Floor Statements

Let's cut to the chase. This is a tax credit for people who want to contribute to the President's campaign fund. They're told you can check this box and it doesn't cost you anything. No, but it takes $40 million-plus a year away from the fund that could be used for other things, including for Social Security, and it gives it to the President's campaign fund.

I stand with our President, Barack Obama, on this issue, who found that that fund is worthless and that it's an impediment to getting elected. So I stand with President Obama in saying let's get rid of the fund and not use it anymore, and let the $200 million in that fund go to something helpful instead of being an impediment to being elected President.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Even though this body is composed of a lot of people who have a lot of different political steadfast beliefs, it is still an honor and pleasure to serve with friends like Carolyn Maloney.

So it is an honor to serve, and even though we disagree sometimes on the way we get to the end, I know that, for example, Mrs. Maloney's heart is always in the right place.

It is a pleasure to serve with her.

Certainly.

Thank you. I certainly appreciate my friend from New York.

There are some areas of research that if the Federal Government doesn't do it, it's not going to get done, and I'm sure there are areas we can certainly agree on.

Balanced Budget Amendment

I wish I were coming to the floor just full of excitement because we had a vote today on the balanced budget amendment. I came to Congress nearly 7 years ago believing we needed a balanced budget amendment, knowing that Thomas Jefferson regretted not having one, that Ronald Reagan wished there had been one. But since I have been in this body, it has become abundantly clear that this body is more likely to have the will to raise taxes than it is to cut spending.

I came here not believing that that was the case. But after we added over 80 fantastic freshmen coming up here with the right motivation, wanting to get our fiscal House in order, knowing that we went from 2006, when we were last in the majority before this year, when we spent $160 billion or so over what we took in, and then, because we didn't have our fiscal house in order as the Republican majority, it's my belief that's the reason, the biggest reason, actually, that the public turned over the reins to our Democratic friends. We haven't done a good job of avoiding overspending.

But also in 2006, November, when we lost the majority, I would never have believed that we would go from a time when we were spending $160 billion more than we were bringing into the Treasury in just a few short years to spending a trillion dollars more than we were bringing into the Treasury. That was just unfathomable. And it appeared very clear that after a year ago, when the majority--we were in the minority at the time--made a pledge, we were going to return to pre-bailout, pre-stimulus spending, and in the first year, we pledged we would cut $100 billion.

And here we are, we have just at the end of September finished the fiscal year of 2011, and we really didn't make any cuts. The jury's out. Initially we were told we may save $27 billion over the year before. It is just chicken feed when you're bringing in $2.2 trillion or $2.3 trillion and you're spending about $1.3 trillion more than that, $3.6 trillion, $3.7 trillion. And all we could find to cut was $27 billion?

Then we have had more recent word that we may not even save that much. Some have told me that actually we may have spent just a hair more than we did.

So it became abundantly clear to me, and I know that my friend, Chairman Paul Ryan, voted against the balanced budget amendment because he knew it ought to have more restraint on spending in there, a spending cap. And Mr. Amash, I haven't talked to him about his reasons for voting no, and Mr. Dreier, who doesn't believe we should have one at all.

It's really not fun not voting with the people that you serve with, that you're in the same party with. You share so much in the way of common experiences. Because I am a strong advocate for a balanced budget amendment.

But the bill on the floor today did not have a spending cap. This past year, we had just witnessed the largest wave election since the 1930s. And all of the over 80 new freshmen came forward with one central charge: stop the wasteful government spending.

Following a pledge to make massive cuts in spending, it really appears that Congress finds it easier to talk about ``new revenue'' which is just code for more taxes, than to cut spending.

It doesn't live up to the pledge that we made.

We made a pledge to the American people to restrain government and to get our fiscal house in order. And we should be doing it. Eleven months into this majority, we should have made more progress than we have.

President Obama has ramped up spending with the help of former Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid, both majorities in the Houses when they were Democrats, by over an additional trillion dollars. It's far more than the Democratic Congress increased the debt under President Bush in 2007 and 2008.

It just is mind-boggling that we could not find enough Members to return even to the liberal Democratic spending of 2007 or 2008. It's clear that, if we had passed a balanced budget amendment without at least having a spending cap, then future Congresses would use the requirement of a balanced budget to increase taxes in order to balance the budget.

We are already at a point at which almost 50 percent of the American public is not paying income tax. We are on the threshold of arriving at that point beyond which no representative societies have ever been able to come back to greatness. When one more than half who is voting is receiving more from the government than they're putting in, you're done. You're doomed. It's over. All that's left is the slow walking and the low talking, but you're virtually at the end.

And we are getting close.

On Wednesday, the national debt exceeded $15 trillion, which left the United States with one of the highest public debt-to-GDP ratios in the world. This $15 trillion mark further enhances the uncertainty that is thwarting our economy from moving ahead. It's apparent America is on a route headed for ruin, and if we continue to spend more money that we don't have, we will arrive at that destination.

Washington, this government, needs to stop the runaway train of spending. This President's policies have added $4.4 trillion to the national debt, all in a fraction of the time that that debt accumulated under President George W. Bush. If we'd at least had a spending cap as part of the balanced budget amendment, which wasn't even demanding the two-thirds supermajority in order to raise taxes--just a spending cap, make it a relevant spending cap--then what we voted out of committee in the regular order--which we promised that we wouldn't bring bills to the floor unless they went through the regular order--produced a balanced budget amendment that had a two-thirds requirement in the way of a vote before taxes could be raised. It had an 18 percent spending cap, where 18 percent of the GDP was the most we could spend. That was produced through the regular order, but that's not what we voted on here today.

I deeply regret having to vote ``no,'' but I've seen what we're capable of and what we're not; and we need it in the Constitution that the budget must be balanced and that a spending cap must be there.

Some have said, Well, States don't really have a spending cap. They can't print their own money. They can't go out and borrow money the way we do in the Federal Government. It's different, and it needed to be addressed differently.

We were told, Well, we had to vote for this as Republicans because it's the only one that had a chance to pass. Then, on further inquiry, we were told the people who were saying that didn't believe it was going to pass the Senate, that they knew it wouldn't pass in the Senate, and didn't think it had much chance of passing in the House. Then why weren't we pushing what came out of regular order?--which is what I think most of the Republicans believed was the best bill.

I don't know.

I also know, in going back through this country's history, that, even during some of its most difficult and darkest days, there was a day set aside, sometimes many days set aside, for thanksgiving.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time remains?

I want to share a Proclamation of Thanksgiving from the year 1798, signed by President George Washington.

In 1798, it was toward the end of President Washington's time as President. It was a difficult time; we were not a strong Nation. We were struggling, and some thought we ought to run to the aid of France; but their convictions in France did not appear to be based on sound doctrine and a desire for liberty. There was too much envy and jealousy involved in that revolution, and we were not a strong Nation.

Despite all the difficulties in the United States in those early days, George Washington proclaimed the following:

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the

providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful

for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and

favor; and whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their

joint committee, requested me to recommend to the people of

the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to

be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many

and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording

them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of

government for their safety and happiness.

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the

26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of

these States to the service of that great and glorious Being

who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that

is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering

unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and

protection of the people of this country previous to their

becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and

the favor, able interpositions of His providence in the

course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree

of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since

enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we

have been enabled to establish constitutions of government

for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national

one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious

liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of

acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general,

for all the great and various favors which He has been

pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our

prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of

Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other

transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or

private stations, to perform our several and relative duties

properly and punctually; to render our National Government a

blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government

of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and

faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all

sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown

kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments,

peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of

true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among

them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a

degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Signed by George Washington in 1798.

But in the darkest throes of this country, in 1863, during a war that saw the death of more Americans than in any war in our history--more than the Revolution, more than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, more than any of the wars--the Spanish-American War--there was this proclamation from President Abraham Lincoln simply entitled ``A Proclamation.''

Lincoln said this:

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled

with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To

these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are

prone to forget the source from which they come, others have

been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they

cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is

habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of

Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and

severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to

invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been

preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the

laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has

prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military

conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by

the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful

diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of

peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested

the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the

borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron

and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more

abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the

waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the

battlefield; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness

of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect

continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human

counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out

these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most

High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins,

hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be

solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one

heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do

therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the

United States, and also those who are at sea and those who

are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the

last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and

Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the

ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances

and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our

national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender

care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or

sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are

unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition

of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to

restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine

purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony,

tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and

caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October,

in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-

three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the

Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln.

We all know--or hopefully most know that John Hancock presided over the Continental Congress from which we got the Declaration of Independence. In 1791, he was Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and signed this proclamation, from John Hancock:

In consideration of the many undeserved Blessings conferred

upon us by God, the Father of all Mercies; it becomes us not

only in our private and usual devotion, to express our

obligations to Him, as well as our dependence upon Him; but

also specially to set a part a day to be employed for this

great and important purpose: I have, therefore, thought fit

to appoint, and by the advice and consent of the council, do

hereby accordingly appoint, Thursday, the seventeenth of

November next, to be observed as a Day of Public Thanksgiving

and Praise, throughout this

Commonwealth: Hereby calling upon ministers and people of

every denomination, to assemble on the said day--and in the

name of the Great Mediator, devoutly and sincerely offer to

Almighty God, the gratitude of our hearts, for all His

goodness towards us; more especially in that He has been

pleased to continue to us so a great a measure of health--to

cause the Earth plentifully to yield her increase, so that we

are supplied with the Necessaries, and the comforts of life--

to prosper our merchandise and fishery--and above all, not

only to continue to us the enjoyment of our civil rights and

liberties; but the great and most important blessing, the

Gospel of Jesus Christ: And together with our cordial

acknowledgments, I do earnestly recommend, that we may join

the penitent confession of our Sins, and implore the further

continuance of the divine protection, and blessings of heaven

upon this people; especially that He would be graciously

pleased to direct, and prosper the administration of the

Federal Government, and of this, and the other States in the

Union--to afford Him further smiles on our agriculture and

fisheries, commerce and manufactures--to prosper our

university and all seminaries of learning--to bless the

virtuously struggling for the rights of men--so that

universal happiness may be allies of the United States, and

to afford His almighty aid to all people, who are established

in the world; that all may bow to the Scepter of our Lord

Jesus Christ, and the whole Earth be filled with His glory.

And I do also earnestly recommend to the good people of

this Commonwealth, to abstain from all servile labor and

recreation, inconsistent with the solemnity of the said day.

Given at the Council-Chamber, in Boston, the fifth day of

October, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Seven Hundred

and Ninety-One, and in the sixteenth year of the Independence

of the United States of America.

This is from James Madison, the fourth President, 1815. Many credit James Madison as being the most productive person in the writing of our United States Constitution. The greatest building block for any Nation in the history of man.

This is James Madison's proclamation:

No people ought to feel greater obligations to celebrate

the goodness of the Great Disposer of Events of the Destiny

of Nations than the people of the United States. His kind

providence originally conducted them to one of the best

portions of the dwelling place allotted for the great family

of the human race. He protected and cherished them under all

the difficulties and trials to which they were exposed in

their early days. Under His fostering care their habits,

their sentiments, and their pursuits prepared them for a

transition in due time to a state of independence and self-

government.

Signed James Madison, fourth President, March 4, 1850, Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

And then in conclusion:

Know that the Lord Himself is God; It is He who has made

us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of

His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts

with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord

is good; His loving kindness is everlasting and His

faithfulness to all generations.

Mr. Speaker, it is the wish here that you and all those in this body and around the country have a wonderful day of Thanksgiving in the week ahead.

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

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

One thing we've got plenty of around here is paper, unfortunately. We've got bills, we've got laws that we should have taken up that we haven't.

And when we talk about the health care bill, people know we talk about ObamaCare, whatever the formal name is. Cutting $500 billion out of Medicare already. That's a done deal. That was rammed through by the majority when Speaker Pelosi was in charge at the behest of our President Obama--$500 billion in cuts. Our seniors deserve better than that kind of treatment.

Republicans, I don't think we had any Republicans vote for that. But it was driven through against the will of the American people, and against the will of the Republicans. But Democrats had the votes, so they did it--$500 billion in cuts to Medicare.

So when AARP has all these seniors send in petitions saying, I'm a member of AARP, don't you dare cut anything from Medicare, we try to make sure our seniors know that it was AARP that stood by the President as he cut $500 billion, and we're glad that they're finally waking up to just what the President and AARP, with AARP's assistance, what they did to seniors.

But if you look at how much money we are spending on Medicare, not to even mention right now Medicaid, just look at how much we're spending on Medicare, and you look at the number of households we have, around 17.5 million Medicare households--this was from 2009. You divide that into the amount of money that we're spending, the Federal Government's spending on Medicare--not even Medicaid, just Medicare: We're spending right at $30,000 for every household with somebody on Medicare. $30,000?

Now, for someone who's got bad heart problems or some kind of chronic disease, well, that's not so bad when you consider what all kinds of treatments and medicines they're getting. That's if you look at the bills that are sent out.

If you look at the amount of actual money that are paid for those procedures, or actually paid or reimbursed by insurance companies or the government for that money, it's not near that much for most households, even most households on Medicare.

That's why I was shocked in the not too distant past to find out that in one situation that I'm aware of personally, when there were $10,000 in bills between the hospital, the physicians, the ambulance, the testing, the people reading the tests, and all that stuff, 2 days of hospitalization, $10,000. It turns out that the insurance company, the health insurance company resolved all $10,000 in bills for about $800.

Well, if we knew exactly how much was being paid to pay for those exorbitant health care bills, we could then finally reintroduce something known as free market principles.

Now, the doctors I talk to, the health care providers I talk to, they wouldn't mind that. Their hands get tired. There are some insurance policies or contracts that health care providers have with some of the health insurance companies that said they cannot charge--that's what I'm told--they can't charge somebody paying cash as little as a health insurance company providing the contract gets out by paying.

You can't have competition in health care until people know how much they're paying for their medicine, for their hospital stay. You've got to know what they're paying.

It was a great thing growing up in a small town in East Texas. I loved the town, Mount Pleasant, Texas.

After I finished 4 years out of the Army from a scholarship at Texas A&M, my wife and I settled in Tyler. We've loved it. It's the only home my kids knew growing up. Been so good to me. But my wife and family, we've all been blessed there.

But in the smaller town I grew up in, everybody knew the doctors. And from time to time we would go to a different doctor. And a lot of the times it was because we found out one upped their price so we would go to another doctor who didn't charge quite as much because they were good. That's called free market competition. We don't have that any more in health care. We've got to get back to it. If we're going to bring the costs down, we've got to get back to it.

People have to know what it costs to go to the doctor. People need to know that their medicine that they see a cost of $900, that the insurance companies, when they reimburse for that $900 prescription, don't pay but a fraction of that. So if somebody can't afford insurance, why should they have to pay $900 for a prescription drug that a health insurance company wouldn't pay a fraction of that much? We have to get back to having some competition in the cost of things.

So there's one way, really the only way I see we get off this track to total socialized health care that ObamaCare puts us well on down the road toward arriving on, and that would be through greater use of health savings accounts. We're told by some actuarials that if kids in their twenties and thirties start putting money in a health savings account and it grows and it grows because they don't use much at that young age, by the time they're eligible for Medicare, not only would they not want to use Medicare, they wouldn't need it. They'd have so much money built up in their health savings accounts that they didn't get through every year.

I agree with some of the people that I've consulted over the last 4 years on what would be a better plan that if you could have people putting money every month in a health savings account, building that account, then not allow it to be drawn out for something like buying a boat or anything like that, but it has to be for health care, can't be for anything else. Once its dedicated in a health savings account, and it should be allowed to be put in there pre-tax, then it has to be for health care.

Oh, sure, we ought to be able to allow people to donate that to some charity that keeps health savings accounts for the less fortunate, ought to be allowed to gift it or bequeath it to children, to family and help them grow that big nest egg of a health savings account, and then you have a debit card coded to cover nothing but health care costs. And you use that health savings account until you reach the amount of the high deductible that the health insurance policy has, and then the health insurance kicks in. That would help make health insurance so much cheaper for most folks. That's what a lot of us have gone to, and I have myself. It is a lot better deal. It is a lot cheaper.

But to think about, as these numbers indicate from 2009, that every household with someone on Medicare is costing nearly $30,000, it is just staggering. And that's why instead of continuing to move toward rationed care putting our seniors on lists where they can't get treated very quickly, they have to wait, because let's face it, the way of socialized medicine is rationed care.

And President Obama not only must have known that that was the truth, but he put a man in the position to oversee ObamaCare who had made clear in prior statements that it's not a matter of if we go to rationed care, it is a matter of when. And then he's the guy that ends up in charge of ObamaCare because obviously this President and the Democratic majority in the last Congress intended--expected--that seniors would be getting rationed care.

How much better to say, you know what seniors, you've got a choice. How about that? We've had so many people on the Democratic side of the aisle talk about it should be people's right to choose. They should have choice. How about in health care? How about giving seniors a chance to choose? You want Medicare? You want to be denied some medicines? You want to have to keep buying that supplemental coverage from AARP? Your choice.

On the other hand, if you want to do something different, we'll put-- and I'm flexible on the amount, but it appeared $3,500 was a good, effective amount for achieving that kind of high deductible and lower cost for the insurance policy. Then we, the Federal Government, will

buy you a private health insurance policy that covers everything over $3,500, and then we will give you cash money in a health savings account, the debit card to go with it that you hold, you use as you see fit, you choose what medicine, you choose what doctor. And if you exhaust the $3,500, then the insurance kicks in and you've got that coverage.

You don't have to buy supplemental coverage, and I know that would cost AARP hundreds of millions. I get that. And I know they care deeply about retired folks. I get that. But, boy, if retired folks wouldn't have to pay anything for supplemental insurance, seems like that would be a good thing.

We would give them the choice. Let seniors choose what you want. You want control of your own health care and the money to pay the deductible if you get that high and an insurance policy to cover everything beyond that if you go beyond that? You control things? Or do you want to let the government keep telling you what you can and can't get in the way of treatment?

The country is better off when the Federal Government is the referee, not the player, because government's always going to be the referee; but when it's the player and the referee, that's when it's so grossly unfair. Anybody should be able to figure that. That would be so much better for seniors. Give them the choice.

But you know what? This President, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid, they felt like they knew better for seniors. They felt like it would be better if they did not allow seniors to have a choice. Too bad, seniors. We're going to cut $500 billion from the amount of money that we're spending on Medicare, and you're about to find out what real rationed care is about once ObamaCare kicks in to the full.

Why not give them a choice? Why not force doctors and health care providers for the first time in decades to start posting what the cost of health care is? How much at your hospital is a hospital bed in a single room or in a double room with two patients in there? How about showing people that, letting them decide which is cheaper? Because as long as an insurance company or the government is paying all of those costs, people really don't care. That's the way of the world.

That's why in the Soviet Union in 1973 when I asked some farmers in the middle of the morning who were sitting in the shade visiting instead of being out in the field working, and I tried to do it as nicely as possible, spoke a little Russian back then, When is it you work out in the field?

