Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I take the floor right now to remind Members to bring their rubber stamp tomorrow. The rubber-stamp Congress will be in session.

They are meeting right now up in the Committee on Rules, and they are dropping an $80 billion tax bill that never went to the Committee on Ways and Means I sit on. Nobody has ever seen it, but it is being dropped here all of a sudden because the majority leader finally quit resisting what the Senate wanted to do. We are going to run it out of here. The chairman did not even go upstairs to explain the bill, they just sent it up there, they greased it, and it is coming down here. Everybody should remember, bring this stamp.

This stamp said ``Official Rubber Stamp. I approve of everything George Bush does,'' signed: The Member. That is what we ought to have tomorrow, because we are going to run another $80 billion out, put people more in debt, and that is what we consider legislation in this one-party system.

Do not forget, Members should bring their rubber stamp tomorrow morning.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we are going to have another session of the rubber stamp Congress. There is an old song by Tennessee Ernie Ford that goes, ``You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.''

This Congress at a Committee on Rules meeting tonight, the Committee on Ways and Means chairman did not even show up. The bill was all greased. We are going to pass $80 billion more of debt out of here tomorrow.

Now, the Democrats offered a bill that would have cost $3.5 billion to take care of those people earning between $10,500 and $26,500.

When the Republicans got this bill, they said, Oh, boy: Let's go, and so they have crammed everything in it that President Bush wants. They are going to come down here, and we will have about an hour's debate, half an hour on the Democratic side, half an hour on the Republican side; and they will stamp that baby and out she goes. That is how this Congress is operating. Not one single hearing will have occurred on this bill, not one single hearing. $80 billion in a half-hour.

Think about it. That is why my colleague, the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), came out here, to show the almost--$1 trillion in debt that has been accumulated over the last 2 years under this administration. Well, tomorrow we are going to add another layer of frosting on the cake, and everybody will come with their stamp in their hand and do it.

Now, we also had a discussion here with one of the gentlemen from Georgia who said next week we are going to deal with the issue of Medicare. There has been no bill put in the Congress for the single largest program in the Congress that the government runs, and that is the Medicare program. The Committee on Ways and Means that I sit on has had not a single hearing on the proposal that is being brought in here. It is being greased somewhere to take up to the Committee on Rules and run down here on the floor, and, in a couple of hours, everybody will bring their stamp out and go, Boom, I approve of everything George Bush does.

That is what this Congress is about, approving whatever George Bush does. Nothing else. There is no thinking going on in here. They just wait for their orders from the White House, go up to the Committee on Rules, slap the bill together, bring it to the floor, and stamp it ``approved.''

Now, that is no way for the United States Congress to operate. We were made in the first section of the Constitution because the founders of this country believed that the Congress was where the basis of our government should derive, that there should be discussion among the 535 Members of both bodies as to what is going to happen in this country.

But this time we are in a one-party government. It is a parliament with a fixed-end, and this party is President Bush, the Senate and the House; and they run them down here and run them through and stamp them, and that is the end of it.

Now, there is a serious problem in that kind of government, because it makes it very partisan. I was told that the Medicare bill is written, but that you have to ask the chairman to go up to a room and sit there and read it in the room. You cannot take it out; you cannot take it to your office. I am a Member of Congress. I was elected by 690,000 people, and so was every other Member. But I am not allowed to read the bill until the day they drop it up here in the committee and ram it through the House in 24 hours.

People I go home to, they say, What is in the bill, Jim? What does this do, what does that do?

I do not know. And it is not because I will not read or I am not smart or I will not work or I will not do what has to be done, but this is the way this place is being run. People are not being given a chance to discuss this.

We have got an even bigger issue, and that is the whole issue of how we got into war. Everywhere in Great Britain right now the belief is that Tony Blair is toast. The liberals are calling for an inquiry. And this House will not do it, because the Republicans have rubber-stamped what we did, ``I approve of Mr. Bush.''

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for coming out here at 11:30 at night to discuss this. The tragedy and really travesty of this whole thing of us being out here at this hour of the night, we have no mechanism to which we can get at the truth. They will never have an investigation in this House that ought to be done on what the President has said, what he has led to believe.

In Great Britain, they are calling for an independent judge to look at the whole question. What do we do in this House? Our distinguished colleague, who was mentioned before, from Florida was, Let's have the intelligence community look at their reports and see if they can evaluate how they did. That is about like asking the fox to go down to the hen house and check the lock, see if the key works. I mean, that makes no sense at all in my view.

It is clear we have two choices. We either have the choice that the President and those people who presented the evidence, or whoever presented him bad information, which implies stupidity, or we have a situation where they manipulated us. I voted against it because it was clear to me from September that they were so eager to go to war that they were going to say whatever they had to, and they shifted from al Qaeda to weapons of mass destruction to aluminum tubes to cake from Niger. Anything they could grab they threw up here and said this is the reason we have to go to war.

