Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the gentleman for having this, staying up here at 10 o'clock at night, talking about this issue because I think the people need to understand the idea of universal health care is that everybody puts into the pot, and then when they get sick, they take out of the pot. Nobody, when they pay for their health insurance, stands around saying, gee, I hope I get sick so I can take something out of the pot. That is not the way people think.

We have given universal health care to senior citizens. We have said anybody over 65 in this country is eligible for Medicare, and we put them all in together; and they put all their money in together collectively, and we put together a Medicare program that has worked very well since 1964. It has not required people's children to pay for anything. They have been able to have their own dignity. They had their own card. They paid for their own health care during all that period.

I sat on the Medicare commission. I was one of the 16 people sitting on that commission for a year back in the mid-1990s, and there is a determined effort by the Republicans to privatize Medicare.

What does privatize mean? It means to separate all the American people from one another and make them deal individually with this particular problem in their life, their health care.

They would be given a voucher, and they could privately go out to a private insurance company and find somebody who would give them a benefit.

Now, if we were to take my mother and myself, my mother is 93 and I am 65, if we were to take those two people and say, send them out with the same amount of money, we know that they are going to get different benefits. Well, they have tried this. They have offered the Medicare through an HMO, and people went and joined, and then the HMO closed, and they lost all the benefits. And people have been jerked around over the last 4 or 5 years by this whole process, but they are determined. And this bill is the real final effort to do that.

It is kind of like when I was a little kid. My mother wanted me to take cod liver oil. There was some vitamins in it, and she wanted me to have those. But cod liver oil tastes terrible, so she would always mix it with orange juice. That is exactly what they are doing here. They want people to take the cod liver oil of privatizing health care, and they are filling the glass with orange juice, which is the drug benefit.

So that is the first thing people have to understand. The drug benefit is not intended to give them a drug benefit, it is to get them to drink the cod liver oil, the privatization of Medicare.

Now, how did they design this? Why do I say they do not intend to give a drug benefit? Very simple. They said, well, let us put up $400 billion. Now, that sounds like a lot of money to people. I mean, it sounds like a lot to me. But if we are going to fix the problem right, to do the deal right, it is going to take way more than that, probably twice that amount. But they just said, well, we will put $400 million in, and we will kind of mix it around so people will not see what we are really doing.

Worst of all, as my colleague pointed out, this does not go into effect until 2006. They can put advertisements on television in the next campaign in 2004, or in 2006 they can put advertisements out and say, we gave you a drug benefit, because it will not go into effect until 2006. Now, most Americans look at politicians and they say, I do not know if I can trust them or not, and I want to see what actually happens. Well, when you put something out there so far, the people will never know that what they see advertised in the 2004 campaign, with all these millions of dollars of ads from the drug companies and from the Members of Congress who voted for this, that, in fact, it was never intended to work.

Now, I will tell you why I know that. I was walking through the tunnel between the Capitol and one of the office buildings today, and one of the Republican Members said to me, do you think this bill is ever going to come out of the conference committee? Do you think the Senate and the House will ever solve it and bring a bill back to the floor? I said, no. He said, I do not think so either, and we hope it does not. This was a Republican talking. We hope it does not. I said, you do? He said, well, it is not a good plan. It does not solve the problem.

So they know it does not solve the problem, but they want to say, I voted for a pharmaceutical benefit, and my opponent opposed it. Or my opponent does not think it is good, but I wanted to give pharmaceuticals to senior citizens. They have no interest in the reality of this bill.

Now, I think there is a couple of things that are really sort of buried in this bill that people have to understand. They said we do not want the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for all the 40 million old people in this country. We want each little insurance company to negotiate with the drug companies as best they can. Every other country in the world that has an industrialized country like us, France, Germany, Canada, anybody, the government negotiates for everybody. My colleagues know that that works better.

If I were to go into a store and say, I want to buy 100 loaves of bread, I will get a better price. It is going to be less per loaf than it would if I were to buy one loaf at a time. But the Republicans set this up so that Tommy Thompson, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, cannot go and negotiate for them. They made it impossible to save money, or save big money.

We know what happens in the Veterans' Administration, we get a 50 percent discount because they negotiate a price for every veteran. All 5 million of them get the benefit of a negotiated price for 5 million people. But when it comes to seniors, we say, no, no, you are on your own, Grandma. You can go 1 at a time or 2 at a time or 10 at a time, or whatever, but you cannot have the benefit of this. I think that alone should make people sort of wonder about this.

The second thing they do is that they say, well, you can go into a Medicare HMO, some kind of health maintenance organization, and get your benefits, if they will take you; or you can stay in regular Medicare with your doctor that you have known for the last 30 years and knows everything that has ever happened to you, so that when you go in the doctor does not have to say, well, let us start with when you were 6 years old; when did you have the mumps; when did you have the measles?

You know, when you get to be 65, or like my mom, 93, who remembers what year it was that you had the measles? You want a doctor that knows you and that you have dealt with for 30 or 40 years, so that they say, well, Mrs. McDermott, how is X, or whatever the problem is that they have been following. Seniors do not want to have to start over again with a new physician.

But they say if you stay in Medicare, you are going to have to pay more for the drugs. Now, the problem with that is that drives up the premium. Right now the premium for seniors is something under $60. HCFA, the Health Care Financing Administration, that administration says that the premiums next year, if this bill goes into effect, would go up to $90 a month for nothing. It would just go up $90. Why? Because the sick people would stay in Medicare, the old standard Medicare, and the healthy ones would go get into these HMOs where they could get a better deal. So sick people who want to stay with their doctor are going to be stuck paying more money than people who are younger and healthier and are acceptable into some kind of an HMO.

I believe, and what the gentleman is saying, is that it should be a Medicare benefit that everybody gets in the

whole United States. It does not make any difference whether you live in Ohio or New Jersey or Washington or Atlanta, Georgia, or wherever, you ought to get the same benefit. It should not be dependent on whether you can find an HMO that negotiates better or anything else.

For instance, maybe a parent would like to move from Tennessee, where they had a pretty good deal, to Montana where their kids are living. They want to move to Montana because they want to be near the grandkids. That is what my parents did. My parents left Oklahoma in 1972 to live with us in Washington State when my dad retired and there were grandkids. My mother said, hey, we are going out to be near the grandkids. Well, why should there be any difference in the benefit between Oklahoma and Washington State?

This bill will guarantee that there is a difference. It may be better, it may be worse. My parents would not have anything to say. Anybody who moves under this new system will have no idea what they are going to.

And then there is this question of a donut hole. Frankly, the bill mystifies me in that it seems to imply that the Republicans think that old people are not paying attention; that somehow we are going to whistle this past them, and they will not see what this is about. My colleague explained it. First of all, the Democratic plan is the only one that says what the premium will be, $25 a month, and there is a $100 deductible. They spell it out in the law. The Republicans do not give us that. They say there will be a premium, and there will be a deductible, but people are buying a pig in a poke right off the bat. Then you pay for that, and, at a certain point, you do not get any benefits. You are still getting your monthly bill for your premiums. You have to keep paying those premiums. Meanwhile every bit of drugs you pay for you have to pay all out of your pocket.

Now, I tried to explain this at a couple of retirement homes in Seattle, and people just say, that does not make any sense. What are they trying to do? What is this about? The minute you explain to people what this really does, it falls apart flat. And yet they are coming in here, pressing this bill and talking about all the things they have done. But people should remember that it is not passed until it goes into effect. And there, I think, is going to be a very big fight between the Senate and the House on this issue because the Senate does not want to privatize health care. They are resisting the idea of putting the orange juice with the cod liver oil. They said, no cod liver oil. This is orange juice.

They are doing a drug benefit over there, and in some ways that makes it a little better. It is not as generous maybe as ours is, but neither one of them works very well. The only bill that really works is the one the House Democrats put out which gives people a fixed payment and a fixed deductible and a fixed amount that they have to pay 'til whenever.

And nobody wants this benefit. This idea that you are going to get an insurance company running in to offer an insurance policy to all the seniors, just ask yourself, and you do not have to be a rocket scientist to know why this will not work, who buys an insurance policy? You do not buy an insurance policy unless you have a car, right? You do not buy fire insurance if you do not own a home. Why would you buy this, paying month after month for a drug benefit, if you did not need any drugs? As soon as you need them, boy, you want to run in right away and get it. But why would seniors, if they had something else or they were tight with money, they would say, why should I buy it?