The loudest one said, I make the same number of rubles when I'm in the shade here or if I'm out there, so I'm here.

That's socialism.

When the Federal Government socializes medicine, as ObamaCare is driving us toward--it's just one giant step; we're virtually there-- well, then, it changes everything.

People don't really care how much things cost because they're not paying for them. People don't try to go to a less expensive doctor or hospital because they don't care. Somebody else is paying it. Then when they see the bill that says this stay cost $10,000, they say, Well, gee, I'm glad I'm not paying that. They don't care because they're not paying it. They don't know that there may have been $200 paid for that hospital bed rather than $10,000.

People deserve to know what health care costs. As I say, the health care providers--the doctors I talk to--wouldn't mind being able to do that. They would love it if patients could come in and give them a health savings account debit card. Then they don't have to have extra people who are chasing down the new codes and all this information about what the government pays and what the insurance company will or won't pay. We'd get back to a doctor-patient relationship. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

As I've told health insurance companies before at a convention here in Washington, D.C., we need to get the health insurance companies back in the health insurance business and out of the health management business, because if health insurance companies are determined to stay in the health management business where they manage our health care, they're eventually going to have everybody mad at them, and they're going to be run out of business, and there won't be any health insurance companies anymore.

Other than the socialist Federal Government of the United States. I don't want to get there.

We're almost there with ObamaCare.

That's why this body, with the majority of Republicans having taken over this year, voted to repeal ObamaCare.

When it's real health insurance, people pay a small monthly, quarterly, semiannual, annual fee in order to insure against some unforeseen disease or accident down the road--unforeseen because, if they could foresee it, they'd know how much they'd need to save in order to take care of that event that's coming or the disease. You pay an insurance company for something you don't know might happen--maybe it will, maybe it won't.

The thing is, if we went to the place where we allowed those on Medicare to choose--to stay with Medicare if that's what you want, and keep buying that supplemental insurance--or we'll give you the cash in a health savings account and a debit card, then we'll buy the insurance to cover everything over the cash we put in your account for the year, and we'll do that every year.

When I was drafting the bill in the prior Congress, Newt Gingrich was very helpful. He sent a couple of experts to come visit about ideas.

They said, You know, we ought to have an incentive in the bill so that seniors would have an incentive not to spend all the money, all the $3,500 that's put in their HSAs every year.

So we put in a provision that if someone on Medicare didn't use up all of the $3,500 in their health savings account, then they got a percentage of that cash money that they could take. No income tax would have to be paid on it. It was just cash money in their pocket at the end of the year in order to encourage them not to waste money from the health savings account by buying stuff they didn't need, because they were going to get a percentage of that if they didn't spend it within the year. Give them incentives. That's what market forces are about: incentives.

Now, if we were to do something like that, then certainly there will be people who are chronically ill. We will always have people who are chronically ill, and those are the people we should help. They can't help themselves. That's what a caring society does.

But when there are people who are able to help themselves, then those are the folks who ought to be able to grow a health savings account over the years so that they don't need any government help by the time they get to the point where they're eligible for Medicare. If they need it, they'll get it. That would finally get us on track to get out of this massive amount of debt that we're in. That's the way to go.

In the meantime, not only is that not something that's occurring, but we're not able to innovate new things that will become law. We're innovating new things, like the alternative to Medicare--the choice we could give seniors--but we know, as the President has called us--and it really only applies to the other end of the Hall--we've got a do- nothing Senate. It's not the Republicans. They keep clamoring--trying to push, trying to get the Democratic leadership in the Senate to do something to help the economy, to truly do something to help health care, but they're not interested in doing that.

We've got a supercommittee, as it has been dubbed, that we really shouldn't have set up. I have nothing but sympathy for my Republican friends who have been put on that committee because they were put into a position where, unbeknownst to our Republican leadership that negotiated the deal that brought this committee about, the Democrats really don't have anything to push them to reach an agreement.

That appears to be why the Democrats seem to be interested in what Pat Toomey had floated out as a framework with the support of his colleagues. They seemed to be interested in it; but, apparently, after consulting with Democratic leadership, they realized, uh-oh, we're told not to work a deal because if we don't work a deal, there will be draconian cuts to our national security, which we don't mind--we've been wanting to do that for years--and then the other cuts will be to Medicare.

Apparently, because of the lack of interest by the Democrats in seeing that there is a deal done, it would appear they don't mind having the cuts to Medicare.

And that's what was puzzling me last week.

After they hear how far backwards Republicans are willing to go on the supercommittee, how is it that the Democrats end up walking away, basically, from what they wanted? So I struggled to try to figure out what it was that would keep them from being desperate to cut a deal with the Republicans because surely they don't want those cuts to Medicare.

Then I realized, well, Democrats are 100 percent totally responsible for the $500 billion in cuts to Medicare that are contained within ObamaCare. They also know that millions of dollars of Republican campaign money will be spent next year in probably talking about the $500 billion in cuts that the Democrats solely, on their own, pushed through in ObamaCare and that unless there is at least a couple hundred billion in cuts to Medicare, then at least that amount would result from a failure to pass some kind of bill from the supercommittee.

Unless there's something like that, the $500 billion that the Democrats cut from Medicare last year is all anybody is going to basically be talking about in the next election.

But if the supercommittee fails and if the House and Senate don't pass what they've sent, then we've already seen the rhetoric begin: Republicans, they say, are wanting to cut health care; they're wanting to cut Medicare.

So now we see how it's playing out.

Some, apparently, on the Democratic side--not all, but some, apparently the leadership of the Democratic Party--apparently the President--want to see a failure so they can campaign against Republicans saying, No, they didn't want agreement anyway; and look at the cuts to Medicare that they've forced. I don't see any other explanation for the cavalier attitude of the Democratic leadership and not pushing so hard to get an agreement to avoid the massive cuts to Medicare. Even with the massive cuts, it won't be as big a cut as ObamaCare was to Medicare; but it will be enough, apparently, for them to campaign and try to demonize the Republicans.

Apparently tomorrow we're going to vote on a balanced budget amendment. It will either be House Joint Resolution 1 or House Joint Resolution 2. House Joint Resolution 1 has a cap on spending that we can't go above, a percentage of gross domestic product. It requires a supermajority in order to raise taxes. That's House Joint Resolution 1. That's what passed out of committee after a long and exhausting day of debate and amendments.

But we're bringing to the floor joint House Resolution 2. It just says, You've got to balance the budget. I know there are those who say, Well, that would mean that our decisions start being made by the courts. Well, 49 out of 50 States, as I understand it, have a balanced budget requirement in their constitutions. Their courts don't make those decisions. I don't see why it would be otherwise if it was. Under the Constitution, we've got the power to restrict jurisdiction for everybody but the Supreme Court. We could do that if that's what we chose to do.

We're in a mess, because we're not doing the things we promised we would when we ran and got elected to the majority, the very things the Democrats lost the majority in this House because they didn't fulfill. It's time to get serious about our promises.

Everybody is aware of Francis Scott Key who wrote our wonderful National Anthem. As my time runs out, I want to finish tonight with something else that Francis Scott Key said. On February 22, 1812, he said this:

The patriot who feels himself in the service of God, who

acknowledges Him in all his ways, has the promise of Almighty

direction, and will find His Word in his greatest darkness,

``a lantern to his feet and a lamp unto his paths.'' He will,

therefore, seek to establish for his country, in the eyes of

the world, such a character as shall make her not unworthy of

the name of a Christian nation.

We've got a lot to do if we're going to live up to our commitments, our oaths. A balanced budget amendment with a spending cap is what we need to do. That's what we passed out of committee in regular order. That's what I would vote for tomorrow. Since that's not coming, then I don't want to push through a balanced budget amendment that requires ever-upward spiraling taxation because, as we've shown this year, without a balanced budget amendment, Congress doesn't have the will to cut spending, not a majority of the House and Senate both.

It's time to live up to the commitments we've made and what we owe our creator, our maker. If we'll do that, we can have another 200 years of greatness as a Nation. If we don't, as Abraham Lincoln said, This Nation will die by suicide. I want it to live and flourish. I want us to keep our commitments.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 44 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, November 18, 2011, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, we are living in interesting times. As I understand it, that's a bit of a Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Well, we're here, not exactly as perhaps the Founders would have hoped, where we would have an executive branch that just declares, without consulting Congress, that he's going to commit American military to an action without knowing really who he's helping in Libya, without knowing exactly what's going to happen once we finish helping them, and without knowing just how much we're going to suffer and just how much our closest allies, like Israel, are going to suffer after this President unilaterally, without consulting Congress, commits our most valuable asset, American lives, not to mention the Treasury and American equipment.

For those who have ears and those who have eyes, they understand that when the President says, Oh, but we're not to worry, eventually we'll turn it over to NATO, and then has a grandiose announcement we're turning it over to NATO, that actually the United States military is 65 percent of NATO's military, because there's supposed to be a regular order to things. And, in fact, Republicans ran last year saying we're going to get back to regular order. One of the things we went through for the preceding 4 years with the Democratic majority and Speaker Pelosi in charge was the Democratic majority came to the House floor over and over with bills that had not gone through committee process, and then they were brought to the floor with no opportunity to make any amendments whatsoever.

Well, one of the things we have done this year, we've had lots of amendments. We've had an incredibly open process on the floor compared to what had happened the preceding 4 years when there were more closed rules than there had been in the history of the country, meaning no input, basically shutting out almost half of America that Republicans represented. It was ``our way and no highway.'' That's not the way regular order was supposed to go.

And we were assured by our own leadership, of course, that, once we had the majority, it was back to regular order. And then over and over, big things had to be dealt with. Not that they couldn't have been foreseen. It could be reasonably foreseen that a continuing resolution was going to have to occur. And lo and behold, it came upon us in the spring as if it had never been contemplated, and we were told there was no time for regular order on these things. We just have to do it. Can't have amendments. Can't cut off funding for ObamaCare even though we cut off funding for some other things that otherwise would be considered legislating; but since it was part of the bill as it came directly from committee, we were told it was okay. So the Rules Committee waived any point of order objections. Now, that's inside baseball; but the bottom line is, even though we have done a better job of allowing amendments here on the floor, we still haven't gotten back to regular order. We have gone from one crisis to another crisis and have had to tell America, gee, this is another crisis so we don't have time to go through regular order.

As I understand it, tomorrow most likely, possibly Friday, we're going to have a balanced budget amendment brought to the floor. It was part of the debt ceiling agreement that was negotiated the end of July, the end of the summer session before the August recess. We were going to have a vote on a balanced budget amendment, but there was no specification as to what balanced budget amendment it would be.

Well, along the lines of the so-called regular order, we have had a balanced budget amendment. We've had hearings on it. We've had it marked up out of subcommittee, committee, and it came to the full Judiciary Committee and we had a long, protracted markup. In other words, markup is simply the hearing where anybody can bring any amendment and we have debate, full debate, and anybody on the committee who has any amendment they want to bring to that bill, they can bring it to the bill. That's regular order. We had that in committee on the balanced budget amendment. And our good friend from Virginia who has been such a long-suffering valiant warrior for a balanced budget amendment, it was his bill, House Joint Resolution 1.

I had an amendment to that resolution that actually changed the cap on spending from 20 percent of gross domestic product to a cap of 18 percent of the gross domestic product, and that amendment passed.

That's regular order. That's how you do it. Some of us had amendments that didn't get passed, but we still had the chance to bring them to speak on them, debate on them, have every other Member on the committee who wished to speak on every amendment be heard. Those things make for long, drawn-out hearings, and that's what we had. That's called regular order. That's because everybody who is involved can have input. And that's what we had.

After that long, protracted process, we voted out of committee, affirmatively bringing out of committee, voting out of committee with a majority of those on the committee voting for the ultimate product. After that long, arduous debate and voting process, we voted out of committee a balanced budget amendment.

Now I'm given to understand the Rules Committee has taken up a different balanced budget amendment, and we're told we didn't need to go through regular order for that. We're bringing a balanced budget amendment that did not come out of committee and that was not voted out of committee.

And, gee whiz, it reminds me a great deal of the outlandish hearings that the Energy and Commerce Committee had when they came forth with a 1,000-page health care bill in the last Congress. And there was a lot of strong-handedness that brought that bill out of committee, and it was clear from the polls that that was not what America wanted. But, then, by the time Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid down the Hall, and President Obama had their say, that 1,000-page bill that was voted out of committee turned into, ultimately, a 2,000-page bill.

And that came to the floor not under regular order, because it just appeared.

Nobody knew who had written it. But when we took the majority, we were going to do better. America would be able to see the debates, listen to the debates, see who was taking what position, see who was pushing what amendments, see what got voted out of committee and would have some confidence that that would be what would come to the floor.

Well, this week we're going to take up a balanced budget amendment that didn't come out of committee, but we're told we've got to vote for it because it's another crisis. We've got to. It doesn't have a spending cap on it, not even the 20 percent of GDP that was amended down to 18 percent--none of that. Regular order would mean that we bring something to the floor that was voted out of committee.

At some point, we have got to get back to regular order which was promised to the American people if they would put us back in charge. And it's good politically for both parties because each side gets to show in committee and here on the floor what amendments they're pushing for. They pushed for them in committee and pushed for them here on the floor. So by the time a law gets passed, it's been fully debated and talked about.

That was one of the problems with the last majority. They were shoving bills down our throats, down America's throats, without any real debate. And that's how you could get a comment from a Speaker like, gee, we've got to pass the bill to find out what's in it. That's because it never went through a subcommittee process, a committee process, came to the floor without full and open amendment debates. No, we just bypassed all that.

And one of the things that has hurt this country and has hurt this Congress is we haven't gotten back to regular order like we were supposed to. We've done a lot better, a whole lot better, because of all the amendment debate. But we haven't gotten back to regular order.

So we're going to bring a balanced budget amendment to the floor that's different from the one that was fully debated, have a full opportunity for amendment at committee; but we're not going to have that opportunity on the floor. No, sir, not going to have it. We're told we can't have a spending cap in the one we're going to have on the floor. Why? Well, not because the committee voted it down--they didn't; not because the body voted not to have it here in Congress, but because we're told that what came out of committee cannot be what comes to the floor.

I recall people previously saying that regular order makes for better law and allows the House to work its will. Well, how is it that we're not going to be taking up the balanced budget amendment that came out of committee? That's regular order. That's the House working its will. What staff member decided that we weren't going to get to have a spending cap that we could debate and vote on?

We know that staff members had a lot to do with ObamaCare, or the President's health care bill, because there's a provision in there that exempted the Speaker's staff from having to be under ObamaCare when all the rest of us were going to have to be under it, including Members. So you kind of figure they must have staff writing that one.

Well, what staff member decided that we couldn't bring to the floor the balanced budget amendment that came through regular order out of committee? That balanced budget amendment was fully debated, a full opportunity to amend in committee, but regular order means we would have that same opportunity with the whole body here. Well, who was it, a staff member? Who was it that just decided we can't do what the body decided was the will of the committee and the will of the House? Who intervened? I really don't know.

The right thing to do would be to bring the balanced budget amendment with the spending cap. Now, there were all kinds of amendments addressing the spending cap. Some folks didn't want it. They lost. There was the provision for a supermajority to raise taxes on that bill that was voted out of committee. Well, that's not in the balanced budget amendment. Why? I don't know why. We're told we're bringing to the floor a balanced budget amendment that appeared, and we didn't have anything to do with bringing it out of committee. We were told that we've got to pass this one because it's the only one that has a chance to pass, even though the Senate says they're going to bring it down, even though we've got Democratic leadership saying they're going to bring it down.

If people on the other side of the aisle in the House and the majority in the Senate say they're going to bring it down, then why aren't we bringing to the floor a balanced budget amendment that a majority voted for and debated and amended and voted down amendments and passed it out to come to the floor in that order?

How is it that we're trying, once again, in the House, as a majority, to strive to pass a bill to hit a mark that we think maybe there might be some chance that the Senate may pass as well, when we're told that it's not everything we believe in, but we're not going to get everything we believe in because we're going to try to do something the Senate will do?

Well, if we've been told repeatedly that the Democrats are not going to assist, that the Senate is going to vote it down, then why not bring to this floor what we believe in our hearts as a majority ought to be passed?

It's going to make it real confusing a year from now in November for voters when the Republican majority in the House is going to have to go back, as the Founders envisioned, and face our constituents, and even though we were in the majority, we didn't bring to the floor the things that we believed in; we brought to the floor things we were hoping maybe the Senate would agree to go along with.

We're bringing to the floor what's called a minibus that's going to have some appropriations in it, but actually, it went through the conference process. Yet the underlying bill that passed out of the House was not a bill that a majority in the House really thought would be the best; it was a bill that we thought maybe the Senate would pass. So we compromised with ourselves in the majority in the House, thinking if we compromised with ourselves in the House that maybe the Senate would vote through just what we passed. But no, they didn't; they compromised with us further after we compromised with ourselves trying to hit the mark that we thought they would pass.

So it goes to conference committee and we're further required to compromise with ourselves. What was the sense of that? And now we have to vote on a bill, an appropriations bill where we didn't even start out hitting the mark we thought was best, but, rather, hitting the mark that we thought, gee, maybe the Senate would pass? It's going to be confusing to voters because we're going to say, Here are the things we believe in, next year in November, and they're going to say, Why didn't you pass that? And apparently the response is supposed to be, Well, because we were trying to pass something we thought the Senate would pass. And the voters are going to respond, Well, what about the principle you told us in November of 2010 you were going to stand on?

And unless we get back to the regular order in this body, we're going to be in trouble, because we need to be able to show the voters in America we passed in the House what we believed with all our hearts was best for America. We were going to cut spending, so we cut spending. We cut over $4 trillion over 10 years. We ought to be able to tell the American public that, but instead we have to tell them, Well, no, we were trying to hit a mark that wasn't too high because we were hoping the Senate would just pass it without the need for a conference. That's why it will be confusing to voters, Well, I know you're saying that you believed in those things, but that's not what you passed.

It's time to start passing what we as the majority in the House believe is right and force the Senate to pass what they think is right. The big giveaway spending bills, force them to pass those. Don't come down here and compromise with ourselves and have a spending bill that we think--even though it spends more than we think is appropriate--we think, gee, maybe the Senate will go along because that looks to the American public like we're just like the Democratic-controlled Senate. But if we stand firm on principle in this body and we say, Here's what we

believe in; here's what went through regular order; here's what was passed out of the Judiciary Committee; here's the balanced budget amendment, and we took it to the floor and we have wide open amendments, wide open debates, the American public could see this body at work, and we would pass what we believe is right for America and then force the Senate to pass what they believe is right for America and not continue to give the Democrat majority--who want to spend like crazy--in the Senate, we keep giving them cover because we won't stand on what we believe and pass that here in the House. That's what we ought to be doing.

