we do not go through the back door of the conference committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt).

(Mr. SPRATT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Berkley), a great advocate for the State of Nevada.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird) who represents the third district, which is down river in the Columbia River from the Hanford site.

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

Just as a closing comment, Mr. Speaker, the one message we hope that comes out of today is that when we have 100 million gallons of material, that if we spread a coffee cup of it on this floor in the House, it would be a lethal dose for everyone here. This is material that our constituents on a bipartisan, bicoastal basis want to make sure gets cleaned up in reality, rather than just in rhetoric; and that is why I think this motion is very important.

I am very appreciative of my friend, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Hastings), and his efforts to work with the Departments and the States to try to hammer out some solution to this. I know he has been personally involved in trying to find that solution. I appreciate his efforts. We appreciate the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton) in accepting this and moving this forward. He has also acted with honor and great wisdom, and I look forward to passage of this.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, subject to rule XXII, clause 7(c), I hereby announce my intention to offer a motion to instruct on H.R. 6, the energy bill.

The form of the motion is as follows:

Mr. Inslee moves that the managers on the part of the House

at the conference on the disagreeing votes of two Houses on

the

Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 6 be instructed to confine

themselves to the matters committed to conference in

accordance with clause 9 of rule XXII of the Rules of the

House of Representatives with regard to ``high-level

radioactive waste'' as defined in the Nuclear Waste Policy

Act of 1982 and other provisions of Federal law.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to rule XXII, I hereby give notice of my intention to offer a motion to instruct conferees on H.R. 6, the Energy Policy Act of 2003.

The form of the motion is as follows:

Mr. Inslee moves that the managers on the part of the House

at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses

on the Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 6 be instructed to

confine themselves to the matters committed to conference in

accordance with clause 9 of rule XXII of the Rules of House

of Representatives with regard to ``high-level radioactive

waste'' as defined in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982

and other provisions of Federal law.

I went home to the Seattle area this weekend and got a real earful from my constituents who in the words of this one veteran I talked to said, ``You know, I know war is hell, but it is double hell if you do not plan on what you are going to do in it and after it.'' And I got an earful from my constituents who were concerned that this administration, in at least Federal employee respects, has not done adequate planning on how we are going to move forward in Iraq.

I want to talk about those three. First, I met with a group of reservist families and active duty families who tonight are worried about their sons and their husbands and their wives in Iraq. They live with this 24 hours a day worrying about if they are going to get that phone call, and they told me that they were offended at the lack of planning that has gone into the deployments that their families have been involved with, post-war. They told me that they were told they would be home in 4 months, then 6 months, that they would be 8 months in country and 12 months overall; and now they have changed the rule that they have to be 12 months in Iraq, in country, past the time of retirement of some reservists.

They told me that they believe this is because there essentially was a gross misunderstanding, understanding of what was going to happen in Iraq, where we were told we would be welcomed with rose petals and kisses and parades. As a result of that, those mothers and sisters and brothers and wives and husbands tonight are worrying about their family members getting home; and they want some answers about how we are going to take care of reserves.

Let me tell you one thing that this administration needs to work with us on: How are we going to increase the incentive for these families to deal with these incredibly long deployments? That is why this administration made a mistake putting millions of dollars into this $87 billion to establish a zip code in Iraq but not a dime to improve the health care for our reservists, and we are going to make an effort on this floor to improve that situation because that is where our priority needs to be.

Second issue where they are seriously deficient is they are asking us to spend $87 billion in the hopes of establishing a democracy in Iraq. But have you seen the plan for establishing democracy in Iraq, about how a constitution is going to be developed? Who is going to vote on it? How we are going to get this together? I will tell you what I saw. This weekend's report out of Iraq was that there is a deadlock between the Shias and the Sunnis and the Kurds about how to go forward; and they are making zero progress, unfortunately.

This administration has not shown us a plan to get from here to there, to have a meaningful constitution with real democracy in Iraq; and we have asked for it now for over 8 months. Show us the plan for getting democracy in Iraq. And they want to send $87 billion without a plan. It is a problem.