So the only people who are going to buy are people who have big drug bills. Maybe they have cancer and their cancer treatments are very expensive, or maybe they have had a kidney transplant and they have drugs that are very expensive. There are a whole raft of conditions which require people to spend an awful lot on pharmaceuticals. Those are the people who are going to buy it. So an insurance company is sitting there saying to themselves, no way.

The way insurance companies work is you sell a premium to everybody, and then you hope nobody gets sick so you can give all the money that is left to your stockholders. That is how they work. It is no mystery, and it is not wrong. It is the way they operate. Well, why would you want to take in a bunch of sick people who want drugs and give them a drug benefit?

Well, the government, these guys recognize that. They realize the insurance industry will not do it. So what they said was, I know what, we will let them offer the plan, and then we will take 99 percent of the risk. The Congress will take it. And if there is any profit to be made, the insurance company can take it out the door.

This is absolutely a fraud for the government to use all of its money and not try and control it, not look for the fraud and the waste and the abuse; turn it over to the insurance company, who has no risk. None. There is no explanation for why they would come up with a plan like this except that they hope it does not pass.

And I hope it does not pass. I would like a real bill to pass, because God knows people are really having trouble, and there are so many things we could do that would not be hard to do.

I see my colleague has brought some things here about the Canadian plan, and I will just say one or two more things and then turn it over to her.

The Canadian Government did not go through any big plan or anything, they just passed a law that said that the price you pay in Canada is going to be the average of the G-7 countries. Now, the G-7 countries are the seven most vibrant economies in the world, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, and so forth. So whatever the price is in Germany, they write that down, write down the price in France, add them all together and divide by seven, and that is the price in Canada. They never pay above the median. They always pay in the middle.

Now, that is why people leave my State on buses on a weekly basis to go up to Canada. Anybody who lives near the Canadian border knows about this. Or they have pharmacies up there, and they mail in up there, and they have it all worked out so they can get them filled and have them sent back. What the pharmaceutical companies are doing now, just to show you how much they hate that, they have cut off the amount of drugs going to these pharmacies in British Columbia, which is north of Washington State.

Mr. Speaker, they say to them you could not possibly sell this many drugs in British Columbia, so we are only going to give you 40 percent of your order so they cannot ship the other 60 percent down to the United States. They are cutting off their supply. It is incredible the lengths to which the pharmaceutical industry will go.

In closing, in case Members would like to shed a tear for pharmaceutical companies, the Fortune 500, which is the 500 biggest companies in the United States, 10 of those companies are pharmaceutical companies. Those 10 companies last year had a profit of $38 billion. That was 50 percent of all 500 companies. Ten companies produced 50 percent of the profit of the whole of the Fortune 500.

Now, I believe in research, and I believe in all of the things that pharmaceutical companies do, and I am not against pharmaceutical companies; but I think enough is enough. I think my colleague who has some Canadian prices here will make a very interesting case on this point.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to realize that last night a miracle occurred in this body, a bill that left the committee costing $73 billion sometime after midnight suddenly became $173 billion. An actual miracle in the Committee on Rules.

The fact is Members have to understand why that happened. All Members make $150,000 a year. They were not covered by this bill. It only went up to $65,000; but in the Committee on Rules they said, let us put ourselves in this bill, so they raised it up to $150,000 so that we could take benefit of this. Now that was a thoughtful thing for them to be doing, but did they think about the people in your district?

My employees at Boeing, they get $65,000 a year. It is a pretty good paying job, and they get good benefits from their company. What is to stop their company tomorrow from saying, We are going to give you a $10,000 deductible policy, and we will put $500 into your account, you put $3,500 in, and you will have it all for yourself? They can do that. They can end a defined benefit package at Boeing tomorrow and give a defined contribution. Give employees a voucher, and say they are on their own. Do Members want them to strike over that?

Mr. Speaker, how about the woman making $30,000 teaching school. We all know those school teachers are rich people. You end the school program, the State governments are in trouble, they could say let us stop giving insurance to the teachers, let us just give them a $10,000 deductible policy, put $500 in their savings account and say to the $30,000-a-year teacher, they can come up with $3,500 to put into their account.

I love to hear people who make $150,000 talk about what it is like to be in this country making $30,000, which is the average pay. Or the people making $18,000. They work every day. They have no insurance. Do you think they have $3,500 to put into a savings account?

This is for rich people. That is why it went up $100 billion miraculously between a $65,000 income limit and $150,000. It only cost 74 for all the people at the bottom, but it cost 100 for us. This is a bad bill.

What it does, also, it says people are going to get out of the pool. People who are rich and healthy are going to get out of the pool, and they are going to leave the sick and the poor in the pool. And what happens to the premiums for the average person? They go up. The idea of insurance is to spread the risk, and you are letting the wealthy and healthy get out of the pool.

Mr. Speaker, well the rubber stamp Congress is ready tonight. The drug companies, after they contributed and got the President elected, gave him this bill, and they said this is what we want. The President brought it up here. We are rubber stamping it out of here. Can you believe that the Senate, excuse me, in another part of this building they are considering something like 400 amendments, but we cannot have one because when you are using a rubber stamp, you cannot have one single amendment in here. Nothing can be improved in this bill. Can you believe it? It is like the Ten Commandments. It is perfect. It came down from God or somewhere, or the White House.

This bill was put together by drug companies, 10 of them. They had $38 billion in profit last year. That is 50 percent of the profit of the Fortune 500. If the Members think they did not have an impact on this bill, why do they want to privatize? Why do they want to give no guaranteed benefit? Why do they want to have all openness in the world? And why do they put the one line in there that says that the Secretary cannot negotiate on behalf of 40 million people, soon to be 80 million people? They want it all broken up into little different pieces so they can divide and conquer. This little agency will get so much. But a little bit bigger one, we will give them a little bit higher benefit. They are going to divide and conquer the American people. This is a sham.

In Canada they get their price reduced very simply by saying let us make the Canadian price the average of the G-7. The United States is way up here and Canada is way down there. Why could we not pass a little amendment in here that said let us give the average of the G-7? I do not know. In my State everybody goes across the border to Canada or they mail across the border. They do it in Vermont. They do it in New Hampshire. They do it in Maine. They do it in New York State. Why? Because everybody knows the Canadians have got a better deal than we. But you say no, no, we cannot make one change. When we are sent in here with our rubber stamp to approve of everything George Bush does, we have to give him the bill exactly as he sent it over here.

The idea that you could come out here with a bill and say that we have a perfect piece of legislation, the seniors are like Abraham Lincoln. Do you remember, the founder of the Republican Party? He said, You can fool some people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.

I know the President is going to raise $200 billion for ads in this campaign to say this, I got this from that rubber-stamped Congress and it is good for you, and he is going to give the tax cuts and the child never left behind, and he is going to give this stuff, and every one of those is phony. The child never left behind? He puts a budget out here $17 billion short to fund it, and the people are going to figure it out.

Counting on believing that the American people are stupid is not a good political way to go. Vote against this bill because the rubber stamp is wrong.

Mr. Speaker, Members of the House and those listening to this, I think you ought to take a piece of paper right now and write this down. The premium is $25. The deductible is $100 a year. The coinsurance means you pay 20 percent, the government pays 80 percent for your drugs, and there is a cap on how much you can spend out of pocket, $2,000. That is written into our bill.

In contrast, we have this magic pill that has been given to us where the other side says trust us. Remember, these are the people who told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were right there. They were going to be delivered in 45 minutes. And, in fact, the President of the United States stood right here and

said, Mr. Speaker, that he believed that they had tried to buy uranium from Niger. It was known that that was a lie. It was known. So now they come out here with this drug bill and they say listen, we think it will be about $35 and maybe you will get this and maybe you will get that, but nothing is written down. I want the people to remember those four things.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. Speaker, Parliamentary inquiry.

Point of personal privilege, Mr. Speaker. Were you making some reference about Baghdad whom? Is that appropriate for the Speaker of the House?

Mr. Speaker, I oppose the awarding of this gold medal now. We have awarded gold medals to many people in our history since 1776, but on only one occasion have we ever awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor to a sitting head of state: Nelson Mandela, when he was 80 years old and in his last months in office. I suppose it is possible that these are the last months in office for Prime Minister Blair, but that is not clear just at the moment.

