Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I would like to commend Temple Parks and Recreation for their recent honor of being named one of the top four departments in the country for a city of its size. When the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration honors one city with its National Gold Medal Award for Excellence, I am proud to say that one of our own cities, in Texas District 31, will be among the elite finalists.

Congratulations to the residents, boards, committees, city council, city administration, and department staff, whose commitment to excellence over the past several years did not go unnoticed. I wish you all the best when the winner is named in October.

Well, some of the things that our friend Congressman Shimkus said are pretty sobering.

We're saying $5 a gallon for gasoline with that increase being caused by this tax-and-trade scheme that's being sold to the Congress as some kind of clean-up-the-world project. We think that at least ought to raise the issue and should slow down the process. Yet they say, No. Let's see what's going to happen when it gets to be $5 a gallon.

Let's think in our recent past as to what happens when gasoline gets to $5 a gallon. Well, of course it's going to be the evil oil companies' fault that secretly have made deals with each other to fix prices and to make them go up. That's why, when they said the electricity bills are going to go up, we just said that we wanted them to say on the electricity bill what caused this to go up. Well, it happens to be our cap-and-tax program that caused it to go up. That's fair. The American people ought to know what caused the doubling of their electricity bills. Guess what they're going to say? Oh, the evil power companies have jacked the prices up to bilk the poor consumers. Truth and sunshine is what this government needs. Put the truth in the bill.

First, if they're not doing their job, we ought to fire them. That's just really easy, okay?

That's simple stuff. If they're not doing what we hired them to do, we've got to fire them.

Yes.

That's fine. I don't have a problem with that at all, but let's get back to what we're doing.

You know, there's an old saying: ``I won't tax you and I won't tax me. I'll tax that fellow behind the tree,'' okay? That's kind of what we heard from the Obama administration when we started off: Don't worry. Ninety-five percent of the people in America are not going to be taxed by this administration. Yet, as my colleague from Georgia said, there's not anything you can think of that doesn't have an energy cost in it. Nothing. I mean it's in everything. So I don't care how rich you are or how poor you are. You're going to be taxed by this.

Now, don't give me the excuse of, well, we're just taxing the company, and they're taxing you. That doesn't work. Everybody knows where this tax is going. They know it in the administration, and we know it in Congress. It's going to us, to the individual Americans, and we're going to pay this tax. Look at that. Shoes. Plastic. Food. Electricity. Housing. All that.

If the gentleman would yield for just a minute. On that food thing, you have forgotten the next tax they're coming up with is the flatulence tax on cows.

Ask our farmers if they like that idea.

I thank my friend from Iowa.

As I listened to that story about switchgrass and that we paid those people money, I don't have anything against them, but it sure sounds like the inmates are running the asylum around here. I mean, I think anybody that heard that story would think, Good Lord, those people are crazy. I really want to say again--and I've said this before--if you're trying to stop CO2, and I'm throwing off a bunch of CO2 in my company, and I can go out and buy some carbon credits from you who happens to be running a real good clean company, I still keep putting the stuff in the atmosphere, right? I haven't cleaned up my act. I mean, they put a cap on me. I'm not meeting the cap, and I just bought an excuse. Kind of like Al Gore with his 100,000-foot house--or whatever it is he's got,

or two or three houses--he said, Oh, that's all right. I buy carbon credits. He's still putting the stuff up there in the air.

I think indulgence is a perfect word because you are allowing the dirty people to indulge in staying dirty by paying for it.

Under this ingenious government program we have got now, all they're doing is just paying more taxes.

It is a sin tax. That's exactly right. It's a sin tax. It is ludicrous to think it's going to reduce any carbon, CO2 that goes into the atmosphere. Because as long as a guy wants to pay the taxes, he's in business. Let's face it, if I'm the guy that's paying the sin credit, the indulgence, well, if I can pass it on down to the neighbors down the street in their bill, that's where it's going to go. So those poor slobs are paying the tax. Why should I worry about it? Why is that going to keep me from putting CO2 into the atmosphere? This is insanity, but that's where we are.

Let me make this very clear. The Rules Committee is the Speaker's committee. The Speaker decides who is on the Rules Committee. So this Rules Committee is an arm of the Speaker's committee. Like one of my Democratic colleagues who went before the Rules Committee said just the other day, he was sort of nervous until he went in and he counted one, two, three, four, five, six; one, two, three, four, oh, I think I'm going to win because there are six Democrats and four Republicans. But the Speaker chooses that committee. They answer to the Speaker. And the chairman is set by the Speaker.

We should be very grateful that the Speaker promised us the most open, honest and ethical Congress in the history of the Republic because think how bad it would be if we didn't have that. We wouldn't even be here, would we? It is amazing what promises are made and what promises are broken in this House of Representatives. It is a shame. It is a shame that somebody besides us on the floor of the House, and hopefully some people are watching this, it is a shame, Mr. Speaker, that we are not getting that message out. This is wrong. It is not what the American people sent us here for.

Getting back to our hoax and our indulgences that we are talking about here, I want everybody to know that when Martin Luther hammered that up on the door of the church, he was informing the church that this was wrong to have these indulgences. We need to be pounding one on the front door of this Capitol Building. This is wrong to put this burden on the American people, some of whom really can't afford it, and many of whom are losing their jobs. And to give us a target of 17\1/2\ percent unemployment that we can see could come in a much less industrialized nation than we are and what happened there, think what can happen in this Nation.

What we learned from Spain is 17\1/2\ percent unemployment. My gosh, back during the Clinton administration they kept saying 6\1/2\ percent, 6 percent unemployment was full employment. Well, we have learned that is not true. But there is nobody going to argue 17\1/2\ percent unemployment is full employment. We are going to be hurting.

We just spent, as my colleague says, our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and maybe even for generations never even thought of, we just spent their inheritance just in the first 100 days of the Obama administration. We spent more money than all the history of the Republic put together. And we are wanting to put in a program that can put almost 20 percent of the American workforce out of work? Isn't this the inmates running the asylum?

Well, you forgot that there is one other source of CO2 that we haven't figured out how to tax on it, but I'm sure they're working on it. We've created some today as we've been in here.

I had a lady when I was doing a townhall meeting. We were talking about energy, and she said, You know, I'm concerned about these emissions because I want my children to be able to breathe clean air. And I said, Do you ever lean over and kiss your kid goodnight? She said, Yeah, I do. I said, Do you realize when you breathe out you're breathing CO2 into that child's face? She stopped. She said, You know? That is right. I said, You're going to have to stop breathing in the presence of your child.

This gas we're talking about we are all breathing out every breath and all animals are doing the same thing and all plants are loving it because they take it in. And guess what they give back? Oxygen for us. It's crazy. It's really crazy what we're talking about. But that number needs to be added in there. Maybe we should limit ourselves to 30 breaths a minute.

We know the corporate tax drives people offshore looking for a better tax structure. We know right now in just a competitive market we have the Chinese offer cheaper natural gas than the Americans. So if you're powering your plant by natural gas and you're paying that corporate tax structure, just in today's world, there is a lure to go overseas to China.

Now, you come in and you're going to add 30 percent to the cost of everything. Why in the world would you not think it's the absolutely worst thing that could happen? We're probably going to get trampled if we don't get out of the way as they head for the west coast to get on a boat to go to China.

One of the things that comes to mind is tariffs. Tariffs brought on the Great Depression. I don't know what you're fishing for.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

If you read this statement right here, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on

November 8, 2006 made this statement, which has been quoted quite a bit, ``The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history,'' November 8, 2006. That's a very, very noble goal, a noble goal that unfortunately doesn't seem to be being met by the majority.

I've been here on the floor of the House talking about ethics now and talking about basically right and wrong, stuff that anybody can understand, I think; that there are just certain things that really just by their very nature just don't seem right.

I credit the American people with an awful lot of common sense, and I think that common sense leads them to look at some of the things that go on in Washington and say, You know what, that doesn't make sense. That's just not right. Something's wrong here.

Generally when the American people are saying to themselves, That doesn't sound right, something's wrong, that's just not the way it ought to be, generally they've got a pretty good judgment of what they're looking at and what they're hearing.

It's been my--I wouldn't say duty--but the goal that I've taken on to try to point out some of these things. And I started off with a good friend, a gentleman named Charlie Rangel.

Charlie is the chairman of one of the most important committees in the House of Representatives, the Ways and Means Committee, the taxation committee of the House of Representatives. I actually discovered when Mr. Rangel spoke on the floor of the House about the fact that he hadn't paid taxes on a piece of Caribbean real estate that he owned for a long period of time because he just misunderstood that that was income to him and that he had submitted the unpaid past-due taxes and would pay any penalties and interest that might be assessed. But none had been assessed.

It just struck me, having been a small-town lawyer and a judge in a medium-sized suburban county, that that didn't sound like the IRS that most of my friends and neighbors were familiar with. Because most of my friends and neighbors were familiar with the IRS that when they just didn't pay on April 15 but paid on October 15 of the same year, they looked at their tax bill, and along with the taxes was interest and sometimes penalties. If they went longer than that, there was even more interest and even larger penalties.

It seemed to me when you're talking about something like 10 years I believe, but don't hold me to that--it was in double figures anyway-- when you're talking about the years that Mr. Rangel didn't pay his taxes, and it was in the sum of, as I recall, it was about $10,000 or $12,000 that he had to pay. I don't remember the exact number on that either. But for there to be no penalties and interest, when somebody who pays their tax bill 6 months late, and they only owe maybe $400, $500, and they look down there and there's penalties and interest. I thought--and I think people listening to that would have thought the same thing--Well, that's not right. If everybody else is paying penalties and interest, why isn't the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee paying penalties and interest? Surely it's not because he's the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and is in charge of overseeing taxation for the House of Representatives. Surely that is not the case. But if it is the case, then the rest of the world is being treated differently than Mr. Rangel.

So I introduced a bill to this august body to create the Rangel Rule. The Rangel Rule is very simple. If you fail to pay taxes for whatever reason, and you're willing to pay those past-due taxes, but you don't want to pay penalties and interest--even if it's been 10 or 20 years that you haven't paid the taxes--just like Mr. Rangel, you can claim the Rangel Rule, and you won't have to pay penalties and interest.

All you basically do is write on your taxes when you pay your taxes, ``exercising the Rangel Rule,'' and then you will be treated the same as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and your penalties and interest should be excused.

Now, a lot of people thought that was funny. And a lot of people caught on to it and thought it was a good idea. And it is still here looking for signatures on a discharge petition which is growing which would allow us to bring this to the floor of the House. But its real purpose was to have people who use common sense apply common sense to this issue and say, That is not right. That is not fair. And it put a spotlight on one particular incident that is not fair. But I have got three pages here of various people that have issues.

And then of course, in our current news, we have issues with the Speaker. So, we will get to all that as we go through this evening. But right now, I don't want everybody to think I'm just picking on Mr. Rangel because quite frankly, there is a lot of other issues here.

And to start off with, we have the Secretary of the Treasury. Do you know that guy? That is the guy that has told us we need to spend these trillions of dollars to save the world. Well, the man who has spent us into the poorhouse almost didn't pay his taxes. Now, the difference between Mr. Geithner and Mr. Rangel, in Mr. Rangel's defense, is what we call the ``Geithner rule precedent.'' Even with solid evidence that a taxpayer was aware of their self-employment tax liability, was given funds specifically to pay their obligation and still consciously failed to pay, only interest should be assessed. Because Mr. Geithner failed to pay his self-employment tax, even though the people who paid him sent him the money in a check, $30,000 worth, and said, Here it is. This is to pay yourself employment tax. And he didn't pay it. Now, I assume he kept the money. But he didn't pay it. And when he then was at that time being offered up as the nominee for the job of the Treasurer of the United States, he did rush down and pay that amount of money. But he didn't have any penalties assessed against him, even though, arguably, it is an intentional act, because he was specifically told, Here is the check to pay your taxes, and he didn't pay them. And it took the fact that the President of the United States chose him to be Treasurer to get him to pay those taxes. We don't know if he ever would have paid them if he hadn't come under the spotlight of this government. But when he did, he paid them.

And if anybody intentionally did something like that, you would think that there would be some kind of penalties about it. And yet all he had to do was, he did have to pay some interest, so that is why it is not exactly a Rangel Rule. But he didn't have to pay any penalties. And my gosh, if the ordinary citizen from Toledo, Ohio, just doesn't pay on the 15th of April and pays on the 15th of October, he will pay some penalties. It may not be a lot, but he will pay some penalties, and he'll pay some interest.

The question you have to ask yourself is, what makes Mr. Geithner so special that he doesn't have to pay penalties for intentionally not paying his taxes? And I guess the answer is it is because he was the second highest man in the Treasury, and now he is the Treasurer of the United States, and he is the man who is advising us on this massive spending program that this House has set forward before it in the last 100 days. More money has been spent by this House in the last 100 days than all the Congresses and all the Presidencies that have ever gone before put together on the advice of the man who was aware that he had to pay his self-employment tax because he got a letter telling him that which he had in his possession and he didn't pay it.

I think almost everybody thinks it is not right for somebody, because they have a government position, to be treated differently from somebody else. I think common sense in America tells us that is the right thing to do. The right thing to do is treat everybody the same. And just because you're a big shot doesn't mean that you don't have to pay your fair share and you shouldn't be treated exactly like anybody else in this country. And that is what we have been talking about. So that is just an extension of the Rangel Rule.

We could stop there because I talked about this before. But there are others that need to be mentioned.

This is an article from The Washington Post, Federal funding funneled to Representative Murtha's supporters. A Pennsylvania defense research center regularly consulted with

two handlers close to Representative John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, as it collected nearly $250 million in Federal funding through the lawmaker, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and sources familiar with the funding request. The center then channeled a significant portion of the funding to companies that were among Murtha's campaign supporters.

