Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I have been in this House for less than a year, not a very long time, but it is long enough to know that this is real reform.

In the first 90 days after I was elected to this House, I received 70, that is 7-0, requests for various earmarks. A whole lot of those, frankly, were not appropriate; whether there wasn't a Federal nexus, whether there wasn't a public benefit, for whatever reason, they weren't appropriate. Now, I submitted seven of those 70 for consideration by the Appropriations Committee, and I have made very public what those seven were. Because if we are going to spend taxpayer money, we ought to be able to justify it and to stand behind what we are doing, why we are doing it, and who is doing it. And that is what this does. It simply says if we are going to spend the taxpayers' money in this way, and there is nothing inappropriate if there is a Federal nexus, et cetera, about Members spending money on things that have a Federal nexus and are appropriate and have a public good in their district. There is nothing wrong with that process. But you should be able to shine the light of day on it, to stand behind it, to say this is what I am doing and this is why I am doing it and this is who is doing it. And that is what this does.

Now, you could sit there as some of our friends on the other side of the aisle want to do and try to indicate everything that is inappropriate. But isn't it better if we just simply say, here it is and here is the name, so that the person doing it, if they know that there is anything there, then they won't come forward with it.

Now, I have to tell you this is unlikely to save any money, unlikely to reduce spending, but what it will do is I think it will add greatly to what we do spend being spent better.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Iowa, and I am going to give you three reasons why we should support this amendment.

First is that it is an expensive, unfunded mandate on local governments. The county in which I live, Orange County, California, very diverse county, in the last cycle spent $600,000 on bilingual ballots when only seven-tenths of a percent, seven-tenths of a percent of the ballots requested were multilingual or bilingual ballots.

Secondly, the current law is discriminatory. In Orange County, California, we are required under the Voting Rights Act to print ballots in five languages, but yet in the school district where my kids went to school, which is only one city out of 35 cities in Orange County, there are 83 different languages spoken at home. So what about those other 78 language speakers? Aren't we discriminating against them by not putting out ballots in their languages, too?

Now, I happen to think it would be less discriminatory if they were only in English, because then everyone would have the same opportunity to understand the ballot as everyone else. But the point of this amendment is that that is for the county to decide. Some counties may not have 83 different languages, while others do. That is for them to decide.

And, third, I think it is interesting that the chairman brought up Chris Norby, a supervisor in Orange County, as being in opposition to this amendment. Chris Norby is actually very strongly in favor of this amendment. The issue that was discussed was the complexity of ballot initiatives.

Now, ballot initiatives, and California is kind of the hotbed of those things, and I personally have been involved in drafting them, but they are complex and they are complex to translate. That is the point.

Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague from Texas for yielding.

Let me make it clear. What this amendment does, which I support, is very simple. There is a Federal law that says you may not prohibit, it does not require you do it, but you may not prohibit local law enforcement officials from cooperating on immigration issues. This amendment simply says you cannot use Federal funds to violate Federal law. Pretty simple. Pretty logical. Do not use Federal funds to violate existing Federal law. You do not have to make them, but do not prohibit your law enforcement from cooperating on immigration issues.

We should pass this amendment.

I thank my colleague from California, Chairman Thomas, for yielding me this time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I, like the majority of this House, would support full repeal of the estate tax, but that, as Chairman Thomas explained, has not passed the Senate. So this is a compromise proposal, but one which I fully support, and for three reasons I will give today: one is facts, second is economics, and the third is equity.

First of all, facts: people on the other side this afternoon have said that 7,500 people will benefit from this reduction in the death tax and that the tax they will not pay, I think it was $750 billion over 10 years. If you do the math on that, Mr. Speaker, you will find that that is $100 million per family.

Now, that is very odd, since families with as small as $1 million of a total taxable estate will be relieved from tax under this bill.

So facts are not what they say. The facts are hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands of families over the next 10 years will be relieved from paying tax on death under this compromise proposal.

Second, economics. We have seen that when we reduce the capital gains tax, the economy improved, and revenue to the government actually increased. The same thing will happen here. People are out there with lead trusts, with remainder trusts, with family limited partnerships and all kinds of things that do not generate benefit for this economy but are done simply so they can try to keep a house or a business or farm in their family, they won't have to do that. Mr. Speaker, 99.7 percent of the families in America will not have to do that under this proposal.