At this moment he is fighting for his political future against accusations that he misled the public about British intelligence findings on Iraq. Mr. Blair's Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was brought up before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the House of Commons yesterday. He was asked, among other things, why Mr. Blair's influential January dossier on Iraq's capabilities was so reliant on the uncredited 12-year-old writings of an American graduate student. Today Alastair Campbell, his doctor of spin, will be up there and he will be answering accusations that it was he who inserted in a dossier the astonishing information that Iraq not only possessed fully developed, operational chemical and biological weapons but was capable of delivering them within 45 minutes of a command order. Foreign Secretary Straw said yesterday there were substantial errors. He said that lessons have been learned, but he blamed the demands of the media. That very media, of course, made sure that the false papers issued by Prime Minister Blair's government deceived others around the world as well as the Britons. The influential information and errors may have even influenced Members of this body.

If this award to Mr. Blair is appropriate, it is either too late or too soon. If the medal had been awarded when it was first introduced, before these deceptions were discovered, it would have had smooth sailing. If it were brought up later, perhaps Mr. Blair will have cleared his name. At this moment, however, we are prejudging and perhaps trying to influence the outcome of some very serious investigations going on in Britain. We are trying to prop up Mr. Blair. The White House has sent up another one of those rubber stamp bills. I do not dispute that he needs propping up. His job rating at home is minus 13 which means his disapproval exceeds his approval by 13 points. What I dispute is whether the Congressional Medal of Honor should become a prop in the strategy of the British Prime Minister to regain his people's trust.

I ask the Members of this body to consider carefully whether they wish to risk cheapening the Congressional Medal of Honor by awarding it to an embattled politician. Let us not rush to judgment. Let us revisit this resolution another day. Even Winston Churchill was not awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor at any point in his tumultuous political career, though there were times when it would have come in quite handy. His medal was posthumous. With all due respect, Prime Minister Blair is not Winston Churchill.

Mr. Speaker, the ``Rubber Stamp Congress'' is about to go back in session. The President sent the word down from the White House: he wants a bill. We have not seen the bill. It has been put together in two different committees. We do not know what the Committee on Rules is going to put out here, but I can tell my colleagues two things about it. It is very clear from what went on in the Committee on Energy and Commerce and what went on in the Committee on Ways and Means that the bill that will be before us in the next couple of days is not going to satisfy what senior citizens really want.

The senior citizens want no privatization. They do not want Medicare to become totally a private insurance operation. They like the program run by the government. It has worked very well for many years; not perfect, but it has worked very well, and the idea that we are going to have a drug benefit and we are going to say, here is some money, we are putting it on the table here, and the drug companies are going to run in or the insurance companies are going to run in and figure out how to give a benefit is simply nonsense, and people know it.

They do not trust insurance companies. They have had the last couple of years dealing with the insurance companies around HMOs and they said, Why do we need more of that? How will we feel more safe if we know the insurance companies can come in one day and out the next and back in another day and another and out, in and out? We will not have any benefit.

They want a guaranteed Medicare benefit that they do not have to join a private program to get. They can get it through the government and it is just that simple. That is why they have rejected all these private HMOs, all of that stuff and have stayed in the basic Medicare program. It is partly because the way the insurance companies have treated them.

Insurance companies went out and promised benefits all over the place. They promised drug benefits and everything else. People joined and 6 months later they pulled out and left them hanging. So they expect the very same thing to happen with this drug benefit.

If this were something the insurance companies wanted to do, believe me they would have done it a long time ago but they do not want to do it. So it has got to be in the regular Medicare program. It cannot be privatized. And it has to have a guaranteed benefit.

You can say to people, well, here is $100 a month. Go out and see what kind of plan you get offered because you are not guaranteed anything in that. In some parts of the country it might buy more than it buys in another part of the country. But everybody will have the same amount to go out and try and buy with, so how is that going to work?

Why should it make a difference if you live in Tennessee or you live in Oklahoma or you live in Vermont or you live in Washington State or you live in Illinois? Why should you not be able to have this same plan no matter where you are in this country? Suppose you want to leave San Francisco and go and live with your children in Kansas City? Suddenly you have got to change plans. All of these are issues that come when you put it in the hands of a private insurance company.

Now, the second thing people want is to control the costs of medication. I live up in the Northwest. I live up in Seattle. Every day people get in their cars, drive across the border into Canada, and buy drugs at markedly reduced prices. Now, that went on for a long time and now there are organizations that will allow you to fill your prescriptions from Canada without ever leaving your home in the United States. Thousands and thousands of people are filling their prescriptions in Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine and New York and Michigan and Minnesota. All the States along the northern tier are doing that and it is going down in other States in the country.

Now, you ask yourself, why are drug costs lower in Canada? I mean, what is it about the Canadians that they are better negotiators or what have they done? They did one simple thing. They said you cannot charge a Canadian, they put this in law, you cannot charge a Canadian more than the average of the G-7 countries. Now, what are the G-7 countries? France, Britain, Germany, United States, Canada, Japan, and I think Italy is the other one. You take all those countries, add the price together on a drug and the average price is what Canadians pay.

All it would take for us to save all that traffic to Canada is to pass a law here that grants us the average price of the G-7 countries. This bill will not have it. It is a bad bill. And you should look very carefully at what you pay and what you do not get.

Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Yes, Mr. Speaker.

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

Mr. Speaker, the amendment that is at the desk on H.R. 1528 is a fairly comprehensive amendment to the bill which we discussed yesterday. The first thing is that my amendment would delete the controversial provisions contained in the underlying bill which would eliminate consumer protections that this Congress provided less than 1 year ago when it enacted the Trade Promotion Act. I think that there are many Members who voted for the fast track bill with the belief that this was in it and now less than a year later we are back taking it out.

I think that is an important part of this amendment.

The second thing is this amendment would provide the recently increased family credit for 12 million children and 6 million families. We passed it out of here and it has gone to an uncertain future in a conference committee. I read there is some debate among the Members of the conference committee about who is going to chair it. We could put this issue to rest with this amendment today.

The third part of the amendment is to stop the delay of tax benefits for our military and relief to families of the astronauts killed in the Columbia disaster. I think that this is one of those issues where we all agree, it has been sitting there and somehow it does not get done, and I think it is time for us to move on.

Fourth, the amendment will prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from implementing a pre-certification program for Earned Income Tax Credit recipients. I think this is a needed and important change in the IRS. It is the only place that we have such a thing where we make people send in their money reports before they even get the benefit, rather than letting them make application for it and then figuring out if there is some question.

Fifth, my amendment would also contain provisions addressing the abusive corporate tax shelters which we have talked about in the past.

Finally, this adds taxpayer protections designed to assist low and middle-class taxpayers in complying with the tax law.

It is a fairly comprehensive amendment, but I think it is a good one, and it does a number of things which we ought to do when we are passing this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin).

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

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

The gentlewoman from Connecticut calls it a small adjustment. I would call it a gutting of the program. If you allow an insurance company to screen people out on the basis of preexisting conditions, which is what this amendment does, of course it will be simpler. They just look down your history. If you are over 50 years old, you will never get access to this. And the people who are losing their jobs here are not 20 years old. They are people who are in steel industries and other industries where the existence of a preexisting condition is very common.

So to say that the insurance company does not have to have that consumer protection, there is no guaranteed issue and they can use preexisting conditions is simply to give the insurance industry the ability to cherry pick the young and leave the others by the side of the road.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Becerra).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on both sides?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis).

(Ms. SOLIS asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin).

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

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

Listening to the other side, Mr. Speaker, I do not quite know where to start. It is not very often that the public gets a clear view of the naked desire of the Republican Party to not do something while appearing to do it. These taxpayer provisions to protect taxpayers could have passed 12 months ago; but at that time, a year ago, they stuck in a poison pill amendment, and it died in the Senate.

Now, if they had only done it once, no one would have seen what was going on there. They passed the taxpayer bill, they put this amendment in, and they knew it would never come back; and that was the end of it. But they did not learn from that. They had the people fooled that they cared about taxpayers. But now they have come back a second time, and they do the same thing over again. They could have put a bill out here that everybody would have passed, that would have had 435 votes for it; but they had to put another poison pill in.

They know this is not going to get through the Senate because, first of all, it was part of the fast track bill and votes were obtained from people on both sides of the aisle around the belief that they were going to look after workers' rights in trade negotiations. One of the things that happens is people lose their health care benefits when they lose their job because of trade. So we took care of that. And now my Republican colleagues come in here, and what is really amazing is they believe in devolution; that everything should be put down to the States; and what they are basically saying is that we are rewarding the States that have not done anything.

Most States have acted under the bill and provided programs. They have followed all the rules. But we do have some laggards. Maybe my colleagues want to read that list again. Those laggards, those slothful ones, whatever they are, that do not care about their people, or whatever it is, they have not acted; and yet my colleagues are saying, okay, okay, we understand you really do care, so we are going to get rid of all the rules. What kind of incentive, what kind of message is that to send to the States? Hang back, do not do it, and we will change it to fit you; right?

