Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

The fourth time for this bill on the floor is not the charm. This continues the process of bringing badly thought through, badly formed legislation on intel to the floor of the House of Representatives.

This is the fourth rule that we've considered this year as we've gone through this process. It is interesting that this bill is titled the fiscal year 2010 authorization. It's September 29. Tomorrow is September 30. Maybe the President will sign this bill if we pass it tonight, meaning that much of the bill will be meaningless, or only in effect for 6 to 8 hours, maybe 10.

This bill, I don't believe, Mr. Chairman, even has a classified annex. It was the one thing that we agreed on, on a bipartisan basis, as to how funding for the bill, or for the intelligence community and different agencies within the intelligence community, at what level they would be funded. Again, it's one part where we had bipartisan agreement. It's gone. We're now just authorizing the expenditures as done through the appropriations committee. Members have no time to review the classified annex. There was no classified annex outlining these specific appropriations levels by different organizations within the intelligence community. Nothing for the Members to review.

The notifications, it's a fig leaf. It says the administration still shall determine who shall be informed of what and when.

We had stronger language before, accepted on a bipartisan basis. Now all the administration has to do is notify other people that the Gang of Four or the Gang of Eight has been notified of certain information, but they don't have to disclose. They have to outline why, but there is no requirement for more complete exposure.

It is a fig leaf that may serve as a justification for dealing with a complaint that was made by the Speaker of the House in May of 2009. The Speaker of this House said the CIA ``misleads us all the time.'' You know, we've asked for more of an explanation on that. The chairman of the committee and the chairwoman of the subcommittee in October 2009 said that they were going to do a notification and a covert action investigation--as far as I can tell, it has never happened, and it is not complete after almost a year now--to find out if there were problems with notification and if it were true that, as the Speaker claimed, the CIA misleads us all the time. So, in one way, we are providing something that may serve in dealing with this allegation by the Speaker.

At the same time, we have CIA employees around the world who did what the administration asked them to do and what previous administrations notified Congress they were doing about what they were going to do to keep America safe. They notified, and took Congress through that in great detail. The people went through that notification process in great detail, understanding that, when they left, if the administration had had a problem with it, they ought to have stood up and said, ``We've got issues with these, and we need to work through them.'' Instead, there was either silence or affirmation that what the CIA and what these individuals within the CIA were doing was appropriate, was necessary and was supported by the political leadership of this Nation as being their best intent to keep us safe.

So, while this bill may serve to provide some people with political cover, it does nothing to protect the CIA employees who now, for the third time, are under review by the Justice Department as to whether they should be prosecuted for doing what the political leadership of this country asked them to do.

Where is the equality? Where is the fairness? How does this serve our national interest by allowing these people to continue to be hung out, facing possible prosecution? It is wrong. It is inappropriate. It should have been dealt with in this bill.

I will detail a number of other issues that also need to be dealt with, but at this point in time, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, at this time, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly).

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

At this time, I yield 5 minutes to my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

I yield myself 1 minute.

Madam Speaker, I find it interesting that people talk about, we are bringing fiscal responsibility back to the Intelligence Committee. There's not even a classified annex which outlines the spending that this committee believes each of the agencies should have for running their operations for fiscal year 2010. As I said earlier, that's one area where we had bipartisan agreement. That's been taken out. That's gone. We are not providing any type of fiscal direction to the intelligence community by telling them what we believe our priorities are.

The other interesting thing, as we go through this process, is that in the bill 2 years ago, we had a bipartisan vote on the floor. We adopted an amendment that I offered to prohibit the use of authorized funds for earmark purposes. As you take a look here, we've authorized everything that the Appropriations Committee has done. What has the Appropriations Committee done? Lots of earmarks in the intelligence bill.

I yield 4 minutes to my colleague from Michigan (Mr. Rogers).

I yield the gentleman 30 additional seconds.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Madam Speaker, let's talk about what should have been in this bill and what this bill does do and what it doesn't do.

We all know that the face of terrorism is changing. We have seen Fort

Hood, we have seen the attempted attack in Detroit, we have seen the attempted attack at Times Square. We know that terrorism is changing.

This bill is based on the past. There were reports that came out after these attacks and attempted attacks on the United States outlining changes that they thought needed to be made. As terrorism changed, intelligence policies needed to change as well.