And that balanced budget amendment ought to be the one that came out of the Judiciary Committee. It ought to have a spending cap. It ought to have a supermajority in order to raise taxes. That was on that bill. Oh, it was debated. There were efforts to strike that part out. There were a lot of amendments--some to strike things like that out, some to put other things in, some to make it weak. But we fought those off successfully in committee and we came out of committee with a good, strong balanced budget amendment, and that's what ought to come to the floor, not the weak-kneed one we're going to get. Because a balanced budget amendment with no cap on spending unfortunately looks like a prescription for spiraling-upward taxes; because we've seen even with a conservative majority in the House, it's just tough to cut spending because we're told we've got to spend to get the Senate to go along with these bills.

It's time to take the tough stands. America's in trouble. It's in big trouble. And as we fight these battles, it doesn't help to have people jumping on a bandwagon that really wasn't the bandwagon they showed themselves to really believe in previously. And by that, I'm talking about Secretary Panetta, Secretary of Defense. He wrote this scathing letter talking about how if the sequestration occurs, hundreds of billions are cut from defense, it could mean the loss of--I believe it was a couple hundred million of our military, which is a little ironic coming from the current Secretary of Defense, because the people on this side of the aisle believe in a strong defense. We all believe that it is our number one job to provide for the common defense, because if we don't do that, all these other things just go away and we're overtaken by people that want to bring down our way of life.

But if you look to what Secretary Panetta was participating in back in the Clinton administration, you get a little better look at what really was believed at the time. You know, we've had President Clinton and those touting his time as President claiming, gee, he's the one President that actually cut the Federal workforce. No, he didn't. He cut the military. He didn't cut the Federal workforce. He cut the military. That's the only area he cut. And we paid a massive price after 9/11 because we had to gear back up because we once again found having a strong defense is important. Reagan tried to warn us about that. He said people don't get attacked because they're perceived as being too strong. They get attacked when people perceive them as being weak. And that's how we were perceived.

But let's see, in January of 1993, when now-Secretary of Defense Panetta started as a part of the Clinton administration, there were 1,761,481 members of the United States military. In July of 1994, Secretary Panetta started as the Chief of Staff for President Clinton, and that continued through January of 1997. So let's take a look. From the time Secretary Panetta started as a part of the Clinton administration, we went from 1,761,481 members of the military to, in January of '97 when he left the Clinton administration, 1,457,413 members. That's a 304,068 drop in members of the military while he was part of the Clinton administration. Seems to fall a little bit on deaf ears when you have a Secretary crying about cuts to the military when he presided over a far more draconian cut to that same military when he was in charge or was part of the Clinton administration.

The problem is, we can't afford massive cuts to our defense. And at the very time they're okay with that, the President goes down to Australia and says we're going to commit some troops down here too. We've got troops this President's committing all over the place, without any regard, like in Libya or Egypt, to the outcome of what is being done, what's going to happen at the end. And we're going to pay a severe price.

We need to stand for a solid defense. And if we get back to a regular order in this body, where things are voted out of subcommittee, after full chance to amend, voted out of the full committee, with full chance to amend and debate, brought to the floor as they come out of committee, and fully debated, and fully amended here on the floor, America will see who stands for what, and it will be easier for the voters in the next election, and it will be easier for all of us to tell what it is the American voters are wanting because they will have had a clear view of just exactly what they're getting.

I really enjoyed Mark Levin's book, Liberty and Tyranny. I think it ought to be a textbook. Let me just finish with this quote from Ronald Reagan that Mark puts in his book:

How can limited government and fiscal restraint be equated

with lack of compassion for the poor? How can a tax break

that puts a little more money in the weekly paychecks of

working people be seen as an attack on the needy? Since when

do we in America believe that our society is made up of two

diametrically opposed classes, one rich, one poor, both in a

permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead

except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in

America accept the alien and discredited theory of social and

class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the

politics of envy and division?

That's what the President's preaching right now. It needs to stop. It's time to provide for the common defense, get back to regular order in this body, and the country will be better off for it.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 22 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, November 17, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much the comments of my friend from Ohio, from Washington State, good people, good observations. It's an honor to serve with devoted people like that.

Spending is at an all-time crisis. We do need a balanced budget amendment. There's no question. We have got to have a balanced budget amendment.

The great Senator from the State of Texas, Phil Gramm, joined forces and got a bill referred to as Gramm-Rudman through. That was supposed to force, legislatively, the House and Senate to only spend within the revenue coming in. But since it was legislation, since both bodies can create such legislation, then both bodies can undo such legislation. Just like both bodies can create a debt ceiling bill, as occurred late July, early August this year, both bodies can decide to do something different a few months later. That's the problem with legislation. That's why we do need a balanced budget amendment.

Now, the bill that was brought through committee this year, this 112th Congress, titled H.J. Res. 1, it passed out of committee, the Judiciary Committee. It says that the purpose is proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Massive number of cosponsors. And it was a good bill. It was, it is.

And all gratitude goes to Mr. Bob Goodlatte. He has been a strong proponent for advancing a balanced budget amendment for numerous Congresses for many years, and he has done a good thing with this bill. I appreciated his also including an amendment that I brought to committee that was passed in committee and is part of the joint resolution. But it's House Joint Resolution 1. It's a good bill. It's to provide for a balanced budget amendment.

In section 1 it simply says:

Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total

receipts for that fiscal year, unless three-fifths of the

whole number of each House of Congress shall provide by law

for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a rollcall

vote.

Well, you might think that would be sufficient just to say total outlays cannot exceed total receipts. But those of us who've been around Congress long enough know that's not good enough unless you add, as Mr. Goodlatte does in Section 8:

Total receipts shall include all receipts of the United

States Government except those derived from borrowing.

If Section 8 is not in there, some Member of Congress down the road, if the balanced budget amendment were made into law as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, would be clever enough to say, hey, it doesn't say you can't borrow. It just says you can't have outlays exceed total receipts. Well receipts, if you get loans, you've got money coming in, even from loans, well, that ought to be good enough.

So we need Section 8 that says total receipts include all receipts except those derived from borrowing. That's a good provision to have in there because we know that this body, different parties in charge, different groups in here, as Members of the House and Senate, have always had people that found a way, found a loophole, found a way to get around the laws, the Constitution.

A good example of that, no, a great example of that is the ObamaCare bill. Article I of the United States Constitution, section 7 makes very clear that any bill that raises revenue, increases the amount of revenue, it has to start here in the House. It can't originate in the Senate. It has to start in the House. That's where the founders wanted bills involving taxes in any way, that raise revenue at all, had to start in the House.

Over the years, people found a way around that. And we saw that with the ObamaCare bill. The election of Scott Brown in the Senate made clear that they were going to have to do something different than what was originally planned in order to get the ObamaCare bill passed. So they took a House bill--they knew they couldn't wait on the House to do anything. They were going to have to start it.

So to get around the clear requirement of the Constitution that bills that raise revenue, as did the President's health care bill--raised taxes quite a bit actually--they said, okay, we're going to take a House bill that's already passed the House. They took one that provided a tax credit for first-time homebuyers who happened to be veterans. That was the basic intent of the bill.

Beginning with line 1, page 1, the Senate then deleted every word and substituted therein 2,400, 2,500 pages of ObamaCare. That way the Senate could say, hey, it didn't originate here in the Senate. This is a bill that originated in the House. We just struck every single word and put in the Senate bill.

Well, that violates the intent of the Constitution because, clearly, that health care bill did not originate in the House. But that was deemed to be a loophole in the rules and in the constitutional law, and so it's been gotten away with before and it was gotten away with on that bill.

So we know games get played like that. If you don't specify that receipts do not include borrowed money, then somebody's going to figure that out and use it and probably get away with it. So it has to be in there.

The rule has now been reported from the Rules Committee about the balanced budget amendment version that we're going to be taking up. And people keep referring to it as a clean balanced budget amendment. That's the one we're going to take up, one that does not have anything else other than total outlays must not exceed total receipts.

Now, in this House Joint Resolution 1, it has another provision that says:

Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed 18

percent of economic output of the United States, unless two-

thirds of each

House of Congress shall provide for a specific increase of

outlays above this amount.

It goes on in section 3:

The limit on the debt of the United States held by the

public shall not be increased unless three-fifths of the

whole number of each House shall provide by law for such an

increase by a rollcall vote.

That means in order to increase the debt ceiling, you can't do it with one more than 50 percent, that also will require three-fifths to raise the debt ceiling.

Section 4 is a requirement that the President transmit to the Congress a budget for the United States Government. That's a proposed budget for that fiscal year. ``Total outlays do not exceed total receipts.''

Well, we've already seen with the Senate, seen previously the President can just choose to ignore that, not because it's not a matter of law. The law requires the Senate to pass a budget. They've chosen to ignore that, to violate the law. They have violated the law. They continue to refuse to follow the law. But, unfortunately, it's another loophole in the law even though they're required to pass a budget, and the Senate's failed to do so for going on a thousand days now. There is no enforcement mechanism of what we do to the Senate if the Senate violates the law by not submitting a budget, so we've seen games get played. The games continue.

Now, in this House Joint Resolution 1, section 5 says: ``A bill to increase revenue''--in other words, raising taxes--``shall not become law unless two-thirds of the whole number of each House shall provide by law for such an increase by a rollcall vote.'' So, in other words, a supermajority is required in the House and the Senate in order to raise taxes.

Now, of course, section 6 makes an exception for war. As it says: ``The Congress may waive the provisions of this article for any fiscal year in which a declaration of war is in effect.'' It's a war exception because we know in times of war we have to do whatever has to be done in order to provide for the common defense and to ward off those who would destroy this country that we love.

So I think those are all important.

But now we're going to be taking up something that is so important to the country, a balanced budget amendment. And I believed when I was elected in 2004 a balanced budget amendment is very important to become a part of the Constitution through the amendment process, and I still believe that. My beliefs have not changed. But in my over 6\1/2\ years now here in Congress, it's become very clear to me that unless we have a constitutional cap on spending, the House and Senate will not be able to control themselves. And all one need do is look at who's paying the taxes now.

We're told somewhere between 50 percent and 53 percent of all of the adult Americans will pay all of the income tax. We're now told over 47 percent of American adults are not paying any income tax. When a country has close to 50 percent who are not paying any income tax, then you're always going to have a situation where there is a hue and cry among those who are getting money from the government and not paying money in not to cut spending but to raise taxes.

I feel like having a cap on spending is so important that even though I really appreciate and think a supermajority to raise taxes is a good idea, I think it would be okay to let that go. If we have a cap on spending, the provision that would say it takes three-fifths to raise the debt ceiling, if we have a balanced budget amendment and a cap on spending, I think we can let those go.

But I've become increasingly convinced that if we don't have a cap, a maximum amount of spending--and the best way we've seen, I'm open to other ideas, but the best proposals have indicated a percentage of our gross domestic product is the best thing to take a percentage of and make that the maximum amount the government can spend. If we don't do that, I've seen repeatedly, whether the Republicans are in charge or the Democrats are in charge, we can't control spending. No better example than what's been going on lately.

We have a President in the White House who has threatened that he'll veto a bill that makes cuts that he doesn't want. He's threatened to veto a bill that tries to rein in the extra trillion dollars of spending that he immediately came in and spent.

I mean, good grief. It would seem that since this body, under control of Speaker Pelosi for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, that we had spent more money than in history, that we could at least go before the big Wall Street bailout, October of 2008, we could at least go back to 2007 spending. That was spending that was created by the liberal Congress headed by Speaker Pelosi. Surely we could go back to 2007 before we added an extra trillion dollars and then President Obama added a trillion dollars, and then we keep adding that extra trillion dollars that we didn't spend in 2007 and actually wasn't spent until fiscal year 2009 because it was so late in 2008. We'd already passed October 1. We're in 2009 spending. Why couldn't we go back to 2008 levels of spending before we added an extra trillion, before this President ran up spending to about $1.5 trillion more than we were bringing in in receipts?

It just seems so grossly ridiculous to have a President come in and increase and say: We're going to have this big, over a trillion dollars in added spending we've never had before. And, by the way, if you dare try to cut any of this spending, I'm going to veto the bill.

So we don't cut spending. We had the biggest wave election last November since the 1930s. Over 80 new Republicans coming into the House of Representatives. Having met them, gotten to know them, these are good people. These are good Members of Congress. They came with the right motivation. They were elected by people who had the right motivation. They want to see this country thrive and not just survive but really prosper and protect liberty. They were driven by those beliefs. They were driven by the same desire that I have that motivated me to run for Congress in 2004.

I do not want to be a part of the generation that gave our children a lesser country than we inherited. That's why so many of us work so hard. We don't want to be that generation. This country could go on for 200 more years and still be the greatest, freest land in the history of the world, but not with the level of spending that we have embraced.

So I've come to see, when you look at what has happened with that wave election coming in and when you go back and look at our conservative Republican pledge made by wonderful people I love serving with, that we pledged to the American people. I didn't write that pledge, but I agreed to it. It said we were going to return spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels. We promised that. We pledged that. Not only that, we said, Here is our marker. We promise you we're going to cut at least $100 billion in the first year if you put us in office. That's our pledge.

Everybody who took that pledge meant it. Then we had a wave election after that pledge, and wonderful, wonderful people came into this body with the intention of keeping the pledge.

We got to the spring of this year. Well, actually, we got to December--Speaker Pelosi was still in charge. There was more money given away by Congress in December than in any lame duck session in the history of the country, which was after the most conservative wave election since the 1930s. Actually, that wasn't a conservative election back in the thirties, but this was a wave election. A powerful majority of Americans wanted restraint on spending, and with the wonderful people who were elected and sent up here, we had the biggest giveaway last December of any lame duck session in history.

Then we come in at the first of this year, still with the best of intentions. We still knew, Okay. Just forget about December because we're going to keep our pledge. Then some realized, Gee, we're up against an awful lot of people who don't pay any income tax, and they don't want any cuts in spending. We may not get enough in the Senate to do what we promised, so let's do a compromise. It was with the best of intentions. There was nothing ill-intended about working out a compromise with the Senate.

The way it should have worked is for this House to pass the bill that they believed was appropriate. It was for this House to pass a bill that cut $100

billion off of spending and then wait and demand for the Senate to pass something, because the Senate just seemed to have trouble passing anything. It's why the President is 50 percent right when he says this is a do-nothing Congress, because the Senate has been doing nothing. They've got our bills piled up down there, led by able leadership here in the House. They're letting them pile up down there. They're not going to pass them. They don't want to create those jobs or it might look good for Republicans who are driving the agenda. So they're just going to let them die down there unless the American public makes it very clear: You either pick up those Republican bills in the Senate and pass them or over 20 Democratic Senators won't be back come January 2013. Maybe that will motivate them.

In the meantime, we should have forced them to pass something. Then it would go to conference, and then a compromise would be worked out. That's how the system was intended to work. Then we could say to our constituents here from the House, where the Republicans have the majority, You see what the House passed. This is what we believe. We passed what we said we would. If you want this to become law as we passed it in the House, you've got to give us the majority in the Senate, and we'll do that.

As it is, all we have is a majority in the House. This is the only place we can pass it. We had to work out a compromise in the conference committee, and that's why we got what we did. But in the meantime, if you want what the House passed before the compromise, give us the Senate next year and you'll get it. That's the way the system was designed to work.

Then it allows the Senate to say, Look, see all these giveaway programs that we passed here in the Senate? We had to drop some of these giveaway programs in the conference committee because, the dadgum fiscally responsible Republicans in the House, they wouldn't go along with all the giveaways, so we had to cut some in conference; but if you want more and more giveaways like we're passing in the Senate, then give us back the majority in the House, and you'll get more and more giveaway programs. That's the way the system is supposed to work.

Then in November next year, the American voters can say either they want a majority in the House to have more giveaway programs like the Senate has passed or they can say we want more fiscal responsibility as we found in the House by virtue of the bills they passed. The problem has been that we have been negotiating with the Senate to see what we think they might pass and then shoot at the target that they say they might pass in the Senate rather than passing what we believe in in the House.

This summer, it is to the Republicans' credit in the House that we passed a bill called Cut, Cap, and Balance. There were some issues and concerns I had, but overall it was a good bill and it passed. We should have demanded that the Senate pass something that would go to the conference committee with our Cut, Cap, and Balance and that we would work out a compromise from there, but that's not what we did. We turned around and passed a debt ceiling increase that had been negotiated and, basically, was what the Senate said they might be willing to pass, and we got it passed.

My point being, we keep passing bills that really haven't cut spending. With the wave election like we had and with a big group coming in, we couldn't control spending? We couldn't get a majority to pass it in the House to cut $100 billion in spending? What are the hopes in the future?

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment with a cap on spending. I think that cap on spending is so important to help future Congresses, to help this country last. I think it is so important that I think we can forget about the two-thirds to raise taxes. I think we could forget about some of the other provisions if we just have those two things: one, a balanced budget requirement where outlays do not exceed the receipts and where the receipts don't include borrowed money; number two, a cap on spending. We've seen time and time again we haven't been able to control spending even with the incredibly good Representatives that were added last November.

With regard to the debt ceiling and bringing down the spending, good grief. We added over $1 trillion. We're spending nearly $1.5 trillion more than we're bringing in in receipts--and we can't find $100 billion to cut from that? I mean, good grief. This House this year had agreed to a 5 percent cut in our legislative budgets. We did that to ourselves. Most of America has no idea about that. Then for next year, we're going to have a little over a 6 percent cut in our legislative budget. Most of America has no idea about that either, but we did it.

The only way that's going to really make a difference in the deficit is if we make that demand of every other agency, of every other department, of every other amount of discretionary spending and if we say, Look, we did it to ourselves, that gives us the moral authority to say, You're cutting your budget 5 percent next year and 6 percent the year after that, and we're going to bring this down 11 percent over the next 2 years. Then, voila, we have met the requirement that was put upon the supercommittee.

You see some problems with the so-called supercommittee. There are some great people on there. The people who were put on there from the House and the Senate, the Republicans, they're friends and they're good people. Pat Toomey--there's not a more conservative guy anywhere--he was even willing, from the reports, to have a framework that actually raised revenue like the demand had been made by the Senate Democrats and by the President. Some of us were wincing at it--ooh--but he was willing to do that. It looked like the Democrats were so impressed-- gee, this is great. So I'll tell you what. This may be the deal that works. Then they went back and talked to their Democratic leadership, whoever that is, and they came back and said, We can't work out a deal here.

That should have made it pretty clear, when the agreement was made to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from our national security and at the same time cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare, that some people on the other side of the aisle have realized, if we go into next year's election and if the only cuts to Medicare have been the $500 billion that ObamaCare did last year--that the Democrats rammed through against the will of the Republicans in the House and the Senate and against the people across America--we're going to be toast next November. So, if we could have this failure of the supercommittee and if all this doesn't work out and if all these hundreds of billions are cut from Medicare, then we can tell them the Republicans did it instead of ObamaCare, which AARP thought was a good idea.

They'll forget about that if we have those cuts this year because we blame the Republicans.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is left.

Let me finish up by saying, we need a cap on spending.