Now, that is no message to send. And the real message here is, and I do not know anybody who wants to see this, this bill occurred because the Republicans would not allow them to use COBRA or Medicaid. When these negotiations were going on, we wanted to put these people into Medicaid, give them coverage there, or allow them to extend their COBRA. But my Republican colleagues said oh, no, no, no, no, we have a new plan. We believe that tax credits are the answer. So we will give them 65 percent of the premium tax credit, and they will be able to go out and buy. And lo and behold it did not work.

This is kind of the reverse of that movie called ``Field of Dreams'': If you build it, they will come. Well, the Republicans said if we build this tax credit around health insurance, they will come; and they have not come. So now they are saying, well, we are going to tweak it a little bit here and take away the consumer protections. And I think that is not fair. It makes it pretty hard to deal with the other side when one year they are saying they are going to do one thing, and in less than a year they are back here taking it out. What can we believe from them? Did my colleagues not think it was a good idea last time, so they just let it go through in order to get fast track, because they knew they could come back and repeal it? What was going on?

I think my Republican colleagues ought to ask themselves what kind of a message it sends from their side to us when they want us to work on a bipartisan basis. We do not work very often on a bipartisan basis; but when we do, on the fast track bill, the Republicans undercut it the next time they stand up. In my view, that is not the way this body should operate.

Now, what are some of the other things that are in here that we took out? We took out some things that the Republicans had in their taxpayer bill. We took out the ability to have tax-free interest on overpayments. If we look at the scoring of this bill, if we look at what the CBO said, they said they think a billion dollars is going to be paid in overpayments. Now, why would anybody overpay their taxes? Well, if this bill passes, they would get tax-free interest because the government has to pay interest on overpayments that are given back. It has always been taxable, but now it would not be. The CBO's estimate is that a billion dollars is going to be put into tax-free bonds, basically, in the IRS.

Now, my view is that is not necessary. And the other thing is, my colleagues talk about wanting to revise the Tax Code, yet they come out here with a bill that is going to complicate it some more. They are going to give some people 2 more weeks. For what?

For 2 years they are going to give people who file electronically two more weeks. I asked the staff, where did this come from? Who asked for this?

Mr. Speaker, no accountants that I know want two different dates. It turns out this is a provision that the last Treasury Secretary kind of thought was a great idea. Guys, he is gone. Let this idea go away. It is a bad idea. We do not need any more confusion in tax filing than we already have today.

Finally, this issue of children. I do not know why they continue to tar

themselves with their own brush. They say they care about kids, and then they pass a bill through here that does not give the benefit to the poorest of the kids, not the poorest, the ones just above the poorest. Their folks make between $15,000 and $28,000, and they say to them, you do not get this money, this child tax credit. But they are willing to give it to people making $80,000, $90,000 all of the way up to $150,000. I do not know why Republicans would want to have that image.

I stand over here and think, why would they be doing this? All I can think of is they thought it was an engine that would be able to drag some things through Congress which they could not get any other way. It makes no sense at all. If they really cared about these kids, they would pass this bill and with this amendment on it, and it would go into law immediately.

I know the other side does not like the provision about companies that run away, but we are over there rebuilding Iraq, and some of the very companies that left the country and have established another office someplace else, the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or wherever, have the gall to come back here and bid on contracts to rebuild Iraq. They are willing to pay no taxes in this country, and then take American taxpayer money and make profit off it in Iraq. It is unbelievable that the other side of the aisle would set up a system like that unless they had friends in the oil industry or concrete-laying or dam-building or airport-rebuilding. All those issues are in this bill, and I say we should adopt this amendment if we want to protect the taxpayers. This amendment in the nature of a substitute would get through the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. Speaker, last night the House began the process of privatizing Medicare. The Committee on Ways and Means put out a bill, and it has a provision in it that says, by the year 2010, we are going to take away the guaranteed benefit that people have under Medicare, and we are going to give them a defined contribution.

Now, that is a voucher under any other name. They call it premium support. They will try and confuse people. It is wrapped inside the drug bill so people will say, well, we want the prescription drug benefit. If you take it the way the Republicans are giving it to you in the House of Representatives, you have to accept that they are privatizing Medicare.

Now, that is a concept that people simply do not understand what that means. Give $5,000 to every one of the 40 million old people in this country and send them out looking for a loving insurance company to take care of them. It is a bad idea. People should wake up and see what is happening in the next week.

This rubber stamp Congress is going to put that bill out of here so that they can go home over the 4th of July and say, we gave you prescription drugs. They are going to give you privatized Medicare with it.

Mr. Speaker, I guess we are all in touch with our constituents. Mine was quoted today. Bill Gates, Sr. lives in my district, and he said the principal issue is the growing budget deficit. You cannot run a $400 billion deficit year after year and go around repealing taxes at the same time.

Now, I learned in Sunday school, and it may surprise some of you, but I went to Sunday school, and I learned that you cannot take anything with you when you die. But it is not fair to heap $800 billion of additional debt on your kids as you go out of sight.

This argument we are having here today is an old one in this society. We made the decision between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that we were not going to have primogeniture in this country; that you could not pass everything on to your eldest son and that was it. We said everybody ought to start with an even shot, men and women. We have come a long way using that. But now we are saying that somebody who inherited from his father or his mother, millions and millions and millions of dollars, should get it just because he was born lucky.

Now, I have read the Bible and I have looked around and I do not find that anywhere, that if you are born lucky, as they say, some guys were born on third base and they think they hit a triple, but this is not something where you have a God-given right to that. You have a God- given right in this country to have an equal shot.

As for the farmers, I listened to my colleague from Washington go on and on and on about the farmers. I have a letter here from the National Farmers Union dated 16 June. ``I write on behalf of 300,000 farmers with the National Farmers Union. There is no evidence that the estate tax has forced the liquidation of any farms, and existing estate tax provisions already exempt 98 percent of all farms and ranches.'' By increasing the level of the estate tax, as we will get an opportunity with the Pomeroy substitute, to $4 million per individual, 99.5 percent of America's agricultural producers would be exempt from any State liability.

Now, if the farmers are who we are arguing about here, 300,000 of them just spoke, and they say this is baloney. In fact, the letter goes on to say that, ``we need that money for crop supports and conservation and all the other things that government provides.'' So they understand that having a government that can provide services is important.

Mr. Speaker, if we give away all of the money, we are going to come back here next year and say we cannot do conservation, we cannot do crop subsidies, we cannot do anything because we do not have the money. These farmers are not stupid. They understand. I think we ought to vote for the Pomeroy amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from North Dakota, who comes from a big farming district, has a great amendment here.

Mr. Speaker, I will include for the Record a letter from the National Farmers Union dated June 16, 2003. The letter says there is no evidence that the estate tax has forced the liquidation of any farms, and existing estate tax provisions already exempt 98 percent of all farmers and ranchers. This is a letter on behalf of 300,000 farmers and ranchers. By increasing the level of estate exemption to $4 million per individual, which is what the Pomeroy amendment does, 99.5 percent of American agricultural producers would be exempted from any estate tax liability. It goes on to say the 20-year Federal cost of Federal estate tax repeal is estimated to be nearly $1 trillion. For farmers and ranchers, such a loss in Federal revenues will reduce our ability to fund a wide range of commodity, conservation, rural development, research and trade programs important to family farms.

Why are we doing this? Well, we are in the rubber-stamp Congress. We have an amendment out here that makes sense, but the Republicans will not consider it because ``I approve of everything George Bush does,'' and they are out here to rubber stamp another amendment.

In spite of the fact that last night we created a bill in the Committee on Ways and Means to deal with pharmaceutical benefits, we said to people, we are going to cover you from zero up to $2,000 and then there is going to be this big gap up to $4,900 people do not get a thing. They have to keep paying their premium, but they are not going to get anything out of it. From $2,000 to $4,900 in your bill is not a tax benefit that covers the pharmaceutical needs of people.

Now we could fix that simply with the money we have here today that we are passing out the back door, not to farmers; this is not a farmer issue. This is a bunch of very, very rich people hiding behind farmers. They are sort of sneaking behind the combine waiting until this bill gets through, and then they are going to stand up and take all their money. This is not for farmers. The farmers say that.

So who is it for? It is the President of the United States who had a fund-raiser last night, and he said give me $2,000 a plate, sit down; and I am going to rubber-stamp another bill.