The other day Wolfowitz said the reason we had to go to war was because we did not have any other way to get at him. They were sitting on a lake of oil so we could not manipulate him financially anymore so we had to attack. North Korea, we can manipulate them financially because they are broke. We can squeeze them, but there was no way to squeeze the Iraqis.

In my view, we were going to go to war from about the first of September on. They had made the decision, and they came out here and repeatedly presented information.

In one of the training sessions before they went to the United Nations, they were rehearsing with Mr. Powell, and he finally got so frustrated looking at this stuff he threw pages up in the air and said bull-, and he used the word from the barnyard. He said this is nonsense. But yet the next day he got up and presented it to the whole world as this was the truth. And here we are, 80 days after they say the war is over. I mean, the President stages this photo op out there and lands and says, well, we have conquered it. You know why he does not say the war is over? Because if he did, he would have to face the reality or the real travesty of this thing is that they never planned for after the war.

The mess they have got over there right now is incredible, and I mean all we have to do is read the BBC. The BBC says that the incidence of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are 2\1/2\ times greater in the month of May 2003 than they were in the month of May 2002. That is what democracy brought the children of Iraq. That is what our President says he was going to bring. We are going to bring democracy, we are going to bring you cholera, we are going to kill kids on the basis of diarrhea.

The electric lights are not on. Why? Because they are having a big squabble with Bechtel about whether they ought to privatize the electric industry. The water is not clean because they are having a squabble with Bechtel about privatizing utilities.

And the worst thing was in today's newspaper. In today's newspaper, the New York Times on page 15, here we have a colonel that is responsible for 500,000 people in southern Baghdad. He has got 700 paratroopers and he is supposed to run a city of half a million people. He says, ``I was in Haiti but I arrived here with zero experience running a city. We all wonder if we can go back and apply for an honorary degree in public communication. A lot of this stuff we are just completely feeling our way in the dark.'' This is a colonel in the United States military talking.

My colleague is absolutely correct. The Arab world has had this before. They saw the West come in into Palestine, into Algeria, into Egypt. They were going to be there just a couple of years to get things stabilized after the Ottoman Empire was over and the First World War was done, and they stayed for 25 years. These people see us, they have got a memory, and they are just saying, hey, get out of here, let us run it; you said we were going to be able to elect our own people. My colleague from Pennsylvania has already pointed out that we have already said we cannot have an election until you learn to pick the right people. So we are going to give you a group of 10 that we will select, and that way we will put an Iraqi face on the government.

Now, if you cannot ask where is our democracy, I do not know. They certainly have a right to choose their own government. It should not be decided by our government who is going to run that country.

It was Mr. Rumsfeld.

There is one other one you have left out. That is our allies, the British. Their defense chiefs are quoted in the newspaper as saying they are resisting calls for British troops to be sent to join American forces in Baghdad because they could, quote, be sucked into a quagmire. They do not want British troops caught up in the rising tide of anti-American violence. So even our allies are stepping back now and saying, hey, look, you guys got over in there and you said you knew what you were doing.

It is more complicated even than our own problems.

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, maybe a little explanation about what we are doing would help.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, we all could bring a picture, as some of my colleagues have done, of a family who has contacted them and told them a story. Mine today was from a woman, a grandmother, who told me ``I can't understand the unfairness of this bill. Why should my son and his wife and two children not be eligible for any kind of tax relief?''

Her son works at a job where he gets $11 an hour. If you multiply that out times 40 hours a week, times 52 weeks a year, no vacation, you are going to wind up around $22,000. And one of the interesting things is the answer that comes from deep in the heart of Texas, and that is ``there are a lot of other things that are more important than that,'' giving tax breaks to this family. ``To me, it is a little difficult to give tax relief to people that do not pay income tax.''

Now, those are the words of our distinguished majority leader on the other side, which really reveals where he is coming from. He says, if you do not pay income taxes. Now, every single one, including my family and the family that the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) had up here and the family the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) had up here all pay payroll taxes. They pay for Social Security and they pay for Medicare. They pay 7 percent of their paycheck for that, which means that my family that makes $22,000 pays $1,400 in taxes into the Medicare account and into the Social Security account.

The Republicans say we are going to take that money out of the Social Security account and that money out of the Medicare account and give it to the rich people, and we are not going to give one thin dime to somebody who is working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Not one thin dime. But we are going to give his payroll taxes to the rich. That is the only way we could be $400 billion in debt this year is to keep borrowing from every account possible, including Medicare and Social Security.

Now, I want to take it a little bit further here. We have got more important things to do, the majority leader said. Well, what were the more important things we have to do? Today, we did not have a vote until 4:30. Oh, it is only, I suppose, a happenstance that that is when people got off the green from the Kemper Open golf course. That was what was more important than working on that issue.

Or, if you want to look at what we have done on the calendar this week, what have we done? Well, we congratulated Sammy Sosa for hitting 500 home runs. We renamed a post office in North Carolina. We dealt with some Indian water rights in the southwest. We did a land exchange in the Grand Teton National Park. We named a courthouse

in Indiana for Birch Bayh, a former Senator. Then we got to the heavy stuff. The heavy stuff. That is when we went after the first amendment again for the tenth time in the last 6 years. We voted on flag burning. Oh, but we have to do that again. We have done it every year since 1994, but we had to do it again because we did not have any time.