And with respect for the veterans, let me finish with a prayer from George Washington, just a small excerpt since my time is so short. It's Washington's prayer:

Almighty God, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt

keep the United States in Thy holy protection; and Thou wilt

incline the hearts of the citizens to entertain a brotherly

affection and love for one another and for their fellow

citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for

their brethren who have served in the field.

Those are our veterans. I'm a veteran. I didn't serve in combat. But thank God for those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our liberties. Now we should not squander it.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 22 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 16, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

It is interesting to see the way the negotiations with the supercommittee are playing out. Some of us didn't vote for the debt ceiling bill. I know in my own case I didn't vote for it because I read it, and I was concerned it was not a good idea.

Our country should not put its national security as a bargaining chip on the table. National security is important to everyone on both sides of the aisle; it should never be used as a bargaining chip, whether or not we're going to devastate it.

On the other side, the defense would be devastated at the same time Medicare would be devastated. If the supercommittee's recommendations are not approved by at least seven of the 12 and then Congress does not pass them into law, Medicare gets cut and so does the national security get devastated.

So who stands to win and who stands to lose in that scenario? Well, we know that when what is commonly referred to as ObamaCare--I don't even remember the real name--when that got passed, AARP indicated, hey, that's a good idea, even though it had $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. I couldn't believe that some of the groups that endorsed that bill did endorse it because, for one, it had $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. You know, we've got AARP stirring up seniors right now--send in a petition, tell them you don't want any cuts to Medicare, that you're a member of AARP. And I appreciated those petitions very much. Those people that felt Medicare shouldn't have been cut should have been telling that to AARP back when they were thinking that ObamaCare was a good idea. It wasn't then, it's not now, and it won't be if it kicks into effect fully and people start having rationed care.

So, what would take people's minds off the fact that the President's pride and joy, his health care bill, cut $500 billion from Medicare and Republicans didn't support it? didn't think it was a good idea? That's 100 percent a Democratic bill that was ramrodded through with most of the country against it. So the President has to carry that mantle, as do the leaders in charge at that time, the people that were in the majority in the House at that time under Speaker Pelosi as she pushed it through, commenting that we needed to pass it so we could find out what was in it. Well, I had read it. I knew what was in it, and knew it was a disaster waiting to happen. I knew that it hurt seniors badly.

So we come back again to this supercommittee. What do Leader Reid and the Senate Democrats--even House Democrats--have to gain if the supercommittee's proposals are not adopted? Well, there will be massive cuts to security, and there will be massive cuts to Medicare. And that will mean, from a political standpoint, that those same people that rammed through ObamaCare against the country's will will then be able to say before next year's election, look what happened.

Republicans caused a massive cut to Medicare. They're the ones to blame. They'll be able to take people's minds off the fact that ObamaCare was a $500 billion cut to Medicare to our seniors that will result in them having rationed care, getting on long lists before they can get treated, like happens in England, like happens in Canada. You get on a list to get your mammogram, get on a list if there's cancer there to have it biopsied or if there's a lump, having it biopsied, get on a list, have therapy of some kind, whether it's surgery, whether it's radiation, chemo, whatever kind of cancer it is. You get on a list.

I mentioned before a man originally from Canada who said his father died because he was on a list to have a bypass surgery for 2 years. If he'd been in the U.S., the son said he'd still be alive. But he was in Canada, and because they have the socialized medicine program basically embraced by ObamaCare, then you are going to, you know, end up on a list. That's what happens when the government's completely in charge of health care. It doesn't have to be like that.

When you look at the amount that the Federal Government, State governments spend on Medicare and Medicaid, divided by the number of households in the country, we've gotten a bunch of different numbers, but it appears that it may be around $25,000 for every household on Medicare or Medicaid. Between $20,000 and $30,000 just to pay for health insurance?

We'd be far better off buying them a high-deductible policy and giving them cash money in an HSA, a health savings account, with a debit card they control. They decide what doctor they go to; they decide what hospital they go to. They decide whether they want this medicine or that medicine. And when they go through, if they go through the amount of the high deductible, that's all the money to cover that's in their health savings account, then their insurance kicks in, and we finally get the insurance companies out of the health management business and back into the health insurance business. Because right now we don't really have any health insurance companies. We've got health management companies.

I want to go back to having health insurance companies. Insurance is when someone pays a small amount monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually to ensure against some unforeseen event, either a catastrophic disease or accident. It's unforeseen. Don't know if it's going to happen. Don't know if you're going to run up health expenses to that kind of high mark so

you've got an insurance policy to ensure against that unforeseen event or disease. That's insurance.

If we don't get the insurance companies back in the business of insurance instead of management, they may not be around because there will always be people that want to push something like the President did last year.

Most of us, I think, don't want the government telling us what medication we can have, what doctor we can see, why we can't see a doctor, why we're going to have to pay through the nose, why we'll have to buy an additional insurance policy to cover all the gaping holes that Medicare or Medicaid leave.

It would be nice if people didn't have to buy the supplemental insurance policies. But here again, you know, follow the money. AARP makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year selling their supplemental insurance, so they had a vested interest--who can blame them?--in wanting to push through ObamaCare when it means even more money for their supplemental policies.

What I'm talking about is a situation where seniors can have a choice. You can have your Medicare. If you're on Medicaid, you can have Medicaid; or we'll give you a debit card where you're back in control of your own health care.

Why not? It would be cheaper. It gets back to a real doctor/patient relationship. It gets people back in charge of their own health situations.

Well, the reason is because for many people, it's all about the GRE, the government running everything. The Founders didn't want the government running everything, but once the government has control of everyone's health care, they have a legitimate right to dictate what you can eat, what you can't eat, what you have to do in the way of exercise, what you can't do in the way of physical activity. They've got a right because they're paying for your health care. If they're paying for the health care, they have a right to tell you what you can or can't do.

I do not want to live in a country where the government gets to tell me what I can eat or not eat, do or not do. Government's role is supposed to protect people against evil, against evil people or countries who want to take away their freedoms and liberty. In other words, it's addressed in the United States Constitution as providing for the common defense. That's what we ought to be doing.

And then on the domestic front, our job is to provide a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. Nobody's guaranteed happiness--that comes in the heart--but everyone would have an equal opportunity to pursue it. That's what we're supposed to do.

We're supposed to be referees. We're not supposed to be the player/ referee. What a terrible game to be in where the government's both player and referee.

But I do want to give the President credit any time I can, and he's been running around, even recently again--I believe it was last night I saw him--talking about Congress doing nothing, that that's what Congress wants to do. Well, again, I've got to give him credit. He's half right on that.

The Senate hasn't passed a budget in over 900 days. He's right. It's a do-nothing Senate. They refused to pass any kind of debt ceiling bill until basically the House passed one that was acceptable. We should have forced them to pass their own CR back in March, their continuing resolution; but they were negotiated with, and a bill was crafted that it appeared they could agree to pass in the Senate.

What the country needs to see is what the House stands for, what the majority in the House stands for and what the majority in the Senate stands for, and I'm not sure that people have seen that. But it means the House should pass what a majority in the House believes is best for the country and then stand, unmoved until the Senate passes something. Instead of trying to hit a mark that we think the Senate can hit, we pass what we believe in, as cut, cap and balance passed, and then don't try to keep coming back and hitting a mark the Senate--make them pass something.

And in the rules, the law is very clear. This is all provided for. The Constitution provides for these two parties. It expected there would be times when they'd pass a different bill from us, and it would go to a conference committee and then a compromise is worked out. And then those of us in the majority in the House can say, see what we passed at first, like cut, cap and balance? This is what we believe in.

See what the Senate passed first? See this monstrosity? That's what they believe in.

So in the next election, when the House can say if you want more of this kind of bill and responsible spending, not continued runaway spending, this is what you do. If you want the continued runaway spending, more and more and more taxes, then go with the Senate.

I think there's some evidence to support that there are people in the opposition party who want to see the supercommittee fail, that want to see the massive cuts to Medicare--not that that would ever be said publicly, but we know that Pat Toomey, as he talked about yesterday, Jeb Hensarling talked about, two of our brightest minds on financial issues. We've got some really good quality people on that supercommittee, so-called.

Senator Toomey apparently had a framework worked out, and the indications were there were Democrats who were agreeing that it was not a bad setup. There would be some people who would lose some deductions that would, therefore, raise revenue without raising the taxation rate, but, in fact, the taxation rate would be lowered to a rate in the twenties, corporate tax in the twenties, but there would be enough deductions and write-offs that would be eliminated, it was actually going to raise revenue.

One Democrat even said that was a huge breakthrough when that was proposed. It gave a lot of hope that something was going to be worked out.

But then they talked to Democratic leaders. We're not privy to what was said. Next thing you know, there is no agreement. They're not going to agree to a deal. So you can't help but wonder if that's evidence that they really didn't want this bill to pass because if the supercommittee came up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion off the budget over the next 10 years--it's only $120 billion a year--then people next year at election time would really begin to realize just what ObamaCare did in cutting $500 billion off Medicare.

But if there are these massive cuts to Medicare, then Republicans can be blamed before the next election, even though it obviously would have been them standing in the way of passing a bill through the supercommittee.

One of the things that should be a no-brainer but apparently it's a no-starter, that is a zero baseline budget bill. Chairman Ryan has assured me and on television and Speaker Boehner has said, we're going to bring that to the floor this year for a vote. It's going to be passed out of the Budget Committee. I guess you can't guarantee that it will be passed, but I sure feel strongly when it's brought up for a vote in the Budget Committee, it will pass. When it's brought here to the floor, it will pass.

That will end this ridiculous automatic increase in Federal budgets that was begun by a very, very liberal Congress back in 1974, the same one that created CBO and started the ridiculous rules that they're bound by that do not let them consider historic reality in scoring a bill but only has to follow a formula that sometimes forces them to come up with a scoring that is completely unreal and not supported by history.

Well, we've got trouble here, and it's not looking good for that getting accomplished as it should. People are playing games and America will suffer.

The Book of Proverbs tells us that where there is no vision, the people perish, and if we don't get people getting a bigger vision not only of where this country has come from but where it could go, then people are going to perish, and it's so unnecessary.

It was interesting meeting again last week with Prime Minister Netanyahu. He was appreciative of House Resolution 271, I provided a copy, which goes through a lot of whereases. We've got lots of cosponsors on this. I hope if anybody is not on, that they'll sure add their name to this on both sides of the aisle.

The whereases include:

Whereas archeological evidence exists confirming Israel's

existence as a nation over 3,000 years ago in the area in

which it currently exists, despite assertions of its

opponents.

It says 3,000 years ago. That was about the time of King David ruling in Hebron and also the City of David. It just turns out archeologically, it's immediately south of the area where the current walled city is. And of course the walled city is over the area which was original Temple Mount and Herodian Temple Mount and then hundreds of years later became of interest to people of the Islamic religion. But it's actually much more than 3,000 years ago.

Nonetheless, the bill says:

Whereas with the dawn of modern Zionism, the national

liberation movement of the Jewish people, some 150 years ago,

the Jewish people determined to return to their homeland in

the Land of Israel from the lands of their dispersion.

And so that means for people who are really wonderful, big-hearted people like Helen Thomas but are just ignorant of actual history, Jews didn't come from Poland. They were originally in the Promised Land that extended from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, if you go back and look at the promises made to David.

Whereas in 1922, the League of Nations mandated that the

Jewish people were the legal sovereigns over the Land of

Israel and that legal mandate has never been superseded;

Whereas in the aftermath of the Nazi-led Holocaust from

1933 to 1945, in which the Germans and their collaborators

murdered 6,000,000 Jewish people in a premeditated act of

genocide, the international community recognized that the

Jewish state, built by Jewish pioneers must gain its

independence from Great Britain;

Whereas the United States was the first nation to recognize

Israel's independence in 1948, and the State of Israel has

since proven herself to be a faithful ally of the United

States in the Middle East;

Whereas the United States and Israel have a special

friendship based on shared values, and together share the

common goal of peace and security in the Middle East;

Whereas, on October 20, 2009, President Barack Obama

rightly noted that the United States-Israel relationship is a

``bond that is much more than a strategic alliance.'';

Whereas the national security of the United States, Israel,

and allies in the Middle East face a clear and present danger

from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran seeking

nuclear weapons and the ballistic missile capability to

deliver them;

Whereas Israel would face an existential threat from a

nuclear weapons-armed Iran;

Whereas President Barack Obama has been firm and clear in

declaring United States opposition to a nuclear-armed Iran,

stating on November 7, 2008, ``Let me state--repeat what I

stated during the course of the campaign. Iran's development

of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable.''

And we know that since President Obama stated it, he absolutely means it, even though he said that the negotiations on health care would be on C-SPAN, would be open for everybody, even though there were comments that he'd be focused on jobs like a laser. Hopefully he really meant this.

Whereas, on October 26, 2005, at a conference in Tehran

called ``World Without Zionism'', Iranian President Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad stated, ``God willing, with the force of God

behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the

United States and Zionism'';

Whereas the New York Times reported that during his October

26, 2005, speech, President Ahmadinejad called for ``this

occupying regime [Israel] to be wiped off the map'';

Whereas, on April 14, 2006, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``Like it or not, the Zionist regime [Israel] is

heading toward annihilation'';

Whereas, on June 2, 2008, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``I must announce that the Zionist regime [Israel],

with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion, and

betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the

geographical scene'';

Whereas, on June 2, 2008, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of

the United States has come, and the countdown to the

annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has

started'';

Whereas, on May 20, 2009, Iran successfully tested a

surface-to-surface long range missile with an approximate

range of 1,200 miles;

Whereas Iran continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons;

Whereas Iran has been caught building three secret nuclear

facilities since 2002;

Whereas Iran continues its support of international

terrorism, has ordered its proxy Hizbullah to carry out

catastrophic acts of international terrorism such as the

bombing of the Jewish AMIA Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina,

in 1994, and could give a nuclear weapon to a terrorist

organization in the future;

Whereas Iran has refused to provide the International

Atomic Energy Agency with full transparency and access to its

nuclear program;

Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 1803

states that according to the International Atomic Energy

Agency, ``Iran has not established full and sustained

suspension of all enrichment related and reprocessing

activities and heavy-water-related projects as set out in

resolution 1696 (2006), 1737 (2006) and 1747 (2007) nor

resumed its cooperation with the IAEA under the Additional

Protocol, nor taken the other steps required by the IAEA

Board of Governors, nor complied with the provisions of

Security Council resolution 1696 (2006), 1737 (2006) and 1747

(2007) . . .'';

Whereas at July 2009's G-8 Summit in Italy, Iran was given

a September 2009 deadline to start negotiations over its

nuclear programs and Iran offered a five-page document

lamenting the ``ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global

relations'' and included various subjects, but left out any

mention of Iran's own nuclear program which was the true

issue in question;

Whereas the United States has been fully committed to

finding a peaceful resolution to the Iranian nuclear threat,

and has made boundless efforts seeking such a resolution and

to determine if such a resolution is even possible;

Whereas the United States does not want or seek war with

Iran, but it will continue to keep all options open to

prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons; and

Whereas Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in January

2011 that a change of course in Iran will not be possible

``without a credible military option that is put before them

by the international community led by the United States'':

Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) condemns the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran

for its threats of ``annihilating'' the United States and the

State of Israel, for its continued support of international

terrorism, and for its incitement of genocide of the Israeli

people;

(2) supports using all means of persuading the Government

of Iran to stop building and acquiring nuclear weapons;

(3) reaffirms the United States bond with Israel and

pledges to continue to work with the Government of Israel and

the people of Israel to ensure that their sovereign nation

continues to receive critical economic and military

assistance, including missile defense capabilities, needed to

address the threat of Iran; and

(4) expresses support for Israel's right to use all means

necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by

Iran, defend Israeli sovereignty, and protect the lives and

safety of the Israeli people, including the use of military

force if no other peaceful solution can be found within a

reasonable time.

Now there's a bunch of cosponsors on this bill but we need a lot more. We need pressure to bring it to the floor of the House and of the Senate.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is right, sanctions won't do it. Unless Iran knows that the military threat is very real, they're not likely to stop.

People keep talking about sanctions, sanctions. If we just sanction the banks, if we sanction this, if we sanction that. Well, the truth is Russia and China have said they're not going to play that game; they're not going to get involved. And as upset as I have been with Russia and China over some issues, I am grateful that they're honest about this. My concern was Russia and China would say, Okay, we'll have sanctions, knowing that there is no better time to make an absolute fortune than when some sanctions are declared against a country that has something like oil because it means all the other countries that are participating in the sanctions don't get to benefit from any contracts, and, therefore, that means the bigger share for whoever wants to cheat on the sanctions. At least Russia and China have been honest and said, We're not going to do the sanctions. So why in the world are we bothering these days to keep saying sanctions are going to work?

Madam Speaker, it's very clear Iran is a threat to the United States and Israel, and we should not leave it to Israel to defend the United States. We ought to defend ourselves and go after Iran and take care of this problem ourselves.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, November 15, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I request that my name be removed as a sponsor to H.J. Res. 2.

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here on the floor to hear my friend from New Jersey's comments, very well thought through. And I feel sure we can find some commonality in our concerns and appreciate the man's heart and mind. Thank you.

One of the things under the debt ceiling act that was passed early August was a requirement for a vote on a balanced budget amendment. There are different versions of a balanced budget amendment. One has most of the things we hold dear, not only a requirement of balancing the budget, but also

a cap to spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, and also an increased supermajority in order to pass any tax bills raising taxes.

My concern has been that we had a wave election last November. We got over 80 new conservative freshmen, and we haven't cut spending like we should. I am more and more compelled that we need a cap on spending. All of our Members support that. But the question will be: What version of a balanced budget amendment will come to the floor for a vote?

I really do appreciate the comments of my friend from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews). There's been a lot going on in the Middle East. And it's not looking very good for those who love freedom, the right to make their own choices, because you find in some of the documentation of those who have pushed, supported rebellion, the so-called Arab Spring, their definition of freedom is the freedom to live under shari'a law and be completely governed by shari'a law. That's the freedom that their Arab Spring brings.

And it's been interesting, there's an article here from the Washington Examiner by Gregory Kane. The title says, ``Obama Becomes `Silent Cal' on Libya, Shari'a.'' I'd just like to read this for the Record. And I'm inserting ``President'' into the mention of President Obama:

With each passing day, we're learning more and more about

the people President Obama tossed us into bed with in Libya.

Here's a headline from the London Daily Mail, a British

newspaper:

``Now the rebels impose Shariah law as Islamic rules become

`basic source' of Libyan legislation.''

In the story below the headline, readers learn from the

chairman of Libya's National Transition Council that the

country's new parliament will have ``an Islamist tint,'' that

``any existing laws contradicting the teachings of Islam

would be nullified'' and that men would be allowed to have as

many as four wives.

Again, the question must be put to Barack Hussein

``American Values'' Obama, president of the United States:

exactly how do Shariah law and polygamy reflect American

values?

Remember, when President Obama justified American and NATO

airstrikes in Libya to support the rebel forces that toppled

the regime of Moammar Qadhafi he claimed that preventing

bloodshed was an ``American value.''