Third issue I want to mention, I think this is very important, we need good ideas from Americans on how to go forward in Iraq. But when Ambassador Joe Wilson at the request of the CIA went to Africa as a patriotic duty and discovered that the claim that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa was patently false and reported it to the CIA, and despite the fact that the CIA told the White House it was false, and the President of the United States stood right there and told us that in fact Saddam was buying uranium from Africa even though our CIA knew that that was false, and Ambassador Joe Wilson does his patriotic duty by writing an article in the New York Times blowing the whistle on this falsehood, which the President of the United States now agrees was false and should never have been in the State of the Union address, what did this administration do? Did it write him a thank you letter for pointing out that they made a huge mistake preceding this war? Did they recommend the Congressional Medal of Honor for stepping forward when he knew he was going to get nothing but flak from people in a very contentious issue?

That is not what this administration did. This administration, we are now told, tried to punish his wife who we are told works for the CIA by blowing her cover, calling Robert Novak who printed a story identifying her as a CIA agent, to punish an American who brought the truth to this country.

That attitude has got to stop real quick. And we are appreciative that there is now, belatedly, after 2 months, apparently going to be an investigation about this potential crime. But this is not enough.

Let me mention something to you: I do not think the President has done enough on this. I heard him speak today, and I appreciate his interest in it, but his spokesperson says we do not need an internal review of this. In other words, the President is not going to demand of people that he wants to know by 5:00 tomorrow whether he or she was the person who talked to Robert Novak. He is not going to do that. And the reason is, the President's secretary said, quote, on September 29, 2003, ``There has been nothing, absolutely nothing brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the Vice President's office as well,'' close quote.

Well, that is very curious. Because the day before that in the Washington Post, which you can buy for 25 cents, it is an incredible deal, maybe 35 cents now in Washington, I am sure they have got it at the White House, which said, quote, yesterday, ``A senior administration official said that before Novak's call, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife.''

That senior administration official of the Bush administration went on to say, ``Clearly it was meant purely and simply for revenge,'' the senior official said of the alleged leak.

The President of the United States needs to demand by 5 o'clock tomorrow that his senior people answer to him, not just the Justice Department, to him, whether they had anything to do with this to get this issue resolved. We have got problems in Iraq. We do not need this distraction, and the President needs to get to the bottom of this right now, pronto, so we do not have 2 years of investigations.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the chair for his rapidity in bringing this to the floor. I just want to say there is total bipartisan agreement that Americans are sick and tired of having their dinners interrupted by these calls, and today that is going to stop.

I just want to answer the people who have raised freedom-of-speech issues here, which I do not believe apply to this, because there is also a freedom not to listen. What we are saying today is Americans have the right not to listen to these telemarketing calls. This is in the finest tradition of the Constitution which said we, the people, in order to assure the common defense and assure domestic tranquility, and we are standing up for domestic tranquility today. This is a good day to do it.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to note the message that I heard in my district this weekend, representing the First District north of Seattle. I went to the homecoming of the USS Carl Vinson, one of our great aircraft carriers stationed in the west Pacific. They went for a tour that was supposed to be 1 month, but because of the Iraq War, they were essentially out to sea for 8 months, and it was really exciting to see families reunited after this patriotic service in the west Pacific.

But I heard two messages while I was out and about this weekend talking to these folks. One was how proud we are of our people doing this very difficult duty, and the second was being absolutely flabbergasted by the amount that the administration has requested for the reconstruction of Iraq and these expenditures. People were absolutely floored when they saw the numbers that are associated with this project that the President has led us into or gotten us into, depending on one's perspective, in Iraq.

And we worked just on the back of an envelope as I was talking to some constituents about how much money this is. Conservatively this is going to be $200 billion before we are out of Iraq, conservatively. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has done a great job on the House Committee on the Budget, which has done an analysis of the various scenarios, and, conservatively, it is going to be over $200 billion. That is $480 million for every congressional district in the United States. That is $8 million a week for every congressional district in the United States. That means if we think about what this money really means, it means in your town, it means $8 million you could be spending on a new school or health care, $8 million a week you could put, conservatively, 7,000 to 10,000 kids in your hometown through college with the amount the Iraq project is going to cost.