Actually, what we had to do was fill up the time so we would not have any time to deal with a tax credit for the working class in this country, the people who work and do not have any of the perks. They do not have anything. They have to get up every morning and go to these jobs where they make $7, $8, $9, or $10 an hour.

Oh, the other thing we did today. We did not have any time today because we had to spend, after we got back from the golf course, we had to have a big debate on partial-birth abortion. We have done that I do not know how many times, and it probably is going to get through and get to the Supreme Court and be declared unconstitutional, but we had to do that today.

We could not give $400 to a working class family. We are giving $350 billion but we could not find $3.5 billion to give that $400. Yes, we are very busy, Mr. Majority Leader. I hope you shot a good game today.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to make a public service announcement. Yesterday was an extremely important day in this country's history.

The FCC voted to allow increased consolidation of the media. They are tightening the noose on the neck of the First Amendment.

The NRA is opposed to what happened yesterday, and so is Jim McDermott, so you know how damning what happened yesterday really is. If you can get people as far apart as the NRA and me on the same issue, you have got a real problem in this country.

Now, my public service announcement is this: Stop watching the U.S. press. Stop watching the television. It is the opiate of the masses. They are using it to put you to sleep. You should cancel your subscription and buy a subscription to a foreign newspaper, maybe the Financial Times of London, or the Guardian, or the Scotsman from Edinburgh or the Sunday Herald from Sidney, Australia.

Why do I say this? Because you have to read the foreign press to find out what is going on in this country. The Financial Times of London was the one that reported that the President hid, or, excuse me, I should not mention the President, it was the administration that hid the report that says we are going to be $44 trillion in debt because of these tax cuts. To put that in perspective, that means every single American, every man, woman and child, everything they earn for 4 years, that is what $44 trillion is. And the President and his folks did not want us to know about it, so they left it out. But the London Times found it.

Reuters came up with a story about the chaos in Iraq. You think the Iraq war is all over and there is no more problem. According to our press, the only thing that matters is this guy that blew up a bomb in Atlanta about 6 years ago. They have suddenly forgotten Iraq.

But if you listen to what happened, Reuters says they interviewed one of the chiefs in Baghdad who said the entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans' face if they do not end this occupation. ``The Iraqi people did not fight the Americans during the war. Only Saddam's people did. But if the people decide to fight them now, they are in big trouble.''

One man said, ``All of us will become suicide bombers. I will turn my six daughters into bombs to kill the Americans.''

That is what we have created over there, and we are glossing over it now. But if you read Reuters, you will find that out. If you do not read Reuters, you will never get it out of our paper.

Then we come to the next issue. You have got to read the Scotland paper, the Edinburgh Scotsman. What do they say? They say regime change in Iran is starting a countdown. That is the editorial headline. Regime change has not been in any of the speaking so far, but you start to see that the phrase has found its way into a bunch of briefings. And now, it is not a done deal, there is a big fight between the war department and the State Department. The war department is the one that took us into Afghanistan, they took us into Iraq, and they are over there ready to go again. It sounds sort of familiar. It is the same way the drumbeat started in this country in September when I said that the President would lie to take us to war. People were outraged. How could you say such a thing?

Well, where are the weapons of mass destruction? Please tell me. I am looking. Mr. Blair is going to have an investigation of him.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for that reminder.

Mr. Blair is going to be under investigation in the British House of Commons. One member said it is worse than Watergate, what has gone on in Great Britain.

But in this country, do we expect the Republican Party to come out and investigate the President of the United States, misleading us, or the administration misleading us, excuse me? The administration misled us, these nameless, faceless people they put out there, sent out there to tell what they wanted said.

That is what you have to get. You will get this if you read the Scotsman. If you do not read the Scotsman, you will not know where we are going next.

You know, last night another American soldier died, another American soldier died in Iraq, shot in an ambush. Now, every one of those soldiers is important. When I was a psychiatrist during the Vietnam War and I dealt with these kids coming back, they were all important, and that kid that was killed last night was important. But you will not hear anything about it in our media, because you are not reading the right stuff.

Get rid of the paper. It is the opiate of the masses.

Mr. Speaker, the Leave No Child Behind President recently signed into law the third largest tax cut in history. But the tax bill was really like one of those clown cars you see at the circus. Because of the budget gimmicks, the Republicans squeezed nearly a trillion dollars in tax cuts into something that only looked big enough to hold $350 billion.

The whole tax bill was a big masquerade and the Congress participated in the party. While pressing for these tax cuts, President Bush declared, My jobs and growth plan will reduce tax rates for everyone. Everyone, I emphasize, who pays income tax. That is wrong.

In fact, 8.1 million lower- and middle-class Americans who paid billions of dollars in income tax will receive no tax reduction whatsoever; 36 percent of American households, 50 million households, in the United States will receive no benefit whatsoever.