But there was bloodshed aplenty, as least on the side of

Qadhafi forces. Qadhafi himself was a victim of the

bloodshed, and the circumstances of his death that have come

to light shed more light on what a sham Obama's claim of

acting to preserve American values really is.

In a separate London Daily Mail story about Qadhafi's

death, the paper printed the photo of an unidentified rebel

who claimed he was the one who killed Qadhafi.

``We grabbed [Qadhafi],'' the young man said. ``I hit him

in the face. Some fighters wanted to take him away and that's

when I shot him, twice, in the face and in the chest.''

Later, it was revealed that more was done to Qadhafi than

this young rebel merely shooting him in the face and chest.

Some reports say that, before he died, Qadhafi was

sodomized with either a knife, bayonet or some other sharp

object.

So let's recap:

President Obama commits American forces--as part of NATO.

I'll parenthetically add, when he did not have the sense to come before Congress and make the case here, as many of us on both sides of the aisle have been advocating. No matter who the President is, Republican, Democrat, if you can't come to Congress and make the case as to why American lives and American treasure should be put at risk, is it really something we ought to be doing as a country?

Now, resuming with the article:

1. President Obama commits American forces--as part of

NATO--to supporting a rebel faction in Libya whose goal is to

overthrow Qadhafi. Obama does this while having absolutely no

clue about what kind of people make up this rebel faction.

2. The rebel forces prevail, primarily through NATO

airstrikes. It was a NATO airstrike that took out a Qadhafi

convoy fleeing Sirte that allowed rebel forces to capture the

deposed Libyan leader.

3. Qadhafi ends up in the hands of what can only be

considered a mob. He is beaten, tortured, possibly sodomized,

and fatally shot in what has been oxymoronically described as

``mob justice.'' His body is then put on public display in a

meat store.

4. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flies into Libya and

announces, with the smug arrogance we might expect from an

official from Obama's administration, ``We came, we saw, he

[Qadhafi] died.''

5. Leaders of Libya's National Transition Council announce

that Shariah law will prevail in Libya.

6. President Obama is mum on No. 5.

He--President Obama--hasn't said one word about the

blatantly false account of Qadhafi's death that interim

Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril initially gave

reporters.

He hasn't condemned the ``mob justice'' that led to

Qadhafi's death, the beating, the torture, the alleged

sodomizing. He hasn't mumbled so much as a syllable about

Qadhafi's body being put on display in a meat store.

Obama hasn't said one word about Shariah being the law of

the land in the new Libya. The man who was unavoidable for

comment when it came to justifying American intervention in

Libya has now pulled a complete Harpo Marx Act.

On this issue, Obama--President Obama--has made ``Silent''

Cal Coolidge look like a motor mouth.

That's an article from Gregory Kane in the Washington Examiner.

Then, interestingly, from the American Thinker, an article by Andrew Bostom, ``Liberated Libya: Al Qaeda Flag Aloft Benghazi's Courthouse.''

The courthouse in Benghazi, is the iconic seat of the

revolt which toppled Qadhafi--Libya's ``(im) moral

equivalent'' to Egypt's Tahrir Square. During the tumultuous

months of Libya's brutal civil war, it was here that rebel

forces established a provisional government, and

propagandistic media center, crowing to foreign journalists

about their ``heroic'' struggle ``for freedom.''

[Picture of al Qaeda flag]

One can now see both the Libyan rebel flag and the flag of

al Qaeda fluttering atop Benghazi's courthouse.

I've got a blowup of that right here.

Just so those who felt so compelled to assist members of al Qaeda, we knew they were members of al Qaeda. We didn't know how many were part of the Libyan rebel forces, but we knew there were members of al Qaeda. We knew that there were people who were rebelling against Qadhafi, that as much as they wanted to kill Qadhafi want to kill Americans. And now we also know NATO forces, as the President kept saying, Oh, no, we're going to leave that to NATO forces. The United States military makes up 65 percent of NATO's military. It's American.

So let's look and recap the good that we've done in supporting those members of al Qaeda who took out Qadhafi, with whom this administration had lawful dealings before they decided to support taking him out and, hiding under NATO's name, took action to see that he was thrown out and, now, killed, brutalized.

So here we are, the al Qaeda flag flying over the courthouse in Benghazi. That's the daylight photo. Over here on this third we have the nighttime photo; and, once again, there is the al Qaeda flag waving proudly over that historic courthouse in Benghazi.

Going back to the article from the American Thinker:

According to one Benghazi resident, Islamists driving

brand-new SUVs and waving the black al Qaeda flag drive the

city's streets at night shouting, ``Islamiya, Islamiya! No

East, nor West,'' a reference to previous worries that the

country would be bifurcated between Qadhafi opponents in the

east and the pro Qadhafi elements in the west.

Elhelwa adds these salient details:

Earlier this week, I went to the Benghazi courthouse and

confirmed the rumors: an al Qaeda flag was clearly visible;

its Arabic script declaring that ``there is no God but

Allah'' and a full moon underneath. When I tried to take

pictures, a Salafi-looking guard, wearing a green camouflage

outfit, rushed towards me and demanded to know what I was

doing. My response was straightforward: I was taking a

picture of the flag. He gave me an intimidating look and

hissed, ``Whomever speaks ill of this flag, we will cut off

his tongue''

How about that for an American value?

``I recommend that you don't publish these. You will bring

trouble to yourself.''

What glorious American values. Our President assured us that, without the support of Congress, without even a debate in Congress, he had to rush headlong into helping these people that turns out are, as we were concerned might be, al Qaeda. We had to help al Qaeda, with whom we had declared war, basically, by the President of the United States after 9/ 11 because they had declared war on us. And so this President, without coming and having a debate, decides he's going to go help these people before he knew who all exactly we were helping because they reflect American values.

Going back to the article. The author says:

``He followed me inside the courthouse, but luckily my

driver Khaled was close by, and interceded on my behalf.

According to Khaled, the guard had angrily threatened to

harm me. When I again engaged him in conversation, he told me

``this flag is the true flag of Islam'' . . .

Well, how about those American values that our President used our treasure, put our military members at risk in order to effectuate? Now we've got the al Qaeda flag flying in Libya, in Benghazi, over the historic courthouse that was the headquarters during the assault on Qadhafi.

We found out on 9/11 there were people in the world who were at war with us, and it turns out they had been at war with us at least since Iran, since those days when a naive but well-intentioned President named Carter had declared the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace coming to Iran. The same President who gave away the Panama Canal that so many valued Americans lost their lives digging, creating, defending, was given away. There will be a price to pay for that at some point down the road by this country.

But we're already paying the price and have been since 1979 for the administration at that time while I was in the Army at Fort Benning watching those things happen, knowing it was a crime for me as a military member to criticize anybody in the chain of command, which was President Carter. We had to bite our tongues as we watched that administration welcome in the Ayatollah Khomeini.

So many lives have been lost. So many people tortured, killed. We've got Christians on the run all over the Middle East, Christians being killed around the Middle East. The last Christian church has now closed in Afghanistan that we sent American treasure and lives, lost so many American lives in order to rout the Taliban. And then we turn the country over to what the people there tell us is a very, very corrupt administration. Having met with leaders of the Northern Alliance with a few other Members of Congress, it's clear we have not done a good thing enforcing a centralized government in a country that cannot sustain it without mass corruption and brutality.

We also know from the recent comments of Karzai himself he's prepared to make peace and be an ally of people sworn to destroy us.

Afghanistan can be salvaged, but we have to be smart in the way that we do that. At the same time, we know that more of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia than from any other country. It certainly appears that there are people in Saudi Arabia who have made massive amounts of money because of our dependence on their oil who have used that money to fund terrorism that has been used against the United States to kill our precious men and women of our military.

We need to become energy independent. We need to get rid of any Department that has had as its avowed goal for 32 years to get off dependence on foreign energy and every year has done a poorer and poorer job of that, although they have made some nice contributions for people at Solyndra and other bankrupt companies. It's time to get rid of the Energy Department.

It's time to get serious about stopping the dependence on foreign energy. We know we've got enough natural gas. We can actually do that now. We have at least 100 years of use of natural gas. And I am fine taking a percentage of the royalties the Federal Government could get off of natural gas produced, oil produced on our own land, our own Federal land, and using it toward alternative energy. But I am not, as most of my friends here, are not in favor of borrowing more money to throw at companies like Solyndra that cannot make it on their own.

Or like the solar company in Nevada, the friends of Leader Harry Reid also getting massive money, 42, 44 cents of every dollar, which we had to borrow to throw at their friends who had gone bankrupt.

It's time we started using some common sense. You don't rush in to help in a rebellion until you know who you're helping, and this administration did not do that because to think that they knew who we were helping is really unthinkable.

That's my hope and prayer that this administration did not understand who it was helping who would one day fly al Qaeda flags over a building where housed the Government in Libya.

And we have sat idly by and watched Iran grow greater and stronger in strength in its move toward creating nuclear weapons, just as my Democratic friend from New Jersey was talking about, Iran getting closer and closer to having nuclear weapons. Plural. Our strong ally in the Middle East, who is becoming surrounded by those who want to take it out, Israel, is at threat for losing its very existence, an existence that was acknowledged and affirmed unanimously in the United Nations before it was taken over by people who sympathize with those who fly the al Qaeda flag.

Back in those days, it was a unanimous decision: How could a country, a Jewish state like Israel, not be created after the worst genocide, Holocaust, in the history of man?

They needed a country of their own, and what better place than in a place where King David ruled 1,400 years before there was a man named Mohammed, 1,400 years before the creation of modern-day Islam.

Well, I'm proud to say that Joel Rosenberg is a friend of mine. I was visiting with him last night. He's got a brand-new book out. Can't wait to read it. Joel Rosenberg has an article in the Washington Times, Friday, October 21, needs to be entered in the Record, and I'll do so by reading it.

The headline, the title is ``Confronting the threat from Iran.''

Joel Rosenberg writes:

The brazen Iranian terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi

ambassador, kill Americans and blow up the Saudi and Israeli

embassies in Washington was a wake-up call. The radical

regime in Tehran has crossed a red line. Iran has murdered

Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon over the years.

Now it appears to have ordered terrorist attacks inside our

nation's capital. Should this prove true, Iran has engaged in

an act of war.

Now the question is: Who will neutralize the threat from

Iran before' the mullahs finish building nuclear warheads and

the ballistic missile systems to deliver them?

``The international community must stop Iran before it's

too late,'' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned

in his United Nations speech last month. If Iran is not

stopped, we will all face the specter of nuclear terrorism,

and the Arab Spring could soon become an Iranian winter. . .

. The world around Israel is definitely becoming more

dangerous.''

``Iran has not abandoned its nuclear program. The opposite

is true; it continues full steam ahead,'' warned Maj. Gen.

Eyal Eisenberg, home-front command chief for the Israel

Defense Forces, in a September speech. He warned that the

Arab Spring could turn into a ``radical Islamic winter'' and

``this raises the likelihood of an all-out, total war, with

the possibility of weapons of mass destruction being used.''

The Obama administration is not taking decisive action to

neutralize Iran. President Obama's policy of engagement with

the mullahs has morphed into a policy of appeasement, and it

has failed. Yet the White House has all but taken the use of

force off the table. In September 2009, then-Defense

Secretary Robert M. Gates said, ``The reality is, there is no

military option that does anything more than buy time.'' In

April 2010, the New York Times reported that Mr. Gates had

``warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House

officials that the United States does not have an effective

long-range policy for dealing with Iran's steady progress

toward nuclear capability.'' Little has changed in the past

18 months. What's more, the administration is pressuring

Israel not to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran

despite the growing threat of a second Holocaust.

The American people, however, expect and deserve better. A

bipartisan poll conducted in September by Democrat Pat

Caddell and Republican John McLaughlin found that 77 percent

of Americans think the Obama administration's current polices

toward stopping Iran's nuclear program ``will fail.'' About

63 percent of Americans think Iran is the nation posing the

greatest threat to us, ahead of China and North Korea.

Remarkably, 63 percent of Americans also approve of pre-

emptive military action against Iran if economic sanctions do

not stop its nuclear program.

And they have not.

It is very clear that these sanctions have not slowed Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. It appears very clear to those who look very long and who study the issue very long that Iran is counting on developing nuclear weapons before the sanctions totally cripple them, because they know, when they get nuclear weapons, they can then use them to extort the removal of the sanctions. They will not work in time. It's time to face up to that.

Going back to Joel Rosenberg's article:

War, of course, is not the preferred solution. There are a

range of options a serious

American president could take to neutralize the Iranian

threat. But none of them is likely to work unless the

president is willing to publicly put the military option on

the table and order the Pentagon to accelerate planning for

massive airstrikes and special operations.

Will any of the Republican candidates for president step

up? Articulating pro-growth economic policies is vital to the

2012 campaign, to be sure, but the GOP candidates must not

drink the Kool-Aid that the economy is all that matters to

the American people. To the contrary, anyone who is asking

for the Republican nomination must articulate a clear,

compelling and detailed strategy for neutralizing the threat

posed by the apocalyptic, genocidal death cult in Tehran.

At the next debate, each of the Republican candidates for

president should be pressed to directly answer the following

questions:

1. As president of the United States, what specific actions

would you take to stop Iran from obtaining and deploying

nuclear weapons and using terrorism to advance its Islamic

Revolution?

2. If you had intelligence that Iran was on the verge of

building operational nuclear weapons, would your

administration support an Israeli preemptive military strike

on Iran's nuclear facilities?

3. Would you as president seriously consider ordering a

pre-emptive strike by U.S. military forces to neutralize the

Iranian nuclear threat?

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney recently delivered a

foreign-policy address in South Carolina in which he raised

the Iranian threat. ``Will Iran be a fully activated nuclear

weapons state, threatening its neighbors, dominating the

world's oil supply with a stranglehold on the Strait of

Hormuz?'' Mr. Romney asked. ``In the hands of the ayatollahs,

a nuclear Iran is nothing less than an existential threat to

Israel. Iran's suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.''

Mr. Romney noted that he would ``begin discussions with

Israel to increase the level of our military assistance and

coordination'' and would ``reiterate that Iran obtaining a

nuclear weapon is unacceptable.'' However, he did not

specifically discuss how he would stop Iran from getting the

bomb and sponsoring terrorist attacks.

Businessman Herman Cain has soared into the top tier of

presidential candidates with a bold pro-growth tax-

simplification plan, but he has spoken little of foreign

policy. He has identified Iran as one of America's most

serious national security threats and has been clear about

his strong support for Israel. Drawing on his experience as a

civilian contractor for the U.S. Navy working on ballistic-

missile projects, Mr. Cain rightly has called for enhanced

missile defenses to blunt an Iranian nuclear threat ``I would

make it a priority to upgrade all of our Aegis surface-to-air

ballistic-missile defense capabilities of all of our

warships, all the way around the world,'' Mr. Cain told the

Values Voter Summit in Washington earlier this month. ``Make

that a priority, and then say to [Iranian President Mahmoud]

Ahmadinejad, `Make my Day.' '' His instincts are right, but

missile defenses are insufficient to neutralize the Iranian

threat.

Few of the GOP candidates better understand the Iranian

threat--and the dangerous end-times theology of the current

Iranian leadership, which is preparing for the coming of the

Shia messiah known as the ``Twelfth Imam''--than former Sen.

Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Thus far, however, he has not

made Iran a major element of his campaign. Former House

Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Texas Gov.

Rick Perry have barely mentioned the issue, though certainly

they understand the dangers.

Only Rep. Ron Paul among the Republican contenders doesn't

grasp the seriousness of the twin Iranian threats of

terrorism and nuclear weapons. ``One can understand why [the

mullahs] might want to become nuclear-capable, if only to

defend themselves and to be treated more respectfully,'' Mr.

Paul has written. The congressman opposes economic sanctions

on Iran. He opposes pre-emptive strikes on Iran. Indeed, Mr.

Paul has indicated he does not have a problem with Iran

acquiring nuclear weapons because he doesn't think the

mullahs in Tehran would actually use such weapons against

their enemies. What's more, he has stated that he would not

come to Israel's defense if Iran fired nuclear weapons at the

Jewish state.

This article by Joel Rosenberg is an excellent article, and it used to be taken seriously.

Knowing Herman Cain personally, Governor Rick Perry personally, Michele Bachmann personally, Rick Santorum personally, Newt Gingrich personally, I know they're all concerned about it, but because of the way the debates have been structured, this has not been an issue that has been pushed. I know all of those individuals well enough to know their hearts and to know they do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons and that they will do what's necessary to prevent it. The trouble is none of those individuals will become President or even have the chance to become President for 18 months.

It's time that the American people convinced the American President of this, who helped create the situation where al Qaeda--our enemies, our sworn enemies who want to destroy it--can fly their flags over the Libyan courthouse. It was more than the Libyan courthouse. It was the brief capital, the headquarters, for the people that this President chose to help.

A dangerous time.

Now, I have filed House Resolution 271. It has got a slew of cosponsors. They're all Republican, but I would hope that some of my friends on the other side of the aisle would join in with us on this.

Madam Speaker, I would hope that people would encourage their Members of Congress to sign on if they support what's here.

Basically, most of this resolution--it's not terribly long; it's just six pages--and most of that are whereas clauses stating facts.