The third is equity. Right now under the death tax as it exists, some people can leave their house to their children; some people can't. Some people can leave their farm to their children; some others can't. Some people can leave their business to their children; and some other people can't.

Mr. Speaker, we should not have a tax policy that says to some people what you have worked for and earned in your life you may leave to your children, and other people can't do that. I urge an ``aye'' vote on the bill.

Mr. Speaker, on Monday, June 19, I was in California attending my son's graduation from high school. I arranged ahead of time to be granted an official leave of absence from the House on Monday, June 19th. Through a misunderstanding, I was granted a leave for the entire week. I want the House to know that I am present and voting on Tuesday, June 20th and the balance of the week.

Offered By: Mr. Campbell of California

Amendment No. 3: Page 62, after line 17, insert the

following:

Sec. 537. None of the the funds appropriated or otherwise

made available in this Act may be used in contravention of

section 642(a) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and

Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1373(a)).

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding.

You know, Mr. Chairman, there are some things we know about this budget proposal and some things that we don't know. We know that it raises taxes. We know that it raises taxes by a bunch. We know that it is about $100 billion a year, or half a trillion dollars over 5 years; that it raises taxes. What we don't really know is what taxes and for how much.

Now, the gentlemen across the aisle have indicated that it is their intention to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or more.

I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Reclaiming my time, it is funny. If I am taxing you at 15 percent and then I tax you at 30 percent, I would think that most people would think that was an increase. I don't know how anyone would say that is not an increase. Four is more than three. Five is more than four. Thirty percent is more than 15 percent. Twenty percent is more than 15 percent. So you can call it anything you like, but it is in fact a tax increase.

So my question is for you, which you can answer later, but have you done any computations as to how you are going to tax?

I would like to finish my remarks at this time, if I could, thank you.

How you are going to tax people with $200,000 or more income? What rate are you going to go to to raise this kind of money? So we know it is going to tax a lot. We don't know exactly how. We also don't know, because we don't know exactly how, what effect that is going to have on the economy.

We can talk a lot about tax increases and so forth, but the fact is that since the tax decreases of 2003, revenue to this government has increased substantially. We are tracking nearly a 12 percent increase this year after a 15 percent increase last year, and the rate since 2003 of increased revenues to the government is substantially higher after the tax rate reduction of 2003 than it was after the tax increases of the early 1990s.

You might find this hard to believe, but that is the way economics works. Sometimes when a business lowers the price of a product, people buy more of it and they actually make more money.

What has happened here is exactly that. We have lowered taxes, and the economy has increased, the economy has grown, and more total dollars are coming into the Federal Government. So we know taxes will be increased, but we don't know how much this is going to depress the economy. But it will.

Therefore, even though you may increase taxes at the rate of $100 billion a year, you will not see $100 billion a year revenue, because we know also the computations show that the tax decreases we have had already actually resulted in increased revenue.

The other thing we know that it does is it spends more money. The gentleman from Virginia outlined a bunch of things, most of which sounded to me as though it was discretionary spending increases, I believe, which means that if I am doing the math correctly, we are looking at discretionary spending increases of about 7 percent just in one year, 7 percent every year, which, if you keep that going with the entitlement increases which are already there, and there is no entitlement reform to deal with those, it is so perplexing to me that you introduce a budget on the basis of it being fiscally responsible and balancing, and then you propose to increase spending along the way, and increase spending by as much as 7 percent a year on discretionary spending.

That is not how you balance budgets. That is not how you get things back in line, by increasing spending.

Also, there was a discussion of smoke and mirrors. Well, the other thing that was included in the committee's budget was a reserve for natural disasters, which I believe you now have added to your budget here just recently, but there is an additional reserve we have for the war, the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, you may not agree with that war, and that is not the issue we are discussing today, but even if you were to terminate, decide you were going to immediately withdraw from both Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be additional supplemental expenditures going into next year even to do that. So by not including that, you are not including some additional spending, which is going to happen and is not included in your budget which is included in the committee's budget.

So, in summary, I think we are looking at higher taxes, less economic growth, more spending, and I would argue, when computed properly, higher deficits.