Mr. Speaker, we have rubber-stamped one bill after another. A Member on the other side of the aisle said this is equally important with the other tax bill we did. Hey, there is $900 billion still laying in the Committee on Ways and Means. It is going to be brought out here, and we will rubber-stamp it. How big is the debt? Nobody cares. Our kids can pay for that, except for the kids of rich people; they do not pay taxes.

National Farmers Union,

June 16, 2003.

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Member of Congress: I write on behalf of the 300,000

farmer and rancher members of the National Farmers Union to

urge you to vote against H.R. 8, legislation that

would repeal the federal estate tax when it comes to the

floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Repeal proponents have characterized this issue as critical

to the future sustainability of America's family farms and

ranches because it is a primary cause of farm liquidations.

This argument is without merit. There is no evidence that the

estate tax has forced the liquidation of any farms, and

existing estate tax provisions already exempt 98 percent of

all farms and ranches. By increasing the level of the estate

tax exemption to $4 million per individual, 99.5 percent of

America's agricultural producers would be exempt from any

estate tax liability.

We believe estate tax laws should be reformed, not

repealed. An immediate increase in the level of the exemption

utilized to calculate estate tax liability, and

simplification of the rules and procedures governing the

filing and payment of estate taxes, represents a more

rational and beneficial approach for farmers, ranchers and

small business owners than full repeal.

The tax reform approach will minimize the loss of revenue

for both the federal and state governments that will result

from full repeal at a time when budget deficits and declining

public revenues are severely stressing our capacity to

maintain and expand priority programs important to the

American people. The twenty-year federal cost of full estate

tax repeal is estimated to be nearly $1 trillion. For farmers

and ranchers, such a loss in federal revenues will reduce our

ability to fund a wide range of commodity, conservation,

rural development, research and trade programs important to

the farm economy. These programs are much more critical to

retaining a family farm oriented production agriculture

system than the limited savings resulting from estate tax

repeal that will only accrue to the nation's wealthiest

individuals.

Estate tax reform will provide much needed certainty to

those engaged in planning for the future while ensuring that

individuals are not subjecting their heirs to a capital gains

tax liability resulting from the potential loss of the

stepped-up basis provisions contained in current law. If this

occurs, the result will amount to a substantial tax increase

for those of more modest means and smaller accumulations of

wealth.

We look forward to working with you to develop and adopt an

estate tax reform proposal that is both fair and fiscally

responsible. Thank you for your consideration of these issues

and for your vote against repeal of the federal estate tax.

Sincerely,

David J. Frederickson,

President.

Mr. Speaker, the underlying bill here today is not in dispute. We had the same bill last year, and they could not get it through because they used it like they are using it this year. They used it sort of like a bun for a hotdog. Everybody wanted the bun, but they keeping sticking a poison pill into the hot dog. They did it last year with section 527, long forgotten. This year with great fanfare they passed the fast track bill. A lot of Members on this side of the aisle voted for the fast track bill. They said if we put in some protections for the workers, and Members said, oh, yes, that is right, we should give protections for the workers so that if because of trade they lose their job and they lose their health care benefits, we should provide some health care benefits for them.

The bill was barely dry from the President signing it, and they started trying to take that out. The workers have got to think there is nobody in this place who is honest with them. The first time it happened, the gentleman on the other side went to the Committee on Armed Services and stuck it into one of their bills; and he got caught, and it got dropped out in the conference committee. So it has been brought back and put in here.

Members know this bill will pass. The taxpayers deserve some relief and protection. So a bill like that is going to pass 435-0, so Members can stick in just about anything and figure it will slide by and nobody will notice it. What they have done to these workers, and I have 11,000 in my State, and there are a few thousand in every State, they are going to go out thinking I have a 65 percent tax credit on my health care benefits and all I have to do is find a place to do this.

Our State does not have a program yet, but they are working on it in the State legislature because they never put in the bill that the States have to establish programs. What is underlying here is a basic philosophic disagreement. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. McCrery) and I have been around on this a lot of times. It is the question of do people have an individual responsibility to take care of themselves, or should we take care of them collectively by developing a State program in this particular instance.

Many States have put together plans, in spite of the fact that Congress gave them no direction. We put it in the bill, and it silently went out into the ether. Some States woke up and found it. New York and New Jersey and a few other States were paying attention, but about 30 States have not found it yet. They have not put together a program, or their legislatures are not capable. I do not know why they have not done it. But here we come with an amendment which says you States which have not done it, you cannot have the consumer protections. If your State legislature says all individual programs have to have a guaranteed issue and they have to have no preexisting condition exclusions, then you can buy a policy.

Mr. Speaker, a guy is 55 years old, he gets laid off in this trade adjustment and, he has got a little problem with his heart or kidneys or lungs. Now he has a preexisting condition, and he has a voucher in his hand and he goes to the insurance company, and they take his history. Oh, you have a kidney problem. Sorry, you have a preexisting condition. We cannot. Now many States have passed a law and said you cannot deny him. At that point he is out of luck. He has this promise of health care, and he cannot get at it.

Somehow the Republicans think that we ought to take away those protections from workers. Now wait until they try to put a trade bill through here again and tell people that we are going to protect the workers. This is where we find out what they really mean about protecting the workers. They better know they are going to have to go out in the individual market and get their health care. If it is too expensive, tough. The other side says we gave them a 65 percent tax credit. But of course in order to get it, you have to be able to pay for the insurance. No provision is made for that.

Mr. Speaker, this is a sham that was put in that fast track bill, and they have been trying to get rid of it ever since because they do not want the principle to be established that States can put together a program to take care of individuals in a group and buy group insurance. That is what is at issue here. This is not fair, and it is wrong and Members ought to vote the bill down.

Mr. Speaker, the House has adjourned its regular business for today, and they have gone off to the White House for a picnic; so I do not suppose very many of them will be in their office listening to this, but I think they should at least consider the fact that today's newspapers and the BBC news, the ABC news, the Economist, all come together in saying the war is not over, boys. Three more dead in Baghdad in violence. There was a drive-by shooting at a petrol station. It sounds a little like some of our cities. And we are there bringing them democracy. I guess that is what democracy means to our President. I do not know. It is hard to know. But when I was reading these articles, I thought of one that I read recently. This is dated March 21, not so long ago. ``A United Nations survey of civilian damage caused by the allied bombardment of Iraq calls the results near apocalyptic. The survey, which was made public today, recommends an immediate end to the embargo on imports of food and other essential supplies to prevent imminent catastrophe.''

This article went on further to say that the U.S. position is that by ``making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people, it,'' meaning sanctions, ``will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.'' This is what the situation was. This is from 1991. We intended to get rid of Saddam Hussein from 1991 on, at least. And for the President and his advisers to come around here saying it just happened since 9/11 and all that kind of stuff is absolutely nonsense.

At the time that one of the Air Force planners said big picture, we want people to know, get rid of this guy and we will be more than happy to assist in the rebuilding. We are not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein and his regime. Fix that and we will fix their electricity. That is what the United States was saying in 1991. This is the country that wants to bring democracy to Iraq. And it goes on.

I mean, it is really wonderful. One planner said, people say you did not recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage? Well, what were we trying to do? Help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions. We bombed the sewer pumping stations. We bombed the water pumping stations. We bombed the television. We bombed the telephone. We bombed the electrical. We bombed everything because we were going to inflict pain on the Iraqi people.

Now if we roll fast forward to today, people in the White House, and I do not know how they could have been thinking about it, Mr. Speaker, that these people were going to be just waiting, so excited to have the Americans come in and bring them democracy.

What kind of fools could plan and state publicly what they were doing and then expect people to be grateful that they were bombed, that their hospitals had no electricity for the refrigeration to save the children and the

blood and all the things that go on in a hospital that require electricity? We did it deliberately. And the President says, well, we had to wage this war because they had these weapons of mass destruction that were an imminent threat to us. We had destroyed their electrical system. We destroyed all kinds of things. We had reduced the value of their money.

I mean, I carry a 250 Dinar note in my wallet just to remind me of what this country can do. This is a 250 Dinar note. These are printed in Iraq. This was worth $875 in 1991; today, 12 cents. Do the Members think we did not crush their economy? Of course we did. And it was all because we wanted to bring them democracy, because we were going to free the world from weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Speaker, I think we ought to have an inquiry in this House, conducted in public, as to what the President knew, when he knew it. How could he come to the well of the House and give us information that was known to be forgery about nuclear material?

It is time, Mr. President, when the picnic is over, you had better come up here and tell us the truth.