Now, if I wonder where the next clown will pop up, maybe it will be in the White House.

Mr. Speaker, in this business you can tend to talk in big numbers, and you can talk about big issues and a lot of other things; but very often some of the most poignant and powerful things come to you in the mail or in e-mail.

All the Members of the House walk around with these Blackberrys on their waist, and I got an e-mail today from a woman in my district. I really do not know how she got my e-mail. I am sort of surprised by that, but she is pretty creative. But she says: ``Our government should stand for basic fairness and justice. That is why I do not understand why families earning between $10,000 and $26,000 per year would be excluded from receiving the $400 per child tax refund that the wealthier families will receive this summer just so millionaires can have bigger tax cuts.''

She gets it. She understands that we have taken money away from the people at the bottom and said we are going to give it to the people at the top. The American people understand.

She went on to say: ``As a constituent I ask you to please amend President Bush's unfair tax cut plan to include these poor families and their 12 million kids.''

She even has the numbers right.

To leave the tax cut as it is brings too much shame upon this great Nation. Then she adds: ``I know this firsthand. I have a son trying to support a wife and two children on $11 an hour.''

I sat down and figured out what that amounts to. That is $22,000 a year in Seattle, which is a very high-cost area to live in, and they are trying to live on less than $2,000 a month. They pay taxes. They pay the FICA taxes. They pay for their Social Security, and they pay for their Medicare. They pay 7 percent of that $22,000. So that means every year they pay $1,400 in taxes. I do not know how much they pay because I could not get to them. I called them. I could not find out if they paid any income tax or not, but they are paying taxes.

And the President and the group who put this bill together, I cannot understand how you could look at somebody in the eye who is working full time, has a wife and two children, the wife is staying home taking care of the kids, how you could look at them and say, We are not going to give you one thin dime. I mean, that takes a real heart of steel or rock. But we are going to give you who have a million dollars, we are going to give you $93,000.

Now, think about the unfairness of that. People want to talk that this is class warfare; that that is warfare on working people who are trying hard to get there. Now, the President says we are not going to leave any child behind. He stood right in here and I was moved by that. I thought, as a child psychiatrist, I thought how wonderful to have a President who is not going to leave any child behind. And then I saw his budget. He puts the bill out here, and he told us how much it was going to cost to do this education program, Leave No Child Behind; but they gave $9 billion less than was necessary.

Now, I do not know how he figures that we could have a program where we are not going to leave anybody behind, but we do not put out the money that we say we need.

That is this family, this family. These kids need an education.

Tell me, how are their parents going to put any money aside so that they can go to college? They are making $22,800. What is the likelihood that they are putting money away for those kids to go to college? One does not have to be a rocket scientist to know that they are spending every dime on rent and food, or maybe they are buying their house.

I hope they have got a house, although it is pretty hard to get a loan when a person only has that kind of income. But let us hope they are buying their house and they have got food for their kids and clothes and some gasoline for the automobile, maybe the car payment, and what is left after a person has $22,800?

People came in here and rammed this bill through. It did not have a hearing in the Committee on Ways and Means. They were not going to let us do that. We had 2 hours of debate and out she goes, and then they send us home and the President signs it and hopes nobody figures out what is in the bill.

This lady figured it out. She is not stupid. Her kids are not stupid, but the Republicans think they are, and they are not going to get away with that. The American people are not going to stand up for this.

Mr. Speaker, when you have been away from this House for a week, sometimes it is hard to tell what subject you ought to talk about first, because this administration is the gang that cannot shoot straight. They cannot tell anybody the truth about anything.

Whether it is weapons of mass destruction, where we have heard every story in the whole world, yet everywhere you look people do not believe the President of the United States, they do not believe our Secretary of War or anybody else when they talk about those weapons of mass destruction. Or we could talk about Medicare, or we could talk about the tax bill.

My colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), got up here and told the game that was run on the people in this House when they slammed the bill through here, this rubber stamp Congress. They did it in one 2-hour period. Bang, they passed out $350 billion, but could not find $3.5 billion to cover the kids of the working poor in this country. They could give money to millionaires, $93,000; but they could not give even $400 to the children of the working people of this country.

Now, there is an overarching question here and that is this whole question of whether you can solve this country's problems by tax cuts. You know, it takes the British. You have to read the British newspapers to find out what is going on in this country. If you read the Financial Times of London, they tell us that our President hid something from us when we were passing this bill. He hid from us a report done by his Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. O'Neill. Remember him? He was the guy before the one we have now. The one now is Snow, so I guess we will get Snow jobs. But the guy before was O'Neill.

Mr. O'Neill said to his staff, suppose the government could get its hands on all the revenue it could expect to collect in the future but had to use it today to pay off future expenditures, including debt service. Would the present value of the future revenues cover the present value of the future expenditures? Very simple question. He asked a guy from the Federal Reserve and his own assistant secretary to sit down and do this report. They did the report, and they came back with some pretty ugly facts. This thing was supposed to go into the budget to talk about what the future of this country was about, about those kids that cannot even get $400 this year. This was a report that was supposed to go in about the future.

