Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the Chair, in a rare moment of clarity last night in the Committee on Rules, told us this is like a poker game. The money on the table at the end of the game is just the same as when you started, just different people have the money than they did at the beginning. And he is absolutely right. The rich get the money in this bill and the middle class gets stiffed.

We cannot trust the middle class to make decent decisions. Eighty percent of this money, of the $500 billion goes to people above $75,000; $105,000 for millionaires; $325 for people making $40,000.

Now, Mr. Speaker, this is not a poker game. This is a crap game we are in, and we have got loaded dice. It is crooked and we have got to shut this game down in 2004 or the middle class is going to be slaughtered.

This Congress is only one thing, and I brought what everybody ought to get. I got one of these. It says here, I approve of everything George Bush does, Member of Congress. This is the rubber stamp, crooked crap game Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the Special Order time of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee).

Mr. Speaker, today we passed a bill out of here in an hour that spent $550 billion worth of taxes. The fact that the House of Representatives, which is the body charged by the Constitution with the responsibility of originating all tax policy in this country, that we can deal with a bill of that size with 1 hour's debate is an absolute travesty. The Founders of this country never considered that a bill of that magnitude with those kinds of long-range effects would be considered on the back of galloping horses as we run to the airport to catch planes all over the country.

The theory of this bill is that if we give back taxes, somehow we will give it to people who will then invest it, creating jobs that will lead to employment in this country. We will hear over and over and over again we are going to create a million jobs, and all this kind of stuff. But the fact is that the Department of Commerce says that today our industries in this country are operating at 75 percent capacity. That means that they can make 25 percent more of whatever it is they make whether it is shirts or tables or furniture or automobiles. They have already the capacity to produce more goods.

What is not happening is that there are people there who have money to purchase those things. So the concept that we are going to give more to the people running the factory and that some factory owner is so stupid that he has already put out all of whatever he can make and thinks he can sell that he would now make more, he would get more machinery and open up a new building and make more automobiles or more whatever, it simply does not pass the commonsense test. If someone runs a bakery and they make 10 loaves of bread and their ovens will allow them to make 20 loaves of bread, but they only sell seven loaves of bread, why would they make 20 loaves of bread? Why would they hire another baker, buy more flour and more yeast and make more bread? So this theory that suddenly if we give more money to the people at the top will magically create jobs is absolutely nonsense. What is needed, obviously, is for the people at the bottom who buy things to have more money.

The bill we just passed out of here in an hour gave 80 percent of the benefit to people making more than $75,000 a year. Now, $75,000 a year is a pretty good income. One can do quite a bit with $75,000 a year. But do all the people above it need more? Do they need to take 80 percent of the benefit and 20 percent goes to the people below? If one is a millionaire under that bill, they will get $105,000 tax refund, $105,000. What will these people on the bottom get? $325.

Most people buy what they can afford, and if they have a small income, they sometimes cannot afford things so they do not buy them. When they have got a big income, they can do whatever they want. But this bill says these people over here with all the money, we are going to give them more, and these people over here, we are going to give them $325.

There are many ways we could have written this bill. I had a proposal to give a payroll tax holiday. There were other proposals that were out here. But the point is that we needed a bill that was fair, that gave the money to the people at the bottom. I was prepared to give a $1,400 amount to everybody in

the whole society because everybody pays the payroll tax. Everybody pays Social Security. Everybody pays Medicare, and if we gave that back to people on the first $20,000 of their income, the people on the bottom would get about $1,500 in refund. They could spend it to buy an extra shirt, to take their family to dinner, to do many of the things that would keep the small businesses open that are now closing because nobody can come and buy dinner for their family. They have to stay at home and live within a tight budget. But the leadership of this House for some reason did not want us to deal with that. They would not let us deal with unemployment. None of the people at the bottom got anything. That is a sad day for this House.

Mr. Speaker, I was coming downstairs from the Committee on Rules where I was up there making a presentation as they prepare for our consideration of this bill tomorrow. It was never so clear to me as it was sitting there that we are in a one-party government here, where the President and the House and the Senate are all from one party, and they are going to have a discussion down here tomorrow on their proposal. But what I really am fearful of is that the proposal the gentleman is putting out here tonight will not be allowed into the discussion tomorrow, except in a very abbreviated form. I think that is unfortunate, because I think the American people ought to have a chance to choose between alternatives. That is what this government is about.