Mr. Chairman, if this budget levels with the American people, then level with the American people and tell them what taxes you are going to raise. Tell them who you are going to raise it on, tell them how much you are going to raise it.

Sir, I am only taking a minute and a half. You can respond at that time, because I have several other questions.

Tell them who you are going to raise it on, what rates they are going to be and what effect those are going to have on the economy.

Again, level with the American people on whether or not the spending that you have added to this thing increases the deficit or not, and level with the American people about whether or not you have accounted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are still going on, and level with the American people about whether or not you have included any reform of the entitlement programs that will soon eat up two-thirds of our entire Federal revenues and eventually eat up 100 percent of our Federal revenues; and level with the American people that that tax cut that the President just signed today, that increased time of those tax rates, has increased the economy in the United States and resulted in more revenue to the Federal Government and thereby reduced the deficit.

Mr. Speaker, what I hear here and what I see here are four things: tax, spend, smoke, and mirrors.

Tax. We have seen, we have heard half a trillion dollars over 5 years, massive tax increase as yet not clearly defined, but a massive tax increase nonetheless.

Spend. Spending, that is, nearly a 7 percent increase in discretionary spending, that sort of spending which is unsustainable over time without constantly accelerating tax increases. So spending supposedly as the way to get us out of the deficit.

Smoke. Smoke to hide those things which are not addressed in the budget, such as the spending necessary for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to deal with the ever escalating entitlement spending that we have going forth.

And mirrors used to make all of this look like somehow it is going to reduce the deficit over time, which I assure you, with the reduction to the economic growth that this will do and the additional spending that is in here and the lack of reform on any of that spending, I absolutely assure you, reducing the deficit is one thing this budget will not do.

Mr. Chairman, I tried to keep track on my paper here of how many times the opposition to this budget proposal used the word ``cut,'' and I ran off the edge of the page. It is 30- something or 40-something times they used the word ``cut.''

The truth is, this budget that is before you increases spending every single year. Let me repeat that. This budget increases spending every single year. Increasing is not a cut. When you go from three to four, that is not a cut. It does not increase spending as much as the current rate of increase, which is unsustainable over time, which is why this is such a responsible budget.

It also does not increase taxes and does not depress the economy in the way an increase of taxes would do, but it does balance this budget in 5 years in the only way we know we can do it; without smoke and mirrors, without any games, by simply spending within our means.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, I have some familiarity with the project, since it is located in the district which I have the privilege to represent. Water is an issue. It is an issue in the West; it is an issue in California.

We will probably be dealing this week and over the next few weeks and perhaps months with some of the issues of a shortage of various energy projects. We can avoid shortages in water if we work on it early, if we get on some of these projects now.

What this project does, as both the previous speakers indicated, is it is not just something that is good for the district I represent or the area I represent, but is in fact a test project for this new type of desalinization, where you are getting the water, rather than directly out of the ocean on the coast, you are actually bringing the water out underneath the sand, and then back to a desalinization plant, which is off the coast.

That is why it does not have the negative environmental impacts putting a plant directly on the coast right against the water would be. But, also, the sand itself has the effect, we believe, of filtering this water on its way to the desalinization plant, which both reduces the cost, reduces the waste that is created in desalinization, and possibly, we believe, makes the project considerably more efficient and therefore cheaper.

So what this project, if it is successful, will do is it will create desalinization that will be both less impactful on the environment, result in a higher

yield of usable water, and be cheaper along the way. So something that is good for all sides.

The Federal involvement here would only be 25 percent of the entire project, as 75 percent of the cost is being carried by local public agencies. So I appreciate the support on both sides of the aisle for this project and would urge its passage.

Mr. Speaker, I have to say the course of this budget debate is somewhat perplexing. My friends on the other side of the aisle here, the Democrats, are consistently railing about the deficit and the evils of the deficit and how bad the deficit is and how big the deficit is, and I confess that I concur. I have problems with this deficit and that we ought to be reducing this deficit.

But it seems like their solution to reducing the deficit is to spend more money. My friends, this is like saying that we have a boat and our boat is sinking, and the way to fix the boat is to punch holes in the bottom of it.

Spending more money does not reduce the deficit. You don't need to be a CPA to know that. You only need second grade math to know that. Spending more money does not reduce the deficit. In the Budget Committee the vast majority of the amendments to the budget offered by the Democrat side were amendments that spent more money.