The text is as follows:

H. Res. 271

Whereas archeological evidence exists confirming Israel's

existence as a nation over 3,000 years ago in the area in

which it currently exists, despite assertions of its

opponents;

Whereas with the dawn of modern Zionism, the national

liberation movement of the Jewish people, some 150 years ago,

the Jewish people determined to return to their homeland in

the Land of Israel from the lands of their dispersion;

Whereas in 1922, the League of Nations mandated that the

Jewish people were the legal sovereigns over the Land of

Israel and that legal mandate has never been superseded;

Whereas in the aftermath of the Nazi-led Holocaust from

1933 to 1945, in which the Germans and their collaborators

murdered 6,000,000 Jewish people in a premeditated act of

genocide, the international community recognized that the

Jewish state, built by Jewish pioneers must gain its

independence from Great Britain;

Whereas the United States was the first nation to recognize

Israel's independence in 1948, and the State of Israel has

since proven herself to be a faithful ally of the United

States in the Middle East;

Whereas the United States and Israel have a special

friendship based on shared values, and together share the

common goal of peace and security in the Middle East;

Whereas, on October 20, 2009, President Barack Obama

rightly noted that the United States-Israel relationship is a

``bond that is much more than a strategic alliance.'';

Whereas the national security of the United States, Israel,

and allies in the Middle East face a clear and present danger

from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran seeking

nuclear weapons and the ballistic missile capability to

deliver them;

Whereas Israel would face an existential threat from a

nuclear weapons-armed Iran;

Whereas President Barack Obama has been firm and clear in

declaring United States opposition to a nuclear-armed Iran,

stating on November 7, 2008, ``Let me state--repeat what I

stated during the course of the campaign. Iran's development

of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable.'';

Whereas, on October 26, 2005, at a conference in Tehran

called ``World Without Zionism'', Iranian President Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad stated, ``God willing, with the force of God

behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the

United States and Zionism'';

Whereas the New York Times reported that during his October

26, 2005, speech, President Ahmadinejad called for ``this

occupying regime [Israel] to be wiped off the map'';

Whereas, on April 14, 2006, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``Like it or not, the Zionist regime [Israel] is

heading toward annihilation'';

Whereas, on June 2, 2008, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``I must announce that the Zionist regime [Israel],

with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion, and

betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the

geographical scene'';

Whereas, on June 2, 2008, Iranian President Ahmadinejad

said, ``Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of

the United States has come, and the countdown to the

annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has

started'';

Whereas, on May 20, 2009, Iran successfully tested a

surface-to-surface long range missile with an approximate

range of 1,200 miles;

Whereas Iran continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons;

Whereas Iran has been caught building three secret nuclear

facilities since 2002;

Whereas Iran continues its support of international

terrorism, has ordered its proxy Hizbullah to carry out

catastrophic acts of international terrorism such as the

bombing of the Jewish AMIA Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina,

in 1994, and could give

a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization in the future;

Whereas Iran has refused to provide the International

Atomic Energy Agency with full transparency and access to its

nuclear program;

Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 1803

states that according to the International Atomic Energy

Agency, ``Iran has not established full and sustained

suspension of all enrichment related and reprocessing

activities and heavy-water-related projects as set out in

resolution 1696 (2006), 1737 (2006) and 1747 (2007) nor

resumed its cooperation with the IAEA under the Additional

Protocol, nor taken the other steps required by the IAEA

Board of Governors, nor complied with the provisions of

Security Council resolution 1696 (2006), 1737 (2006) and 1747

(2007) . . .'';

Whereas at July 2009's G-8 Summit in Italy, Iran was given

a September 2009 deadline to start negotiations over its

nuclear programs and Iran offered a five-page document

lamenting the ``ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global

relations'' and included various subjects, but left out any

mention of Iran's own nuclear program which was the true

issue in question;

Whereas the United States has been fully committed to

finding a peaceful resolution to the Iranian nuclear threat,

and has made boundless efforts seeking such a resolution and

to determine if such a resolution is even possible;

Whereas the United States does not want or seek war with

Iran, but it will continue to keep all options open to

prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons; and

Whereas Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in January

2011 that a change of course in Iran will not be possible

``without a credible military option that is put before them

by the international community led by the United States'':

Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) condemns the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran

for its threats of ``annihilating'' the United States and the

State of Israel, for its continued support of international

terrorism, and for its incitement of genocide of the Israeli

people;

(2) supports using all means of persuading the Government

of Iran to stop building and acquiring nuclear weapons;

(3) reaffirms the United States bond with Israel and

pledges to continue to work with the Government of Israel and

the people of Israel to ensure that their sovereign nation

continues to receive critical economic and military

assistance, including missile defense capabilities, needed to

address the threat of Iran; and

(4) expresses support for Israel's right to use all means

necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by

Iran, defend Israeli sovereignty, and protect the lives and

safety of the Israeli people, including the use of military

force if no other peaceful solution can be found within a

reasonable time.

That's House Resolution 271. And I certainly hope that more Members of Congress will join us in supporting that position because time is running out.

It is also my hope and prayer that the rumors that have gone around about what this administration has told Israel behind closed doors do not have support. In fact, that's my hope and prayer. Because if this administration were to be telling Israel behind closed doors that if they move to protect themselves against a nuclear attack by Iran without the United States' permission--which would not be given--then Israel, since they do not have all of our stealth capability, do not have the most sophisticated bombs we have, will likely lose many planes and will be in need of replacement planes and parts.

I hope and pray that the rumor that they're telling them, we will not support them with replacement planes, replacement parts if they defend themselves, is not true. But this President, though he's been so vocal about why we needed to go support Libya, why it was in our American values, interest, has not talked a lot about what he's telling Israel behind the scenes.

Israel is in grave danger. We have been a friend because we believe in the same value of human life, the same value of freedom, of liberty. We owe it to them, our friends, our allies.

If we're not going to have the nerve to take action against a country that is sworn to be at war with us and to destroy us and take us out at all costs, then we should at least not stand in the way of a friend who wants to do so.

I have a few more things I want to cover here. There's an article from National Review online from The Corner by Andrew McCarthy, another brilliant man and, I'm proud to say, a dear friend. The headline: ``Did Obama appointee access confidential database in effort to smear Perry as `Islamophobe'?''

At PJM, terrorism researcher Patrick Poole reports that

Mohamed Elibiary, an appointee on President Obama's Homeland

Security Advisory Council, is in hot water with the Texas

Department of Public Safety (TDPS). The issue is whether

Elibiary used his privileged access to a state law-

enforcement database to acquire intelligence reports and then

tried to shop them to the media, urging that they showed

rampant ``Islamophobia'' at TDPS under Governor Rick Perry.

Poole says no story was published because, according to one

press source, there was ``nothing remotely resembling

Islamophobia'' in the leaked reports. The source told Poole,

``I think [Elibiary] was hoping we would bite and not give it

too much of a look in light of other media outfits jumping on

the Islamophobia bandwagon.''

The Islamophobia bandwagon was the subject of my column

last weekend. Seems there are plenty of Islamists and

Leftists climbing aboard.

Elibiary, you'll no doubt be stunned to learn, was also on

the Obama DHS's working group on ``countering violent

extremism.'' That's the brain-trust that helped devise the

new Obama counterterrorism strategy I outlined (here and

here) a few weeks back--the one that envisions having law-

enforcement pare back their intelligence-gathering activities

and take their marching orders from ``community partners.'' I

call the new strategy ``factophobia.''

As noted by Poole and the Investigative Project on

Terrorism, Elibiary's history includes an appearance at a

conference honoring Ayatollah Khomeini; condemning the

Justice Department's successful prosecution of a Hamas-

financing conspiracy designed by the Muslim Brotherhood (the

Holy Land Foundation case); praise for Brotherhood theorist

Sayyid Qutb; and an aggressive email exchange with Rod Dreher

in 2006 (when Dreher, at the Dallas Morning News, countered

Elibiary's praise for Qutb), in which Elibiary reportedly

called Dreher ``a Klansman without a hood'' [ACM: I think

that means ``Islamophobe'' and warned him: ``Treat people as

inferiors and you can expect someone to put a banana in your

exhaust pipe or something.''

Who better could President Obama possibly choose to help

formulate counterterrorism strategy? Actually, once you read

the strategy, I think you'll agree that he made a perfect

choice.

Then we have another article from National Review Online, again from Andrew McCarthy. Headline, ``Napolitano: On Elibiary, I know Nothing. I Know Nothing * * * ''

He said that Secretary Napolitano ``professes not to know anything about the matter''--he's talking about Elibiary--``or about how I got a guy who appears at a conference honoring Ayatollah Khomeini, who praises Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, and who condemns the Justice Department's successful prosecution of the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas financing network (the Holy Land Foundation case), somehow winds up on the Department of Homeland Security advisory council that helped devise the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy.''

Actually, it turns out, as Secretary Napolitano testified, that actually she, as the Secretary of Homeland Security, gave this gentleman the secret security clearance which ultimately allowed him to access sensitive documents, at least three of which he downloaded and then tried to market to major media sources.

It is important to note that in the pleading that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed filed--and he is a very smart man. He may be crazy, but he is a very smart man. He did his own interpretation in English, so some of the articles are not quite appropriate, but he sets out a legal document and justifies all of the actions he took in working on 9/11's murder of 3,000 Americans. He takes verses from the Koran and uses them to justify his actions.

At one point in his pleading, which we have access to through our Web site--and this was declassified by the judge in the 9/11 cases involving five planners of 9/11. It was ordered released on the 9th day of March, 2009, and there are also transcripts of his colloquy with the judge in which he confessed to many other acts of terrorism, quite voluntarily, it was obvious.

But in his pleading, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, on behalf of himself and the four other defendants who were ready to plead guilty, announced they were pleading guilty before this administration; and the Attorney General-to-be, Eric Holder, announced they were going to give these guys a show trial in New York. So they withdraw their guilty pleas so they could get a show trial in New York. Now that's not going to happen, and now it looks like, 4 years after these people agreed to

plead guilty, which will be December of next year, they will still not have been tried because of the actions of this administration.

But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says: We do not possess your military might, not your nuclear weapons; nevertheless, we fight you with the almighty God. So, if our act of jihad and our fighting with you caused fear and terror, then many thanks to God, because it is him that has thrown fear into your hearts, which resulted from your infidelity, paganism, and your statement that God had a son and your Trinity beliefs.

Then he goes on and he says: God stated in his book, verse 151, Al- Umran, Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for which he has sent no authority; their place will be the fire; and evil is the home of the wrongdoers. That is just one part.

He also says: We ask to be near God. We fight you, destroy you, terrorize. You'll be greatly defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq, and America will fall politically, militarily, economically. Your end is very near, and your fall will be like the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day.

But this gentleman references that one of the reasons that it's okay to kill Americans is because many Americans believe there is a Holy trinity, a Father, Son and Holy Ghost. They believe that God had a son that Christians call the Messiah.

My time is running out, so let me direct you to the Treaty of Paris, 1783, such a historic document. The most powerful country in the world at that time, 1783, was Great Britain. They had the most powerful Navy, the most powerful military; and yet a ragtag bunch of people who believed so firmly in the ideas of freedom and being able to practice most of them--in fact, a third of the signers of the Declaration, they weren't just Christians; they, as Martin Luther King, Jr., were ordained Christian ministers, and they believed in freedom and that God was giving us a chance to govern ourselves.

So after this ragtag bunch defeated the strongest country in the world, Great Britain, and they sat down in 1783 in Paris, and we had there on our behalf John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, three of our brightest minds, they had to set about figuring out: What can we put on paper to have Great Britain sign that will be so important that they would not want to risk violating an oath? What kind of oath could we put on this treaty that Great Britain would be scared to violate?

This treaty will want them to recognize the United States of America. What can we do to make it serious enough that they would not turn around the next month and say we had no right to be independent despite what they signed? There is an original copy of the Treaty of Paris in the State Department. Tours can be taken, I've taken tons of tours around Washington, D.C. Until my pastor and his wife, David and Cindy Dykes, were in town years back, I had not seen that. But I was taken aback, and I've got a copy of--this is a duplicate--of the Treaty of Paris, two pages, well, it's the first and last page here. There are 10 articles, so we've got the first and last pages here.

So how would you start a treaty in such a way that it would scare the strongest country in the world from violating their oath? Well, they figured it out, and they put it on the document. The biggest letters anywhere in the treaty are those in the first two lines, and they began ``In the Name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity.'' Starting the Treaty of Paris with ``In the Name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity,'' they knew would be strong enough to scare Great Britain into not violating the oath that they signed on that document.

Then you tie it in with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's pleading, the very fact that they would sign such a document recognizing the Holy Trinity, according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his interpretation of the Koran, that's justification for killing and terrorizing people that believe in the Holy undivided Trinity.

There's a war going on, and in Libya, apparently we fought for people who want to destroy us. The al Qaeda flag now flies proudly over this federal building in Benghazi, Libya. Congratulations to this administration for making that happen.

With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, for going on a couple months now, we've been hearing the President say we need to pass his jobs bill--pass his jobs bill right away, right now, pass his jobs bill. And it was so ironic to have a President of the United States, who says he wants to work with the Members of Congress, but Members of Congress won't work with him, and in his purported ``effort'' to work with Members of Congress, he doesn't ask to sit down with Congress in a private meeting and talk about these issues. Oh, no, that would really show an intent to work with Congress, to sit down in a room where we can visit about the issues. That would be really working with Congress. Instead, what we have from the President of the United States is a demand.

Now, I'm not sure historically, Mr. Speaker, how many times a President of the United States has decided to just throw a little hissy fit and, I'm going to come talk to Congress. Well, we know that he was an instructor. He wasn't a professor, but an instructor. You can be an instructor in a law school if you practice law on the side or a community organizer on the side, or whatever; and they'll let you come teach a course or two. So anybody who has been involved in a law school, you would think, even as a low instructor, would know that the Constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States has no right, no moral authority to demand to come speak in the House.

Now, the President would never give credit to the willingness of this Congress to vote unanimously to allow the President, after his little hissy fit, to come speak in the House, but we did. He demanded to come speak to the House. He has to have an invitation to do that. In social circles, if somebody demanded to come to someone's house--I demand an invitation to come lecture you in your house--most people would say forget it. But this House, controlled by Republican Members--the majority here, Republican, Democrat majority down in the Senate--we voted unanimously. There were no objections to inviting the President to come lecture us rather than sit down and try to work with us.

I certainly will yield to my friend from Texas.

Well, that's so unexpected and unnecessary, and it actually means a great deal. Thank you.

Somebody that's been here slugging it out longer than I would ever be able to handle, Mr. Barton from Texas came as a young man, and he's been able to endure the slings and arrows through many, many years of being in the minority.

And we're back to dealing with a White House who wants, he says, to negotiate, to work with Congress, and does so by demanding to come talk to Congress, and comes.

Did we have a warm, friendly meeting here as the President stood here on the second level?

Well, actually we got lectured. We were lectured that we needed to pass the President's jobs bill right away, right away, 16, 17 times. We've just got to do it now.

During the speech, I don't recall the President ever saying, I really don't have a bill. I don't have a bill. And, in fact, if you want to sit down and work with me, you won't be able to because in the morning I'm getting on Air Force One, funded by the taxpayers, and basically hit the campaign trail. And I'm going to be beating up on you guys in the House of Representatives for not being willing to negotiate with me, even though I'm not around. And, by the way, I'm not going to negotiate even if we sat down because you've got to take my bill completely, pass the whole thing. I'm not going to compromise on anything.

That was the message for a number of weeks. Take it; pass it as it is. Never mind the fact that he didn't have a bill when he hit the road and was condemning Congress for not passing his bill. That's just strange.

You would think if somebody really wants to work with Congress, really wants to do something for the people of America that are hurting--I've had four job fairs in east Texas, and I've gone to each one, and it breaks your heart. There are people in their fifties and sixties, there's a lot of young people, a bigger percentage of young people, but there were older people, tremendous experience, tremendous education and training, been laid off because of the bad economy.

And it's heartbreaking even more so because this Congress and this President have to take responsibility for continuing to put more and more laws, regulations, burdens on business that keep them from being able to retain jobs, keep them from being able to expand and create more jobs.

And when you hear from people who've lost their job, and they're not only brokenhearted, but they're upset because then they find out that this administration has done things like throw $600 million at Solyndra, has spent millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, to create jobs. One giveaway program, seems like I read we spent $8 million per job that was created. Different amounts resulting in a different number of jobs.

One of the things I've seen in talking to people in Texas who are involved in the education system is that when the President's so-called stimulus bill in January of 2009 was passed and it was done, rammed through like the ObamaCare bill was, it didn't have, it didn't seem, the full support of America. But it had a majority in the House, it had a majority in the Senate, and so it passed.

I like to think I'm objective enough that I certainly acknowledge it didn't start in January of '09 with President Obama. A good man, a smart man--he's not given credit for that--made a major mistake when President Bush trusted Hank Paulson. Paulson says, we're about to have a catastrophe, give me $700 billion and I'll keep things on track, get things back on track.

We don't give $700 billion to one man and say go fix things. You don't do that in America. That's not what the country was founded for. But it was done. And as I understand it, about $250 billion of the $700 billion is around the amount that Hank Paulson squandered

of the so-called stimulus or the bail-out, TARP, whatever you want to call it.

Ironically, if one wishes to look at things from a political standpoint, it was pretty amazing because a Republican administration provided $700 billion to mainly bail out people on Wall Street who had donated to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans. That's what's so amazing is to hear people constantly talk about these rotten Republicans on Wall Street, when the fact is they give to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans.

So, not only was it absolutely, in my mind, an immoral thing to do, to take people's hard-earned money and add it to money we borrowed from China and others to bail people out on Wall Street. That's not the America that was founded, that so much blood and treasure has been spent to establish.

Wall Street executives, I've got no problem, as long as they're playing by the rules, they're not cheating people, if they make $100 million a year. I have no problem as long as they're playing fairly; but when they get greedy and end up being broke, I do think it's appropriate for them to do what Americans are supposed to do and what is set out in the Constitution to do, called bankruptcy.

And AIG, it sounds like they were making money in every department except the credit default swaps. Well, gee, that's what happens when you sell what is, in effect, insurance against a catastrophic event, which would be the failure of the mortgage-backed securities to have the value that was paid for them. You ensure against that. You take what amounts to premiums. You put no money in reserve to ensure against the event you took money to ensure against; and then are shocked some day when people want to make a claim under that insurance, and you've done nothing but take profit.

What a great business that was, selling insurance to ensure against mortgage-backed securities not having the value paid for them, and not having to set aside a dime of that in a reserve account so that if somebody ever makes a claim you've got to pay it back. Now, there had to be a fun business.

But, again, it was immoral, it was irresponsible, and they should have been under the rules of insurance. If you're going to sell insurance, you've got to ensure against the event you took money to pay off for if it ever happens. It didn't happen, so AIG should have been allowed to go through bankruptcy. If they had enough assets, and thought they might, they were certainly making a lot of money, if they had enough assets, they could reorganize, get creditors to agree and come up with a plan for reorganization. The law is very clear. At least it used to be before the auto bailout. But that's what should have happened.

Goldman Sachs, even though those were the dear, close friends of Hank Paulson, the worst Secretary of the Treasury this country has ever had until we got Tim Geithner. Now it's a close call. I'm not sure who is worse. But he bailed out his buddies at Goldman Sachs. They should have been allowed to go through reorganization if they could, and, if not, then liquidation and bankruptcy. That is what the Constitution provides for. And it should have been allowed to happen. And I realize that if that had happened, then those massive donations that the Democratic Party and President Obama got from Wall Street wouldn't have come through for him. I realize that. But this is more than about political parties and more than about political donations. It's about the life and the existence of this country.

Nobody should be too big to fail. If you can get big enough that the failure of your company or your bank hurts a lot of people, then it's going to hurt a lot of people. But that is the problem when the government becomes a player. We start becoming the lending institution, we start becoming the player in insurance where we're going to be selling the insurance like we do flood insurance, and we're going to be guaranteeing all the home loans. Well, people have to be in the good graces of the Federal Government if they're going to be able to get what they want because the Federal Government becomes the player, selling the insurance, like flood insurance, or backing home mortgages, and then you have a catastrophe like we've witnessed for the last 3 years. It didn't have to happen, but it is what happens when a country moves toward being more socialistic, where the government runs everything, the GRE, government running everything. That is what ObamaCare was about, the GRE. That's what the President's stimulus bill in January of 2009 was about. We were told it was $800 billion. It turned out to be maybe more like $1 trillion. It was about the GRE, the government running everything.