Will Rogers one time said people would rather have fair taxes than lower taxes. The fact is we do not have fair taxes. The proposal that is coming down here tomorrow is one that 80 percent of the benefit goes to people above $90,000 a year in income. Now, I do not think they need a tax break. The effect of this bill tomorrow would be to give a $105,000 tax break to people making $1 million, while people who are making $40,000 will get $325.

Now, that is not a fair tax structure, and it basically says the only people who know what to do with their money are people who are rich. If you give it to the people down there making $40,000, they will not know what to do with it. They will squander it away on something, I do not know what; but if we give it to the rich people, suddenly things will be stimulated.

The problem with that theory is that the Commerce Department, Mr. Bush's Commerce Department, has come out and said that industry in this country is operating at 75 percent of capacity. There is plenty of capacity right now. There is no need for further investment in capacity. What you need is people with money in their hands to buy things.

Now, the bill that I proposed, the amendment I proposed upstairs, is a proposal that would give a tax holiday on the first $20,000 of your payroll taxes. Everybody pays payroll taxes. Not everybody pays income tax, because if you are down low enough, you do not. But if you are down low or high up, you pay payroll taxes for Social Security and for Medicare.

If you gave a tax holiday on $20,000 of income, everybody in this country, every working person in this country, would get somewhere between $1,400 or $1,500 in rebates. That means that 94 percent of the money would go to people below $75,000 in income, and it goes all the way to the bottom. Everybody gets it. In my view, that is a fair tax cut, if you are going to have one.

I really think the idea of a tax cut in the first place is a bad one. Sitting on the Committee on Ways and Means, I have watched these tax cuts go whistling through there one after another, and we go deeper in debt.

I was looking at what is going on in the States. California is $34 billion in the hole; New York is $12 billion; Texas is $10 billion; Washington State, my State, is $2.4 billion. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that 41 States have accumulated almost $84 billion worth of deficit in this year, and what we are doing at the national level is looking out on those States and all the mess that is out there and saying, tough luck, you are on your own.

Now, that is a major philosophical debate that goes on in this House, what responsibility does the Federal Government have and what responsibility does the State have, and this administration has been pushing off on to the States all the responsibility for education, health care, the environment, whatever; and the States are being destroyed.

The Missouri Governor, the new Governor, is going around turning off every third light bulb. He put out a memo for the State of Missouri. Connecticut is laying off prosecutors in the court system. In Kentucky they are laying off prison guards. Nebraska just put 25,000 women and children off the Medicaid program. In Michigan they are considering a proposal to put advertising on the sides of police cars so they can make money, making them rolling billboards. That is where these States are. Ohio has taken 50,000 off of health coverage and Colorado is cutting out the senior citizen benefits on property taxes for 120,000 seniors in Colorado.

Now, I could go on with that list, and it does not make any difference what State you are talking about. And we at this level are saying what we are going to do with the money we have is we are going to give it to those people at the top. They are the only ones who know what to do. They are going to save us. And we are not giving money out to the States and the counties, with all the problems at the State level or dealing with the problems in our own system, or preparing for all the people who are going to come on to Medicare and Social Security in 2008 or 2009 or 2010. We are not preparing for that at all.

Today, we are giving it all away. And then we are saying, gee, Social Security does not work anymore, Medicare does not work anymore. We have to put that responsibility on people.

Next Friday, a week from today, we will be dismantling the Medicare system in the same way. That is the system that this party has put in order and they are going to keep doing it one week at a time, and we are seeing it, and we will not have any money to respond to that because we have given it all away.

Now, we have a choice tomorrow. We could say no to the President's way and the Committee on Ways and Means chairman's way. The chairman said upstairs that the Congress is kind of like a poker game where everybody sits down at the table and at the end of the night the same amount of money is there, but different people have it. And what I am saying, my answer to that is yes, that is true, and I think that ordinary working people ought to get it and the Democratic proposal is an attempt to do that. But the leadership of this House is going to bring in a bill tomorrow that will make it increasingly unfair in this country.

I congratulate my colleagues from North Carolina and Virginia and Connecticut for coming down here and letting the people know that the Democrats do have a proposal, because they will control the rule tomorrow in such a way it will look like we did not even have any ideas. We do have ideas, but they are not consistent with giving it all to the people on the top.

Mr. Speaker, the American people are sitting there, after dinner, at the dinner table and you think to yourself, does somebody who makes $1 million really need a $105,000 tax break? I mean just ask yourself. And then you think about the people in your neighborhood who are scraping to pay their drug benefits and do the things that they have to do for themselves. My mother just bought a hearing aid. She is 93. Hearing aids cost $800 if you can get a cheap one. They are not covered by Medicare. So if you do not have kids who can help you, you do not get a hearing aid.