This brought to attention another issue. This issue has to do with the fact that Representative Murtha has steered millions of dollars to a group of people, contracts, to a group headed by a man named Bill Kuchera, who is a government contractor. And these offices of this firm, PMA, were raided by Federal officers on January 3 of this year. It says, this contact has very close ties to John Murtha. The agents were from the FBI, IRS and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. They searched the offices of Kuchera Industries and Kuchera Defense Systems in three different locations in Pennsylvania. This is the same group that has contributed thousands of dollars to Mr. Murtha's campaign.

Now, this is something that, at a very minimum, should be talked about by the Ethics Committee. I didn't mention that in the ethics report on Charlie Rangel we were promised by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, back when this all broke last fall, that the Ethics Committee would have concluded the investigation and cleared up the Rangel situation by the beginning of this Congress. So we all waited in anticipation of finding out if there was a solution to this issue concerning Mr. Rangel. Nothing has come. And we have heard nothing, absolutely nothing, from the Ethics Committee.

The same thing, Nancy Pelosi has actively blocked seven resolutions that would require the Ethics Committee to form an investigative subcommittee that would look into the relationship between PMA-awarded earmarks and campaign donations with Mr. Murtha. Why does she feel the need to protect PMA? Well, we have a body here called the Ethics Committee. And that Ethics Committee's job is to go look into these allegations against our Members and come up with solutions to that problem. Either they have violated the rules of this House or they haven't violated the rules of this House. Either they have violated, more importantly, rules of the laws of the land or they haven't violated the law of the land. And if that is the case, the Justice Department should, I assume by this search that they had, be looking into this issue.

These issues need to be resolved. These issues prevent us from having the most open, ethical Congress in history and caused that rule to rest in peace. So that statement is now resting in peace in those two cases because nothing has been done.

And there is more. An organization got earmarks from Representative Alan Mollohan that gave free rent to a family charity. Mollohan provided millions of dollars in earmarks to a group he helped to start, and that group gave the Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation $75,000 in free rent, according to Roll Call newspaper on the Hill. The West Virginia High Technology Consortium has provided more than $75,000 in free rent and administrative services to the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation according to the tax records while receiving millions of dollars' worth of earmarks from Alan Mollohan, Democrat from West Virginia, who serves as the family charitable foundation's secretary.

Here is a copy of The Washington Post article, upon taking control of the Congress in November of midterm elections, Democrats vowed to require lawmakers to disclose their requests and to certify that money they are requesting does not benefit them. Another key Democratic reform requires House Members seeking earmarks to certify that neither they nor their spouses have any financial interest in the project. In the Democratic Congress, pork is still getting served. That is from The Washington Post, May 24, 2007.

And then, West Virginia charity got rent deal, Roll Call, March 10, 2009. The West Virginia High Technology Consortium has provided more than $75,000 in free rent and administrative services to the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation while receiving millions of dollars of earmarks from Alan Mollohan.

Now Mr. Mollohan says that this is perfectly legitimate. And do you know what? It might be. It might be. But that is not for us to judge.

Once again, if you are trying to have the most open, ethical and honest Congress in the history of the Republic, then when you have questions raised like this, there should be a place you go to resolve those questions. To me, at least the starting place is the Ethics Commission and the Ethics Committee. And yet here we are. There has been no ethics investigations that we know of launched to look at these allegations.

I think the American citizens ought to look at this and say, well, why not? If in reality this is innocent and there is nothing wrong with it, then why couldn't it be brought before the Ethics Committee and they can tell us this is perfectly all right, normal behavior to give large amounts of earmarks to a company and then get free rent for your charitable foundation. Maybe it is perfectly legitimate. I don't know. But if you listen to that, and you think of the most honest, open, ethical Congress in the history of the Republic, then you would say, something needs to be resolved about this issue.

And really that is what we are about here. We are saying we want resolution. We want someone to look into these matters, and let's be what Nancy Pelosi has promised us we would be.

I would like to say that was all. But there was also this issue recently. Representative Maxine Waters pushed for a $12 million TARP giveaway to One United Bank. Waters' husband is a stockholder and member of the board of directors of that bank. Daughter Karen Waters and her firm have made over $450,000 charging candidates and ballot measures sponsors for endorsements for Ms. Waters. And L.A. County supervisor, Yvonne Burke, supported a measure to lease the Chester Washington Golf Course to American Golf, owned partly by Representative Waters' husband and son after Waters supported Burke in her campaign. All these allegations came out in the Los Angeles newspapers.

Now, there may be absolutely nothing to this. We don't know. But you ask yourself, does it sound like there is nothing to it? Because what I failed to say was part of that article was that it is a clear indication that Ms. Waters used influence to get them to look at giving TARP money to One United Bank. And doesn't that talk about benefits to House Members or their spouses, any financial interest in the project?

I would argue if that is the rule passed by the Democratic Congress, the ethics rule for this Congress, imposed upon themselves and others, shouldn't we follow that rule?

Doesn't it make sense? Doesn't it make sense to say let's get answers to that question? I don't understand why that also is not something for the Ethics Committee to report on.

Rahm Emanuel, a former Member of this body, now the, some would argue, the number two man in the White House, the man who has President Obama's ear, he got free rent from Rosa DeLauro, who is also a Member of this body, by living in her basement in an apartment. I mean, you know, I am sure it was a nice place, for 5 years. Rent free.

Now, you say to yourself, Well, isn't it all right for one Member of this Congress to allow another Member of this Congress to stay in their place if they want to and not charge them any rent?

I would say, yeah, I don't really see anything wrong with that. But then, if you knew that Ms. DeLauro's husband was a lobbyist who regularly lobbied this Congress, then all of a sudden you have got to say, wait a minute. Now we're talking about this rule right here, these requests, and spouses and Members and financial interests and interest in lobby events in this Congress.

And, you know, the lobby right now, they are the enemy of the state as far as we hear around this place all the time. These are the most horrible people on Earth we hear from people around here. I don't agree with that. They're human beings just like anybody else and they're doing a job, but those who aren't doing it properly are

an issue for this Congress. And I would argue that that ought to at least be looked into.

No action has been taken by the Ethics Committee, and when Rahm Emanuel was put on as Chief of Staff to the President, the Ethics Committee said it now has no jurisdiction over him. So I guess if there is an issue there, it's gone away by moving from the legislative branch to the executive branch. But just because you move doesn't make it right. It's an issue that ought to be answered to.

And it may be absolutely positively nothing there, but what do you think? What do the Members of this body think? Does it sound like it ought to be looked into? Does it sound like it ought to be questioned? Does it sound like something you would like to know the answer to? Because, let me tell you, I can almost take judicial notice of the fact that rent in Washington, D.C., it's not cheap. And so if he's getting rent every month for 5 years, I would say, I don't know what the place looks like, but I've shopped around for those basement apartments. I rented a room with a microwave for a thousand dollars a month. Others rent those apartments down in the basement of people's townhouses around here for anywhere from $1,500 to $1,800 a month, times 5 years. That's a pretty decent gift. That's a pretty decent reward.

And it wouldn't be bad if it was just a Member of this Congress, but it is the lobbyist spouse who also is giving that gift, and it ought to be talked about. It ought to be looked into.

We say that we don't want to have conflicts of interest in this House. We want to disclose those conflicts of interest. Anyway, you are supposed to disclose what you're doing. Here. Disclose the requests and the money being certified and what you do.

Now, Hilda Solis served, who has now been appointed to the Labor Department, Secretary of Labor. She was the treasurer with fiduciary duties for a labor organization, in direct violation of House Ethics Rules. Her group lobbied Congress and took direct action in elections under all her fiscal approval while serving in Congress.

Her husband failed to pay taxes, even after the IRS liens, for 16 years. And I guess the shift to the executive branch is the solution to that problem, but it really ought to be the Ethics Committee's job. But once again, now that she's Secretary of Labor, the Ethics Committee has no jurisdiction over here. But does that make it right? Does that make it not--does that make it okay to do that? Is that the kind of government that our President promised us he wanted to have? He was going to have the kind of a government that we could be proud of; and yet this lady, in violation of House rules, represented a labor group that lobbied this Congress, and she was part of their executive committee and didn't report it, and now she's Secretary of Labor and all is forgiven. And yet she's right where the conflict was, if there was a conflict. I mean, doesn't that make sense to anybody that that ought to be looked into by somebody?

We had an ethics issue down in Florida, and it caused one of the Members of this House, rightfully, for other reasons also, to lose the election. Tim Mahoney, the Democrat, we learned through the press and from his own lips, paid off a mistress that he had with Federal funds so that she'd keep quiet. He is accused of using these taxpayer Federal funds to pay a former staffer and his mistress. The Speaker of the House refused to take action. Florida voters told her she was wrong and kicked him out.

Compare that to the pledge. The Ethics Committee took no action. He was voted out of office after one term. The people took some action. So maybe that's where we are today. Maybe that's the only place we get recourse is from the people of the United States. They have to step up.

You know, we took a big battering as a party. I was very offended, as were many Members, when we were accused of all being part of a culture of corruption. You don't hear me accusing every Democrat in this House, because of these people on this list, being part of a culture of corruption. There are good-hearted people on that side of the aisle who are doing the right thing, and I don't think it's fair for anybody to step up and classify a whole party because of the issues of some.

But I do think that when those issues come up, it's the duty and responsibility of that party to make sure those issues are resolved. We resolved ours. Many people resigned. Many people didn't run for reelection because of issues that came up, and here we are with these issues.

And then finally, once again, resting in peace is the most open, ethical, honest Congress in history, and that very noble phrase basically died between January 4, 2007, and February 10, 2009. And it died because of all these issues not resolved by this House, not resolved by its Ethics Committee, not resolved by the Justice Department if it is applicable. And when you come out of a world of right and wrong and you try, to the best you can--and people make mistakes. You know, some of these things could be mistakes. I want to make that very clear.

But these are the kinds of things that others have been accused of being part of a culture of corruption, and those issues were resolved. These issues go unresolved, and the leader who set the standard, who has told us that these things would be resolved, has not only not resolved them, she has been a stumbling block for resolving these issues.

And now, that brings us to an issue that we have with the Speaker. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is having an ongoing war with the CIA. I think most of the country is aware of that, and it has to do with accusations and allegations concerning what some call torture and others call interrogation practices with those people who are, have been held in Guantanamo or other places as potential terrorist enemies of our state. And the issue, of course, that makes the front page is waterboarding. Whether it's good or evil, whether it's torture or not torture is not what we are talking about today. That's for--I think each of us has our own opinion about that.

I think the real issue here, the issue we have to resolve, is that the Speaker of the House has attacked unmercifully this entire operation and all of these things to do with the--who got told what about this interrogation practice. And she denied vehemently that she had ever gotten any knowledge of these extensive interrogation tactics. And she's just really stood up and in no uncertain words said, I never knew about it.

Well, the current CIA director, the current Democrat CIA director who was appointed by President Obama, has released information to the fact that Ms. Pelosi was, when she was the minority leader and in the minority, she was in the room when these interrogation methods were discussed and that there are notes to show she was there. And she has said--she's basically taking the position that the CIA is not telling the truth. Some say either Ms. Pelosi's not telling the truth or the CIA is not telling the truth. That's kind of where we are.

But truthfulness, public statement truthfulness is what we would expect from a Speaker who tells us this is going to be the most open, ethical, and honest Congress in history.

I don't know. I think most everybody comes from a part of the world sort of like mine, honesty means telling the truth. And I think at your parents' or your grandparents' knee, they would tell you, You be honest. You tell the truth.

I have told my children, when something was broken or something happened, Now, you be honest and you tell me the truth, because if you don't, it will be worse on you than if you did tell the truth. And I believe they will testify to that fact. Because the truth is just, that's something we instill in our children. We hopefully all do that because, quite frankly, truth and honesty is a goal we set for ourselves as Americans. We set the goal for ourselves as a Nation to be an open, honest Nation. And we do that by raising the next generation, hopefully, to understand the difference between telling the truth and not telling the truth.

I don't like the word ``lie'' or ``liar,'' and I'm not going to use it. Others might, but I'm not. I will tell you that you are not honest if you are not telling the truth. It comes down to: Is this CIA telling the truth or is the Speaker of the House telling the truth?

Now, why would somebody go off on this in such a big way? Well, I don't

think I'm going off on it in nearly as big a way as are some of the people in the press right now. Let's wake up, folks. The reality is we're talking about a person who, through a series of horrible disasters, might end up being the President of the United States, an unelected President of the United States, because if something should happen to the President or to the Vice President, God forbid, the Speaker of the House stands in line to be the President of these United States. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is an important, important position.

This issue of truth plays on how we want this place to operate and who we want to be. Do we want to talk to each other straight, tell each other the truth, look each other in the eye, give our word, and keep it? When something happens, do we want to tell them, yes, it happened or, no, it didn't happen, and it's the truth? How do 400-plus people get together and try to work things out and keep saying, let's all work together, if we don't talk honestly to each other?

So it's either the CIA--the agency that is in charge of intelligence for this Nation--or it's the Speaker of the House. They're both important. I would allege the Speaker is more important even though the duty of protecting this Nation by National Intelligence is really what has kept us safe for these last 8 years since the attack on 9/11. Even so, as for the Speaker of the House, who is standing in line to be President should a disaster strike this Nation, I think the truth should be part of what comes from her lips.

So this needs to be resolved. The American people have a right to know. This Congress has a right to know. We have a right to know all that we can about those meetings where enhanced interrogation was discussed, whether it was at one or whether it was at 50. I don't know how many it was discussed at, but I know it has been clearly stated by the head of the CIA that at one Ms. Pelosi was present, and it was clearly stated that enhanced interrogation was being used.

So I guess the best, real title to this discussion we are having these days is: Let's get to the bottom of it. Let's get to the bottom of this stuff. Let's get through it and find out what the truth is. Let's lay it out before the American people, and let's let the cards fall where they may. That's what I think ought to happen.

As a solution finder for 20 years, everybody who comes into the courthouse is looking for a solution to their problems. You hope most of the time you're right, and sometimes you might not be right, but your job that day is to try to solve that problem to the best of your ability under the law.

We owe a duty to this wonderful body, to the greatest legislative body ever created on the face of the Earth. We owe a duty to this great bunch of folks out there--we call them Americans of all sorts--that this government speaks the truth.