We heard with the President's stimulus bill in 2009, January, that if we did not pass the President's stimulus bill--the President told us, he made very clear, if you don't pass this bill, I'm warning you, unemployment could go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. Well, 2\1/2\ years later, that 8\1/2\ percent looks pretty doggone good. That would have been nice. But it got up to 10, and we're back at 9.1 for months now.

The numbers are bad, but what is worse is all those people that cannot find jobs, and the biggest reason is because we have a government that thinks it is the answer when it's the problem. It's not the answer. When the government becomes the player and tries to be the player and referee, it doesn't work. When the government is so busy being a player as well as referee, it can't do its referee job very well, and so you have people like Bernie Madoff who get away for years with bilking people out of billions of dollars--life savings. That should never have happened. If the Federal Government were more interested in being the referee and making sure people played fair, Madoff couldn't have gotten away with it for that long.

When the government wants to run health care as we do with Medicare and Medicaid, it becomes the problem, not the solution. And now we have seniors who are scared to death because they see what's happening. The President gets his bill, ObamaCare health bill, passed, and it has a provision for $500 billion to be cut from Medicare. And then AARP, after supporting that bill that cut $500 billion from Medicare, has the unmitigated gall to encourage people that are sending AARP money to notify their Congressman that we don't want any cuts to Medicare. Well, I've gotten those petitions. And my response is that if you're part of AARP and you don't want cuts to Medicare, then I'm so glad you're now off the AARP team and you now support what I do. Because AARP sold the seniors down the road.

Why would they do that? Well, let's look. Gee, they made, I believe it was in 2008, one big health insurance company made around $92 million clear profit and another $112 million or so profit, and then you have AARP that made over $400 million in clear profit from the sale of their supplemental insurance. I had a proposal that would have given seniors a choice: you can stay on Medicare, or you can choose to have us buy you private insurance that covers everything. You won't need any supplemental insurance; it will cover everything, but it will have a high deductible. Thirty-five hundred dollars was the proposal, but I'm not married to that. If there were another figure that would end up being better from an accounting standpoint in the long run, you can do that. But the proposal was $3,500. And then for that, we will put the $3,500 cash in the seniors' health care account for each of those 30 million or so homes that have people on Medicare, Medicaid. So then you have a debit card coded to only pay for health care, and the senior for the first time since the sixties will finally be in control of their own health care, making their own decisions, and we get the government out of the way of making decisions--oh, no, you can't have that medication; oh, no, you can't see that doctor; oh, no, you can't have that treatment. And what we're seeing are the early stages of what ultimately happens when the government controls health care. It's lists, and lists mean rationing.

I've heard from people that live in Canada and England. The father of one man from Canada needed a heart bypass operation. They put him on the bypass list, and 2 years later he had not gotten his bypass, and so he died. If he had been in the United States, he would probably still be alive today. One secretary in my district told me about her mother getting breast cancer. But she had to get on a list in

order to get the mammogram, had to get on a list to get the treatment, get on a list to have therapy, and get on a list for surgery, all those things that came with it. And as a result of all those lists, she said, ``my mother died because she was in England. I was found to have cancer, I had immediate treatment.'' She's a secretary. She got treatment. She got the surgery and treatment. And she says, ``I'm alive because I was in the United States. My mother died because she was in England.''

Well, unfortunately, there are people who love people but think that by the government running health care--which will inevitably lead to rationing of health care--that somehow that's a better thing. Our health care system needs work. It needs to be fixed. But the thing we should be doing is not having the government become the ultimate, the biggest player and referee in health care. We need to get the government out of being the player and get them back into the business of being the referee.

At the same time, we need to get the health insurance companies out of the business of being health managers and back in the business of selling insurance. And you do that, if we can move forward, with health savings accounts. The young people of today in their twenties and thirties start putting away money in their own health savings account, let that build--there shouldn't be any limits on how much you can put in, but it ought to be a requirement you can never take it out. You can give it to your kids, give it to charities for a health savings account for those who can't provide it themselves, but once it becomes health savings account cash, that's where it stays until it's spent on health care.

Leave it to your children when you die. Leave it to other charities that have people who need health care, and it could go in their health savings accounts.

Once we do that, for the kids in their twenties and thirties, indications are, by the time they're 65, 70 years old, not only will they not want Medicare, they won't need it because they'll have enough money in their accounts that they can do whatever they want to and have whatever health care they need. But it's not the end-all solution. We don't have free market forces at work in health care. It's why costs keep going up. That's one of the reasons.

Another reason is the tremendous advances that have been made in medicine that are now slowing down without the great people who have been attracted to health care--brilliant doctors and nurses. People in the health care industry are so smart, but we're already seeing the quality of people applying not at the level it once was. Why should it when this government intervenes and prevents people from being compensated properly?

But until we get free market forces at work in health care, we're not going to fix health care, and you cannot have competition in health care as long as we have our existing system in which nobody knows what anything costs:

You ask, What does an MRI cost? Well, it all depends, you're told.

What does a room with a single bed in your hospital cost? Well, it all depends. We can't really say.

You have Blue Cross. You have this and that. You have Medicaid. You have Medicare. Are you paying cash?

It all depends. You can't fix health care when there's no competition.

Growing up in Mount Pleasant, Texas, it was no secret that we went between two and, actually, eventually three different doctors' offices. We loved the doctors. They were great doctors. My mother passed away at 91, and my dad is still alive. I recall, growing up, we'd go to one doctor when I thought we were going to this other doctor:

Well, they raised their prices, and they're both great doctors.

Well, yeah, they are. I love them both.

So we would go. When one would raise his price, we'd go back to the other doctor. You can't do that now. You don't know what a doctor charges. I've talked to doctors who would love to tell people what they charge, but it all depends whether it's Medicare, Medicaid, what insurance.

Then the most unfair cut of all is, if you come in and if you're too poor to have insurance and if you're not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, then they're going to sit down with you and work out a payment plan for an amount that is normally many times more than the insurance companies would ever have agreed to pay. Well, that's not right. If somebody comes in with cash, they ought to be able to get it cheaper than Blue Cross or cheaper than other methods of payment. They're coming in with cash. In a good scenario, that's the way it would be.

If everyone had a health savings account that covered the high amount of the deductible, of their catastrophic insurance, that's the way it would be because you would call up the doctor or the hospital and say, I need to come in. How much do you charge? Under a bill I've proposed, they'd have to tell you. You could find it online. It would have to be posted. ``This is how much we charge.'' They'd have to know before they'd come. Then you could get competition. You've got your debit card coded to only cover health care, and so you then care about how much things cost. You can't find a whole lot of people who care how much health care costs anymore because they're not paying it. What does it matter if the cost goes up 10 times?

Then you've got seniors, many of whom are AARP members. They're paying their dues, and they've got their supplemental insurance. How tragic that AARP didn't mind the $500 billion cut to Medicare. Gee, let's think about that. If there's a massive cut to Medicare and if AARP sells supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare doesn't, I wonder if maybe they might think they would sell more insurance. Maybe that's why they would support a bill that cut Medicare by $500 billion.

The games that have been played around this town really need to stop. We've gotten this country in trouble, but they're not going to stop with the President spending every day traveling around the country, demonizing Congress for not passing his bill, his law, when he doesn't even know what's in his bill. I do. I read the whole thing. I'm told there may not be anybody else in the House or Senate who has read every page of the President's bill like I did. Well, if the President would read it--he's obviously a smart enough man--he would see that a lot of his claims do not have the merit he thinks they do--or whoever is putting those words in his teleprompter thinks they do.

On education, we have the stimulus bill. We were told it was going to create so many jobs, that it was going to build bridges and fix bridges. It didn't do those things. So now, 2\1/2\ years later, the President makes the same speeches. That's got to be good for the speechwriters because they could go back and take the same speeches that the President gave in January of 2009:

You need to pass this bill. You've got to pass this bill right now, right away. Then it will build bridges; it will fix these bridges; it will hire people, get school teachers back and law enforcement.

Those were all said in January of '09. I'm wondering if we shouldn't go back and compare those speeches and see if they haven't just cut some of those speeches and pasted them. Hey, it worked. They got Congress in January of '09 to pass the massive stimulus bill.

As I've talked to educators around Texas, I found something that was deeply saddening and a bit maddening. There was some very limited amount of the trillion dollars in the President's so-called ``stimulus bill'' in January of '09 that went to hire teachers. I've met young people who were hired as teachers, and I'm thrilled when young people are able to get jobs. It's a good thing. Then I've talked to different educators who have said, It's so tragic. The stimulus money ran out, so we had to let teachers go. If you don't keep paying the stimulus money, then we don't get to keep those same teachers.

That ought to tell us something. The stimulus money was not stimulus. If it had been stimulus, it would have stimulated things to the point that those teachers who were hired 2\1/2\ years ago would have stimulated enough in the economy that they would have been able to keep those jobs; but the stimulus bill in January of '09 was not nor was the stimulus bill in January of '08 under President Bush. They did not

work. They don't work. That's not the way to stimulate.

So then what really breaks my heart is when I find out people my age, who are in their fifties, and people in their forties who have been teaching for 20, 25, 30 years--and because they do and because of the payment structure in education, they make a little more and a little more as they go along. Lo and behold, the Federal Government comes in and says, Here's a bunch of stimulus money, not that much in the scheme of a trillion, but we'll give you a little bit to hire some new teachers. They hire new, young teachers. They're working for cheaper than the older, experienced, well-trained teachers.

So what happens when the stimulus money that didn't stimulate anything runs out? It's rather tragic. People who have families, who have committed their lives to education, have lost their jobs.

I've heard from those people. Good teachers, good educators. But when they look at it, jeesh, if this stimulus has allowed us to hire these young, new teachers, these experienced teachers that have a heart for the students, well trained, well educated, they're costing a little more, let's let them go. How tragic that this body would pass a bill under Speaker Pelosi intending to help education; and as a result of the misguided attempt to help education, we have driven out many of our best, most experienced, most caring teachers.

I have talked to young people who have gotten a job. They don't intend to stay teachers all that long. They're hoping they can find something else. So you have people who committed their lives to education losing their jobs because of a stimulus bill that wasn't for young teachers who don't plan to stay teachers. They don't like teaching; they want to do something else.

This body needs to get back to the original purpose of the Constitution. The purpose of the Constitution was to have a limited government, and that government would be a referee. It would make sure people and businesses in America played fair. It would not guarantee equal results, but it would guarantee opportunity to be fair and equal. It was a long way from doing that until the wonderful works that were accomplished by the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr.

So we were on track, more equality of opportunity; but now it's as if some people think, no, Dr. King wanted equal results. No, he didn't. He wanted people judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We made great, tremendous strides, but when a government wants to guarantee equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity, it becomes a tyrannical government. It becomes the player and not the referee.

The other thing we're supposed to do is provide for the common defense, and that means not checking in our brain before we come to work every day. That means in every executive agency charged with providing for defense, you don't suddenly declare that the only people who can advise us about that tiny percent of radical Islamists, tiny percentage of the overall Muslim population, the only ones that can advise us about those radicals are people that really understand that mentality.

We want people from the Muslim Brotherhood who want to take over the county, take over the world, have a united caliphate under sharia law to be the ones to advise us on how we deal with radical Islam, although this administration has now made it extremely clear, Attorney General Holder has made it clear, Secretary Napolitano has made clear, we really don't want to offend those who want to kill us and destroy our way of life by referring to them as radical Islamists.

Let's call them violent extremists. But when you look at what they've said, and you look at what they've done and want to do, it's because of their sick beliefs in what being a Muslim means.

An even further tragedy is the fact that we have allowed people with organizations who have supported terrorism to be advisers to this administration, to this Justice Department, to this intelligence community, to this Department of State. We've got foxes in the hen house.

We don't need to pass the President's so-called jobs bill. This will do more to drive up the cost of oil and gas because this President doesn't understand that the four pages of deductions that he repeals in here will put independent oil and gas producers out of business.

He doesn't understand that 94 percent of the oil and gas wells that are drilled on the land in the continental U.S. are drilled by independent oil and gas producers. He doesn't understand that when you eliminate their ability to raise capital, those wells will no longer be drilled. The major oil companies that the President demonizes and says he's going after will not only not drill all of those wells and produce all of the oil and gas; they can produce the exact same amount and make massive amounts more in profit.

So the one thing the President says he wants to do that's page 151 through 154 of his bill has the exact opposite effect. It will increase revenues, profits, for major oil companies because it will drive out the independent oil and gas producers, not to mention the millions of jobs that we'll lose by doing that.

Now, when I came to Congress 6\1/2\ years ago, I was concerned that there was not enough natural gas to continue to produce electricity with it, even though it is the most clean-burning thing that we've got. It would be wonderful, I thought, if you could do that. We just don't have enough because you've also got to have natural gas. It's a feedstock that you have to have in order to produce so many of the plastics, so many of the goods that are now so important to all Americans and to health care and to transportation. So if you're using natural gas to produce electricity, provide energy, then it's going to drive up those costs.

Well, then science and necessity being the mother of invention, we hone our ability to horizontally drill. Hydraulic fracking allows us to get gas that we couldn't get otherwise. And now, depending on who you believe, we've got 100, 300 years of natural gas. Some of us have been told that possibly the largest deposit of natural gas just may be off the west coast of Florida, and nobody's allowed to drill there.

We find out that the Marcellus shale up in the Northeast is producing jobs for people, unless our friends across the aisle are successful in killing those efforts to drill for that gas, Haynesville shale down in Louisiana, east Texas where I am; Barnett shale, north, northwest Texas. These other gas finds are so extraordinary I now fully support my Democrat friend, Dan Boren's, efforts to encourage people to convert cars to natural gas, to encourage manufacturers to produce cars that will run on natural gas. It will be cheaper than gasoline.

Some people identify greatly with the tea parties. I think they've been demonized, the people I see at those tea parties, all races, all ages, but they seem to have one thing in common: They're all paying income tax. And we're down to about 50 percent of the country that's doing that. People that come out at the tea parties, that's the one commonality: They pay taxes, they pay income tax and, as a result of that, they'd like to see less government.

So some have been surprised that I would support something that's not free market totally because I'm a free market kind of guy. But the overriding concern for this body, the oath that we take should be to make sure that we provide for the common defense. We have been sending trillions of dollars overseas when so much of that money finds its way into the hands of those who hate us, want to destroy our way of life. They don't think that people should have freedom to choose because if you give freedom to choose they think, their religious beliefs are, you'll slip into degradation, and then you'll be part of a Nation that needs to be destroyed.

Well, it happens. When you give people freedom of choice, just as I believe God did to start with, some are going to choose to do wrong. It's going to happen. We're all going to make mistakes, and some will do so intentionally. That's when you need a government to enforce rules of fair play to make sure that we provide for the common defense so that people can freely practice peaceful religious beliefs.

But we've been sending all that money year after year, growing more and more dependent on overseas oil.

When President Carter created this new monstrosity, a couple of them, one called the Department of Education and another called the Department of Energy, and every year the Department of Energy has existed, its goal has been to reduce the dependency on foreign oil. And every year they fail at their job more than they did the year before. Every year. No matter how many billions, hundreds of billions of dollars they throw at alternative energy rather than letting the free market play, it's not working.

But the reason I would support encouraging people to convert cars to natural gas, I'd like to buy a car from a factory in the United States that runs off natural gas. We do need infrastructure where you can pull up to a gas station and get natural gas instead of gasoline. But I support it because if we do that, I now see we could be 100 percent energy independent. It would save the lives of our most treasured possessions in this country, the American people, the men and women who give their lives for their country, when we have funded terrorism, not intentionally, but by paying people who hate our own country for their oil when we could get off of it. And if we get on natural gas for 100 years, there's going to be time to develop--and I know some people think it's not possible, I really do think we could eventually come up, somebody will, with a way to hold electricity. Some laugh at that. The late Ted Kennedy laughed about having a strategic defense shield of rockets, that's Star Wars. And lo and behold, it's happening. Well, until President Obama reneged on our agreement with Poland that cost so many their political lives in Poland, supported the missile defense that would stand between us and Iranian missiles, and we turned our backs on them, stabbed them in the back.

Well, we're at risk, and it's time to quit sending money to countries that hate us. As I have often said, you don't have to pay people to hate you; they'll do it for free. You don't have to pay them. And yet we keep sending money to people who hate our guts, and it doesn't cause them to like us. It causes them to not only hate us but to have total contempt because of how stupid we are--that we know that they hate us and we still keep giving them money. Bullies on a playground who demand lunch money from another student don't develop admiration, love, and respect for students who give them their lunch money. They still hate them. They still don't think anything of them. That's not the way to deal with bullies. The way to deal with bullies is to make sure that if you have to band together as a government, as an educational administration, and just decide we're not going to let bullies prevail, then you do that. You can do that in schools. You can do it in the world by having a government that is strong enough militarily that what it says, it can back up.

You don't do that when you make contractual agreements, as we did with Mubarak. And I'm not a President Mubarak fan. I was not a Qadhafi fan. But this administration had agreements with both of those people. They turned their backs on them, and now it appears we have radical Islamists that are taking over in those countries, and they will hate us more than Qadhafi did because at least Qadhafi was afraid of us.

And then, we had a hearing yesterday in the Judiciary Committee. Secretary Napolitano came here. It has not made the mainstream media. They'll probably never touch it, but it ought to rock people's lives when they see what's going on with this administration. You can't use the word radical Islam--that might offend the people that want to kill us--when the fact is if we address radical Islam, we will protect the moderate, the vast majority of Muslims who are moderate who want to live in peace. If the radicals take over, they could be the first ones they go after. As well as liberal reporters, they'll take them out. Gays, they'll take them out.

You would think people for gay rights would be on the side of those of us who want to go after radical Islam. But instead, it seems to be strange bedfellows in combining against those who want to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

So we do some digging, a couple of sleepless nights doing research, and we find out the Homeland Security Department has people in its midst who are advising it. We find out, there's an article about it, it can be found on the Internet, we find out that there was a seminar by two of the leading experts on radical Islam that was going to be given to law enforcement. And CAIR--a named coconspirator supporting terrorism, named as a coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial that should have been prosecuted, but this administration says they're friends, we're not going after them--CAIR complains to the White House, to this administration, and they cancel the briefing. And the word we're reading is that, gee, apparently they're rewriting the rules so that people in our intelligence of this administration, people in Homeland Security, people in the Justice Department, people in the White House, can only be briefed. They are rewriting the rules, and what we are told they'll end up saying is, you can't do the briefing if you're part of the government. So if you're in the government and you're not Muslim and don't have sympathies for radical Islam, then you'll be prevented from briefing others despite the fact that you may have spent your whole adult life studying this terrorism since 1979, when we saw it first come after us in Iran after President Carter proclaimed this ``man of peace,'' Ayatollah Khomeini, was coming in, and he has done more to create hatred, to create violence, than any leader I'm aware of in the last 50 years.

President Carter thought he'd be a man of peace. Wrong. He wasn't. Nor is the present Khamenei. Nor is Ahmadinejad. And then you find out the president of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, who has ready access to the White House, within the inner sanctum of the State Department.