Their answer was, no, we cannot pay for it with the money that we need. We will be $44 trillion in debt; $44 trillion in debt because of what they are doing right now. Now, that is a number that, if you are sitting at home and you are thinking to yourself, my God, how much is $44 trillion, well, think of it this way: imagine that everyone in this country worked for 4 years, every single day went to work for 4 years, everybody in the country, and handed over every penny to cover this $44 trillion deficit. That is what it would take. Every man, woman and child. Even those little kids that they could not find $400 for now.

They are creating a problem out there that when their fathers and their mothers come to Medicare and come to Social Security, they will say, well, gee, we would like to help you out, but it is all gone. They are creating it right here in front of us. And it is bad enough, I mean, people voted, we did talk a little bit about it out here, people talked about it; but what is awful about this is that they knew these figures and they kept them from us.

Just like the weapons of mass destruction. There is a kind of a pattern, you see, in this administration. Feed the people the facts you want them to know, keep snapping your fingers so they will look up here, and meanwhile take away from them down here. They did it with weapons of mass destruction. We were assured. Our President said he has them. Our Secretary of State said he has them. He went to the United Nations and put up charts and graphs and all kinds of pictures. We have them, he said. The Secretary of War, Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the same thing. One after another these guys went down the line telling us what they knew was not true.

The Voice of America carried a very interesting interview with a man who came out of the Iraq situation. He was in the United States, and he said there were no weapons of mass destruction after 1991. This administration will not tell you the truth, but you are in for one awful problem dealing with $44 trillion all of a sudden.

Mr. Speaker, I received my symbol for this Congress just the other day. It is an official stamp from the White House, and they are passing them out. You will all get one in the mail I am pretty sure, and it says: ``Official rubber stamp. I approve of everything George Bush does. Member of Congress.''

All you have to do is sign your name on there. That is what this Congress is about, rubber stamping the President's proposals. Bring it out here. No debate. Do not let us offer amendments. Do not take any time. Just get out the rubber stamp and put it down there and just roll it on in. You have now joined the rubber stamp Congress.

This party is running a one-party government. They want no input from the Democrats whatsoever. They are a rubber stamp for the President. They are willing to give away all their prerogatives on the war. They said to the President, whenever you think it is time to go to war, go ahead. So they have rubber-stamped whatever he wanted to do. On the tax cut, just give it to him. It will work. On unemployment benefits, well, they stalled and stalled; and he said, look, we are getting bad numbers on those polls. We better do something about employment. So in about an hour we are going to come out here and rubber-stamp again his unemployment bill that the Democrats have been pushing for 4 months. But when the President says it, everybody on the other side jumps up and says, Where is my rubber

stamp? God, I got to get over to the floor and cast my vote for whatever he wants.

Whether he wants to repeal all of the environmental issues related to the military, give the military an open season on doing anything they want. They are killing whales and porpoises in Washington, they are doing all the rest, but over here on the other side, we do not want to have any debate on that. We are rubber-stamping whatever the President wants. I welcome everybody to the rubber stamp club. I hope you got yours. Do not forget to bring them to the floor when you vote.

A few minutes ago, Mr. Speaker, I came out and talked about this being a rubber stamp Congress. We now have a perfect example.

We brought up in the Committee on Ways and Means at least three or four times, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) did, the issue of unemployment. The chairman said, whoa, we cannot do anything about that. We cannot do anything about that. The person who sponsors the bill today voted no against it in the committee again and again and again.

Then we come out here on the floor and they say, oh, no, we cannot vote for unemployment.

Then they must have done a poll and the poll must have come back real bad, because we have a bill here that we are going to vote on what about 90 percent of the people in this House will have never even seen. They will not know what it says here. It was filed on May 21. Would that be yesterday?

This has not had any hearings, no testimony from anybody to come in and talk about this issue, and we run it out here and we put it under martial law and we run it through the House. If that is not a rubber stamp for the White House, I do not know what is.

They have Mr. Rove down there. He gins up all kinds of destruction in Colorado and Texas. He also runs what happens on this floor. The junta up in the leadership office, that junta says, Mr. Thomas, you cannot handle this. We will send it straight to Rules. You are not smart enough to get a bill out or handle any kind of discussion about what is going on.

It is an absolute destruction of the process. They ought to allow us to have amendments to fix this. We heard from the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin) that there are problems. There are one million people who are not covered by this.

Even Mr. Greenspan says that probably people who are not getting jobs now are not doing it because they like being on unemployment. They cannot find work. Why would we leave $20 billion in the unemployment fund put there by these very people? Why would we not give it to them during this period? It is because the rubber stamp at the White House has come out, boom, this is what we are doing. And our leadership on the other side, they get all in line and say, folks, this is what we are doing.