The recommendations included improving the systems that deal with information, information sharing, terrorist screening, watch lists, watch list criteria, and those types of things. That's not dealt with in this bill. It is on the sidelines, even though the threat has evolved.

My colleagues have clearly articulated that, by doing nothing, we now open the possibility for Gitmo folks to come to the United States. We open the possibility and the likelihood that once again terror suspects overseas will be Mirandized.

Where is there a provision in this bill that would regulate covert actions that may impact U.S. citizens? Where is the bipartisan part of this bill, the classified annex, the part that we did agree? It was tossed.

Why wasn't there a conference on this bill? Why couldn't we go and have a meaningful discussion and debate involving all the parties about what would make a good intelligence bill?

When did Members meet to discuss the bipartisan agreement that has been claimed in the Senate amendment? They didn't meet. This is a short-circuited process that didn't address and doesn't address the top issues that needed to be addressed to keep America safe.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

There aren't a lot of things in this bill. The chairman is absolutely right. Lots of things that should be in this bill. There should be a classified annex. There should be something that outlines our committee's response to what many believe are actions that are being carried out by the government through covert means that affect Americans overseas. This committee should take a stand on that position or on that issue.

This committee should take a stand on Mirandizing. This committee should take a stand on Gitmo. This committee should take a stand on the things that groups who have taken a look at what is happening to terrorism and have recommended changes that be made to keep America safe. And that is a reason why we are opposed to this bill.

We know what is in the bill, and we know what is not. The things that would keep America safe and safer in a changing environment are not in this bill.

I yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to work with you on the committee. I am disappointed that we did not get to agreement on this bill and that we are at different places on what is a very important piece of legislation to keep America safe.

I wish you the best in your future in Congress, as I leave this institution and as I leave the House Intelligence Committee. It has been a great honor to serve on this committee and do the work that we have tried to do to keep America safe.

You know, there are things that I wish we would have gotten done as we structured this bill that would have enabled us to move forward in a bipartisan basis.

There have been a number of investigations, beginning in 2007 dealing with the tapes investigation, dealing with detention, dealing with interrogation. I wish those investigations had been completed and reports would have been issued, and that we would have used the findings of those reports and those investigations to improve this bill.

I wish that we would have continued to move forward in a way that, a few years ago, in a bipartisan basis, this House said we are not going to put earmarks into intelligence bills.

I wish that we as a committee would have taken a position in repudiating a position that the President of the United States took soon after he assumed office which said he was going to close Gitmo and move the detainees from Guantanamo, move them into the United States. I wish we had said in this bill that we would have continued that prohibition on moving and expending any funds for moving people from Guantanamo into the United States. That is now an open question as to whether that may or may not happen.

I wish that in this bill we would have taken a position and said that it is inappropriate to Mirandize terrorists captured overseas, in many ways, I believe, giving them more legal rights than what we give to our own employees of the CIA.

CIA employees that do face perhaps the possibility of being prosecuted, I wish we would have said in this bill, these people have been investigated twice, they did what the leadership and the political leadership of this country asked them to do, and we will now protect them and say no, no funds will be used to prosecute them for the things that leadership in the United States of America asked them to do to keep us safe.

I wish we would have clearly said that we repudiate the policy of this administration where they for a period of time said, ``We are not going to use the word `terrorism' anymore. We are going to wipe the slate clean, and we are not going to use that language. We are now going to call terrorism `manmade disasters.' ''

We all know that if you don't correctly identify the threat that you face, you will never be able to contain it, confront it, and defeat it.

I wish that we would have taken a strong position in this bill in response to what happened at Fort Hood. Remember at Fort Hood, for months after the attack at Fort Hood, where 14 Americans were brutally murdered, this administration refused to recognize that this might be related to terrorism or the threats that we face from overseas.

We now know that in this and other terrorist attacks, as this face of terrorism changes, that in Fort Hood and other instances, Anwar al- Awlaki, associated with al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, played a part. We maybe don't know exactly how big of a part, but whether it was Fort Hood, whether it was the Christmas Day attack or what happened at Times Square, al-Awlaki may have been involved in some if not all of these attacks, and we know that al-Awlaki, bin Laden and all of these individuals continue to plan attacks against the U.S., against our allies in Europe, and against other friends around the planet.

These are all things that needed to be done in this bill. These are all things that needed to be done if we were going to keep America safer.