I mean, do we really need to give all of this money to the people on the top? Where is the fairness in that?

I think the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) should be congratulated for his effort tonight to give the people an understanding of what is going on. It is unfair.

They basically were stiffed.

Mr. Speaker, I do not think the American people understand, and the gentleman is down in Chapel Hill and he knows the pressure that is on the hospitals; it is the same in Chicago or Richmond or Seattle or New York or anywhere. What we are saying to those counties, to those cities, to those States, we are not going to help you. You are on your own. The President made no provision.

No, not a single dime.

Mr. Speaker, I think the long-term effects of not dealing with the social problems in this society are more costly in the end than if you put the money up front. If you do not feed people and take care of them and give them preventive health care, you pay much more at the far end when they are seriously ill and then you spend thousands and thousands of dollars that would not have been necessary if you had dealt with it in the early stages. It is so cost ineffective.

We talk about history. I do not know where the people went who were here on the other side when I came here. They used to talk about deficits being terrible and bad, and they have all disappeared. I mean I sat on the Committee on Ways and Means and the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Snow, came before us and said, deficits are not bad. I could not believe what is going on. We are going to spend so much money financing that debt. And the gentleman and I, we will not do it. It will be our kids. That is not fair.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hall) for yielding me the time.

I am in opposition to this bill because today I believe we are preparing to pass the oil industry's dream plan. It was drawn up in the secrecy of the vice president of the oil dynasty's office, Mr. Cheney. He has fought every attempt to tell us who was even in the meeting, much less what they talked about.

The bill was brought up to the Congress and the Committee on Ways and Means, and we could not get any amendments adopted, nothing. It has been put out by the White House, and that is good enough for the boys up in the Committee on Ways and Means.

Now, Rumsfeld and Bechtel were involved in this whole business with Iraq back in 1983. In December of 1983, Mr. Rumsfeld was there negotiating for a $2 billion pipeline from the southern Iraq fields to Aqaba, the Gulf of Aqaba, across Jordan.

Saddam negotiated with them a while, and then he said no. Ever since then, there has been all this interest in why can we not go in and have a regime change, because he would not roll over for what was going on.

Now, this is at the time, when Rumsfeld was negotiating with Saddam Hussein is exactly the time when he was bombing the Iranians with chemical weapons. We are over there making an oil deal, and this guy is doing this stuff out there. People act like we have such clean hands in this. This administration is going to get out of here with a bunch of money for oil.

I offered an amendment in the Committee on Ways and Means to put money up for buying solar panels. They did it in San Francisco; they passed a bond issue to put solar panels on every building in San Francisco. They are doing it all over California. Eight times the amount of energy they need in California falls out of the sky every day.

For this bill the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means would not even consider that amendment. This is an oil company bill. It is oil, oil, oil. It has a greasy feeling to it.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for yielding me this time.

The other day I saw something in The New York Times that gave me hope. The White House had put in solar panels on one of the sheds out there. And I thought, well, my goodness, they must have some enlightenment down there at the oil ministry.

But when I offered an amendment in the Committee on Ways and Means that would have allowed us to have energy companies give tax-free bonds for the purpose of raising money for interest-free loans to homeowners to purchase solar equipment, every Republican in the committee voted ``no.'' I guess they did not get the message from the White House.

Mr. Chairman, it usually costs about $11,000 to put a solar panel on a home. It is not pie in the sky. Solar production has grown 600 percent since 1996. So this is something that everywhere else in the world they are doing, but not here, and certainly not in the Committee on Ways and Means, in a committee controlled by the oil industry.

We had a chance, if we had passed that amendment, to follow California. They always lead what is happening in this country. Watch and see. San Francisco puts panels on their buildings, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. They will be doing it, and all the rest of the country will be sitting around tied to these oil companies and saying to themselves, why is this?

Now, we gave an opportunity for the House to begin a program that would have had 2 million families with secure, clean energy. We could have gone a long way down the road toward meeting the Kyoto Accords. The President walked away from that and said, We cannot clean up the environment; no, sir, we cannot.

We cannot do anything, we are just hopeless, we Americans.

Well, if we put an area of 70 miles by 100 miles of solar panels in Nevada, we could provide all of the energy this country needs in one place. It can be done, and we have got to start it someday, but I guess this administration is going to keep drilling and drilling and drilling. It will not work, Mr. President.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) for yielding me this time.