Here, the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn), put this bill in. They put it in last night. They have a Committee on Rules meeting at 11 o'clock after they have a $22 million fundraiser. They all troop back in and say, great, now let us get things ready for tomorrow. This is what we get. Maybe we will be here tomorrow doing more rubber stamp stuff. We are going to do unemployment and this tax bill so they can go home and say they have handled unemployment.

I come from a State with the highest unemployment in the country. When that happened before, we had people who were defeated who voted against it, so they remembered. Now we must come with this bill, so rubber stamp it. ``Get ready, guys. Bring your rubber stamps from the office when you come over.''

Mr. Speaker, welcome back to the rubber-stamp Congress. This bill is a statement by the President of the United States that he does not care about 1 million people. He sent the message to his junta here, and they run a bill out last night, drop it in, never had one single hearing on it, will not give us a chance to amend it.

If you gave us an amendment to cover those 1 million people, it would pass. The people on your side would be afraid to go home, having given the stiff arm to people who are off benefits. But we have to rubber- stamp everything George Bush does. ``I approve of everything George Bush does. I will leave a million people off the unemployment rolls deliberately.'' Deliberately. It is not an accident. It is not as though it just happened to us.

I got this from the White House. I suppose everyone else has theirs. You are going to use that again tonight on another bill, the tax bill. I have figured out what the President is thinking. He figured out, ``Well, I'm leaving a million people off and then I'm going to give this huge tax cut and I'm going to create a million jobs. And all those people who have been left out, they're going to have a job.''

Of course they are going to have to wait until tax time next year or sometime. I do not know when all that is going to start.

This is nonsense. You did absolutely the minimum you could do and keep a straight face and put out your press release that you did something for unemployment. How you could deliberately construct one when you have 70 percent more people running out of benefits now than Bush, Sr., did 10 years ago.

At least he said 27 weeks. He was expansive. His son is about as tightfisted as we are ever going to see towards working people. Not to the military. Not to nuclear defense and all that kind of stuff, but to working people he is just saying, hey, folks, I am sorry you do not qualify or your State did not trigger but tell the kids to kind of suck it up. Pull their belt a little bit tighter because the rubber stamp Congress of George Bush is out here tonight. They are waiting at home to see what you do.

If you had been out of work and you cannot pay your rent and you cannot buy for your kids and you are one of those million, you say to your kids, I am sorry but the President does not care. He has got $20 billion in a fund down there, but he will not give us anything.

How is that going to look in the next election? You ought to be thinking about that. I guarantee that before we leave here you will be back here extending these benefits again.

Your idea that people are staying at home from work to live off these fancy benefits is simply nonsense. Nobody who has lost a job stays at home when there is a job available. There are not enough jobs.

Well, Mr. Speaker, here we are back at the rubber- stamp Congress. Bring the bill out, rubber-stamp it and go on home. The American people have to understand, these guys are bringing out $1 trillion worth of tax cuts and say that you are going to get 1 million jobs out of that. That is $1 million for every job you are going to get. The bill was dropped on the desk out here at 9:20. So we have had just about 2 hours to look at how they are spending $1 trillion.

The gentleman from New York stands up here and very confidently says, da-da-da-da, we're going to get a thousand for this and a thousand for that and all this kind of stuff. Not a soul on this floor knows whether that is right or wrong. Nobody has had any time to look at this bill. You do not want anybody to have any time to look at this bill, because if they did they would find out just how fraudulent it is.

The theory behind it, that is, give the money to the rich and they will go out and invest. The people at the bottom buy most of the stuff that the people at the top make. If the people at the bottom have no money and no job, you could have given a payroll tax holiday and given the money to the people on the bottom. They would spend every nickel of it.

But no. You are going to give it to the top, and then you are going to pray, please, Lord, have them invest and create a new job for some poor person in my district. The million that you left on the table in the last bill, in the bill on unemployment insurance, when you would not take care of the people who were unemployed, you would not give them any money there, you would not give them any money with a tax break, you are going to give them $325 if they make 30,000 bucks. That is a fraud. It will not work, and the American people know it. That is why the Wall Street poll looks the way it looks. You try to fool them. You can fool them once in a while, but after a while it really does not work.

Mr. Speaker, well, here we are, one more time, rubber- stamping whatever the President says he wants.

They come out here with a 43-page bill and 302 pages of explanations, and there is not a soul in here who knows what is in it. Let me tell Members what is here. You are spending a trillion dollars, which is almost exactly what is estimated as the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare. You are going to come back after this break, and you are going to privatize Medicare. We know what you are going to do.

What is nice for the American people about this rubber-stamp Congress out of White House, the junta gets its orders, they bring it to the Committee on Ways and Means or Committee on Rules, and zoom, out it comes. The American people are getting a clear, unadulterated picture of what the Republicans are all about. Every single Member comes from a State where they are cutting their State budget. They are cutting the living daylights out of their budget. If you are from Texas, it is 275,000 kids who will not have health care. In my State, they threw 60,000 people off of health care programs. Every State in the Union is doing that.