I am really pleased to see my friend Mark Kirk join me. I am going to yield such time as he would like to use. He is a very intelligent man about the military in general, so I would like to hear his comments.

The gentleman raises an excellent point, and that's just what we've been talking about here. I thank the gentleman for reminding me of that fact. In reality, that testimony is treated under oath, and lying to Congress carries penalties. If the CIA is lying, as Ms. Pelosi seems to be alleging, then, quite frankly, we ought to look into it. I mean, the one thing this body should do is enforce the laws of this land. So I thank the gentleman for reminding me of that.

As we've been talking here today about solutions, that would be one solution, to bring this to light. It's all about sunlight. You know, sunlight is purifying, and if you put the light of day on things, we generally get the answers to questions we have. All of the things I've talked about today, all of them, just need sunlight on them. Maybe they'll all clear up, but we've got to have somebody asking for it, and that's what I've been doing these last 6 or 8 weeks.

I see my good friend from Texas, a fellow judge and fellow Congressman is here, Louie Gohmert. He is one of my very dearest friends. I yield such time as he would choose to consume.

Reclaiming my time.

I'm reminded of when I was in law school. It's a beautiful spring day and the baseball team was playing off in the distance. And the professor called on every member in the back row to respond to a case, and every one of them stood up and said, I'm unprepared, Mr. Fritz. And when he finally went all the way across the back row of the auditorium, he said, Everyone stand and look around. You're seeing the greatest concentration of ignorance in the history of man.

Maybe we're witnessing the greatest lapse of memory in the history of this Congress, because if you give them credit for forgetting, they sure have forgotten a lot. And I thank the gentleman for pointing that out.

There are those that say that the way politics should work is you tell people what you're going to do in the campaign, and then you do it, and then you tell them what you did to get elected the next time. Of course, the new modern world is you tell them over and over and over what you're going to do, you don't do it, and you tell them over and over and over that you didn't. Maybe that is where we are. All of these things are curious, but the reality is, we raised enough issues here tonight that we don't meet anywhere close to this standard.

I want to ask the Speaker how much time we have left.

Thank you.

I thank my friend from Texas, a wise counsel, to look at that and decide maybe it's not that we're not having any untruths here; maybe we're just having a gigantic lapse of memory by the leadership of this House, the Democratic leadership of this House and possibly some of its participants. But I don't think all of the participants. There are open, honest, ethical men and women in this House. I think their voices all should be heard on both sides of the aisle.

Resolve these issues, Madam Speaker. Make the Ethics Committee work. Make your office work. Follow the rules and procedures. As Mr. Kirk says, if we have the top leader of the House of Representatives saying a Federal agency has lied to Members of Congress and to its leadership, then file charges and let's go take them to task on this and find out if they did lie, and then let's open the pages of the books and let's look at the events and let's decide.

The burden of proof will be on the state. That is fair. Our Founding Fathers created that. They don't have to defend themselves other than sit there if they want to. But the state has to prove that they are lying. But if someone is accusing them of untruth--because I just used a word I swore I wouldn't use--then the law says telling a falsehood to Congress is an actionable offense, as Mr. Kirk pointed out. Let's take that action. If the CIA has been lying to this body, let's take them to court. Let's find out. Let's have a hearing before this body. Let's find out and let the sunlight, the purifying sunlight of day shine upon this issue between the Speaker of the House and the CIA.

And by the way, the CIA director appointed by President Obama confirms what other CIA directors and other Members of this Congress who were present said, that there was a briefing. Maybe it's part of Mr. Gohmert's famous memory lapse or just forgotten. Maybe that is the defense to all of this we've talked about. Maybe all of these issues we raised, the solution is, I forgot. Maybe with all of the ethics issues that have been raised before this Congress, someone would think could be

resolved by, I forgot that was a rule. It's not the way it works, and that's not the way it should work.

We've got issues before this Congress that are issues that divide this Nation. We are about putting back this Nation together, not dividing it. That is what our President has told us. We, in this body, are about putting this body back together in a healthy way. The noble statements made by the Speaker are only noble if they're carried out. But if they're only words--we hear lots of words around this place. There is more than just words involved in everything we do. There is action. Let's resolve these issues. That is all I ask. That is all the Members of Congress ask. And I think that is all that the American people ask. Let's resolve these issues.

I guess the ultimate resolution will be at the polling place, but that is not really the solution we should have. There should be more pride in this institution than having to settle it at the ballot box. That is kind of like settle it out in the street in Gunsmoke. That is not the law we want to have in this country. Let's settle these issues.

I thank the Speaker for his patience, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I think most people know I spent a little time in the courts of this country. I am going to start off this conversation by saying that I'm not a bankruptcy judge, nor a bankruptcy litigant. And, in fact, I do not claim any expertise whatsoever in the area of bankruptcy. But I have some serious concerns that bother me about some things that are going on, and I would hope at least that the American people have these same concerns, because I really believe that the third branch of our government, the Judiciary, is there for recourse for all citizens, big and small. I think they are the fallback position, where politics should not interfere, but due process should prevail.

I believe that the protection of the minority interests of whatever we may be doing, it is best protected in the courts of our country.

I look at what is going on tonight and have been trying to figure out--and, I'm going to tell you, you're going to hear me ask a lot of questions tonight that I would like someone to give answers to, because I don't understand where things are going. But I'm looking at what is going on with the automobile industry in this country.

You know, the big three automakers in this country have been symbols of corporate greatness for my entire lifetime. We all can have a debate about who made the best car, what is the best car ever made, but most Americans would argue for some form of a GM car or Ford or a Chrysler as the best car they ever drove. Our grandfathers and our fathers have owned these vehicles and they have worked with these companies, and they have been respected and honored across this Nation.

Now, these companies are in trouble. At least two of them seem to be in a lot of trouble--Chrysler and General Motors. At least it has been indicated through the media that Chrysler is going to be seeking recourse in the bankruptcy courts.

The reason I say it has been indicated is because, in the normal course of things, what you normally see is that the board of directors, through its chief executive officer, will have a vote or will discuss the economic situation of the company and will come up with the fact that it's just not going to be viable. That at least they need the reorganization and the cancellation of some of their debts to be able to maintain order within the company and be a viable company.

But, in the case of Chrysler, the announcement was made by President Barack Obama to the media in a speech that he made announcing Chrysler would go into bankruptcy--at least it's my personal opinion that I don't believe at that time Mr. Obama held any position in the corporate structure of Chrysler to speak on their behalf, other than he is the President of the United States and he may have more knowledge than some of the rest of us, but it would be normal for Chrysler to make that announcement.

But then it would be normal for the board of directors of Chrysler to fire the executives of their company if they are not doing a good job, and it would be normal for the board of directors of General Motors to do the hiring and firing of executives that they have hired to manage their company.

March 29 of this year, President Obama forced the CEO of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, to resign from his post. As far as anyone can tell, this marks the first time in American history that a United States President has directly intervened in the daily running of an American business.

So we start with that announcement. The CEO, Mr. Wagoner, is fired by the President. Then, the President announces--not the CEO of Chrysler, but the President--announces the bankruptcy of Chrysler.

This bankruptcy, under normal circumstances, would go before a bankruptcy judge. And we have a set of laws that are established in this country--they are called creditors' rights. And we have creditors that stand in different positions when it comes to being repaid on debts, depending on whether they are secured or unsecured creditors, and we have a battery of laws that make that determination, and the bankruptcy court, doing a way more complicated analysis than I just did, comes up with who gets paid what and when and where and how and what happens; what assets are sold, all or part, and these are laws that are on the books that pretty well anybody can go see, and they are from time-to-time changed by the legislative body.

But we understand now from what the newspapers tell us that the Obama administration has announced the deal they expect to be rubber-stamped by the bankruptcy court. That deal is, according to the papers, a 55 percent ownership of Chrysler will be owned by the UAW, United Auto Workers. So the laborers of that company will be owning 55 percent of Chrysler. Then, 35 percent of Chrysler will be owned by Fiat, a foreign company out of Italy, and other places, I am sure. Then, 8 percent of Chrysler will be owned by the United States Government, and 2 percent of Chrysler will be owned by the Canadian Government.

I suppose, if we look at who is normally involved in corporate structure, you would have stockholders and preferred stockholders that are probably in there someplace; and, it looks like, to me, that they are divested of any interest in this trade.

Now, let me say that this should be something that the court makes a decision based upon creditors law, but it seems to be this is being shoved into the hands of the court, with an announcement by the White House saying: This is a settlement these people have agreed to, and you will do it this way.

I wonder, who is looking out for the stockholder? I don't own any Chrysler stock, but if I owned a share of Chrysler stock I would think that at one point in time I owned a portion of the Chrysler Corporation, that I was one of the owners of the business. Because we can cut through all the mystique of a corporate structure, the mystique that many call the bad guys, the big corporations. But big corporations are nothing more than a gathering of people who are called shareholders who invest their hard-earned money into a company, expecting that company to make profits and, in turn, return that value to them by an increase in stock price and possibly a dividend. It is Americans and others investing in America. That is what a corporation is all about.

Now, whether it is a small corporation that is in Round Rock, Texas, where I come from, that maybe has 20 shareholders, or whether it is a giant corporation like the Chrysler Corporation that probably has, who knows, a million shareholders, those people have invested their money and they have some interest in that business, and through their representatives that they elect to the board, they supposedly have a voice in what is going on. Yet, if this deal is the deal we are talking about, I don't see where these shareholders, whether they be preferred or whether they be ordinary stock shareholders, I don't see where they are accommodated at all.

You can hear some criticize and say that the Federal Government is taking over the automobile industry. Of course, I am sure that they would argue: Well, certainly not in the case of Chrysler, because we are not going to own but 8 percent of Chrysler. But their agent, the group that donates 99

percent, by the last report, of their political donations to the Democratic Party, the UAW, owns a controlling interest, 55 percent.

There seems to be an assumption that when this is announced by the White House that this is the deal, even though it seems that some of these preferred creditors have actually stood up a little bit and said, wait a minute, we didn't make this deal. But it seems that these people are then, by the White House, called not cooperative or other things.

In fact, it was reported in the newspapers that they twisted the arms of these preferred creditors to a point where they felt like they were being threatened and not being able to look out for the interest of their people. And, of course, the finger was pointed to them as the big rich preferred creditors, the big rich bondholders, when, in reality, these companies were stepping up and saying: We are not going to be threatened by the administration. We are going to stand firm. Because it is not just the couple of great big rich folks. They have got lots of people, including other people's pension funds, that are invested in their hedge funds and their groups that own this interest.

According to Thomas Lauria, Global Practice Head of the Financial Restructuring & Insolvency Group at White & Case, said that Perella Weinberg Partners was directly threatened by the White House and, in essence, compelled to withdraw its opposition to the Obama Chrysler restructuring deal under the threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

That statement should concern us all. The White House press corps is supposed to be a press corps that is gathering news and making inquiries, not becoming an arm of the White House or the White House's restructuring force that they are putting together to restructure this deal for Chrysler. It should concern every American that the White House is threatening the use of those people who sit in those press conferences supposedly asking the tough questions of the President, they are threatening that they can use them to harm these individual bondholders, these bondholder companies. I think there is something tragically wrong with that.

One of the questions I ask is where are our courts in this situation. I mean, the stockholders are being left with their interests basically dissolved in the Chrysler Corporation. The bondholders are being threatened by the press corps of the White House to the detriment of their shareholders to take possibly 25 cents or less on the dollar as part of the deal, when there are creditors' rights laws that should be looked to by the bankruptcy court. And if you are not getting good recourse from the bankruptcy courts, there are other courts you can go to.

I am very disappointed that there seems to be some weakness that the courts are not standing up for what could be, and in my estimation would be, a large body of people whose defined rights are being forced away from them by the heavy hand of the White House. And the White House heavy hand is a dangerous place to be.

I will remind you that President Harry Truman seized the Nation's steel mills during the Korean war in order to avoid a shutdown during a strike. He could have sought an injunction barring the strike under the Taft-Hartley law, but instead he chose to seize based on his powers as Commander in Chief. He specifically notified Congress of the right to reverse or endorse his action, but Congress chose not to act. The Supreme Court overturned Truman's Executive order.

The legal questions were: Has the Congress granted the President the power to take possession of the property? The answer was ``no.'' Does the Constitution grant the President the power to take possession of the property? The answer was ``no.'' Is Truman's Executive order in compliance with the Constitution? And the answer was ``no.''

The opinion written by Justice Black said: All powers of the Presidency are contained in the Constitution or in subsequent acts of Congress granting specific powers to the Executive. The contention that the aggregate power of the Constitution and acts of Congress create new, more far-reaching powers was rejected by the Court. Under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, Congress has addressed the precise issue of labor strikes and national security, and has chosen not to grant the President the right to break a strike.

Likewise, nowhere in the Constitution is the Executive granted the right to seize power. An evaluation says Youngstown was instrumental in reaffirming that the President cannot legislate, only execute legislation passed by the Congress.

Black wrote: The Constitution limits his function in the lawmaking process to recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. The ruling limits the nature of the Executive order to carrying out the limitation of laws already established by Congress.

Now, I guess the question that we would have in what is going on in the Chrysler case, and to some extent the General Motors case, which we will get to in a little while: Has Congress granted the President the power to take control of the negotiations of a private corporation and attempt to make a settlement to go before the bankruptcy court? I would certainly argue that the Congress has not given the President that power, nor do I think that the Constitution grants President Obama the power to take control of the negotiations to be submitted to a bankruptcy court and to threaten those who choose not to enter into these negotiations with abuse by the White House press corps that would harm their business. I don't think the Constitution in any way, form, or fashion grants that power to the President of the United States. And I think what is going on with the White House and its heavy-handed manipulation of the duties and responsibilities of the bankruptcy court is nowhere granted by Congress or by the Constitution of the United States.