Mr. Speaker, this body lost someone very important when we lost Al Davis. We lost a man who helped fix the course of the House Ways and Means Democrats. We lost a man of ideas and a man of data, a combination that is too uncommon. Al was a man of endless information, which the Committee Democrats used to tack and jibe through the political storms that erupt so often in the Ways and Means Committee.

Al Davis passed away after 56 years of life. I didn't know him well outside of his briefings, his memos, and his witty analysis but I don't think that anyone had to be particularly close to Al to know how much he cared for those who have the least among us. I now know that he loved to go sailing.

Members of Congress are often generalists. Our knowledge is usually a mile wide but only an inch deep. I frequently could not fathom the amount of memory and facts that Al retained. When it came to taxes and our economy, Al Davis increased the depth of my understanding about the issues and how changing public policies would affect working class Americans.

Things move fast in the House and in the Committee on Ways and Means. Members often find themselves confronted with complex and multifarious issues, which can be quite challenging. Al was just the type of person that our committee needed. He liked to linger down in his ``engine room'' to make certain that the ship and its crew had all it required. Al was a harbor in a tempest. I could go to Al, and he could, within a few sentences, quickly and easily break down a complex issue for me.

Some say that statistics lie and liars use statistics. Al would say that it doesn't have to be that way. Whether it came from the Bush Administration, or elsewhere, Al was not a fan of distorting data for political gain.

Recently during President Bush's campaign to sell another tax cut, the President said that his plan would on average cut everyone's yearly taxes by $1,083. As soon as President Bush said that, Al quickly rattled off a memo to me correcting the misleading data that was being used by the President. In the memo, Al said that when Bush refers to the ``average'' tax cut in his proposal, it ``is like saying that every farmer in the nineteenth century got the average of a mule, if a few farmers were given a team of draft horses and most farmers got a small dog, instead.''

I will miss Al Davis. I will miss his talent, his wisdom, and his humor. But I think that most of all, I will miss the trust that Al invested in Ways and Means Democrats. Al trusted that we would use our best effort to honestly employ the information he gave us to improve the well-being of the average American. We'll sail on without Al. But I feel that, at least for a while, our ship is heading into the wind, and against the tide, because we are without our navigator.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a letter by the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) to Condoleezza Rice, the Security Advisor to the President, because it contains some questions I think are important.

The other night I was on Crossfire, and Robert Novak asked me whether I thought it would be a good thing or a bad thing if weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The show moved on before I could answer, but it was an interesting question. I think what he was getting at is whether I would feel better if I knew the President were right all along and that there were huge stockpiles of anthrax and nerve gas and missiles armed with bioweapons ready to be launched 45 minutes and a latterday Manhattan Project hidden under a stadium somewhere.

He was really asking if I would feel better knowing that I had not been misled or if I were rather nothing were found so I could gloat over having been right when I said in September that I thought indeed the President would mislead the American people on the way to Iraq.

Of course, the answer is that I hope that no weapons are there to be found. I hope we are never in danger and that we were not in danger and that our troops were never in danger, and that Saddam Hussein, despite his aspirations, was not on his way of becoming the Saladin of the 21st century. Who would not prefer a world with fewer weapons in the hands of dictators? And if there were weapons, all Americans want them found and destroyed.

The President himself seems to have retreated from the claim that the U.S. was in imminent danger from the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Now he is speaking of existence of a weapons program, not of armed missiles and gallons of nerve gas.

Mr. Speaker, 11 young Americans have died in Iraq in the past 15 days. Fifty have died since the President declared the war over. A total of 180 Americans and 45 coalition troops have died. What does it mean that 180 young Americans have died in Iraq? Did they die to bring democracy to someone else's country or to stop Saddam Hussein's terrible human rights abuses?

Mr. Speaker, I am glad that Hussein is gone, and I believe that nearly all Iraqis are glad that he's gone. But I do not think that the young Americans who died in Iraq signed up to fight against tyranny in general. They signed up to protect this country and our country, their own country.

In light of this where do we go? If this were still the Clinton administration, there would be a highly publicized investigation coming out of every committee in this House, including Small Business and Agriculture. There would be calls for special prosecutors, for resignation, for impeachment.

President Bush puts great store in personal responsibility, and I believe the time is long past for the President to take responsibility and level with the American people. Did the President believe that Iraq was so likely to pose a danger in the future that it was okay to play fast and loose with the Congress, the U.N. and the American people to get approval to go to war?

Was the President misled by bad intelligence? Was he misled by advisors who had prejudged the facts, or was there solid, credible intelligence that just unaccountably turned up to be accurate? We need to know.

If the President's information was bad, we need to know what steps are being taken to dismiss those who provided and vouched for it. If the President decided that future dangers were so great that misleading us about the present danger was warranted, we need him to take responsibility for that decision. We need the President to explain to us and to the world why 180 young Americans are dead and why U.S. credibility is eroding all over the

world. I am waiting to hear from the President, the Congress is waiting, and 180 American families are waiting to hear.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Government Reform,

Washington, DC, June 10, 2003.

Hon. Condoleeza Rice,

Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the

White House, Washington, DC.

Dear Dr. Rice: Since March 17, 2003, I have been trying

without success to get a direct answer to one simple

question: Why did President Bush cite forged evidence about

Iraq's nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union

address?

Although you addressed this issue on Sunday on both Meet

the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, your

comments did nothing to clarify this issue. In fact, your

responses contradicted other known facts and raised a host of

new questions.

During your interviews, you said the Bush Administration,

welcomes inquiries into this matter. Yesterday, the

Washington Post also reported that Director of Central

Intelligence George Tenet has agreed to provide ``full

documentation'' of the intelligence information ``in regards

to Secretary Powell's comments, the president's comments and

anybody else's comments.'' Consistent with these sentiments,

I am writing to seek further information about this important

matter.

The forged documents in question describe efforts by Iraq

to obtain uranium from an African country, Niger. During your

interviews over the weekend, you asserted that no doubts or

suspicions about these efforts or the underlying documents

were communicated to senior officials in the Bush

Administration before the President's State of the Union

address. For example, when you were asked about this issue on

Meet the Press, you made the following statement:

``We did not know at the time--no one knew at the time, in

our circles--maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the

agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts

and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course, it

was information that was mistaken.''

Similarly, when you appeared on This Week, you repeated

this statement, claiming that you made multiple inquiries of

the intelligence agencies regarding the allegation that Iraq

sought to obtain uranium from an African country. You stated:

``George, somebody, somebody down may have known. But I

will tell you that when this issue was raised with the

intelligence community . . . the intelligence community did

not know at that time, or at levels that got to us, that

this, that there were serious questions about this report.''

Your claims, however, are directly contradicted by other

evidence. Contrary to your assertion, senior Administration

officials had serious doubts about the forged evidence well

before the President's State of the Union address. For

example, Greg Thielmann, Director of the Office of Strategic,

Proliferation, and Military Issues in the State Department,

told Newsweek last week that the State Department's Bureau of

Intelligence and Research (INR) had concluded the documents

were ``garbage.'' As you surely know, INR is part of what you

call ``the intelligence community.'' It is headed by an

Assistant Secretary of State, Carl Ford; it reports directly

to the Secretary of State; and it was a full participant in

the debate over Iraq's nuclear capabilities. According to

Newsweek.

``What I saw that, it really blew me away,'' Thielmann told

Newsweek. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation.

The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show

Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide

from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the

purchases were implausible--and made that point clear to

Powell's office. As Thielmann read that the president had

relied on these documents to report to the nation, he

thought, ``Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was,

how did that get into the speech?''

Moreover, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has

reported that the Vice President's office was aware of the

fraudulent nature of the evidence as early as February 2002--

nearly a year before the President gave his State of the

Union address. In his column, Mr. Kristof reported:

``I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that

more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an

investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S.

ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February

2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that

envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the

information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents

had been forged. The envoy reported, for example, that a

Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents

had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. . . .

The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the

administration and seemed to be accepted--except that

President Bush and the State Department kept citing it

anyway. ``It's disingenuous for the State Department people

to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for

a year,'' one insider said.''

When you were asked about Mr. Kristof's account, you did

not deny his reporting. Instead, you conceded that ``the Vice

President's office may have asked for that report.''

It is also clear that CIA officials doubted the evidence.

The Washington Post reported on March 22 that CIA officials

``communicated significant doubts to the administration about

the evidence.'' The Los Angeles Times reported on March 15

that ``the CIA first heard allegations that Iraq was seeking

uranium from Niger in late 2001,'' when ``the existence of

the documents was reported to [the CIA] second- or third-

hand.'' The Los Angeles Times quoted a CIA official as

saying: ``We included that in some of our reporting, although

it was all caveated because we had concerns about the

accuracy of that information.''