The estimated cost of that, $100 billion. That is what States are cutting out of their budget. No, you cannot give that money to them. You give them $20 billion, and I know you are going to stand up and say $20 billion is better than nothing. Yes, it is better than nothing, but it is not going to fix the problem.

When some kid is sick in the State of Washington, and they now have waiting lists in Medicaid, and you are a mother with your kid in the waiting room, maybe you will get into the hospital and maybe you will not, then you have to ask yourself, is this the country that you and I believe in? Is this the common good? I say it is not. You really ought to be ashamed of what you are doing because what you are doing is sticking it to the kids of this country. The President says Leave No Child Behind. My God, not only in education are you leaving them behind, you are leaving them behind in the hospitals and the environment and everywhere else in this society. Vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, it seems like not one week goes by without another outrage from this administration with respect to the environment of this country.

I rise today to submit an article from a recent newspaper in my city which I think everyone ought to read before they vote on this change in environmental regulations for the military. The column details a recent sonar test that was conducted by the navy near my hometown and the effects of the marine mammals that were observed by a University of Washington class who happened to be studying the area.

There is a lot of worry in my area about the orcas and about the porpoises, and there are a number of people who are involved in this kind of study, and they were up there watching, observing the sonar, what was going on and with cameras what was going on with these animals, and along comes a ship and sets off a sonic boom. They say they have to test it there. There is no reason why they could not call the University of Washington and say where are the animals, we have some concern, we do not want to kill porpoises, we do not want to kill whales, but no, they set off the boom, and soon, porpoises were floating to the surface, dead, and whales were beginning to act very strangely, and this is unnecessary.

The military should be held to the same account that everybody else is. A few weeks ago, they were out there shooting shells into the water with depleted uranium on the end of them. Everybody knows there are questions about the effects of depleted uranium and what it does to the human body. The salmon fishery off the Washington coast is right where they are shooting the shells. They could not even figure out how to get out far enough or something to get out of the fishing grounds.

To make it even worse, this issue of depleted uranium is a big issue in Iraq. We dumped 300 tons of depleted uranium over southern Iraq in 1991, and we have had recorded, at least by the Iraqi medical people, a 1- to 300-percent increase in cancer and deformities at birth in children. In the last 6 months, we dumped 600 tons, twice as much, and the military continues to put out the word that there is no problem.

The British Government, the Royal Society of Medicine in England said, there is a problem and we are going to clean up the area around Basra which is where the British are responsible, but the United States, in Baghdad, in Mosul and Kirkuk and all these places, we say no problem.

The military is unwilling to confront the environmental damage they bring about, and when called to account for it, they say, well, it is a national security matter. Look, we can test sonar devices 300 miles out in the ocean. We do not have to do it 50 yards, through a pod of whales. There is no reason for that, and they know they are there. It is not as though it is some mystery.

The science is very good. They simply did not think they had to worry about the environment. They are the military, and this bill that is going through here with an exemption for military from the environmental regulations is simply an absolute atrocity.

In all the places in the world where they have nuclear weapons, where they have all kinds of chemicals, in Anniston, Alabama, they put in a facility to burn the waste gases they have created from making the weapons of mass destruction in the United States, and they burn it right in Anniston, Alabama, 10 blocks from a school with no protection for that school. This kind of thing is unacceptable in the United States, and the United States Congress should not endorse it and make it okay. It is wrong.

I will enter into the Record an article from the Seattle Post- Intelligencer dated May 19, 2003, at this point.

[From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 19, 2003]

In the Northwest: Sonar Tests' Effects on Wildlife Should Set Off

Alarms

(By Joel Connelly)

Lovers of Washington's inland waters, including this part-

time Whidbey resident, enjoy a living tip sheet in

www.orcanetwork.org, a Web site filled with recent sightings

and locations of killer whales, gray whales and other great

marine mammals.

Last week, however, the customary lighthearted dispatches

yielded to a gripping account of the extreme distress of

marine creatures during a Navy sonar test earlier this month.

The episode, on May 5, raises major new questions about

whether Congress should roll over for a Pentagon campaign

designed to exempt the military from complying with landmark

federal environmental laws.

Without these laws, the natural systems and marine life of

our Puget Sound-Strait of Georgia region would possess no

defense against the Department of Defense.

Orcanetwork's dispatch came from David Bain, a University

of Washington faculty member. With students, he witnessed

what happened when the Everett-based guided missile destroyer

Shoup conducted a midfrequency sonar training exercise off

San Juan Island.

``The passage of naval vessel 86 (Shoup) was observed by me

and the marine mammal class at Friday harbor laboratories,''

Bain wrote. ``Collectively, we observed effects on three

species.' These were:

Porpoises: Bain and students watched Dall's porpoises in a

bay north of Lime Kiln Lighthouse, an island landmark.

``After the (Navy) ship passed, they were observed traveling

away from the ship at high speeds,'' Bain wrote. ``This is

similar to the behavior of Dall's porpoises in the presence

of other loud sounds, such as air-gun blasts.''