It is really an honor to have a part in another example of the Republican tax follies. This bill could have been passed weeks and weeks and weeks ago. As we celebrate and are grateful for the fact that the war seems to be winding down in Iraq, the people who have been over there, we have been trying to do this for them for about, I do not know, 3 or 4 or 5 months. First the bill got over in the committee, and we had to add on fishing tackle and a whole bunch of other stuff, and that did not work out here. So it had to go back and come back on a rule, and now it has gone over to the Senate. They have more generous provisions. There is just no question about it. And they also added this provision that would make it a little bit more difficult for people who want to avoid taxes to leave this country, to give up their citizenship. At a time when this country ought to be thinking about sacrifice because we have asked men and women to sacrifice their lives for us, we have people leaving this country saying I do not like this country. I have made a whole bunch of money here, but I do not want to pay any taxes; so I am leaving. And we let them get out of paying taxes for that.

What kind of statement is that to our troops overseas that this Congress will not close the loophole that lets somebody drop their citizenship in order to avoid their taxes? If that is not folly at a time when our deficit is $400 billion this year and going up and we expect the young men and women who are over in Iraq to sacrifice for us but we will sacrifice in terms of taxation even on people who are giving up their citizenship, there is something really weird about this bill. And I certainly know that everybody is going to vote for it.

What is also strange is they say we are going to give the tax benefit to the soldiers and those people, the Marines and whatnot, give it to the State Department; but when we offered an amendment in the House committee for people in the Peace Corps who are out there risking themselves for the United States, they say no. No, not them.

Let us talk about people who are doing a service to this country, which is what this is all about; and yet finally we come out here and of course it is almost the day we pay our taxes. So every year for the last 8 years we have always had the April 15 tax follies, and this is act one and will be followed by act two, which we will get to in a few minutes. But this is a bill that we should have accepted the other body's construction. It is more generous, and it closes an egregious tax loophole.

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

This is, as I said, the second act in the Republican tax follies. This is the one that is the longest-playing act in this town. They have been talking about tax simplification since they took over. Since 1997 to today, they have added 293 Tax Code provisions that required 515 rule changes, that everybody has to understand they have added 2 hours to filling out their tax form every year. By 2010 there are going to be 35 million people who are going to have to figure their tax twice because of the alternative minimum tax. So these are the people who say we want tax simplification, and they come out here every year and add more complexity to this whole business.

I read this resolution. It says one out of four taxpayers are not in compliance with the tax laws. The facts are that wage earners, the ordinary citizens of this country, 98 percent of their income is reported and 85 percent are in complete compliance with the law. The former IRS Commissioner, Mr. Rossotti, said in his departure speech, the most serious noncompliance areas are promoters of tax schemes of all varieties, the misuse of devices such as trusts and offshore accounts to hide or improperly reduce income.

The average guy working in an automobile plant is not setting up a trust, does not have any money invested offshore. He is not using abusive corporate tax structures. He is not underreporting, as high- income people do, and the accumulation of failure to file and pay a large amount of employment taxes, these are the people who are not in compliance with the law. The average taxpayer has been waiting for that taxpayers' bill of rights they have been promising them. And of course the Republicans fell to fight among themselves upon that issue; so they could not even bring that out here. They have been promising it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and it ought to come out. April 15 is almost here. But, no, they are going to bring this foolishness out here.

This reminds me of that story of the Methodist minister who was sick and they had a board of deacons meeting come together and they had a long discussion about what they should do about the minister's illness. Finally, by a vote of four to three with 25 abstentions, they voted to write a letter to the minister urging him to get well. This is a get- well letter to the tax structure from the people who make it complicated.

Why do you not stop putting this nonsense out here? We have had Speaker and Committee on Ways and Means chairman after Speaker and Committee on Ways and Means chairman talk about the fact that we are going to have a simpler tax structure. I remember Mr. Armey, we are going to pull it up by the roots. You have never put a single bill out here. Eight years of talking and sending these letters urging the tax structure to get well. Come on, guys. Let us stop this nonsense.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, before I yield to my colleague from Massachusetts, I would point out that the gentleman from Georgia has introduced a bill called the Fair Tax Act. We submitted it to the Joint Committee on Taxation, that is a joint House and Senate committee, everybody agrees that it is balanced, Democrats and Republicans and all that sort of thing, and they came up with the fact that this flat tax that we are talking about here, the rate would have to be at 59.5 percent.

That means if you buy a Coke, suddenly the Coke is $1.60. If you buy a hamburger and it is $2, you are going to have to pay $3.20 for that hamburger. This goes onto health care, this goes onto pharmaceuticals, it goes onto everything, not just things you just choose; that is, everything you buy, you have to pay 60 percent taxes.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, no, I would not admit that at all. This is the letter they put out, and they are standing by this.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I know, you fired the lady that wrote this. You got rid of her. So I know that that is probably why you got rid of her.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Cleveland, Ohio (Mrs. Jones).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume just to finish up.