Right now, we all see and read about the fact that there is heightened awareness of threats, a heightened threat alert in Europe and in the United States, because we sense that there is an urgency by the radical jihadists to attack the West and to attack them again. This bill needed to meet that standard of addressing a changing environment, a changing threat level.

We see that happening. And my fear is that sometime in the future people are going to say Congress came up short. They didn't connect the dots one more time. They didn't connect the dots of threats coming out of Pakistan, coming out of Somalia, coming out of northern Africa, coming out of the Arabian peninsula. They didn't clearly understand the changing face of terrorism. They didn't learn the lessons from Fort Hood. They didn't learn the lessons from Christmas Day. They didn't learn the lessons from Times Square. Because the people who investigated those said, These are the types of things that we need to do to keep

America safe. And as we close out a fiscal year, Congress acted; but it didn't act on the lessons learned. Why didn't they act? Didn't they really have all the knowledge? Didn't they really connect the dots? I think we have the information. We could have connected the dots better. We needed to connect the dots better because each and every day the threats that we face change and adapt.

The challenge that we have as a Nation, that we have as an intelligence community is to design an intelligence community, to design an intelligence capability that is one step ahead of the challenges that we face, not one or two steps behind. The face of terrorism is changing. This bill doesn't put us out in front of dealing with those threats. It leaves us behind. That's why I am disappointed in this bill. That's why I am voting ``no,'' and I encourage my colleagues to vote ``no,'' because we need to do better than what is in this bill.

Having a bill with no classified annex providing no direction is not an authorization bill. Much more needs to be done. I wish and I hope that we can send this bill back, vote it down and improve it, and do what this country needs and what this country demands from us to keep America safe.

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

Madam Speaker, I would like to note for the Record my specific objections in several respects with the Fiscal Year 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act ``agreement'' that was passed by the Senate and agreed to by the Administration based on a Staff draft, and that now may come before the House just two days before the end of that fiscal year after repeated delays. The bill is completely unnecessary and moot for the purposes of authorizing intelligence activity; it instead appears intended to force through several controversial provisions as the House approaches a ``lame duck'' session.

While I have repeatedly raised our broader concerns with respect to this legislation in the House and in our formal Minority Views, I felt it important to memorialize what we believe are significant shortcomings and flaws in the current bill, especially with provisions that were not previously included in the House bill. I do not believe that this bill in its current form addresses a number of critical national security issues, and in many respects would fail to empower our intelligence professionals and create significant and unnecessary new bureaucracy and politicization of the intelligence community.

Most significantly, we are concerned with the absence of provisions to address the following critical issues:

Earmarks: The bill removes language from a previous

Republican amendment to prohibit the use of funds authorized

in the bill for any earmarked purpose, and effectively

authorizes earmarks of the Appropriations Committee.

Covert Action Authorities: The bill does nothing to provide

safeguards for certain covert action activities that could

impact U.S. citizens.

Intelligence Flaws Revealed After Fort Hood Shooting: The

bill contains no substantive provisions to address critical

information sharing flaws brought to light in the aftermath

of the Fort Hood shooting.

Interrogation of High Value Detainees: The bill contains no

substantive provisions to make intelligence collection a

priority in the interrogation of high value detainees, or to

address the complete lack of coordinated decisionmaking with

respect to interrogation of high value detainees.

FISA Authorities: The bill does nothing to provide

critically needed clarification of authorities under the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Guantanamo Detainees: The bill contains no outright

prohibition on using intelligence funds to bring Guantanamo

Bay detainees into the United States, or to prohibit secret

payments to foreign countries using intelligence funds to

accept Guantanamo Bay detainees. The conference agreement

also omits a Republican amendment--agreed to on a bipartisan

basis--to evaluate potential threats from released Uighur

detainees.

Administration of Miranda Warnings: The bill omits a

Republican amendment--supported on a bipartisan basis in the

Committee and in the House--to prohibit giving Miranda

warnings to foreign terrorist suspects in foreign countries

in order to protect intelligence collection.

In addition, I have concerns with several provisions of the bill that we believe are seriously flawed in several different respects. A number of these provisions are inconsistent with the letter or the spirit of bipartisan agreements reached in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. I believe a number of provisions would unduly and unwisely further grow the intelligence bureaucracy. I believe that other provisions would impinge on the smooth operation of the intelligence community, and that others would interfere with efficient and centralized intelligence oversight as recommended by the 9/11 Commission. Other objectionable provisions do not appear to have been fully or adequately justified, some with potentially significant consequences. The objectionable provisions include, but are not limited to, the following:

Contractor Conversion: While I support appropriate review

of the size and nature of the contractor workforce, Section

103 of the bill would provide unlimited authority to add an

unlimited number of employees, regardless of any other

statutory limitation. This is inconsistent with bipartisan

agreements in the House Intelligence Committee with respect

to limiting the size of the ODNI.