Mr. Speaker, that is why people are flabbergasted by this number. The reason they are flabbergasted is because the enormity of the number and because the President simply did not shoot straight with the American people on how much this was going to cost when we started this entire project, and now people are very, very upset about it.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I want to note another little secret cost, and this is another reason for congressional oversight of this expenditure. There is a secret little bitter financial pill in here that so far I do not think we have talked a lot about, and that is because the administration wants to borrow, every single dollar for this Iraq operation, the President wants to take it right out of the Social Security Trust Fund, every single dollar. He will be borrowing every single dollar he expends in Iraq from the Social Security

Trust Fund. And to do that, of course, we will have to pay interest on that. The interest alone, for which Americans will get absolutely nothing, conservatively, under an optimistic scenario, will be $83.9 billion in interest charges that the President of the United States wants to impose on our children, because that is the generation that will actually be paying this. If it is not so rosy and we are there through 2008, it will be $104 billion in interest charges.

One of the reasons Congress needs to engage in a debate about how to handle this situation is we do not believe we should put those interest charges on our children. It is unconscionable to put $80 billion of debt on our kids of interest for which they get no teachers, no cops, no sailors, no soldiers. This is the biggest item of waste, fraud, and abuse probably in the Federal budget, this interest charge that they want to sneak by the American public so they do not know about it. And they do want to sneak it by. And do my colleagues know why they want to sneak it by? Because the President did not tell us about this when they started this war. I do not remember him saying, this is going to cost $80 billion in interest, and I can borrow it from the Social Security Trust Fund.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to note also that the projections that the President has given us are assuming that he is going to go with his tin cup to the rest of the world and get another $50 billion to $60 billion from the rest of the world. I do not see that money coming in in the next 10 days.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be here. I just want to relate to my colleagues a couple of communications that I was very impressed with that I got in the last 2 days. The first was from a letter from a marine who is from Colfax, Washington, who was very early in the operation in Iraq, who is now recovering in Colfax after he was involved in an incident where a tank basically slid off a road and came down and crushed and killed the Marine standing right next to him and totally crushed this Marine's leg. They thought they were going to have to take it off. He has kept it, and he is now trying to get some weight back on it and he is recovering. It was a remarkable letter I got from him because he talked with great pride about his service. He talked about his feeling for the Iraqi people, and he talked about the importance of the prayers and condolences he has received from all over the country. He got letters from all over the country helping him get through this time of crisis. And it was really heartening just trying to read this letter in the midst of what we have been talking about, about substantial controversy about what happened in Iraq, to read a letter from somebody who felt so proud of his service and is still in the recovery mode. Our prayers and thoughts are with him. And I will not mention his name because he is a humble person, so I will not mention his name tonight.

The second communication was on absolutely the opposite end of the spectrum of at least how I viewed the communication, and that was a communication from the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who went to Iraq a few weeks ago and toured Iraq. He was asked in Iraq, Mr. Secretary, what did you find about the weapons of mass destruction upon which you based a war, upon which you sent thousands of Americans, hundreds of whom are never going to come home and many, many are going to come home to a disability they are never going to recover from. And his answer was stunning to me. He said, you know what? I was just too busy. I did not ask about that.

Here is an official of the administration who sent our sons and daughters to war based on a premise which has obviously turned out to be false from the information we have today, who went to Iraq and who was apparently so embarrassed about this failure, this massive failure of intelligence that this administration was responsible for on multiple occasions, and he said he was too busy to ask about our search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In fact, we have 1,500 people at least who have been scouring Iraq for months now to try to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction and have not turned up a gram of weapons of mass destruction.

To me, this administration has some answering to do to the American people, and this body of the U.S. Congress has an obligation to get to the bottom of why this false information led us into a war. That is why I am proud to say I am one of the Members calling for a bipartisan, bicameral investigation, led by a prominent Republican, to find out why our sons and daughters were sent into war based on this faulty information. We have an obligation to get to the bottom of that, not only for our soldiers and sailors who are at risk, but for the future of our future security efforts.