We have a tax structure, and we are all going to vote for this foolishness; and I would suggest to the Clerk of the House that you not throw these resolutions away, because you can just bring them out again next year. We will be back here at the same old place with the same old tired rhetoric. They will not have done anything more about this issue than they have this year. So I think we could at least save a little money by not reprinting this kind of nonsense.

We passed a tax bill last spring; and I do not remember the exact figure, but something like 75 percent of the benefit went to people who make more than $100,000 in this country. Now, if that is a fair tax structure, I will be darned. I mean, I have to relearn the meaning of fairness. The whole idea of a tax structure is to pay on one's ability to pay.

Ideas like the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder), who comes out here with a sales tax, the idea being that we will put a sales tax on everybody and that will be fair. Of course, ordinary people have to buy food and clothes and medicine and gasoline and a whole bunch of things; they do not have any choice whatsoever. So they have to pay the tax. Rich people, well, of course, they have to buy food and gas and medical care and whatnot; but all of the rest of the money they earn, they do not pay any taxes under that kind of a structure. That is not fair. Everybody knows it. That is why we can never bring that thing out here seriously and debate it on the floor. You would get eaten alive in the press when the American people figured out what you are talking about.

I know what my colleagues are doing today; they are really laying the groundwork for their press releases. We will all leave in a couple of days and you all have to have your April 15 press release: ``I voted to change the unfair tax structure. I was working in Washington all last week trying to change the unfair tax structure that is burdening my constituents'' and other silliness that will be in the papers.

This is not going to do anything, everybody knows it will not do anything, and it is not going to make anybody do anything. We are just sending another letter to the minister telling him to get well.

I see the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan) is here. He has a great chart that is too small for anybody to read, but we are going to put it up anyway; and we will go through with this so we can get out of here. So I want the gentleman to have his press releases. Are the gentleman's press releases related to that?

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I appreciate that. Explain it to my mother who is watching this, will you? Because she really wants to understand how this fair tax structure, when she is living on Social Security, why she has to pay a 60 percent sales tax, because I have no idea. For all of the people living on Social Security, if the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) succeeded, they would get a 60 percent flat tax on everything they bought. It is so nonsensical, I do not know how my colleagues can stand out here with a straight face and offer it up here.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the erudite lecture on the tax structure of the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan). I know he sits on the Committee on Ways and Means, and he knows we have not had a single hearing on any kind of tax reform bill the whole time he has been on the committee.

It is good to come out here and send these letters to the Congress. I do not know who this Congress is. When we send the sense of the Congress, where do these go? Do these go to the leadership or somewhere, or up in the air, or over to the Senate?

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

I would ask the gentleman, Mr. Speaker, when are they going to bring something to the full committee? I do not sit on that subcommittee.

Mr. Speaker, I take back my time. I appreciate the gentleman's point.

The last tax we had last year, the one they have been running their elections on, the Urban Institute says that if your income is between $30,000 and $40,000, that is the average income in this country, the tax cut was $339. Households with over $1 million get an average tax cut of $90,000. Sixty-eight percent of households in this country get a tax cut of less than $500.

If you are a typical elderly family with an income between $20,000 and $30,000, you get 89 bucks. That is an unfair tax structure. They made it worse. If they have their way with this $700 billion nonsense that they are trying to push in this session, they will make it even worse, because they will saddle our kids with debt and give all the money to people on the top.

Now, I agree, this is a great thing. I wish we could get somebody, when we send this sense of the Congress, it would actually get to somebody who could actually do something, maybe the Speaker's office, maybe the majority leader's office. Mr. Armey used to talk about it, but he never brought a bill here. Maybe the new majority leader would bring us out something we could vote on. It would be real nice to have a debate on an actual piece of legislation, so we could understand what it was really going to do.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my Members to vote for this, because we all want a more fair tax structure.

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

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a sponsor of H.R. 1119. It was an error that my name was added to the bill, since I did not authorize the action.

Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 153 will undoubtedly pass this morning. Many members, having read the summary, are probably uneasy because the resolution asks Americans to pray on behalf of the American Armed Forces and people--not for the British soldiers dying in the desert, nor for the Iraqi mothers searching for their children in the flames, nor for the countless others who need the blessings of Providence. I know I feel uneasy about the narrowness of the resolution.