I think Americans ought to be looking at this, and Americans ought to be concerned about this. These are private businesses owned by private people who borrowed money from other groups of people who either are shareholders or lenders in some form or fashion whose rights are defined by law. And for the President of the United States and the White House to intervene to force a settlement to be submitted to the court and then ask the court to basically rubber-stamp that settlement without looking to the protection of these other rights of the other individuals that are involved, to me, these raise questions that we need to be asking; because if the government can do this to the Chrysler Corporation and the millions of stockholders that own Chrysler Corporation, who else could they do it to that stood in the way of their negotiations? And where does the Constitution or the Congress authorize the President of the United States to heavy-handedly negotiate in this private situation? And where does it authorize the turning over of 55 percent of the business to the laborers who work there in the form of the ownership by their union? And why isn't it quid pro quo, when you look at what that union had done?

In 2008, according to reporting that has been done, according to Open Secrets, the UAW gave 99 percent of its political contributions to the Democrats in the 2008 cycle. If you give 99 percent, then you own 55 percent of the company. Is that the way it is supposed to work? Shouldn't some court somewhere ask that question? Shouldn't some courageous litigant somewhere stand up for the rights of the stockholder, stand up for the rights of the bondholders, speak out for those preferred creditors? Shouldn't someone be going to court and speaking out on these people's behalf?

I have real concerns because I start from the premise that I believe that that third branch of government that I served in for 20 years is there for the protection of all Americans. That is what our court system is about. And if we are going to politicize--and as we look now to an appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice--if we are going to so politicize our court system as to take away the ability for the weaker party to have a voice through politics, then there is something wrong.

We, as Americans, need to be asking that question, and I would challenge my colleagues to start thinking about this: At what point in time does the

President have to follow the Constitution, or at least does the Congress have to grant him powers before he can do these things?

That is just Chrysler. Now, the GM deal, President Obama hasn't announced yet that they are going to the bankruptcy court. But they are trying to work out a settlement.

Oh, going back to the Chrysler deal, doesn't it bother anyone that the deal we are making is taking control away from the American stockholders and from the board of directors of Chrysler and giving ownership to the labor union? I don't see any indication that the labor union is making the assumption of any of these debts or contributing any money to this project. They are just being rewarded for being a labor union. Now where is the logic in that? And then what are they going to do? Thirty-five percent of that is going to be Fiat. I have nothing against Fiat. I actually owned one at one time. So let me lay my cards on the table. It was a neat little yellow convertible, and my wife told me I couldn't keep it, but I owned one for a while, and it was fun and a good car.

But now we are basically turning Chrysler over to a foreign company. I don't have anything against foreign companies. We are in an international world. But let's get a reality check here. The President of the United States is putting together a deal to turn Chrysler over to a foreign company in a foreign country. And you can bet your boots that one of these days the word ``Chrysler'' won't be in our vocabulary anymore. I hope and I wish Fiat all the best, but realize that it will be the ``Fiat Company of North America,'' or at least logic would seem to make one think so.

All of this is to make sure that we meet a pledge that the President of the United States made to the UAW that he would protect their benefits and pensions. The government didn't protect the benefits and pensions of the Delta pilots when Delta went bankrupt. So why, all of a sudden, is the government going into ownership of this company and taking direct direction of this company to make sure that it benefits this labor union rather than another labor union? It is a question that we ought to be asking. It is a question some court ought to be looking into. This concerns me.

Before I go any further, I do want to go ahead and lay the supposed GM deal that the White House is telling us looks like this is what they are recommending, and I read this one on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Fifty percent of General Motors will be owned by the United States Government; 39 percent of General Motors will be owned, again, by the UAW; 10 percent of the company would be owned by the bondholders, so at least the bondholders of General Motors are going to end up with 10 percent ownership. And the stockholders are going to do all right, too. They are going to go from at least more than 1 percent, they are going to go from some percentage of GM down to 1 percent. So if you're the proud owner of GM stock, then all of the stock that is out there is going to be worth 1 percent of General Motors.

One of our Members was telling me that he owned, I forgot what he said, 1,000 shares of General Motors or something like that. The diluted price is estimated to be somewhere between two cents and a nickel a share for General Motors stock--General Motors, that great icon of American industrial might. Many pension funds, teachers' retirement funds and other people invested in them because they were like the American flag. They were American industry at its best. And now all those people and all those funds that invested in stock are going to own 1 percent of a company where they used to own most of the company.

They are going to take the burden, the great burden, of the mistakes made by General Motors and, I would argue, that overwhelming pressure put on by the United Auto Workers to maintain, at all costs, their right of contract. There are written and unwritten contracts, but the contract is sacred in America, and the unions certainly stand up for the rights under their contract. But under creditors' rights, there are rights, too, that are created by law. And a person who does something and buys stock or invests in a bond, those people have the right to rely upon the law to protect them, just like a contract. But it seems that every day as we go forward in the Obama administration, the sanctity of contracts seems to be of less and less importance, and, truthfully, that will be terrible for this Nation.

I am very pleased and blessed to have my friend, a good friend from Iowa, Steve King, to be here with me tonight. I will yield to him such time as he may wish to consume.

I thank the gentleman. I want to point out a couple of things so we don't get off into this magic world that has been created by our Democrat friends and the media, that stockholders are some sort of exotic, wealthy billionaires that own all of these companies.

The teachers retirement system of Texas probably owns General Motors stock. I don't know, I haven't looked into it. But back when General Motors was $60 or $70 a share and everybody was proud to be an American, I am sure that pension funds for our teachers around this country invested. So those people would be looking at a 2-cent value or a 3-cent value or a nickel value for stock that they paid $60 or $70 a share for. So don't get into this magic myth that is created by those who would like to socialize this country that we are talking about fat cats. We are not talking about fat cats. We are talking about the ladies down at the Catholic church that got together and decided they would have an investment club. And they all put a little bit of their egg and butter money, as my grandmother used to say, in a little pot and said, now let's sit around and study the stock page in the newspaper and let's buy ourselves some stock.

A lot of them made a whole lot of money and lost a whole lot of money during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. But those were not fat cat investors. Those were little old ladies at the Catholic church, okay, or at the Methodist church or at the Baptist church or the bridge club or whatever. They are your neighbors. They are the people who live next door to you. They are the people your children go to school with, their parents; and even the kids' college funds are invested in things like General Motors and Chrysler.

So when we nationalize these industries, when we take it out of the hands of the people who own it, which is the stockholders, and we don't give them, defend their rights as stockholders, we make a deal through the pressure of the White House.

You know, interesting statement, this is one of the lawyers talking about what happened to the bondholders in

the Chrysler deals. He said, ``One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw his opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy his reputation if he continued to fight. That was Perella Weinberg,'' Tom Lauria, the head of the bankruptcy department for the top New York City law firm of White & Case, told a WJR 760 radio host.

He goes on to say down here, ``Some of the critics charged that the administration used leverage to provide TARP funds to force banks to comply with this deal. In other words, investors like JPMorgan Chase, who also were bondholders in this Chrysler deal--the old TARP fund deal that we've been talking about now for months--was all of a sudden the twist to make them get in line. And what happened was this group that Mr. Perella Weinberg was involved in, they didn't take any TARP funds, so they didn't have the twist. And they stood up. And what did they do? They threatened them with the White House press corps. I'm sorry, when I was a kid, this doesn't sound like the America that we grew up with. This sounds like the people we used to fight. This sounds like Joe Stalin and some of those people that threatened their way to power.

I am telling you, we ought to be worried about this. And I am deeply worried--although I am happy to see that this New York law firm is involved. I would hope that good litigants--because I believe in the justice system--would use the justice system to protect the rights of these creditors. I would hope they would do that.

I would hope that we would realize that neither this Congress nor the Constitution of the United States has given the White House or the President of the United States the kind of power and authority that he is executing and utilizing on these two car companies. And then we find out that we've got some folks that--they have already said that they would take common stock in the banks, so they want to be stockholders when it comes to the banks. They want to vote that stock and control those banks. They want to take majority interest in our large banks. That is another nationalization of an industry.

And so some of the banks said, you know what? We see the handwriting on the wall. We see that freight train coming down the track right at us. Here's your money back. We don't want your TARP money, take it back. And they are refusing to take the money back and threatening to charge massive penalties if the banks return the money that the American taxpayers provided to bail out banks in this TARP program. If they don't need the money and they want to give it back, what in the world is wrong with that? Except you no longer control the bank when they give the money back. You no longer can control the deals that are made with Chrysler by twisting the arms of the banks. You no longer can control American industry. And that is the kind of thing that these trillions of dollars that we're spending, we, as Americans, should be deathly afraid of, that there are people who would control our Nation with the money that we give them out of our pocket and we permit them to borrow in our name that we are going to have to pay back.

I remember what I told my children as soon as they could understand English: the United States Government, nor any other government, never made a dime; they took it from you.

I yield.

And then we have national socialism, which is something we should fear.

Something that we have fought against a lot of time.

I think we are about to wrap this up. I want to thank my friend for coming in here tonight. I want to thank the Speaker for her patience. We are raising questions that we think everybody and Members of this House should be asking each other and should be asking on the floor of this House and in committee and around this town. We didn't sign on to get on the slippery slope to socialism, and it is time for us all to stand up and say so.

Madam Speaker, recently I read an article by Gene Edward Veith entitled, ``A Kinder, Gentler Marxism.''

He begins his comments by saying, ``Barack Obama is not a socialist, explained Eric Etheredge of The New York Times, he is a ``social democrat.'' The administration's attempt to control private companies and the free market should not alarm us, according to Etheredge and other pundits. European nations do this all the time. It is simply an application of the European political and economic theory known as ``social democracy.''

We were promised several things by our President during his campaign. He promised us government reform, a renewed and repaired economy, and more ethical business practices. And he did all this as we watched our economy crash.

After these 100 days in office, we need to illuminate the path that this administration is actually taking us down. It could be the path that leads us from limited government, that stimulates our economy naturally, to a government mostly aligned with social democracy like the social economies of Western Europe, with massive taxes and chronic high unemployment.

An objective definition of social democracy from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary is as follows: ``A political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means.'' Or a second definition, ``A democratic welfare state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practices.''

So this political and economic system either moves from capitalism to socialism or combines both capitalism and socialism to form a welfare state. We need to know more.

Here is the first paragraph from the Encyclopedia Britannica about social

democracy. ``A political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes.

``Based on 19th century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism, but eschews its militancy and totalitarianism. Social democracy was originally known as revisionism because it represented a change in basic Marxist doctrine, primarily in the former's repudiation of the use of revolution to establish a capitalist society.''

These definitions, paired with some of the actions we've seen so far in the administration, cause us concern that they may be indicative of gradual movement towards social democracy. We've got the stimulus bill, we've got the bank bailouts, now we've got the proposal that they will own 50 percent of General Motors, along with a 39 percent share for the unions, a 10 percent share for the bondholders, and a 1 percent share for the stockholders. As a result of these actions, the Federal Government's outrageous spending now equals almost 90 percent of gross domestic product. The GDP for last year was 14.2, and now 12.8.

So the question is, did we elect a President because we wanted to have a social democracy system? When Americans cast their vote for Barack Obama and they cast it for the Democratic Congress, did they also intend that this country should adopt social democracy, that lesser form of Marxism?

These are issues we need to talk about. And if this is the place our country is going, then maybe we need to amend or adopt new founding documents that more fit this form of government.

These are thoughts we ought to all think about. I know I'm thinking about them. I hope you are, too.

These are really not the kind of records we like to have. We don't try to set these kind of records. These are records that we will be paying for for generations to come.

I want to remind you that this is 100 days of Democrat dominance. So the President had some help on these things, and that is the Democrat majority and the House and Senate certainly helped to move this along-- in record time, I might add. Sometimes those things just completely almost bypassed the whole process and just came popping up on the floor kind of like a Jack-in-the-Box surprise. ``Here we are. Let's vote.'' And sure enough, we managed to break all kinds of existing records.

And I have to point this out because my daughter, I promised her I would. The last time I talked about this Debt Day, I failed to say that was my daughter's birthday. Danielle Carter. Her birthday is on the 26th day of April. And she probably, in her lifetime, has probably not gotten the biggest present in the world because it was so close to tax day that maybe she didn't get it. So she understands how close her birthday is to the day we pay our income taxes.

Oh, yes. It's like that college debt. It's going to go on forever. That's something that we ought to be thinking about as we run these things up.

I find it phenomenal that we can, in actually less than a hundred days, spend more money than everybody else spent in 200-and-some-odd years, including George W. Bush. Add them all together and sure enough, this Democrat Congress and this Democrat President managed to outspend them all. I mean, I tell you what, that's breaking some records right there.

Not only has this administration cut missile defense, but they are also cutting the F-22 fighter, which, by all analysis, we need a new fighter because of some real technological advances that the Russians and the Chinese have made in their fighting planes. And we have had fighter pilots telling us this for years. The F-22 has now been scrapped, the missile defense, as you point out, has now been scrapped.

So you can't accuse this budget of overspending in the area of defense because it actually is going less in the area of defense and is spending in other areas. Many of which, I would argue, are some sort of voodoo economics. But that's my personal opinion.

But make it clear, missile defense we need.

There is so much to talk about, but the one that just pops off the page is the promise that was made that I will cut taxes on 95 percent of the American people. That's what the President of the United States told us during the campaign. ``I assure you I will cut taxes on 95 percent of the people.''

He also said he was going to raise taxes on the wealthy. You may have heard me talking earlier--one of the indications of social Democrats is class warfare, the hardworking American worker versus the rich man. How many times have we heard that?

But now we've got this great energy tax that they call cap-and-trade, which

makes no sense at all. Even the name makes no sense. But the reality is, it's a tax on energy, all sorts of energy. And it's a tax on existing energy that's going to make everybody's bill go up because the American people are going to pay that tax, and that means the middle class.

You asked what that two consecutive quarters of 6 percent negative growth means. That means, I believe, and I know my friends talk about this all the time on the Ways and Means Committee, I believe that means recession. Two consecutive quarters is the definition of recession. So we are now in the Obama recession. So it's one of those things you've got to think about. As we keep blaming other people, at some point in time you have to take credit for what happens on your watch.