Now, to be fair, they do propose to close the deficit by raising taxes, and that is their argument and their proposal. But they claim that the tax rate cuts, and I want to point out that they were tax rate cuts, that happened in 2003 have increased the deficit. Except, since those tax rate cuts went into place, the income to the Federal Government, the revenue coming into the Federal Government has increased by an average of nearly 7 percent a year because tax rate cuts stimulate the economy, and tax rate cuts, these particular tax rate cuts, allowed capital to move to where it is best used and it resulted in more revenue. So you can't say that tax rate cuts have worsened the deficit when the revenue has gone up by higher than historic averages since the rates were cut.

Now, this budget that is before us increases spending. That is another thing. You are hearing about all the cuts in this budget and, sure, some things go up and some things go down. But overall it increases spending by 3\1/2\ percent. My friends, that is not a cut. An increase of 3\1/2\ percent is not a cut.

It spends $2.7 trillion. That ought to be enough to make things work around here, you would think. And it reduces the deficit because the revenue by this stimulated increased economy will go up by more than that 3\1/2\ percent.

So this budget does not cut spending. It increases it. It does not increase the deficit. It reduces it. And it does not raise taxes. It maintains the stimulative tax policy that currently exists in our economy.

Mr. Speaker, today, the House considered legislation to increase spending. I support the Global War on Terror and would have supported a clean bill to continue to provide financial support to our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, I could not vote for this bill because it was loaded with extraneous unrelated spending initiatives that run up our deficit and take precious recourses away from our troops in the field and those fighting the War on Terrorism.

Mr. Speaker, today the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin work on the immigration and border security legislation the House passed at the end of last year.

This bill is one of the most important pieces of national security legislation before Congress because border security is national security.

Recently we have been engaged in debates, some of which you have just heard, about whether or not our ports are secure. This is an important debate. But we know our southern border is not secure; we know that illegal aliens, criminal illegal aliens, are attempting to cross that border every single day, and it is time that we stop it.

In December, the House passed a good enforcement and border security bill, and the bill is a great start to address this problem and make our Nation safer. One important provision included in the bill was an amendment I had authored which will withhold Federal law enforcement funding from sanctuary cities that prohibit law enforcement officers from notifying Federal officials about known illegal aliens.

The practice of prohibiting cooperation is appalling. We should not reward these cities with Federal funds. I urge my colleagues in the Senate to include this provision and pass a strong enforcement bill without amnesty.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, there are cities around this country that have laws or executive orders under which they prohibit law enforcement officials from reporting to the Department of Homeland Security when they encounter, through the normal course of law enforcement practice, individuals who are aliens, who are foreign nationals and who are in this country illegally. That, first of all, is a violation of Federal law. Both the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 both prohibit cities from adopting that sort of ordinance.

But secondly, it is just wrong. We have Federal law here, and we have people in the ordinary course of their law enforcement activities encountering people who are foreign nationals and in this country illegally, and cities are passing ordinances making it a crime basically for those law enforcement officials to let Department of Homeland Security know that.

The reason this happens is there is no enforcement mechanism on this Federal law right now. What this amendment would do is simply provide an enforcement mechanism by making those law enforcement agencies in those areas not eligible for Federal grants if they have such a prohibition which is in violation of Federal law.

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

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

I appreciate the comments from the gentlewoman from Texas, but let me make it clear what this bill does and does not do, what this amendment does and does not do. It does not require local governments to do anything. All it does is tell them they should not prohibit, they should not actively prohibit their law enforcement officials from giving this information to the Department of Homeland Security. It does not require them to give the information. It says you may not prohibit or you lose Federal funds.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 45 seconds to the gentleman from California (Mr. Royce).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 45 seconds to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood).

Mr. Speaker, thank you all. Thank you, Congressman Dreier.

I wish, Mr. Speaker, to thank my family first for their support and their coming here today. I wish to thank the people of Orange County for the confidence that they have placed in me to have this very honored position. And I look so forward to working with all of you on the many issues that we have coming ahead of us.

I feel so the history as I stand here, what this building, what this room means and what it has held and what it has done. I only hope that I can do honor to those who have served before us here, and that I will help with all of you to do justice to those whose futures we serve.