However, I want to urge my colleagues to read and take seriously the entire resolution. I especially urge them to read the section which says:

``Whereas through prayer, fasting, and self-reflection, we may better recognize our own faults and shortcomings and submit to the wisdom and love of God in order that we may have guidance and strength in those daily actions and decisions we must take;''

I urge my colleagues to take seriously the admonishment to remember that we, as individuals and as a nation, have faults and shortcomings. We are not, as individuals or as a nation, lords of this earth. We must do our best with imperfect knowledge and imperfect wisdom, never assuming we act on God's behalf.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to recall I Corinthians, 13:11-12:

``For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.''

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take my special order at this time.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor with an issue that I feel the Members of this House should think about.

The BBC carried a story on March 27 saying that there was proof of biological weapons found. They found protection suits, gas masks; and officials argued that these precautions were not to counter the threat of coalition attacks, as the Iraqis would know that the United Kingdom and U.S. forces in the gulf do not possess chemical and biological weapons.

Mr. Hoon, who is the Secretary in the British Government, conceded that the discovery of the suits was obviously not conclusive proof that Iraqi forces were set to use chemical or biological weapons, but he added, ``It's clearly indicative of an intention, otherwise why equip his own forces to deal with a threat which he knows we do not have?''

I just received an e-mail message from one of my friends in the British House of Lords who said to me there was a news story on the BBC this morning about the U.S. administration saying they may be prepared to use nonlethal chemical weapons in Iraq in an urban situation where it would be preferable to stun people rather than kill them. Now I do not know how we put those two stories together. We think the Iraqis are getting ready to do something; but the BBC, the very same, carries the story which we will never find in an American newspaper or on American television that we are talking about using chemical weapons.

My correspondent went on to say this would be illegal; they are very nasty substances and can kill children. They would be effective against military forces equipped with even rudimentary gas masks. I am sure my colleagues will be speaking out against such a thing. However, it might help them to know that I am hoping to ask our government what action they would take in such a situation.

``My party will certainly call for the U.K. troops to cease work with American forces if they use illegal chemical weapons, even nonlethal ones. If it happens during the Easter recess, we would call for a recall of Parliament to debate it.''

Mr. Speaker, I bring this to the floor because the media in this country has done a terrible job reporting the war. They give us one side, they are all embedded inside our military, and they get whatever they are supposed to put out about what is going on. They are not looking broadly across the horizon at what is happening.

The Washington Post carried a story today that the American people are so dissatisfied with the American press that the number one hit on the Internet is Al Jazeera, a Qatar television station that provides another point of view. Americans are trying to find out what the truth is.

Mr. Speaker, I do not know, I cannot make head nor tail out of this. I looked

quickly to see if I could find the story, but it is not written in the BBC. I have no reason to believe that my correspondent would not tell me the truth. I believe this Congress should look into this issue.

If we are going to start a war in which we are going after a country and we say they have weapons of mass destruction, we know it, but we have not found any, and now the story comes out that we are getting ready to use them. Remember what happened in Moscow when the Chechnyan rebels took over that theater with all those people in there, and the Russian Army used a nonlethal chemical weapon to stun the people, and they had several hundred die? The question is, are we prepared to use those on civilians in Iraq or how do we keep it only on the military and not on the civilians? When gas is spread, it goes around, and people breathe it.

The United States Congress should be made aware of this. I do not go to the secret briefings because I want to be able to talk out here about what I hear in the general public. I do not think that they will tell Members in a secret briefing whether they will use it, but Congress should demand from the people in the war department and the White House as to whether or not they intend to use any kind of nonlethal chemical weapons. Are they talking about tear gas? What are they talking about? We do not want to be a part of doing the very thing that we accuse the Iraqis of.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding me the time.

When the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) heard I was coming over here, he said, are you bringing your walnut shells? Are we playing the shell game again over here? I said, no, I have got a new thing that came from the White House. It is a rubber stamp. It says ``official rubber stamp.'' I approve of everything George Bush does.

Now that is what we have on here on the floor. You are not henchmen. You are just a rubber-stamp bunch.

What is awesome about this day is we are going to war. Maybe that message we just got in here was the war message, I do not know, from the President, but Iraq is a country where 60 percent of the people get their food through the Oil-for-Food Program. We have now told the United Nations take their people out, there is no longer any way to feed 60 percent of the 24 million people in Iraq.

They are your responsibility now. You have taken that on by saying, we are going to bring you democracy. Democracy is a pretty empty thing if you have got an empty stomach. So you are going to have to come up with some money to pay for the food program. There is not one thin dime in here.