I heard two Members arguing today, an interesting argument: How long is it going to take us to pay off this debt we are accumulating? One of the Members said, well, it's estimated 3,000 years.

The other one said, no, that's not right. It's maybe perpetuity.

He said, how do you get that?

He said, the only way you get that 3,000 year number is you've got to show a surplus. And there is no surplus projected within a couple of lifetimes, based upon what we are doing right now. So, therefore, it's like this never-ending debt.

And another one said, well, that's like a Ponzi scheme. You get one bunch of investors to invest in your product, and this is like our boy that's in jail right now, and then you get another bunch of investors and you pay these investors from these investors, and then you pay these investors from these investors. Why isn't this a Ponzi scheme?

That's what we are supposed to be doing with them.

We have got to wake up and realize what we're creating. We're creating another generation paying for this generation and then another generation will pay for that generation. And at some time when you get numbers like these, it becomes so overwhelming, what are we going to do?

And that's the deficit. The debt is worse than that, because we are borrowing all this money that we are spending right now.

And so when you look at all these packages that we put together, and you total them up, that's where your $8.7 trillion comes in right there that you have got demonstrated there. It's the debt.

In addition, as Kevin points out, they made false assumptions of the growth of this economy. Based upon those false assumptions, everybody's already told them they weren't going to work. They were told by all the authorities that look at these things, these numbers don't work. They went ahead with them, anyway, and now we're looking at a $2 trillion deficit. So the debt gets even worse.

I heard somebody say this morning, somebody ought to tell every graduating senior this year that they can add $156,000 to their school debt, because that's what they are going to have to pay off. That's going to be their share of what they are going to have to pay off in their lifetime.

That's what the guy said. I don't want to take credit for that number. I am just telling you I heard it on the television this morning, and it shocked me.

You've hit upon something that everybody needs to think about. First, you have to start with the premise that the government doesn't make any money. The government takes the citizens' money. That's the way it works. They are not a creator of wealth. They are a taker of wealth and a distributor of wealth. But they are not a creator of wealth.

So all this stimulus we have looked at, its purpose is to give a shot in the arm to the economy, if you believe in the Keynesian theory of economics, a shot in the arm to the economy, and make it start creating wealth again. But, in reality, we have seen no real indication. Japan can tell you for 10 years they did that and failed miserably. Most people will point to the Great Depression and say it failed miserably.

So the real solution is real wealth for America. You do that by putting more money in the American people's pocket, making it easier for people to be entrepreneurs. For small businessmen, don't tax them. Give them a chance to grow their small business. They employ the vast majority of the American people.

What we have got to turn around is real wealth from real jobs from real businesses for real people. That's what we've got to have.

I just want to point out there are a few things we haven't talked about, like apologizing to the terrorists; labeling enemy combatants, they are now foreign detainees; labeling the war on terror as international contingencies; labeling the terror attacks as man-caused disasters; hugging up to the Castro brothers, who tried to make their island a launching platform for intercontinental ballistic missiles within my life; and hugging up to Hugo Chavez, the man who hates this country more than anybody, and taking his book, which is all about venom against this country.

These are just a few of many, many other things we haven't talked about tonight.

Mr. Speaker, we celebrate today, shortly, I think in 2 days, we celebrate 100 days of President Obama's Presidency. His rankings are way up there, and we all respect him on his first 100 days, but I am going to talk about those 100 days because I have a little bit different viewpoint than others might. I highly respect the man but, in turn, you can view the world differently, and I certainly view the world differently than Mr. Obama and the majority party.

I am going to talk, and I hope I will be joined by some of my colleagues, a little bit about the way I look at the last 100 days and actually farther back than 100 days, the way I look at the last 6 months of what's going on in this country and where we are going and what concerns I have.

Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not doing this to get on Ms. Napolitano's hit list. I am just doing this to express my opinion.

The first thing, when you start trying to look at this new administration and the direction we are taking the country, you have got to start, I think, with our foreign policy. And I think, literally, the first thing or almost first thing that the President of the United States did when he became President of the United States was to order the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to be closed down and, of course, we are now having the debate as to what we are going to do with the prisoners that were there.

As a result of putting the spotlight on Gitmo, we put a spotlight on the argument of whether or not certain behavior is torture or not torture. And, clearly, this is a matter of opinion. And then we, as of yet, have not had official release of documents that tell us what resulted from these various procedures like waterboarding, as far as information gained by our intelligence folks.

But the argument is that this was a great thing to do, to close down Guantanamo Bay. I disagree. I actually think it was almost the perfect place for us to keep those folks because, quite frankly, I haven't seen anyone, certainly none of our European allies have stepped up yet and said that they were willing to take them. We have had a few that stepped up and their political leaders said, whoa, time out, we are not going to do that.

A fellow has got a private prison somewhere in the country said this morning he would take them, and then--I am not sure who the official was, who said, oh, no, you are not going to take them. So right now we don't have anyplace to put them.

I would volunteer the Williamson County jail, because I know that they would wish they were back at Gitmo, but I don't think they are willing to take them. So we are at a dilemma on that, and we are at a dilemma on whether or not what has happened to these folks that are in this detention facility is, in fact, torture.

I think that the general consensus in the press is that it is. But did it result in something that saved the lives of Americans, that's a good question.

Hopefully that information will be released in the very near future. I know the President and Senate requested it. And I hope that we get that full information so we, as Americans, can get a good picture of whether or not this is really a good thing that we did.

We certainly closed down something that was all over the news, it was all over the talking points of the Democratic Party. And, of course, that being the President who was elected from the Democratic Party, and as he says, he won, and he gets the opportunity to do that, and that's the first thing that he did.

Other things in foreign affairs that he has done, he has made some trips overseas to Europe, was very, very warmly received by our allies in Europe, and they cheered for him and patted him on the back.

But they didn't give him what he asked for. He asked for some help, some real help, in Afghanistan.

Let me say, I just came back from a meeting with the EU myself, and there are a lot of folks over there that certainly are standing in harm's way in Afghanistan. Most of those are Eastern European countries, but there are a few, like Great Britain, who certainly stand in the gap. But the President didn't get what he was looking for in the way of assistance over there, and, quite frankly, I think the Europeans should step up for him.

I do support their participation, and not just the participation, as I told them when I was over there. The way we look at it where I come from, when you are making ham and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed, and we are looking for some folks that are committed. That means, if necessary, they will go there without restrictions in their ability to perform, as some of our allies have done when they have gone to the battle areas that we are fighting terrorists in.

Oh, by the way, one of the things that the Obama administration has done through Mrs. Napolitano is we are not supposed to call these folks ``terrorists'' anymore, but I have a hard time remembering what I am supposed to call them, so I am going to call them that until I can remember what the new politically correct term she invented is.

The President went to visit with the Central and South American leaders. He has opened the doors, or is attempting to open the doors, to a regime that has been a very, very evil regime since I guess I was a freshman in high school, and, believe me, that is a long time ago.

Fidel Castro, we all thought he was going to be the savior of mankind when he came to the United States in, what was it, '56 or '57, until we got to know him and realized he was nothing more than what all dictators seem to be and they are, and that is a tyrant who totally and completely persecuted any opposition that might arise in his country of Cuba. He has slaughtered innocents for 50 years, and his brother doesn't seem to be moving in any other direction but backing up Fidel.

Yet we have opened the doors now to Cuba. We are saying we are going to let tourists go down there. We are going to work with these people. Of course, we asked them if they would release the political prisoners down there, some of whom have been there forever, and President Obama thought that he heard Fidel Castro say yes, he thought we could work something out. But now they have come out and officially said they thought maybe the President misunderstood what Fidel said, so we didn't get anything out of that. But let's hope that maybe this will be good for us.

But I always have a problem that when you acknowledge tyranny and you legitimize tyranny, then how do you fight against tyranny? It is an interesting dilemma to be in as a leader.

We have got Hugo Chavez, who has been probably the biggest hater of this country since he came into power of anybody in my remembrance. I don't believe that the dictators of the Second World War that we fought against said as many bad things about the United States of America as Hugo Chavez has said.

He has written a book called ``Open Veins of Latin America,'' which is a venomous attack on the United States blaming every woe that Central and South America has ever had on the United States of America. I think he gave an autographed copy of that book to the President of the United States when he was there, and they shook hands in agreement, not about the book, I am sure, about acceptance of the book.

From a foreign policy standpoint, I don't think we laid a good foundation there, not a foundation of being the voice for freedom in the world. But then good men of good character can disagree, and I certainly think that the President of the United States disagrees with that position, and certainly he is an American citizen and is rightfully able to do so, just like I am.

When the President, when we had visitors here from Great Britain, it was about the time we sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to England, which was supposed to be a permanent gift to this country, but somehow it got sent back. The President met the Queen. He shook her hands with both hands, and then bowed to the leader of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah. The view of the world is just different from the heights that the President views it and from the lowly position here in Congress that we view it, at least from my standpoint.

That is enough to talk about the foreign policy. But the truth is we are trying to be open and we are trying to reach out to folks and we are asking them to let's all be friends, and hopefully we all will be.

If there is one thing that you have to look at this 100 days that the President has been President, that defines this 100 days more than any other thing, it is the new way we are going to handle an old problem that has been in the economic cycles of this country, that has been coming up for many, many years, and that is the idea of a recession and the possibility of a depression and how do you handle it.

The best guidance that some think we have ever had is the guidance that was given to us by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 and served the longest of any President of the United States, which brought about the limiting amendments that we have had that limited us to two terms for President. He served many more than two terms for President, but he served from 1932 until basically 1940 when the world and the whole subject matter of the world at that time was the Great Depression.

The Great Depression, however, got overshadowed by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War. So the periods as you define the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, you take the Great Depression, '32 to '40, and then the next phase in which the American soldier did an excellent job and the American President did an excellent job of defeating tyranny around the world.

I guess going back to a little bit of the history of the Great Depression, the interesting thing was that in 1932 the unemployment rate, and I am not good at getting figures, but it was double digits, somewhere in the 20s or 30s, something like 25 or 30 percent of the population was unemployed. In 1940, that same number was still unemployed. Yet we had gone on, we had adopted the Keynesian version of economics and we had leaped forward with the Keynesian version, and the biggest spending spree in the history of the country took place from 1932 to actually 1946.

But this administration has managed to have spent more than all of that and more than all the other Presidents combined in the first 100 days. Now, I don't want to be totally unfair, because part of that came at the tail-end of the Bush administration with the Democrat Congress, and so I don't think it is completely fair to lay all that off on President Obama. But the facts are just that the President's budget is going to create the largest single deficit a budget has ever created in the history of the Republic.

You know, one of the things that we discussed, there is a long debate, it was debated out pretty heavily in the Presidential election, was whether or not we were going to have earmarks. We still debate to this day in this Congress what is an earmark, is it good, is it bad. Everybody has got an opinion. We haven't resolved the issue. But the President said he would veto any bill that had an earmark in it, because he didn't believe in earmarks, and he is in a large crowd of people that continues to believe that way. And we have this debate on this floor, in committee, and elsewhere right now we have this debate. It goes on continuously. But the President did sign the omnibus spending bill, and he signed it with 9,000 earmarks in it. So as we look at this 100 days, we have got some promises, promises made and promises kept that we need to look at, and there is just a lot of different ways to view what is going on.

I will say this. I will tell you that the President has got as good a popularity rating as anybody that has ever held the office in the first 100 days, so I will give him absolute credit for that. He certainly knows how to be popular, and he is popular. But, you know, we had thousands of people take to the streets, I guess it was last weekend, the weekend before last, with the TEA parties, and although it was probably targeting the Congress as much as it was targeting anybody, but they were certainly not happy with the state of affairs in the United States.

We signed the stimulus bill with $787 billion. Obama's inauguration cost the taxpayers $49 million, which was triple the amount of money that was spent on the Bush administration's first inauguration. There is still a $50.5 million budget shortfall on the Democratic convention in Chicago. So spending has become something that identifies this Presidency; $1.5 trillion is this year's budget. Now we are looking at a new budget, $3.6 trillion. We talked about $1 trillion before on the floor of the House; $1 trillion is a stack of brand new $1,000 bills somewhere between 63 and 65 miles high. That is a whole lot of money, a whole lot of money.

So as we look at this 100 days, you can look at it in different ways. I will say this: The President has certainly kept his cool. He is an excellent speaker. He dazzles our allies and he makes people feel comfortable, and that is a lot that we need in this country.

My problem that I have with President Obama most of all is that I fear the kind of overwhelming expenditure that we have to deal with from the Obama administration. We are getting so far in debt that our great-great-grandchildren are going to have problems paying this bill.

I see I am joined by one of my colleagues, Kevin Brady. He is one of the people that I look up to in this building because he has always got good things to say. I will yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, the issue of bipartisanship is one that every American wants, including every American, I believe, in this House. But the facts are that you have situations where some things are just so diametrically opposed to what you stand for that there's no place you can go there.

When you're talking about bipartisanship, you've got to come in and try to move to a compromise middle position. Most of the legislation that we've seen in Congress in the first 100 days hasn't really even been vetted with the committee system. It just almost comes directly from the Speaker's Office to the floor. So we don't have any input into all that. To get bipartisanship you've got to sit down and talk things out, work things out. That's why we have committees. That's why we have the smaller units that discuss these things.

You know, I was on, when I was, my first term in Congress I served on the then called Education and Workforce, now it's called Education and Labor Committee. And we had a group of African American women, and mostly women, but a few men, mostly grandmothers, but a few mothers, who came to express their desire to make sure that the voucher program that had been created before I got here for the D.C. schools was kept in place because, and they testified over and over and over how it was saving the lives of their children and grandchildren; that it was allowing them to select the school of their choice, and to put an effort forward to excel and be a superior student, because they were able to have gotten into the lottery system to get one of these vouchers for 1,700 students as an experimental program.

But I had never, I've never been up here where I saw just ordinary folks come in and, I mean, I saw a grandmother stand up there and cry: Please don't take this program away. This program is saving my grandchild's life. Please don't take it away.