When the President gave his speech to try to upstage Netanyahu the day before Netanyahu was coming from Israel to the United States and ultimately to address this body, the president of ISNA, a named coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, 105 counts of conviction in which the named coconspirators should have been pursued after those initial convictions, he's advising the President on his speech about Israel. He's giving remarks on how the President is doing. He's got the President's ear. He's got the State Department's ear. He's got National Security's ear. In fact, we see from the Deputy National Security Advisor's own transcript of his own remarks that were on the White House Web site, the Deputy National Security Advisor commends the president of this named coconspirator to fund terrorism for leading prayers for the Iftar celebration last year at the White House.

We haven't seen anybody in this mainstream media that wants to talk about the fact that al-Awlaki, who this administration killed with a drone just not that long ago, was leading prayers for Muslim staffers on Capitol Hill.

Foxes are in the hen house. And they're given more and more authority.

We found out yesterday that it was Homeland Security that gave a secret security clearance to Mohamed Elibiary, from all accounts, a very nice gentleman. But if you read his writings, he thinks the world of the Muslim philosopher on whom Osama bin Laden relied so heavily for being barbaric, for killing innocents. The man that is part of the inner circle and now has been elevated to the National Homeland Security Advisory Council of the Secretary of Homeland Security thinks that he was a man of peace. He was executed in the sixties, but his writings fully supported what Osama bin Laden was doing. They support what radical Islam is doing. And that's why they constantly point to his writings from the fifties and sixties.

We also find--and I have got a flyer in my materials here--that Mohamed Elibiary was one of the featured speakers for the tribute to a man of vision, the Ayatollah Khomeini, just recent years ago. He's been given a secret security clearance. I find out 2 days ago he's also working with the ACLU to attack from the outside, to demand materials that will tell them about the sources and methods of how we try to get some intelligence on the people that want to destroy and kill us and ruin our way of life and create a one-world caliphate for some dictator like

the Ayatollah Khomeini or Khamenei over there now in Iran. And we're giving people like that access.

And then I find out this week--and it's written; it's now on the Internet and you can read the story--that the same man used his security clearance and is allowed to access security databases from his home computer; and he accesses a security database called the State and Local Intelligence Community database, called SLIC for short, and he pulled off some material that said on it ``For Official Use Only,'' and then was shopping that to mainstream media in this country to try to condemn people in Texas for being concerned, under Governor Perry, as being Islamaphobes.

Then we find that the OIC that has been so powerful--57 states--that actually in 2007 they said that the most fearful terrorism that exists--and these are their words--is Islamaphobia. They created the term ``Islamaphobia.'' They're donating hundreds of thousands and millions to some of our best educational institutions to go after people who are concerned not about Islam, not about the 95, 99 percent, whatever it is of Muslims who are peace-loving, but if you want to go after the 1 percent that wants to kill us and make this country into a caliphate under sharia law, you're an Islamaphobe. And they're paying millions and millions to develop that terminology.

So the mainstream media will buy into it and come after anybody that says, Look, there is a common thread that runs through those people who want to destroy our way of life, that want to take our young men and women in this country, radicalize them and have them help them destroy the greatest, most free country in the history of mankind. And this administration is bringing some of those foxes into the hen house.

So not only does this administration give a man who admires the inspiration for Osama bin Laden, who is a featured speaker for the tribute to Ayatollah Khomeini, he's given secret security clearance and now is using that as a political weapon not just to go after people concerned about radical Islam, but also to go after an opponent of this President politically.

It's time to wake up. It's time to be a referee, not a player. It's time to let the free market system drive the economy, create jobs, while we do what we're supposed to do--provide for the common defense.

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

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 12 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, October 31, 2011, at 1 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend, the gentleman from Illinois. He knows something about struggling for civil rights, and he's done a great deal for civil rights, and I respect that very much.

As a Christian, it's okay to talk about our religious beliefs as long as we don't ram it down somebody else's throat trying to force them to believe as we do, but the First Amendment allows our right to discuss that.

I'm very grateful for Abraham Lincoln, and as I was just talking with some constituents down in Statuary Hall about John Quincy Adams believing he was called to try to end slavery in the United States after he was defeated in 1828 for a second term, so he did the unthinkable after being President: he ran for the House of Representatives.

And some thought it was extremely strange, and as I told my constituents, my friends, it was reputed that when someone asked him about that, he said he was prouder of being elected to the House of Representatives after being President than he was after being elected President, which seems strange to some of us until you realize that it means after he was President his neighbors still liked him. That's a big deal because most Presidents don't end up going back to their earliest hometown; they go somewhere else. John Quincy Adams got elected nine times, preached sermons over and over down the hall about the evils of slavery.

We really couldn't expect God to keep blessing America while we were treating our brothers and sisters by putting them in chains and bondage. Seventeen years he fought that fight, believing he was called to bring an end to slavery.

His last year there, there was a young, tall man from Illinois who had been elected to Congress one time, most people don't know that he was ever elected anything but President, but Abraham Lincoln was elected.

John Quincy Adams liked him and took him under his wing. It was reported that after Lincoln was defeated after just 2 short years, went back to practicing law, made some money working doing some legal work for the railroads and other things, after the compromise of 1850, he knew he couldn't allow slavery, as even more States were coming in with slavery, and he got back involved and fought the battle. He didn't get elected to the Senate. In 1860, he got elected President.

It was reported that someone asked him if there was anything memorable that happened in his 2 brief years in the House of Representatives, and he replied not other than those powerful sermons John Quincy Adams used to preach on the evils of slavery. He knew it was wrong, but it just etched it on his soul. He had to do something. John Quincy Adams died in 1848 not achieving what he was originally called to do--end slavery.

But a man who believed in God, who read the Bible constantly, whose Second Inaugural Address is etched in marble on the north inside wall of the Lincoln Memorial, one of the greatest theological dissertations on how, if there's a just God, there could be something as horrible as a Civil War, brothers killing brothers. As he said, they all read from the same Bible, pray to the same God. The prayers of both can now be answered; the prayers of neither were fully answered.

But as Lincoln came to realize, if it is that God chooses to have every drop of blood that was drawn by the master's lash be equal with blood from the sword, then as he said, we still must conclude what was concluded 3,000 years ago from the Old Testament: ``The judgments of the Lord are just and righteous altogether.''

Powerful theology of a very difficult subject, but those beliefs drove him to give his life for others.

Downstairs, I just saw the statue of Father Damien, a Catholic priest in the Hawaiian Islands who knew that going to the island where the lepers were, where they had no basic life, that eventually he would get leprosy and he would die from it, but he knew that he had a calling, that God called him to minister to those lepers so they could have a life, they could have a society, a place to worship, a priest to come to for ministering and consolation and direction.

So it is entirely appropriate that despite the existence of the ACLU wanting to tear down so much of what the Founders did and the great things that are emblazoned in the soul of this country, the statue, the plaque starts with John 15:13: ``Greater love hath no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.''

Basically, Abraham Lincoln did that. But there was not full equality in this country. That was clear.

Bobby Rush can talk about that authoritatively; I really can't. He can talk about it authoritatively.

And along came an ordained Christian minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. He believed it was his calling, God's calling on his life to bring about real equality in America. As he said, he had a dream that one day people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. He had a dream.

I'm so grateful for that heritage that God moved in the hearts and minds of great men like that. Some would say Martin Luther King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his life to help African Americans, black men and women in America to have equality, but it goes much deeper than that. For those of us who are Christians, he created an environment where white Christians could finally really be Christian and treat brothers and sisters as brothers and sisters. That's a big deal, because before that there were too many white Christians who didn't. He freed them up. Now you can treat your brothers and sisters as true brothers and sisters where the color of skin doesn't matter. Powerful.

But the country we have come to know and love is under attack. We, many of us, I was in the Army at Fort Benning in 1979. We look back and we think the war started, radical Islam started at war against us in 1979. More recently, some who know more about the history of radical Islam say it actually started quite a bit before that. But in 1979, it became clear, President Carter, well intending, meaning well, hailed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace, just like this country did with President Mubarak. We would not assist and, in fact, encouraged rebels and the leader of a country with whom we had agreements. We reneged on our end, not that the Shah was a fine, great, upstanding man. From reports--I never met him--apparently he wasn't. Not that Mubarak was a fine, loving, cuddly fellow--apparently, from reports, he wasn't. And there wasn't equality as there should have been, but he kept radicals at bay from destroying the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. We had agreements with him, and apparently this administration looked the other way and wouldn't honor those agreements.

I sure never thought much of Qadhafi, but I could not celebrate a man being captured, tortured, and then shot; and then all the adoration and excitement by the same people who get so upset if a terrorist who is trying to kill Americans has water poured on his face, knowing that the water won't hurt him, that there's a doctor right there, and that when he reveals information, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did, it will save lives and lead to the saving of many more lives. But he won't be harmed because the doctor would be there if there was any problem. Yet those same people that went ballistic over pouring water on a guy's face, not pleasant, how excited they could be about a man being captured, tortured, and shot in the head routinely. How excited people could be about having a drone take out an American citizen. Well, he had declared war on the United States. You declare war on the United States, the United States has every right to declare war on you back. You are an enemy combatant and the rules of war apply, such as they are.

But we have come so far in the last 10 years from being careful and concerned that it seems that we've gotten careless, gotten ridiculous. Our obligation, even those of us who are Christians, is not to turn the other cheek as part of the government, not to reward evil with good as individual Christians are supposed to. Our obligation is to provide for the common defense. The same thing is set out in Romans 13: ``You do evil, be afraid, because the government is not given the sword in vain.'' You are supposed to encourage good conduct and punish evil, provide for the

defense so that individuals, whether they're Muslims, Christians, Hindu, Scientologists, whatever, they can worship as they wish. But when we fail to protect this Nation and provide for the common defense, we're not doing our job.

We've had a very interesting time today with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. There's some things that have come out that have been very deeply troubling to me, and I would hope that they would be very troubling to many.

I have got numerous articles, things that I have taken out to talk about here today. One is a news segment here about Secretary Napolitano appointing a deradicalization expert, Mohamed Elibiary, to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Originally, he was made by Homeland Security a member of the Countering Violent Extremism. It's a little strange, violent extremism. Then you realize that's because this administration does not want to use the terms ``radical Islam'' about the people who are radical Islamists.

And when you get to digging a little deeper, you find out that the OIC Islamic group years ago figured out, We need to go on the attack and start calling anybody who mentions radical Islam an Islamophobe. Even if it's a lie, it doesn't matter. Call them Islamophobes. They found if you give universities--even great universities; proud heritage in this country--massive amounts of money, you can also get them to teach seminars on Islamophobia. You can get them to teach courses on Islamophobia. And you can paint the picture that anybody, no matter how open-minded, no matter how well read, how well studied they are, you call them Islamophobes enough, then maybe it will catch on, and people will be afraid to call radical Islamists what they are.

Now, I don't know of anybody who was in Judiciary today that believes that Muslims are terrorists. They're not. The only disagreement among those I know concerned about radical Islam is whether the radical Islamists are 1 percent, 5 percent, maybe a little more. Some might say as much as 10 percent. But at least 90 percent, maybe 99 percent of Muslims are peace-loving people. If you have got a Muslim friend, they are your true friend. And people have experienced that. They have seen that. But those who study radical Islam also come to know that it's very difficult for a moderate, peace-loving Muslim to speak up against radicals because under some of the contorted thinking by people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who helped plan 9/11, that basically makes him an apostate. They're not really Muslim. They're Muslim in name only. They think that means they're okay to be killed because they don't really believe in true Islam.

So when you get down to it, it appears from a studied look at the issue, when you don't worry about what the OIC or Muslim Brotherhood may try to paint you as, or the mainstream media, for whatever reason-- though many in the mainstream media would be one of the first ones killed if radical Islam takes over this country. They nonetheless do some of their bidding for them without realizing just how ignorant they're being. But if they were to take over, any area where they take over, as they did in Afghanistan, the moderate, peace-loving Muslims are often the first ones brutalized and killed because they don't see them as true Muslims because they're not radical like that small percentage.

But documents have been discovered going back to the 1993 meeting in Philadelphia of those who would be part of the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups trying to plot a strategy for the years ahead, they believed a number of things that we're now seeing carried out. You intimidate people, you make them think they're much more intellectually elite. They say, Well, gee, we're not going to even say the name of radical Islam. In fact, as Speaker Pelosi led in the last Congress, the 2006 military tribunal bill was changed, the law was changed so we didn't call them ``enemy combatants'' anymore. We changed the name--big deal--changed the name from ``enemy combatants'' to ``unprivileged alien enemy belligerents.'' I guess we just hope that the word ``enemy'' wouldn't offend them, even though they have shown, as they did with Pearl, they will take a jagged knife and cut your head off.

They don't do it in the name of Scientology. They don't do it in the name of the Southern Baptist Convention. And if they did, I would be calling them out for doing so. They do it in the name of a perverted form that they believe is Islam. But it's radicalized jihadist Islam.

So here's an article, October 21, 2010. Secretary Napolitano appoints Islamist to Homeland Security panel. It turns out Mohamed Elibiary had been appointed to her Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and apparently impressed somebody to the point that a year ago, October 21, 2010, Secretary Napolitano swore him in as being part of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. As we found out today from Secretary Napolitano, he was also given a secret security clearance.

We've also seen from other articles we've talked about here before that the White House--and as we found out today, Homeland Security--has implicit trust in the president of the Islamic Society of North America, ISNA, even though ISNA was found to be a named coconspirator in funding terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation trial. CAIR, same way, named coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. The original prosecutor's thoughts were that the Bush administration, those I have talked to, intended to do everything they could to get convictions because they saw--they had the documentation--that these groups were doing some charity work, and actually doing some, but then sending money--really, the basis of their group--sending money to Hamas to fund terrorism. And that's what they were convicted of. It was 105 counts, as I recall.

There was a move by CAIR, ISNA, some named coconspirators, to have their names struck from the pleadings so the people would not see that they were named coconspirators. But both the judge at the trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found there was sufficient evidence to show that they were coconspirators in funding terrorism and therefore they did not, as the Fifth Circuit ruled, they weren't going to have their names removed.

The evidence was there. In fact, I have got some of it here. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of documents that have these kind of checks and ledgers and deposit slips and things like that that make a clear case that these groups ended up providing funding that funded terrorism. But this Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Holder, decided not to pursue all of these other named coconspirators. They let the cases drop.

And not only did they not pursue them, they ended up--actually, we have the president of ISNA, who we find in the comments that have been on the White House Web site, actually led the Iftar prayers a year ago at the White House and actually has a very nice relationship, from what the Deputy National Security Adviser said, with the National Security Administration, the National Security Advisor, and the President.

We found out from one article that, with two individuals who were going to participate in training law enforcement at one of our intelligence services, all it took was CAIR calling the White House, reporting to the White House that people were going to say bad things about radical Islam, and that people that wanted to kill us were radical Islamists, and explain how you could look for people who were radicalized, look for telltale signs.

The White House, according to one article, intervened, and we know for sure the conference was canceled immediately before the conference was to start.

And we have an article indicating that actually now they are rewriting the rules so that if you are a government employee, you will not be able to do briefings on the threat of radical Islam. And, also, they will not pay for outside contractors who've spent their adult life studying the issue, so that it will be left to volunteers, like those from the Muslim Brotherhood, who will come brief our intelligence, our State Department, our Justice Department

and the White House on issues to do with violent extremism.

And then we find out more about this person. I'm told he's a very nice gentleman, Mohamed Elibiary, that he's done a lot of nice things. But you don't have to look very far and you find out he was one of the featured speakers for the tribute--in fact, there's a flier--a tribute to the great Islamic visionary, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who has done more to bring hate and war and death and torture into the modern age than most anybody in the last 40 years. And he is a named presenter in the tribute to the great Islamic visionary.

Then we find out not only did he speak at that, but also he's written articles. He got after the administration for the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, thought the trial was unfair and unjust and uncalled for. He also speaks glowingly of Qutb, who is the Muslim who was executed in Egypt in the 1960s after being convicted or found to have conspired to kill the leader of Egypt. But he has many writings. And, well, he's held in high esteem not only as a basis for Osama bin Laden, feeling that he should be a barbaric killer and destroyer, but also for Mr. Elibiary. And so we have an article he wrote about the verdict misrepresenting the situation with the Holy Land Foundation.

Then we have an article from the Dallas Morning News where they go through and cite so many of these things that seem to indicate we should be very careful about giving Elibiary access to secrets; but he has been given, by this Homeland Security group, secret clearance.

Then there's an interesting article from May of 2007. The OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, reported in 2007--their words-- that Islamaphobia is the worst form of terrorism. In fact, that means it's worse than flying commercial airliners into high-rise office buildings, worse than beheading three teen Christian girls on their way to school, worse than launching attacks from civilian areas in order to use retaliatory actions to score propaganda points. Yeah, worse than that is to be an Islamaphobe.

Then we find out that the ACLU and the Islamists are joining hands. I found out yesterday that actually Mr. Elibiary is working with the ACLU, but he's got a secret security clearance so he can work from the inside and from the outside working with the ACLU to try to get documentation that will ultimately, if he gets it--and this administration may just do this--it will reveal sources and methods of how we are dealing with radical Islam or violent extremism, and he's working with these guys. But the ACLU and Islamists are going after the FBI and trying to destroy their ability to actually fight those who want to destroy our country.

There's an interesting article by Bill Gertz October 5 of this year, and he points out that the anti-terror trainers were blocked. And according to people close to the conference I mentioned awhile ago, the event was ordered postponed after Muslim advocacy groups contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the White House, including scheduled speakers Stephen Caughlin and Steve Emerson, both specialists on the Islamic terror threat. Mr. Caughlin, a former Pentagon joint staff analyst, is one of the most knowledgeable counterterrorism experts specializing in the relationship between Islamic law and terrorism. Mr. Emerson, head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, is a leading expert on Islamic violent extremism, financing and operations.

But, anyway, it looks like they're rewriting those rules so people like that--since they're not Muslim Brotherhood--will not be able to instruct law enforcement on the threat that radical Islam creates for the country.

And then we find an article here, ``Holder Firmly Committed to Eliminating Any Muslim Training.'' But just so people understand--and I'll close with this--I understand that the vast majority of Muslims are dear, wonderful people, peace-loving people. But the radical Islamists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four at Guantanamo Bay who said they wanted to plead guilty in December of 2008--the judge was going to accept it until this Justice Department rushed in and said no, no, no, we'll give you a show trial in New York City, and threw a bunch of gum in the works.

So now there has still been no trial; there has still been no justice. And in his own writing he says, in quotes from the Koran, ``We fight you with almighty God. So if our act of jihad and our fighting with you cause fear and terror, then many thanks to God because it is him that has thrown fear into your hearts which resulted in your infidelity, paganism, and your statement that God had a son and your trinity beliefs.'' Then he quotes from the Koran: ``Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for which he has sent no authority; their place will be the fire; and evil is the home of the wrongdoers.''

People like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are radical Islamists, and we need to recognize it so that we can perpetuate the freedom that we've had for 200 more years.

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