My colleagues know that the Lord Jesus Christ went up on the Sermon on the Mount there, and he gave this sermon and said that you should feed the poor. That is in Matthew, Matthew 26, I believe, and my colleagues all know that. All good Christians know that. We are all Christians in this country, are we not? We ought to have some

money in here figuring out how we are going to pay for those people.

It is not just the Iraqis that are going to be in trouble. In Eritrea, the world food program will be out in 2 months. Burundi has enough for another 4 weeks. The beans are gone in Liberia, and by the end of May they will have no cereal. There are 1,000 refugees in Guinea with nothing after August 10.

This is a budget where we put 400- and I do not know how many billions of dollars into the defense budget, but there is not a thin dime in here for the people of Iraq. We are saying, oh, we are bringing in democracy, oh, yes. Those people in Afghanistan learned about our democracy. The first year we did not authorize anything. Then we coughed up $300 million after a while. The U.N. said they needed $10 billion. We put in $300 million. The next year we are about $270- or $290-, and we refused to make any long-term commitments. This is a country where we spent $4.5 billion bombing them, and we can only come up with $300 million a year to rebuild them. Tell me how the Sermon on the Mount figures into that. Do my colleagues think that is what Jesus would want us to be doing?

The fact is that the President of Afghanistan came over here, Karzai. He went to the White House very shortly ago, last week or the week before, begging for money because he is broke. We gave him $50 million in OPEC money, but said, by the way, $35 million has to go to build a hotel.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today as a Member of this body who was privileged to serve my country as an officer in the United States Navy. In that roll as chief psychiatrist at the Long Beach Naval Station at the height of the Vietnam War, it was my duty to evaluate and treat seaman and Marines returning from combat. I saw their pain.

I wish it to be clearly understood that I have the utmost respect and appreciation for the courage, tenacity, and dedication of those currently serving in Iraq and elsewhere. But, Mr. Speaker, war is not a partisan matter. The leadership should be ashamed of bringing this resolution to the floor. Everyone here wants to support an honest and straightforward resolution to support our troops. Do not give us a disingenuous and deceptive resolution that confuses the issue by asking us to endorse the Bush doctrine that sent our troops to war. I for one will not be forced to praise the President's reckless decisions when what I want to do is praise the troops. I cannot endorse the administration's policy of unilateral military action without international sanctions. This war of choice undermines the international order and endangers our Republic.

Mr. Speaker, as the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war has begun, we must now turn our attention to the reconstruction. As we discuss the budget today, we must keep some facts in mind.

In a country where 60 percent of the people are entirely dependent on the Oil-for-Food Program run by the United Nations, which was ended 2 days ago, we are preparing to spend $12 billion a month bombing and $65 million for food, water, sanitation, shelter and health.

We have accepted full responsibility for the people of Iraq as of this day. We did the same for Afghanistan. We promised back in October of 2001, Bush and Blair said the conflict will not end, we will not walk away as the outside world has done before. The fact is we spent $6.5 billion bombing Afghanistan, and $300 million was all we would commit for the first year. Mr. Karzai was in this country the other day begging for aid. He got $50 million, and we told him $35 million has to go to build a hospital.

I will include in the Record an article by George Monbiot.

A Scar on the Conscience of the World

left behind to starve--a humanitarian disaster is engulfing Africa as

cash is poured into the war with Iraq and its aftermath

(By George Monbiot)

There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption

of western politics than the disproportion between the money

available for sustaining life and the money available for

terminating it. We could, I think, expect that, if they were

asked to vote on the matter, most of the citizens of the rich

world would demand that their governments spend as much on

humanitarian aid as they spend on developing new means of

killing people. But the military-industrial complex is a

beast which becomes both fiercer and greedier the more it is

fed.

As the United States prepares to spend some $12 billion a

month on bombing the Iraqis, it has so far offered only $65

million to provide them with food, water, sanitation, shelter

and treatment for the injuries they are likely to receive. A

confidential U.N. contingency plan for Iraq, which was leaked

in January, suggests that the war could expose around one

million children to ``risk of death from malnutrition.'' It

warns that ``the collapse of essential services in Iraq could

lead to a humanitarian emergency of proportions well beyond

the capacity of U.N. agencies and other aid organizations.''

Around 60 percent of the population is entirely dependent on

the oil for food programme, administered by the Iraqi

government. This scheme was suspended by the U.N. yesterday,

leaving the Iraqis reliant on foreign aid. The money pledged

so far is enough to sustain the Iraqies for less than a

fortnight.