And we didn't.

But, unfortunately, the administration has eliminated that program. Now, this program was just what a bunch of poor people wanted. It's just a shame we couldn't expand that program so that we could do something about the failed D.C. school system, to make sure that good, hardworking kids, no matter where they live or what their circumstances in life are, would have a place to go to have a chance to have a better education. I don't understand that. I don't understand why that would happen. But it has to do with, something to do with politics.

But when you're talking about little kids and their chance to go to a safe school and their chance to learn something, and you have a program that's giving them that chance and every one of their supervising parents and grandparents are there saying it's the greatest thing that ever happened to us, why in the world would you take that little token thing away, when you're spending trillions of dollars on other things?

I will yield.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman for his comments. And let me say, so that everybody understands where I come from, when this all started, President Bush

was President of the United States. And we had a Treasury Secretary come running in here and say, oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, the sky is falling. I need you to give me three-quarters of a trillion dollars, roughly, and I need it now. Don't ask any questions. Trust me.

Well, when that all happened, I thought to myself, now, the folks in Round Rock and Georgetown, Texas, are pretty decent, hardworking, honest people. But I don't believe, if a guy came running into their place of business in a big hurry and said, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the world's going to hell, I just gotta have a couple hundred bucks. Give it to me. I'll pay you back. Trust me. I think they'd say, whoa, wait a minute. What do you need this $200 for in such a big hurry?

At least they'd say that: What are you going to do with it if I loan it to you, and I'm not going to get it back? That might be their best friend to whom they might be able to do that; but I believe any normal- thinking American would ask that kind of question.

We were talking about three-quarters of $1 trillion that he was asking for, and all he was saying was: Trust me. It's too complicated for you to understand. Trust me. So I voted against it because, quite frankly, I think that the man on the street manages his money with more commonsense than the Congress does in managing that money.

Now I hear this story from you, and you would know because you're on the Ways and Means Committee, which looks into these things. It shocks me to think that we are being told very clearly that the use of this money could be used for money laundering--that word jumps off the page--and they're not even doing it? Something is wrong. There's something wrong.

I've got friends who have arrived. My friend Phil Gingrey has arrived here from the great State of Georgia. He was the first one here, so let's let him talk a little bit about the first 100 days.

That's the word. That's the word.

Reclaiming my time, I thank my friend from Georgia. That's exactly what I was talking earlier about. It's easy to talk about bipartisanship, but when you just really believe the policy is wrong, that it's the wrong policy at the wrong time and for the wrong purpose, how can you work in a bipartisan manner on something like this cap-and-tax system that's being proposed by the majority?

I mean, I'm going to tell you: unless I just don't understand it--and I'm not saying there's not a chance I might not understand it--but it seems to me that if your purpose is to keep people from putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you've got a plant over here that's pouring out carbon dioxide and you've got a plant over here that's clean and that's saving carbon dioxide and planting 1,000 trees, then you say, well, this guy can loan to this guy some of his cleanness, and this guy will be in compliance, but, hey, he's still putting the stuff in the air. So how does that do anything?

Oh, by the way, there's a tax that goes with this that's estimated to raise about $1.5 trillion for the United States, a brand-new tax. Well, that's okay. That tax is going to be on the big oil companies and on the utility companies and all of those people. That's okay. Who cares about them. Do you think those people pay that tax? Go down and get out last month's utility bill. Open it up, and see whose name is on it. Then see what they tell you you've got to pay, and look at the bottom line, and see what it is, and write it down someplace because it's going up, and it's going up by the amount of that tax if they pass this bill. So it is a new way to tax Americans. Believe me, that bill is not going to say, oops, you're middle class, so we're not going to put it on your bill. It's not going to

say that. Oops, you're poor, so we're not going to put it on your bill. It's only going to go on the rich people's bills. It's not going to say that. It's going to be on everybody's utility bill and on everybody's gasoline bill and on everybody's fuel bill. It's all going up by the amount of that tax, and you, the American people, are going to pay this.

We--my friend Mr. Westmoreland and my friend Mrs. Bachmann--we're all going to pay this.

I'd better recognize Mrs. Bachmann. She's one of the bright lights of this conference. We're glad to have her with us.

Mrs. Bachmann, I will yield to you such amount of time you wish to consume.

Reclaiming my time for a couple of other facts.

It's so nice to have people that are on Financial Services and Ways and Means come in here because you get to see so much more of this stuff than we do. And we're supposed to be seeing it in Appropriations, but when it comes to spending, they sort of bypass Appropriations most of the time when it comes to spending.

The 10 days before President Obama was inaugurated, he said there were two different economic scenarios that were coming down the pike, and one was good and one was bad. The good one was the passing of the stimulus bill. The bad one was doing nothing. He said that if we did not pass the stimulus bill, that unemployment rate would go above 8 percent; but if we passed the stimulus bill, we wouldn't see 8 percent unemployment at any time until 2014.

Today, unemployment is 8.5 percent going on 9.

And in addition to the spending we're spending, the Fed is printing trillions of dollars into the economy.

That's what they're trying to do.

But the reality is our spending is not working, and now the worry we have to be worried about is the fact that we may be looking at inflation, maybe 10 percent a year. Now, young people who have lived through the last--grown up since the 1990s, which would fit a great deal of the young people that are out there today, they really don't know what we're talking about when we say ``runaway inflation.'' They really don't get it.

They didn't live through the Jimmy Carter times.

But when you see your paycheck, you get a paycheck and you realize that your dollar gets--in a year gets worth 10 percent less, and the next year 10 percent less again, and just like interest compounds, so does inflation.

So if it would have cost you $1 to buy this clip when you first started, it will end up costing you $2 to buy that clip--it's the same clip--because inflation is running away.

President Obama promised the people at Caterpillar that if the stimulus bill passed, they would start hiring soon. The reality is they started laying off again because it wasn't the solution to the problem.

I have got another friend that's here to join us, Mr. Westmoreland from the great State of Georgia, and I am going to yield him so much time as he may wish to consume.

Amen.

I thank you. Those were wonderful comments.

You know, when you were talking about bipartisanship, I wanted to point out to you that you had it exactly right. It seems that bipartisanship means ``do what we say.'' You know, the worst demonstration of wanting to be bipartisan occurred in February when it was announced that the 2010 census would be moved out of the Department of Commerce and into the White House to politicize the accounting of the American public.

Now, why would I worry about that? Well, because we, Members of Congress, are the branch of this government that is represented by a number of people. We have a number of people that we represent. And we divide the population of this country by a number that is expected to be somewhere around 800,000-850,000 people, I understand it, after the next census. And then that decides how many congressmen and -women we get from each State.

This has always been done by independent people as nonpartisan as possible because the count matters. And so say you're moving it out of the department that it has been in and into the White House, there is nothing bipartisan about that. Absolutely nothing. The center of the universe of one party is the White House.

Mr. Speaker, this past work period that I was home, I visited with some folks with Sallie Mae and Texas Guaranteed Loans. These are two private programs that have been providing student loans for our students in Texas and for the rest of the country. Over 80 percent of the students chose a private lender as their choice to finance their school program. But now, the Democratic party is, by their action, forcing us into a government-only program. And I looked into a room that a year and a half ago was full of hundreds of people, it now stands empty, not because of a recession but because of the action of the Federal Government as led by the Democratic majority.

It is a shame not to give the choice to our students, and when they make that choice, they choose private industry to the tune of 80 percent. This is estimated to cost 30,000 jobs in the Nation this year. And I don't have a problem with jobs in my district unless the government takes those jobs away. This is a shame. I think they should apologize to those hardworking people, most of whom are spouses of fighting soldiers.

I thank my friend for yielding.

I'm proud to join my colleagues in speaking up against this horrendous amount of spending that's going on in the country today, and it's all done by the Obama administration. They're calling it ``stimulus,'' they're calling it ``save the economy,'' all these things. But I just got back from a trip where I was meeting with some parliamentarians from the European Union. And, you know, I will admit, I will confess that I viewed the European Union--my wife is from Europe. In my experience, the fact that my wife is from Holland, we have visited Europe on many occasions, and I really thought they were much more towards the socialist side of the calendar and that their ideas were much more leaning to the left. And then I went to listen to these folks talk about what they called an economic stimulus package in the EU and what they were calling upon their member countries to do for economic stimulus. And, amazingly enough, it was exactly what the Republicans have been saying we should do to have an economic stimulus. And that is cut taxes, especially on those categories of people that create jobs like employers and business taxes, and cut spending.

Actually that's just it. I wouldn't, after having these conversations, classify them as socialist nearly as much as I might classify the administration we are dealing with today as socialist because their ideas are more that we've got to let the free market work; so we are, meaning the Europeans, cutting taxes, we are cutting spending.

Then, amazingly enough, I think this should be a surprise to everybody: The United States of America could not join the European Union if they wanted to. Why couldn't they? Because our debt ratio is too high. And it's going higher.

That's right. They have no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product and we're bumping up against 6 with the Obama plan here.

When we saw voodoo accounting in the Enron case, look what it has done to accounting principles and to accounting firms. That makes no sense, but then there is a lot of this thing that doesn't make an awful lot of sense. That surprises me, but it's kind of the old shell game. Look under this shell. Now, which way is it going? Which way is it going? There it is. We gave it to you. No, wait, what is this? That's what this whole thing is about.

If I may answer, of course, the stuff above the line, the surplus, is a little different. But on the below-the-line side, it's clearly the last four lines because there's this one gigantic line which looks like it's this year and then every year thereafter is bigger than the other lines all the way going back to 1990 or something. What year is that?

So basically the last four lines are bigger than anything that we've seen since 1980.

If the gentleman would yield.

It is certainly enough of a percentage of our gross domestic product that if we were a nation trying to join the European Union, we would be above their joining point.

I was in Estonia, which is protected by NATO but wants to join the EU, and their problem is they are 1 percentage point above 3 percent of their gross domestic product. So they're cutting programs and reducing taxes because they've learned they get more revenue that way so that they can get to the point that they will be able to be admitted to the European Union. It's embarrassing that Estonia is doing better on debt than the United States of America.

This spending and this debt record, I am sitting here thinking and contemplating while you all were talking, my children haven't rewarded me with any grandchildren yet, but they will. They don't even come close to taking care of this while my grandchildren are alive. We are talking about my great-grandchildren. In fact, there are people that estimate with the amount of interest that we will have to bear on this debt, that this goes on for generations not even conceived of today. It could be generation after generation after generation.

When you take what we already considered a troublesome debt of $5.8 trillion, there was an amazing amount of criticism of the Republican administration under George Bush when that number popped up. Of course, they blamed it all on George Bush. He did certainly increase it, but I am not here to go into that. But that number seemed to concern the Democratic now-majority quite a bit when they were in the minority.

But their President, the new President, Barack Obama, our new President, $8.7 trillion on top of $5.8 trillion, and this means that that number that we were talking about could be the downfall of humanity is now almost tripled. People have to just realize what is happening.

None.

By the way, I didn't support that first one either, or the one before that.

Not one.

If the gentleman will yield, let's not forget all the taxes you just rattled off, who is really going to pay those taxes? They are going to be put in the price of goods and services that are provided, and then those goods and services are going to go to the American people. So they are going to wake up in the morning and they are going to get delivered to their house this month's electricity bill, and, holy cow, where did all this come from? Everybody in America. It is not going to discriminate on whose bill is going to go if you are making $250,000 a year. No. It is going to every American that is burning electricity, every American that is consuming gas, if they have natural gas in their home.

The American public is going to pay the price. And this cost that we have added to the manufacturers or to the retailers, these small business owners, they are going to put that on the price of their goods and services, and guess who is going to pay that? The people that need and purchase the goods and services. So the price of shirts and suits and shoes and T-shirts and baseball gloves and all of the things we want for our family are going up by the cost of that carbon tax, which that means who is paying the tax? The American people. All of the American people.

And they are taxing energy. If you look at that map, you see that the energy-producing States, right now I am from Texas, my neighbors Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico are all energy-producing States, as is Mississippi to some extent, until you get over to the blackout area around Florida on the coastal offshore productions.

And so we're looking at those States that everybody's been calling, you know, the evil monsters of the oil and gas industry, that that's who we're going to get even with. The tax burden on those States is going to be less than the tax burden on our Midwestern States and some of our Southern States. This has been conceived with a program of attacking people that you can--it's easy, they think it's easy to get mad at. And the reality is this is going to hurt the very people that they're calling upon to get mad. It's going to hurt the Midwest and the Southern States. It's embarrassing how much the public is being fooled by this particular tax. This is just the beginning. We're talking about carbon, not necessarily energy. There will come a time when we figure out other carbon producers that we will tax.

Well, I'm very sad to say that, to learn that Debt Day, the day we don't have any money that we raise from taxes, is my daughter's birthday. I wish her a happy birthday. But, quite frankly it's coming up this weekend. And you know, it's mind boggling that taxes are paid on the 15th, and basically we'll have spent all the money that we've gotten from tax revenues by the 26th. That's spending some money, folks. That's doing it better than anybody's ever done it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you for recognizing me for this hour. I'm very pleased to be here.

I'm here to talk about a subject that, I think, is very interesting, and I don't think the American people have really gotten their hands on this subject yet, but it's also extremely concerning. It really concerns me a great deal.

I happen to serve on the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security. We have spent an awful lot of time and an awful lot of effort trying to make sure that we keep our country safe from clearly identified terrorists who, if you have any question of do they mean us harm, then just look back at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and then ask yourself: Do they mean us harm?

We have been diligently trying to defend our borders, diligently trying to stop terrorism and trying to catch it before it gets here and trying to deal with these people who have identified themselves and who have told everyone publicly they're here to hurt us. Now we have a new administration, and we have a new memo that has come out from Ms. Napolitano over at the Department of Homeland Security. It would just shock you to know that she is warning not of al Qaeda, not of the Taliban, not of Osama bin Laden. She is warning people about right-wing radical domestic terrorism.