Since the sonar tests, bodies of seven porpoises have been

found--three beached in the Strait of June de Fuca near Haro

Strait, and three more in the San Juan Islands.

A number of porpoise deaths have occurred in recent months,

Bain noted, some predating the Shoup's passage through Haro

Strait.

``Midfrequency sonars were heard in April as well, although

they seemed to be coming from Juan de Fuca Strait or points

south,'' he wrote. ``Thus, these earlier strandings were

potentially related to sonar activity.''

Minke whales; During the test, a minke whale was spotted

porpoising (coming out of

the water) as it swam north of the Shoup. Other sightings of

similar behavior were recorded at two other locations off San

Juan Island.

``It has been about 20 years since I've seen a minke

porpoising,'' wrote Bain.

He speculates that all sightings were of one whale, racing

to get away from the naval vessel and its sonar tests.

Killer whales: As he and students watched the widely known

J pod of orcas, wrote Bain, ``Killer whales were observed

behaving normally until the sonar became audible in the

air.'' At that point, however, the J pod moved inshore and

grouped tightly. ``As we moved inshore with them, the naval

vessel disappeared over the horizon, although the sonar was

still audible,'' wrote Bain. The J pod then moved quietly

northward, staying near shore and later bunching up again.

Given the recent sharp decline in our resident killer-whale

populations, did it make sense for the Shoup to be causing

apparent distress?

Did the Navy bother to think about this, or to consult

beforehand with biologists expert in marine mammal life of

the northern Sound?

We are a military-intensive region. The shores of Puget

Sound likely would sink were another Navy base, shipyard or

testing facility located in our waters.

Aside from pacifists protesting the Trident base--most

memorably Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen paddling a kayak--

local officials and politicians have embraced bases and jobs.

Once upon a time, too, there were security grounds for so

doing. The buildup of the Soviet Pacific fleet was endlessly

cited by the late Sen. Henry Jackson. An Everett Navy base,

Scoop argued, would be a day's sailing time closer to the

Soviet Far East than berthings in California.

As Bain notes, however--with cool understatement--``the

threats arrayed against the United States at this time are

minor compared to what we faced when the environmental laws

proposed to be overturned were first passed.''

As well, it should be recalled that Jackson--the Pentagon's

most devoted friend--was the chief architect of the National

Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

Washington's congressional delegation ought to take heed of

the distress caused by the Shoup's recent sonar tests.

In recent years, lawmakers have constructively pushed the

Navy. Environmentally sensitive construction of the Trident

base was one result. Another was forcing the Navy to abandon

an untested, risky plan to deposit toxic dredge spoils

beneath a berm in Everett's Port Gardner Bay.

What is to be done? First, there should be no exemption

from federal environmental laws. If the military ignores

regulations, citizens should have recourse in the courts.

Second, the Navy must be made to consult with civilian

agencies in case of sensitive or potentially harmful

activities. A firm suggestion on this front might come from

Rep. Norm Dicks, senior Democrat on the House Defense

Appropriations subcommittee.

Third, as noted by Bain, the Department of Defense is

reviewing proposals on what it can do to prevent such

conflicts as those caused by the Shoup's sonar tests.

``The Navy (should) proceed with caution until such

programs are completed and the Navy can accurately predict

where it can operate dangerous equipment without causing

undue environmental damage,'' Bain wrote.

Amen. Marine mammals are a big part of what makes the

waters of Puget Sound and Strait of Georgia worth defending.

Mr. Speaker, sometimes when I come to the floor, I think I have come back into the French Theater of the Absurd.

Here we have a bill that we are going to allow employers to provide financial advice to their employees but does not require sufficient safeguards to ensure that the advisers do not have a conflict of interest.

The country has gotten a better idea about the Republican idea of fiscal management recently, and I am sure that that would be the kind of people they would want their employees to get their information from. Despite running a budget of $400 billion in debt this year, they continue to spend money for their affluent supporters in trying to keep them from cutting taxes. They have really turned a modest government surplus into a prescription drug problem for the next 25 years. We are drunk on giving tax relief.

If we look at Mr. Bush's economic report on page 58, he says: ``A conservative rule of thumb is that interest rates rise about three basis points for every additional $200 billion in government debt.'' Now he tells us that things are going to go up. He tells us, and yet he continues to drive us into the hole.

Now, I was thinking about the kind of advisers that the company might recommend. They might recommend Bear Stearns or Credit Suisse or Deutsch Bank or Goldman Sachs, or any one of a dozen companies here that the Attorney General of New York has just fined $1.4 billion for misleading their investors. If you are an employer, and you want them to buy the stock in your company so you have some dough, and you send them to your credit bank that floats your bonds, it would not be very surprising if they recommend that people buy your company, even if it was like Ken Lay and Enron and it was going in the tank within a week. But there is nothing in this bill that says you cannot do that. Any way you can manipulate your workers is fair game.

Now, there is a legitimate role for government, and that is to protect the American people. And not only to protect them from terrorists and al Qaeda or whatever is going on in the rest of the world, but from the financial rapacious people in New York City.