It is hard to believe, however, that the U.S. Government

will leave them to starve once it has captured their country.

For the weeks or months during which Iraq dominates the news,

the U.S. will be obliged to defend them from the most

immediate impacts of the institutional collapse its war will

cause. Afterwards, like the people of Afghanistan, the Iraqis

will be first forgotten by the media and then deserted by

those who promised to support them.

But even before the first troops cross the border, the

impending war has caused a global humanitarian crisis. As

donor countries set aside their aid budgets to save both

themselves and the United States from embarrassment under the

camera lights in Baghdad, they have all but ceased to provide

money to other nations. The world, as a result, could soon be

confronted by a humanitarian funding crisis graver than any

since the end of the Second World War.

Every year, in November, the U.N. agencies which deal with

disasters launch what they call a ``consolidated appeal'' for

each of the countries suffering a ``complex emergency''. They

expect to receive the money they request by May of the

following year. The payments and promises they have extracted

so far chart the collapse of international concern for the

people of almost every nation except Iraq.

In Eritrea, for example, the drought is so severe that the

water table has fallen by ten metres. Most of the nation's

crops have failed and grain prices have doubled. Seventy

percent of its 3.3 million people are now classified as

vulnerable to famine. The United

Nations has asked the rich countries for $163 million to help

them. It has received $4 million, or 2.5 percent of the money

it requested.

Burundi, where almost one-sixth of the inhabitants have

been forced out of their homes by conflict and natural

disasters, and which is now officially listed as the third

poorest nation on earth, has received 3 percent of its U.N.

request. Liberia, where rebels have rendered much of the

western part of the country uninhabitable, forcing some

500,000 people out of their homes, has been given 1.2

percent; Sierra Leone, where lassa fever is now rampaging

through the refugee camps, has received 1 percent; and

Guinea, which has recently taken 82,000 refugees from Cote

d'Ivoire, 0.4 percent. Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic

Republic of Congo have all received less than 6 percent.

Much of the money for these invisible countries has come

from donor nations with relatively small economies, such as

Sweden, Norway, Canada and Ireland. ``The state of Africa'',

Tony Blair told his party conference in October 2001, ``is a

scar on the conscience of the world, but if the world

focused on it, we could heal it''. Well, let it now be a

scar on the conscience of Tony Blair.

As a result of this unprecedented failure by the rich

nations to cough up, the people of the forgotten countries

will, very soon, begin to starve to death. The U.N. has

warned that ``a break in supplies'' to Eritrea ``is now

inevitable''. The World Food Programs has started feeding

fewer people there, but will run out of food within two

months. In Burundi it can, it says, continue feeding people

``for another four weeks''. Beans will run out in Liberia

this month; cereals in May. One hundred thousand refugees in

Guinea could find themselves without food by August. Yet

neither of the two governments which are about to launch a

``humanitarian war'' appear to be concerned by the impending

humanitarian catastrophes in the world's poorest nations.

The aid crisis is now so serious that it is restricting

disaster relief even in nations which are considered by the

major powers to be geopolitically important. The U.N.

agencies have so far received just 2.9 percent of their

request for Palestine, and 8.4 percent of the money they need

in Afghanistan.

The latter figure is, in light of the repeated promises

made by the nations prosecuting the war there, extraordinary.

``To the Afghan people we make this commitment,'' Blair

pledged during the same speech in October 2001. ``The

conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the

outside world has done so many times before.'' Three months

later, the U.N. estimated that Afghanistan would need at

least $10 billion for reconstruction over the following five

years. The U.S., which had just spent $4.5 billion on bombing

the country, offered $300 million for the first year and

refused to make any commitment for subsequent years. This

year, George Bush ``forgot'' to produce an aid budget for

Afghanistan, until he was forced to provide another $300

million by Congress.

The government, which has an annual budget of just $460

million--or around half of what the U.S., still spends every

month on chasing remnants of Al qaeda through the mountains--

is effectively bankrupt. At the beginning of this month the

Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, flew to Washington to beg

George Bush for more money. He was given $50 million, $35

million of which the U.S., insists is spent on the

construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul. Karzai, in other

words, has discovered what the people of Iraq will soon find

out: generosity dries up when you are yesterday's news.

If, somehow, you are still suffering from the delusion that

this war is to be fought for the sake of the Iraqi people, I

would invite you to consider the record of the prosecuting

nations. We may believe that George Bush and Tony Blair have

the interests of foreigners at heart only when they spend

more on feeding them than they spend on killing them.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the 5 minutes of the gentlewoman from Indiana (Ms. Carson).