Now, this would be almost humorous, but those of us who have a little age on us, like I do, can think back to the Clinton administration and can remember how many times when anybody ever criticized the Clinton administration you would hear the First Lady then and now Secretary of State say, ``Well, it's all a plot by those right-wing extremists, those right-wing extremist organizations.'' President Bill Clinton would say, ``Well, they don't agree with my party and with what we're saying here, but it's really the people you're hearing from who are right-wing extremists.'' They label talk show hosts as right-wing extremists. All this fear was generated about right-wing extremists. Now we're not even 6 months into the Obama administration, and the people who are supposed to be protecting our homeland are warning us against right-wing extremists.

This is the intelligence briefing right here. Now, I'm not trying to be mean about all of this. I'm just trying to tell you what they tell me is a right-wing extremist. I just took the things that they tell people who fall into that category, and then I put those classifications in with a poll that we did to identify the nature of my congressional district. Believe it or not, based upon accurate polling data that has been done in my district, 81 percent of the registered voters in my congressional district would qualify as right-wing extremists under Ms. Napolitano's memo--81 percent. They're probably going to come up with a category to cover the other 19 percent. I'm not being facetious about this. I happen to have Fort Hood, Texas in my district. Fort Hood, Texas is the largest military base on the face of the Earth. It has two field divisions of the corps headquarters.

One of the things they tell us in this report is very sad in light of what our Army has been going through, which is to watch out for returning, disgruntled military veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan in that they have the potential to be right-wing terrorists. These young men and women, some of whom have done four and five deployments overseas, some of those deployments for as much as 15 months, have served our Nation as heroes, as the next great generation, and our government is labeling them: At the time they finish their service, we should consider them potential right-wing extremists and terrorists. They are defining them as people the government had better keep an eye on. Veterans who have served in other wars are in here. They classify them as right-wing extremists.

Are you opposed to abortion? It says right here at the bottom of this page: ``It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.''

It's just shocking. It basically says, if you disagree with the Obama administration, you could be a right-wing terrorist. Now, I hate to say that. It talks about people who believe in the right to keep and bear arms: right-wing terrorists. It talks about people who disagree with the stimulus package: right-wing terrorists. It talks about people who disagree with the economic path of recovery that this Nation is taking: potential right-wing terrorists. This is what this report says. I'm sure it's available. It's unclassified. It's for official use. We got it off the Internet. There's more, a lot more.

I have friends here who have joined me on this shocking thing that's going on in this country. I'm going to start with my good friend, Virginia Foxx, who was with us here in the last hour, and I'm very pleased to have her again.

I'll yield to her what time she may need to consume.

I thank the gentlelady for her excellent comments on what we're dealing with here.

You know, I think these--every kid that ever graduated from high school and took, whether they call it civics now or whether they call it government, and just had a brief study of the Constitution, knows that every single provision of the United States Constitution is equal and that these amendments have a purpose. They define what is our governing body. Remember, every person elected in this Congress and every person who serves in the Federal Government and every person who serves in the State government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, all parts of the Constitution.

The 10th amendment, the part that says all those things that are not specifically given to the Federal Government or aren't specifically excluded from the State government, those powers belong to the States.

Now, to say that because a person believes that they ought to support what is written in the Constitution in the 10th amendment, that makes them a right-wing radical, then does somebody who thinks they ought to be able to--that we should support the right of free speech in the First Amendment, does that make you a right-wing radical? Does supporting any amendment or

any provision of the Constitution make you a right-wing radical?

I had one of my friends today say to me, They are radicalizing the war. If you are a right-wing radical because you're opposed to abortion and you're passionate on that issue, then does that make you a left- wing radical if you favor abortion and are passionate on that issue? If you are a right-wing radical if you believe that our Constitution clearly says that our citizenry has the right to keep and bear arms, do you become a left-wing radical when you believe that the government should regulate and take away the right to keep and bear arms?

I mean, at what point does disagreement on issues make you a radical?

I see the gentlelady from Minnesota, Mrs. Bachmann, has risen to speak on this issue, and I will yield her such time as she may wish to consume.

If I could reclaim my time to point out to the gentlelady what we've got in this definition that I have got on this board right here. And it says, ``right-wing extremism,'' I like this right here where it says ``those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting Federal authority in favor of State and local authority.

Then, if I understood what the TEA parties were all about, the TEA parties were all about all of these millions of people that came out to express their right to free speech and to demonstrate and to step up and petition their government and say, ``You know what? We don't like what the Federal Government is doing. We don't like the way you're taxing. We don't like the way you're spending.'' Guess what? The Obama administration just classified them as right-wing extremists, terrorists.

Now, if the gentlelady needs to conclude her remarks and then--or maybe

I will let Mr. Brady take over and then we will come back to you.

Kevin Brady, my good friend from Texas. I will yield you as much time as you need.

Not really.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, and my good friend, very much for his comments. As you were saying that, you know, I had to think, if you are first classifying people who disagree with you as terrorists, or dangerous, then the next step is dealing with those people. The next step may be, we'll read headlines like this, ``Venezuelan Government arrests Chavez opponent.'' ``Equatorial Guinea: Arrest and torture of political opponents.'' ``Zimbabwe arrests opposition leaders.'' ``Britain tells Pakistan Government don't arrest political opponents.'' ``Obama administration issues warning over right-wing extremists.'' What is the next headline going to say? I am not trying to be a scare factor, but when you start classifying ordinary Americans who disagree with you as an extremist, we have to be concerned.

I am not going to change my position on State's rights and the right of our States under our Constitution. I am not going to change my position on abortion. I am not going to change my position on the right to keep and bear arms. And if I have to go to prison for it, I am going to do it because that is what our Founding Fathers would have done. And that is where we have got to be.

I yield back to Mrs. Bachmann.

Reclaiming my time, I am going to yield just briefly to Mr. Brady.

Reclaiming my time for a moment, the other thing that is very offensive to me--and I think it should be very offensive to every American--is that this report, when you read it--and we haven't even touched it, but I am going to tell you I am going to touch it right now--almost every paragraph begins, ``Due to the election of an African American President.'' They are lumping everyone who disagrees politically with them, they are lumping them all into a racist category. And that is offensive to me. That should be offensive to every single free American that breathes a breath on this soil because disagreeing with your government does not make you a racist against electing an African American. With all that we have done and this great victory of an African American President that everybody recognizes as a turning point in the history of America, and then to say, but anyone that disagrees with anything he says or anything he does or anything anybody under his auspices does is a racist and a domestic terrorist?

I agree with the gentlelady from Minnesota; it is time to talk seriously about who is in charge of the new Obama department that we have got that is supposed to be protecting our Nation, Homeland Security.

I have my very good friend and colleague, one of my classmates, and a very intelligent gentleman, Mr. Burgess from Texas, who has been my buddy since we got here, and I am glad to yield the time he needs.

I thank my good friend for his comments. Let me read something just for a moment from this report, let me read something. As we recall, we have had a lot of discussion on this floor by our friends on the other side of the aisle, the Democrats, about some of the things that they are concerned about in manufacturing.

Let me read you another definition of right-wing extremists. ``Right- wing extremist views bemoan the decline of the U.S. stature and have recently focused on themes such as U.S. manufacturing capability going to China and India. Russian control of interview resources and the use of these to pressure other countries, and China's investment in the United States real estate and corporations, are part of the subversive strategy.''

Wait a minute, we have been arguing on the floor of this House with Democrats bemoaning China taking jobs away from the manufacturing industry. Good Lord, they are domestic terrorists. Good Lord, you know, I am pretty dad gum mad about this, and I agree with my colleagues.

Mr. President, fire that woman. Ms. Napolitano, this is inexcusable to go on television and say, your apology would be, ``I am sorry you were offended by this report.

That's no apology. That's saying I am sorry, you have got a chance to read it, and know what our plans were for you in the future.

Mr. President, respectfully, this woman deserves firing. I think it's time we act.

I yield to my friend from Minnesota.

You know, I am just reading some more of our report, it just continues to be more and more offensive.

The category where this provision comes from, talking about right- wing extremists being our returning veterans, some examples given, after Operation Desert Shield/Storm 1990-1991, some returning military veterans, including Timothy McVeigh, joined and associated with right- wing extremist groups.

Yes, maybe Timothy McVeigh did, but the veterans that Mike Burgess just read about, they didn't. Okay? They served their Nation, and they have left the military service and have been good citizens of his congressional district, and yet they lumped them with Timothy McVeigh.

Another one says, a prominent civil rights organization report, without telling us who they are, ``that large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the United States Armed Forces.''

That is so insulting, it's beyond belief, it's beyond belief. It is condemning every bit of our Armed Forces.

So basically they are there. We are not sure who they are. Watch them all. Watch they all. They have got a uniform on. If it says Iraq or Afghanistan or has that American flag, keep an eye on those guys. They might shave their head when they get home and be a skin head. What kind of paranoia is this? It's just beyond belief that there is this kind of thought processes beginning this term of an American President, someone he put in this position.

That's exactly right. This is his responsibility. He chose to be our leader, he needs to lead on this issue.

It is absolutely inexcusable to let a head of a major department, whose purpose is to protect the innocent of this country, to accuse possibly 80 percent of Americans of being right-wing extremists.

I do too.

What was the exact term that you said that he was calling those that are outside the country, rather than terrorists? Now Ms. Napolitano calls them something nebulous.

So a person who believes in an interpretation of the Book of Revelations in the Bible is, by her definition, labeled as a terrorist.

But a man who, live on television, on videotape, cuts another man's head off on television in the name of another religion is a what?

Man-caused disaster.

Before we finish here, because we are about to run out of time, I want to say something else. When we are talking about immigration, we are not talking about people who come to this country legally.

We are not talking about people who came here illegally and meet their obligation to the country, get in line and become good American citizens.

We are talking about people who break this law in this country. We all, every one of us support immigration, good legal immigration in this country, because that's who we are. Every one of us, unless we are an American, a Native American is an illegal immigrant.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 23, 2009, at 10 a.m.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Actually I have been listening to what you have got to say, and I think it is a really interesting concept, but it is not one we haven't seen before.

When I first came to this Congress when the Republicans were in the majority, I happened to be on the Education and Workforce Committee, and No Child Left Behind, everybody was screaming they would need more money. I don't remember the funding numbers, but they were something like $8 billion. So we decided we would accelerate that to $10 billion because it was needed.

The minority offered an amendment to make it $15 billion and then put out a press release that said, ``Republicans cut No Child Left Behind $5 billion.'' And they never changed it. And I kept saying, Wait a minute. That's not right. We raised it $2 billion.

But from their proposal--which is the right proposal--if you look at this over here, I mean, it is pretty obvious in those out-years, that line is half as big as this big line. It is actually less than half as big, if you look at this. Nobody is lying right here. I cut this line more than half. Of course, it exceeds this line and far exceeds this line and far exceeds this line.

So to say before you propose a budget, you're going to cut the spending in half, and then you say but first I am going to jack it up 2\1/2\ times and I am going to raise it down to this level. Nobody is telling a story. It's half this.

But this is the record of all-time spending in the history of the Republic.

It is not half of this, which is the Democratic Congress with Bush, or half of this, the Republican Congress with Bush. But it's half of this, which is President Obama with a Democrat Congress. I think that's an interesting concept.

I was thinking as you all were talking, these numbers will glaze over the eyes of almost anybody listening to them because there is such a tremendous amount of money that people just kind of go, whoa, this is more than I can think about. And I think that could happen.

There's been several examples that have been coming out. Recently I saw one in either Roll Call or The Hill, just the day before yesterday, where they were talking about if you spent a dollar a second, that 32,000 years from now you would have spent $1 trillion.

Yes. Thirty-two thousand years from now you'd spend $1 trillion.

It's a number that shakes the imagination.

But there is more in this budget that we ought to be talking about that I think and I want to suggest, do you have information about this carbon tax?

Let's talk about the carbon tax because I think that's something that people can relate to.

If you look at that, divide that $3,100 by 12, it's, what--I am not a mathematician--about $300.

A $300-a-month increase in your fuel bill.

Now, the way to remember all of this, when you think of this national energy tax that they are proposing, is from now until we get through with this debate, every time you turn off a light or turn on a light, realize that you have increased out of your pocket probably 50 cents. Every time you turn one on and maybe if you turn it off you're saving 50 cents.

But the bottom line is about $300 a month, next month, if this tax were to go into effect, would be coming out of your pocket. Okay. It wouldn't be something you did. And the real issue is more important because let me point out, and I pointed this out the other night.

Everything in this room was brought to you by a truck, including the clothes on your back and the food that you ate for lunch. And that truck ran on diesel, and diesel is going to be taxed. Therefore, that tax is going to be passed on to who? The consumer.

So everything in here is going to go up by a percentage.

Or the wood or the plumbing or the cement or the carpet or the clothing or the food you eat.

Just the transportation costs are going to go up.

People need to realize if it's raising your heating bill and air- conditioning bill $300 a month, then some percent of everything else you're going to have is going up in value and cost.

And coal.

If the gentleman would yield for just a moment, in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, I saw an article about Germany, and Germany has had a cap-and-tax procedure over there now for 5 years. I believe that's what the article said.

Well, according to the scientists, they actually are putting more carbon in the air and in the atmosphere since they put the cap-and-trade proceedings in because those

companies that were dirty could just pay the tax and continue to be dirty. If you have got a dirty plant that's putting carbon dioxide, if it's bad, into the atmosphere and they say, well, fine, how much is the tax, here's the tax, I will pass it on to my customers down here that are buying my product, does that keep this stuff from going into the air? No. It's still there in the air.

It doesn't make sense. And the other thing is, at least some people who are very zealous on this theory say we're going to tax everything that produces carbon, and my thoughts were, we've been sitting here breathing now for 30 minutes, and every time we breathe out, we breathe out carbon. So are we going to have a little monitor that sits right here that monitors how much carbon we breathe as we go through the day?