When we deal with Iran, when we face the challenge in Iran, which is a real nuclear threat, with a real nuclear program; in North Korea, which is a real nuclear threat with a real nuclear program, we cannot go to the international community under this cloud of suspicion. We must peel it away, we must get light, we must remove this wound to our Nation's credibility, and we need this commission to get that done.

Mr. Speaker, I want to tell my colleagues I am just astounded by what I heard this weekend from the Vice President, realizing that it is a tough job that we are in. But I was just shocked and I want to quote what I am told he said. I did not see the interview, but I am told he said in part, he said, ``So what we do on the ground in Iraq, our capabilities here are being tested in no small measure. But this is the place where we want to take on the terrorists,'' meaning Iraq. ``This is the place where we want to take on those elements that have come against the United States.''

After we have had 1,500 people scouring Iraq for months, and the intelligence service that reported to us that the two highest al Qaeda people we had in captivity told us they did not have anything to do with Saddam Hussein, because they did not trust him because he is a seculist and they are fundamentalist Islamists; the Vice President of the United States stands for the American people and said we are just going to go after al Qaeda in Iraq. Where is the shame? We have to get to the bottom of this.

I want to make one more comment about what we are in right now. This is history, but it is something that we have to peel back to find out what happened, and that is where we go from here. I think there is some responsibility now. No matter how we got into this, there is a mess in Iraq. But I want to point out that the difficulty we face in mobilizing support for this is in part because of the administration's failure to level with the American people at the beginning about what this project was going to cost.

I was just at a charity event and I ran into a gentleman who works for the American Society of Civil Engineers. He showed me this report card that the Society of Civil Engineers just did about the status of American infrastructure in this country, and they basically gave a grade to all of our infrastructure: our bridges, our roads; wastewater had a D, drinking water had a D, dams a D, solid waste, C plus, hazardous waste, D plus, energy, D plus. Basically, America's infrastructure, GPA, D plus, with a backlog of investment needs of $1.6 trillion, $1.6 trillion to fix our electrical system and our roads and our bridges and our schools. But this President cannot afford to do it when he wants the taxpayers to shell out $20 billion for the infrastructure of Iraq, because he will not give up the tax cuts that have jeopardized our ability to move forward in this country. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I want to posit a reason why the administration is trying to reach back for this, for a justification for this war. And the reason is they refused to recognize that they used false information to lead this Nation into a war, and they have two options at this point. One is to stonewall and search for any justification they have, and now they are focusing on something that happened in 1988 during the previous Bush administration or shortly before that administration.

What they should be doing is embracing our approach, which is to find out why this happened. We think the President should be looking for the people in the administration and holding them accountable for why when they find out why this happened.

He ought to be on our side trying to find out why the administration let down the American people, but no, no. Instead, they want to stonewall this. Stonewalling is not an answer to help this country move forward into how we are going to solve this problem, but it is an indication of what problem the administration has.

This administration has always wanted to sugarcoat this war for the American people and think it was going to be roses and tax cuts for the whole way. It is about time the administration started talking the truth.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, we have an amendment that will cure a modest imperfection that occurred essentially due to the PATRIOT Act. It is something that I think actually may have been an oversight, but it is something we would like to take a shot at solving today.

Mr. Chairman, while the FBI for years has been allowed to have access to our credit reports, we have wisely included certain conditions in the law about the FBI being able to dial up and get access to citizens' credit reports. There is a requirement that there be a sign-off by the Director or someone appointed by the Director, and that there be a report to Congress and that there be payment to the credit reporting agency for the costs associated with sharing the information. These are reasonable conditions and requirements for privacy concerns.

Unfortunately, when we adopted the PATRIOT Act, we did not include those conditions, those privacy protections, when it applied to the ability now for the Treasury Department and a host of other investigatory agencies who can now essentially call up and get citizens' reports. So our amendment would simply require the same privacy protections that apply to the FBI's getting access to our credit reports to other investigatory agencies.

We understand that there is a point of order raised on this, but we have brought this to the Chair's attention; and we hope as this matter moves along, the chairman will look for a way to solve this problem at a later date as this legislation matures. It is very solvable, it needs to be resolved, and it should not be controversial. So we hope that that will occur.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.