With all respect, this is not a situation like the pre-9/11

evidence that al-Qaeda was planning to hijack planes and

crash them into buildings. When you were asked about his on

May 17, 2002, you said:

``As you might imagine . . . a lot of things are prepared

within agencies. They're distributed internally, they're

worked internally. It's unusual that anything like that would

get to the president. He doesn't recall seeing anything. I

don't recall seeing anything of this kind.''

That answer may be given more deference when the evidence

in question is known only by a field agent in an FBI bureau

in Phoenix, Arizona, whose suspicions are not adequately

understood by officials in Washington. But it is simply not

credible here. Contrary to your public statements, senior

officials in the intelligence community in Washington knew

the forged evidence was unreliable before the President used

the evidence in the State of the Union address.

In addition to denying that senior officials were aware

that the President was citing forged evidence, you also

claimed (1) ``there were also other sources that said that

there were, the Iraqis were seeking yellowcake--uranium

oxide--from Africa'' and (2) ``there were other attempts to

get yellowcake from Africa.''

This answer does not explain the President's statement in

the State of the Union address. In his State of the Union

address, the President referred specifically to the evidence

from the British. He stated: ``The British government has

learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant

quantities of uranium from Africa.'' Presumably, the

President would use the best available evidence in his State

of the Union address to Congress and the nation. It would

make no sense for him to cite forged evidence obtained

from the British if, in fact, the United States had other

reliable evidence that he could have cited.

Moreover, contrary to your assertion, there does not appear

to be any other specific and credible evidence that Iraq

sought to obtain uranium from an African country. The

Administration has not provided any such evidence to me or my

staff despite our repeated requests. To the contrary, the

State Department wrote me that the ``other source'' of this

claim was another Western European ally. But as the State

Department acknowledged in its letter, ``the second Western

European government had based its assessment on the evidence

already available to the U.S. that was subsequently

discredited.''

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also found no

other evidence indicating that Iraq sought to obtain uranium

from Niger. The evidence in U.S. possession that Iraq had

sought to obtain uranium from Niger was transmitted to the

IAEA. After reviewing all the evidence provided by the United

States, the IAEA reported: ``We have to date found no

evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear

weapons programme in Iraq.'' Ultimately, the IAEA concluded:

``These specific allegations are unfounded.''

As the discussion above indicates, your answers on the

Sunday talk shows conflict with other reports and raise many

new issues. To help address these issues, I request answers

to the following questions:

1. On Meet the Press, you said that ``maybe someone knew

down in the bowels of the agency'' that the evidence cited by

the President about Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from

Africa was suspect. Please identify the individual or

individuals in the Administration who, prior to the

President's State of the Union address, had expressed doubts

about the validity of the evidence or the credibility of the

claim.

2. Please identify any individuals in the Administration

who, prior to the President's State of the Union address,

were briefed or otherwise made aware that an individual or

individuals in the Administration had expressed doubts about

the validity of the evidence or the credibility of the claim.

3. On This Week, you said there was other evidence besides

the forged evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium

from Africa. Please provide this other evidence.

4. When you were asked about reports that Vice President

Cheney sent a former ambassador to Niger to investigate the

evidence, you stated ``the Vice President's office may have

asked for that report.'' In light of this comment, please

address: (a) Whether Vice President Cheney or his office

requested an investigation into claims that Iraq may have

attempted to obtain nuclear material from Africa, and when

any such request was made; (b) Whether a current or former

U.S. ambassador to Africa, or any other current or former

government official or agent, traveled to Niger or otherwise

investigated claims that Iraq may have attempted to obtain

nuclear material from Niger; and (c) What conclusions or

findings, if any, were reported to the Vice President, his

office, or

other U.S. officials as a result of the investigation, and

when any such conclusions or findings were reported.

On Sunday, you stated that ``there is now a lot of

revisionism that says, there was disagreement on this data

point, or disagreement on that data point.'' I disagree

strongly with this characterization. I am not raising

questions about the validity of an isolated ``data point,''

and the issue is not whether the war in Iraq was justified or

not.

What I want to know is the answer to a simple question: Why

did the President use forged evidence in the State of the

Union address? This is a question that bears directly on the

credibility of the United States, and it should be answered

in a prompt and forthright manner, with full disclosure of

all the relevant facts.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman,

Ranking Minority Member.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) for not only yielding to me, but also for coming out here and doing this.

I think that a lot of people in this country right now do not realize how important tomorrow really is. This is the first time when we have got both the House and Senate working on the same issue, and my belief is the President of the United States has told them bring me a bill or you are never going home, because he knows if they do not do something on this issue of drug prescription prices and access to prescriptions, they are going to wind up losing the next election on that issue alone. So they are going to do something. So it is very important for people to watch what is going on here.

What is fascinating about what we are hearing tonight, we have heard my colleagues from Michigan and New Jersey talk about what is going on over in the Committee on Energy and Commerce. There are about 45 people over there, sitting and making amendments and working away and putting together a pie; and then over in another part of the building, there are another 50 of us in the Committee on Ways and Means.

We are making our pie, and somehow those pies have got to be put together. We cannot pass them both. So where is the real pie going to be made? I mean that is the question that people ought to wonder. Is it going to be in the Committee on Rules? Is what is going on in these two committees just for show? And then ultimately the majority leader will bring out the bill and say here it is, rubber-stamp it and let us get out of here. I think this process, as we listen to this, we realize why this is such a difficult process.

One of the things that my distinguished colleague from New Jersey brings up and echoed by the gentleman from Michigan, this business about the Secretary of Health and Human Services, on behalf of us as Americans, us taxpayers, is absolutely by law prohibited from going in and doing any negotiation. Now, when the Government negotiates for the Veterans' Administration, it is all right; and when the Government negotiates for a lot of other places, but in this one area we are going to put a fence around the pharmaceutical industry and say we are not going to use the power of the Government.

Now, that is one part of the bill. Then we go down a little further where the Republicans are promising that there will be two choices in everybody's district. Well, that is nice, but we have already heard from the gentleman from Michigan. Everybody knows what happened with the HMOs. Everybody was promised there will be a lot of HMOs and they will go out there and they will be competing. And pretty soon there was one and then there was none, and most people do not even have an HMO anymore.

So this idea that there are going to be two competing plans out there is a really nice idea. The insurance industry said we do not want it because we have never done this and we do not want to get into this. So the Republicans figured out a way to make it appealing to them. They said, look, go out there and be one of these companies and we will take 90 percent of the risk and they can take the profit. But, remember, once we have cut that deal with them, our Secretary of Health and Human Services on the side of the Government cannot even go in and negotiate as a part of something he is accepting 90 percent of the risk on. I mean, boy, talk about buying a pig in a poke. I cannot imagine a more senseless kind of arrangement for them to be trying to deal with this problem of pharmaceuticals.

Now, I think the other thing that people have to really understand, and I think the gentleman has already alluded to it, I sat on the Medicare Commission several years ago. We were planning to do some revamping of Medicare. It became very clear very soon that the leadership of that committee was interested in only doing one thing, and that is getting rid of the traditional Medicare program and giving everybody a voucher.

Right now, seniors have a guaranteed set of benefits, things that they can count on, and what was going on in that Medicare Commission was how can we shift from these guaranteed benefits to a guaranteed contribution. Those are all fancy government words. What that means is they looked across and said, how much is being spent all across the country? Well, the average is $4,500, so we will give $4,500 to every senior citizen in this country and let them go out and individually find an insurance company that will take them.

The government is not going to stand up and fight for them. The government is not going to try to drive down the prices. It is on you, grandma. Here is your $4,500, there is the street and the door, and go start. Go look.

Now, anybody who looks at that says to themselves, this cannot possibly work, anybody who has a parent. My dad died a few years ago, 3 years ago, at 93, and my mother is now 93. The idea of handing my mother a voucher and saying, Ma, you have got to go out and find yourself an insurance company, is so crazy, it shows so little understanding of older people and what their needs are. They do not want more choice; they want certainty.

My mother every once in awhile will call me up, there be some mail come up, and she will say, ``Jim, could you come over here and read this brochure and tell me if I should get into this or not? I don't know if it is a good idea or not.'' She cannot make those kind of decisions for herself. She is having a little trouble with her memory at 93.

She will say, ``You know, I used to be able to remember some things a lot better than I do now.''