It's ridiculous to talk about taxing something like that if it's not preventing the situation. You're right, nuclear is a major solution to big power. I'm all for alternative vehicles, and they will be a solution at some time that will help a lot and let's do it. But we don't have an electrical engine big enough to pull a big load down the highway unless it's a ship engine which is as big as this room.

So we've got to be practical about this stuff and say, all energy sources, let's clean them up, make them as good as we can, but let's continue to thrive by being the most productive place on the face of the globe.

If the gentleman yield, here's not a ``no'' issue on the CO2 but an opportunity. We right now know that we can recapture oil in played out oil fields by charging those oil fields with, guess what, CO2. So there's an industry out there for capturing CO2 and charging oil fields with it. Louisiana knows about it, Texas knows about it, and so does the rest of the world.

That means if you put together a plant that captures the CO2, rather than paying a tax so you release it in the atmosphere, and then you take it and put it in trucks and take it down there and put it in the oil fields, you actually produce more of the oil and gas energy that's in the ground, and the CO2 is in the ground. That will actually keep CO2 out of the environment.

I'm glad you made that point. What makes America great is the giving of the opportunity to succeed. The parents right now that are sending their children off to college and times are tight. Now they're not throwing money out the window for other projects. They're not going out and buying five flat screen TVs as a good idea to make things better for themselves. No. They're saving that money. They're cutting those costs. They're not eating out every night. They're doing these things so that they can do the projects that they want to do, which is send their kids to college.

That's normal budgeting. What we're doing here, what the President's proposing is not commonsense budgeting. It's voodoo economics.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I enjoyed visiting with my neighbors and talking in the previous hour. They are welcome to join me if they would like to talk some more.

I'm going to be joined here in a minute by a good colleague of mine, Louie Gohmert, a Congressman from east Texas, and we are going to talk about an idea that Louie has got. It's an idea that an awful lot of people find interesting. It's the idea that maybe the easiest way in the world to get money in the hands of the American people is to just give them their own money.

It's not real complicated. It's pretty simple. But I want to let him talk to you about it because the option that we've got right now is that as we look at that stimulus package that was supposed to stimulate the economy, and if you look closely at it--and I don't want anybody to take my word for it. I want you to go to the library or on the Internet and pull either a review of that bill, or that bill, and look into it and see how the money is spent. And you will see that it's spent on industries that don't exist, but maybe they can make them exist. It's spent on things that people wish existed, and maybe they can exist. But they are investing in those things.

Maybe they won't create jobs over the next 5 years, but maybe they will create jobs in the next 10 years. That's great, except that stimulus is supposed to be about now. It's supposed to be about doing it right now. If you believe that the economy gets saved by spending money, you need to spend the money now to stimulate the economy. If you're not, then you're putting off the rescue that you anticipate.

I would argue, however, that government spending was tried very extensively from 1931 until 1941, and the unemployment in 1939, according to the Secretary of the Treasury at the time, was the same as it had been in 1931. In that 10-year period, the largest expenditures in the history of the Republic at the time--we're fixing to top those tomorrow--but at the time had been spent, and we had not gotten out of what is called the Great Depression.

I want to make a point, too, that what Todd said in the other hour that I think is important that you hear. I want to tell you because I believe it's important that anybody that stands up here, confess your own sins.

We as a Congress cut taxes, but we failed to cut spending. We deserve to be told by the voters that we didn't do it. And they did. They told us. The Democratic Party said: We'll do it better. And they hired them to do the job.

But the key is both formulas cut taxes and cut spending and the economy will blossom. It has and it will. And it always has and always will. That's what the message is about.

People say, Well, that's the same old thing. I'm sorry, but let's be honest. Let's look at the last 8 years and then look at any time in the history of the country where you were involved in two major wars, came in with a recession, and had the largest single weather disaster in the history of the Republic in an 8-year period, and yet the economy after the first three quarters grew every quarter up until the last quarter of the Bush administration. This is what you look at to say: Are we in a recession or are we not in a recession? Are we growing? We were always growing. We are not growing now. Nobody's anticipating we're going to grow for the rest of this year, although some say maybe around Christmas Santa Claus is going to bring us some growth. And maybe he is. But I have my doubts.

My friend Louie Gohmert, who should be here in a few minutes, has basically said, You know, if you want to stimulate the economy, there's an easy way to do it. Let's just give people a tax holiday. Just tell them for a couple of months, You don't have to pay taxes. You get your full paycheck. You know what? That might just be the solution.

So I'm looking forward to Louie talking about this tax holiday. In the meantime, let's talk about the budget just a little bit and what we're looking at.

I see that one of my classmates is here, all dressed up and looking dapper.

Doctor, would you like to let me yield you a little bit of time to say a couple of things?

Dr. Phil Gingrey.

Reclaiming my time, it's pretty amazing because I got an e-mail from a very good friend of mine, a very good businessman, John Avery back in my district, basically saying exactly the same thing. He said it would be criminal for the people who put us in this position to able to put 5 percent down and get 50 percent of the profits from buying up these assets. It would be criminal. And I happen to agree with him.

I actually think you have put forward a good plan--a place where those who have seen their 401(k)s go to 201(k)s, as we like to joke, that they be able to invest in people who would offer a group--but become involved in buying these at 5 percent down and 50 percent of the profits, these bad assets.

But don't let the guys that put us here get out of the mess and make 50 percent of the profit for a 5 percent investment. As my friend from back home said, it is criminal. And I agree with you, I think that may be part of what the plan is. And it frightens me with this bonus money we have already battled with that someone would plan a $1 trillion expenditure of our Federal funds that basically is going to prop up the very guys that put us in this mess.

I am going to yield some time to another good Georgian, Dr. Broun, to take as much time as he chooses to use.

Reclaiming my time, if I may. Actually, I agree with everything you have to say.

And the real point here is that the American people have common sense. We talk about all of this budgetary language here. If we are honest, it is confusing to us, and it is certainly confusing to the American people. But they understand that when they have a budget shortfall in their budget back home, they have either got to make more money, work harder and make more money, or they are going to have to save. And if they don't have the opportunity to make more money, they are going to have to cut back on something.

Like I said a minute ago, you know, I have talked to people who say, I am sending my kid to a State school in Texas, which we are very blessed to have. They are expensive, but they are still reasonable, State schools. And, I have found that if my wife and I will just cut out buying our lunch every day at work and just take a sack lunch from home, we have got almost enough money to pay the tuition. We save almost enough money to pay the tuition.

So the American people know how to budget. They know how to look at what they have got and what they have got to get, and figure out a way to make it work.

So Dr. Gingrey's suggestion, which happens to be a suggestion of one of my constituents, too, is an outstanding suggestion because it basically makes sense. Sure as heck, if somebody puts the country at risk by their poor decisions on investing, then certainly don't let them get the benefit of a government program spending $1 trillion worth of taxpayers' money by letting them bail themselves out with a 5 percent investment. I agree with that. That is perfectly good common sense. And I think every American in America would say, I don't want those guys that created these bad assets to be able to pay 5 percent of the value that they are going to set, understand that, and then get 50 percent of the profits when they clean up those assets and sell them. And that is what is available potentially under the plan that has been put forward by Secretary Geithner.

Now, if he will step up, and I think we owe a duty now to tell him the American people don't want that, so that he can make rules that say all you guys that bought all these bad assets, don't you come in here with your 5 percent and try to bail this deal out. We have other people who want to invest in it. And then a great idea would be let people who lost on their 401(k)s join investment pools and maybe invest in some of these that might make them good money. A 50 percent return on a 5 percent investment is not a bad deal.

Yes, I will.

Reclaiming my time. I think we have made an excellent point here, as we both talked about; we came here because our good friend Louie Gohmert, my colleague from Texas, has a proposal that deserves to be heard. And so I am going to yield such time as my good friend Louie Gohmert may choose to use tonight, and I will just be here to try to help.

I have been on the floor of this House talking about the fact that we need to resolve some ethics problems that are out there so that we can be sure that we feel comfortable trusting people that are making decisions around here. And then when my friend, Brother Gohmert, talked to me about his tax holiday, I realized that I've been talking about two tax holidays now for a month. Mr. Rangel took a tax holiday for $10,800 for 20 years. He didn't pay his taxes on his Dominican Republic rentals for 20 years. He took a tax holiday. And then when he finally ended up paying them, he didn't pay any penalty or any interest. So that's a tax holiday.

Reclaiming my time for just 1 minute.

That has been my exact point. And that is why I introduced legislation to put forward the Rangel Rule. And the Rangel Rule is very simple. Everybody that owes taxes that doesn't want to pay penalty and interest, just write at the bottom of your tax form ``exercising the Rangel Rule,'' and the IRS won't be able to charge you penalties and interest. They will have to treat you just like Mr. Rangel. I thought that was fair. And I thought I was being reasonable about that.

Then we have the Secretary of the Treasury come along, and he took a 4-year tax holiday on $43,200. Although he did pay some interest, he still hasn't had any penalty assessed against him either. So I guess we could change it to the Rangel-Geithner tax holiday or the Rangel- Geithner Rule. But I just kind of like Rangel Rule. It has a nice ring to it.

Reclaiming my time, you can certainly sign on to my Rangel Rule bill, and we are going to try to get that thing before this Congress, and we are going to start getting pretty serious about getting it done.

And I thank you.

We have got here, what's really interesting is when the IRS gives you the money to pay the taxes, and gives you a form that tells you you owe the taxes, and says, now here is the check, you're responsible for your own taxes, be sure and pay them, and you sign that form agreeing to pay them, and then you say, it was only $42,000, and I just forgot. I mean, that is kind of what like our friend, Mr. Martin, said.

We make a little bit light of this, and we do that because, quite frankly, I don't want to be accused of being mean-spirited. But the facts are that we want people that are giving us ideas to save us from what could be an economic disaster. We want them to speak openly and honestly and come from a situation that we can trust them. And my whole issue that I have been raising are these issues of trust. I am not doing what has been done in the past and accusing people of being corrupt and that type of thing. I am not doing that.

I am pointing out accusations made by other people. And I'm saying that these accusations need to be resolved so the American people can trust the folks they are counting on to fix this economy. And the head of the tax committee of the House of Representatives, they need to be confident they can trust him. Our Ethics Committee needs to finish the investigation and get that done. And if he is exonerated, wonderful. But the American people have the right to know. The Americans have the right to know, can they trust the Secretary of the Treasury when he doesn't pay his taxes and he says, ``TurboTax messed up''?

First off, I kind of thought he was in a pay grade a little higher than TurboTax. But the point is, it's about trust. It is about the American people trusting the people they send here. That is why I continue to come up here every week and talk about these issues of lapse of memory or whatever it may be, and they need to be resolved by a finder of fact, whoever that may be, to resolve this issue.

Let me yield to my friend from Georgia for a moment.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank you for those comments. Now I'd like to yield so much time as he chooses to consume again to my friend, Louie Gohmert from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I thank Judge Gohmert, Congressman Gohmert, for a really heartfelt explanation of why he is trying to come up with alternative ideas. It's the same reason that Dr. Broun and I are trying to come up with alternative ideas. We just see this phenomenal number that is looming on the horizon of expenditures, and we can't help but be just absolutely scared to death as to what it means for our grandchildren. I don't have any right now, but, by golly, I plan to, and I want to make sure that when I do, that I'm not leaving them $100,000 a person debt, which is something that at least one of the pundits has said, that when they finish with this, every American's portion of the debt will be over $100,000. That's today, without any interest stacking up on it. What's it going to be for our grandchildren and our great grandchildren? Because, believe me, the kind of numbers that they, the Obama administration, is putting forward in 60 days, they've done almost $3 trillion. There's another trillion on the drawing board that we just heard about that we're going to bring out of the Fed, which is ultimately still got to be paid back. We're not even looking at the numbers that are over in the Fed. And then we've got a $3.6 trillion budget proposed, which supposedly is going to be crammed down our throats next week, without much participation on the side of the minority.

So, yeah, we're worried. And yeah, that's one of the reasons that I come up here every week and talk about it's time for us to resolve these issues of trust. And I want to make it very clear, I sat here, when we were in the majority, in the chair that the Speaker's in sitting here tonight, and heard the term ``corruption'' used to every member of the Republican Party every single night. And I'll tell you, there were some people that deserved it. But the vast majority of the people didn't. And those issues got resolved, and they got it resolved in the Court and they got it resolved by the rules of the Republican conference.

There's nothing resolving the issues that are being brought up. And there's lot more than I've talked about here today, and I will talk about those too, because nobody's accusing anybody of being corrupt, but somebody is saying there are accusations that should be resolved. And it's a trust issue.

Can the American people trust our economy, trust our soldiers on the battlefield, trust our health care to people who have trust issues with the American people?

And I think the American people should say, whoever's in charge of resolving it, resolve it. Tell us, is this something we should be concerned about? Because they are. Or shouldn't we be concerned about it?

That's the reason I'm here. I think that's the reason Dr. Broun's here. We're here to say, these are serious issues, serious issues for the American people.

I would like to have a little more time at the end. But I would like to yield some time to my friend, Dr. Broun from Georgia.

I thank you for your comments.

I want to thank my friends for coming out tonight and for joining me in this hour of talk and discussion. I want to thank the Speaker for being patient with us tonight and for staying here with us, and I thank those who work to make a recording of what is said here, which I happen to know from long years of experience is a very difficult job, and I always have a lot of sympathy for the court reporters who have to take down people who talk like I do, so I want to give them some credit here tonight.

I want to thank the American people. To those who did listen in, let's use some common sense, and let's get everything out on the table, and let's resolve any ethics issues we've got so that America can trust the people who are talking to them. If we talk straight and if we try to come up with straight ideas, I think the American people know that good, solid, commonsense ideas can fix things. I hope that they will participate in this representative form of government by contacting their Representatives and by making suggestions. I have gotten good ones from my constituents. They will send me more good ones, and I hope that everybody in America will contact their Representatives and will let them know how they feel about things and will give them the good ideas, because that is what a representative form of government is all about, and that is why we have a Republic. I am proud to be a small part of this Republic.

With that, I would like to yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 17 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 26, 2009, at 10 a.m.