You are going to send my mother out looking for this? Luckily, she has four kids in Seattle, so we will be there to help her. My mom will be taken care of. But there are a lot of older people in this country who are not fortunate enough to have somebody around to help them through this mystery that we are creating here for them.

Now, another funny thing about this, people have to really understand, in the Committee on Ways and Means, they have already written the bill. The bill is already printed. I heard about it because I said to one of the Republicans, ``Hey, what is in the bill?'' So he told me. He is giving me all of this stuff. I said, ``Is it written down somewhere? Could I go look at it?''

He said, ``It is upstairs in a locked room. If you go in there, you cannot take any paper or pencil or anything, and you can just read it, and that is all.''

So I asked the chairman, ``Could I get in there?''

He said ``No.''

I said, ``Why not?''

He said, ``Because you would go outside and tell the press right away.''

Now, here is the major social program in this country. I have been here 15 years, 13 years on the Committee on Ways and Means, and I am not given access to look at it one day before it is going to happen tomorrow.

The bill is going to come out of your committee, but the one in our committee, I understand there is a provision in it that sets this as a goal for 2010. They are going to put it in the bill now. They figure everybody is going to forget about it. It will not affect anybody, so nobody will jump up and down before the next election, because 99.9 percent of the people will not understand it is in there, because it does not affect them.

What they want is to get it in place and started out there, and every imaginable problem one can think of I think will happen, because how does my mother, or how do I know what I should say to my mother? Mother, you should buy this plan.

Let us say they are in Seattle and there are maybe three plans, so we have some choice. And I say this one is a little more expensive, this is less expensive, this is really expensive. How do I know which one to tell her she should take? Do I know what her health care needs are going to be over the next 5 years?

They are using the drug benefit as a come-on. You see these ads from automobile sales, sales at Sears or something. There is always something that looks really good. It is a come-on. They are going to get people on the drug thing, because that is the thing people are hurting on most. But they have not looked at what it does to the other part of it, which takes away the benefits.

The home health care, that will be such a target to get rid of. Why have home health care? Either be in the hospital or go to a nursing home. Why should we be wasting our money? Can you just imagine how they would cut the benefits? You are in home health care and you have to take medication, and instead of having somebody come twice a day, if they might need to, you come every other day.

It is all those things that will be cut, little by little by little by little, and you and I will be stuck with our parents and their problems. Neither of my parents have cost me a dime.

We bought a hearing aid for my mother. It cost $800. My brothers and I and my sister each threw in $200 and bought her a hearing aid. That is the only thing we had to do. People do not understand what they are cutting away now.

It is like the story about the eight blind men describing an elephant. One is describing the leg, one is describing the trunk, and one is describing the ears. We really do not know what we are going to do tomorrow. They are going to try to come out here and run flim flam on people. ``You are going to get a drug benefit.'' What it is worth, or is it worth anything, people will have no idea. It will just be a line in a campaign ad.

I think you and I came together.

Mr. Speaker, the rubber-stamp Congress is in session. Last night, they came up to the Committee on Rules. Nobody even bothered to come up and talk about the bill. They had an order from the President. Ari Fleischer said, the President says, pass it so he can sign it. So they had the little meeting up there and rifled it down here, with no hearings in the Committee on Ways and Means, not one single minute of debate in a hearing where we could listen to anybody give any opinion about what this bill does. But all of them came with their rubber stamps.

Let me tell the Members, if they go for what they put out there, the chairman has put out there, the President is going to be real mad, because the President does not like that bill. He likes the one that the Senate passed. So hold rubber stamps on the one for the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) and save it for the one for the President.

All he asks Members to do is to approve; to say, I approve everything George Bush wants. That is what this Congress is about. They do not want any debate. They do not want to talk about how much this debt builds up or anything else; they simply want to be rubber stamps for the President. Boom.

Mr. Speaker, there seems to be some confusion here in the rubber-stamp Congress today.

I will quote from an article in Roll Call this morning which explains to me what happened.

It says that the President invited them all down to the White House, and this is from a senior Republican aide: ``Most people in the GOP leadership think it is inappropriate for the White House to bring our bosses down there to discuss congressional business and then not invite any staff to go with them.'' The aide said, ``Members who attend meetings are frustrated by the exclusion of the staff because it leaves them without aides to jog their memories of the sessions later.''

Now it is clear what has happened. The President said pass the Senate bill. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) had on his mind that he had to find all these legislators in Texas, so he had to call up the home security board and he had to call up the FBI, and he got confused and got down in there and told the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, Do anything you want.

Now, here we are coming out here with no debate, and nobody wants to have anybody talk about what the issues here are. They just want to slam another $80 million on this bill, and wind up with what? A dead bill. They know the Senate is going to kill it. They are not as wild and radical as they are. With 74 to 2, this is a conservative Senate; or 94 to 2. I get carried away.

This rubber-stamp Congress is really out of control. They are the gang that cannot shoot straight. They should at least have one meeting on this.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

I think that is a good idea.

Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article from Roll Call this morning to which I referred earlier.

The article referred to is as follows:

[From Roll Call, June 12. 2003]

Hill Aides Spurned

(By Ethan Wallison)

Republican aides on Capitol Hill are incensed over a new

White House policy to exclude virtually all Congressional

staff from

the semi-regular ``bi-cam'' meetings between President Bush

and the GOP leadership.

The aides contend that they are being kept out of the

meetings even as White House staffers and other senior

officials, such as top Congressional lobbyist David Hobbs,

continue to sit in.

``It does strike one as a little bit arrogant,'' one senior

Senate GOP aide said. But, the aide added, ``I think that's

the way some people at the White House think about

Congressional staff.''

Noting that the meetings focus on the Congressional agenda,

one senior House Republican aide added, ``Most people [in the

GOP leadership] think it's inappropriate for [the White

House] to bring our bosses down there to discuss

Congressional business and then not invite any staff to go

with them.''

The aide said Members who attend the meetings are as

frustrated by the exclusions as the staff, because it leaves

them without aides to help jog their account of the sessions

later.

A White House official denied that there are any ``hard and

fast rules'' about whether Congressional staff can attend the

meetings.

``It comes down to the space that's available in the room

and the topics that are being covered,'' the official said,

adding that the same factors apply to White House staff.

But Congressional sources said they have been told that the

staff directive comes straight from the top and President

Bush, who simply wanted less staff in the meetings.

Under the new guidelines, according to these sources,

Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) top aide, Scott Palmer, and

Lee Rawls, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's chief of

staff, will be permitted to attend the bi-cam sessions.

The new policy appears to be the upshot of a months-long

give-and-take between the White House and the Congressional

GOP leadership on the staff issue. Senior Congressional aides

said the White House has been seeking ways to pare down the

number of aides at the bi-cam meetings, but were finding it

difficult to exclude some Capital Hill staff while allowing

others to continue to attend.

``The figured they couldn't get away with the half-way

approach, so they went all-or-nothing,'' one senior House GOP

aide said.

The same aide said the White House has pledged to pare down

the number of administration officials and staff at the

meetings as well in the weeks ahead. Congressional aides

remain skeptical.

One source noted that even Rawls was among the Capitol Hill

aides who were kept out of the room Tuesday evening, when the

GOP leadership went to the White House to discuss

appropriations. (The spending meeting immediately preceded

the bi-cam session.)

Rawls made the trip to the White House along with Senate

Appropriations Committee Staff Director Jim Morhard and Kevin

Fromer, Hastert's policy director.

All three were forced to wait outside the door to the

meeting, even though Hobbs and Candida Wolff, Vice President

Cheney's legislative affairs director, were allowed to

participate.

Neither Rawls nor Palmer responded to phone calls on

Wednesday.

To be sure, frustrated Congressional aides acknowledge that

the personnel who are allowed into meetings at the White

House reflects Bush's sense of what's appropriate.

Some of the meetings in the past have taken place in the

White House residence, a more intimate setting that provides

less space for visitors, according to a White House official.

But the exclusions have nevertheless fed resentments on

Capitol Hill about what some Congressional Republicans

believe to be the White House's disregard for Congress' role

in shaping the overall agenda.

``It's particularly unhelpful in the same week that [the

White House] cut our legs out from under us on the child tax

credit,'' one senior House GOP aide said.

And some senior GOP aides contend that the shortage of

first-hand accounts has at times had significant practical

consequences, such as misunderstandings about deals and other

arrangements that were sealed behind closed doors.

``When it comes down to implementing an agreement, it's the

staff that has to do that,'' a senior Senate aide said,

citing the appropriations process as one area where such

miscommunication has been a problem.

``It's just frustrating.''