``A not A'' Funds: Section 101 of the bill would deem any

appropriated but unauthorized funding to be authorized. This

provision fundamentally cedes the authorization prerogatives

of the Intelligence Committees to the Appropriations

Committees, and virtually renders moot bipartisan agreements

on the funding authorizations contained in the classified

annex.

No Classified Annex: The bill omits the classified annex

that provides the specific direction to the intelligence

community on the conduct of operations and the permissible

uses of funds, which had been negotiated on a bipartisan

basis.

Unlimited Increases in Employee Compensation: Section 301

of the bill would allow unlimited increases to pay and

benefit authorization for any increases authorized by law.

Such unrestricted authority effectively renders moot specific

authorization levels elsewhere and can be used by the ODNI to

circumvent such restrictions for additional unapproved

growth. Similarly, Section 303 would permit the DNI to

authorize technically unlimited pay for specific positions at

his sole discretion. I am not aware of any demonstrated need

for such extraordinary authority.

Award of SIS Rank: Section 304 of the bill would permit the

Director of National Intelligence to recommend that the

President directly award Senior Intelligence Service rank to

employees across the intelligence community. This would

directly involve the DNI in specific agency personnel matters

contrary to the intent of the IRTPA and may foster cronyism

and non-merit based promotions of intelligence community

personnel.

Temporary Personnel Authorizations for Critical Language

Training: Section 306 of the bill would exempt up to 100 ODNI

personnel from personnel caps for the purposes of language

training. Given the widespread prevalence of persons

receiving foreign language training in the intelligence

community, I believe this is a thinly veiled authorization to

circumvent existing personnel caps, again inconsistent with

the intended size and scope of the ODNI and bipartisan

agreements within the House Committee on personnel levels

within the ODNI.

Education Programs: Sections 311 through 314 of the bill

would create or modify a number of education programs in the

intelligence community. While I do not necessarily oppose any

of these programs, I do not believe that these provisions--

most of them permanent--have been adequately explained or

justified. I note that previous versions of the bill would

have required a study to review and justify such programs,

which suggests that others share our concerns that these

programs have not yet been fully reviewed. For that provision

to be dropped in lieu of outright authorization makes little

sense in light of the implicit acknowledgment that further

study is needed.

Business System Transformation: Section 322 of the bill

would require the DNI to ``develop and implement'' (rather

than coordinate) an enterprise architecture to ``cover all

intelligence community business systems''. I believe this

provision is inconsistent with the role and scope of the ODNI

contemplated in the IRTPA.

IP Funded Acquisitions: Section 326 of the bill authorizes

the DNI to delegate certain acquisition authorities within

the intelligence community. This provision is inconsistent

with the express agreement reached in the IRTPA conference

not to permit such delegation.

Congressional Notification: Section 331 of the bill

continues to cede sole authority to the President to

determine which members of the congressional intelligence

committees would receive briefings on particularly sensitive

intelligence matters. This provision is inconsistent with

previous bipartisan agreements reached in the House

Committee, and fails entirely to protect the Constitutional

prerogative of the Congress to make its own rules of

proceedings. It would have little meaningful effect and

appears to provide political cover at the expense of real

reform in this critical area.

GAO Review: Section 348 of the bill also contains a

provision that requires the Executive Branch to promulgate

guidelines for dealing with GAO reviews of intelligence

community programs. I believe that this provision is unwise

for a number of reasons. Most notably, it potentially cedes

significant elements of the traditional oversight role of the

intelligence committees to the GAO and potentially to other

Committees of the Congress, and it fails to adequately

protect the security and dissemination of classified work

product under the same terms as the Committee rules. In

addition, this specific provision cedes to the Executive

Branch and the Comptroller General the determination of how

to manage GAO inquiries that should be directed by Members of

Congress.

Report on Intelligence Community Contractors: Section 339

of the bill would improperly require reports on sensitive

intelligence collection matters--including covert action

programs--to be provided to the Armed Services committees,

contrary to the Rules of the House. Several other provisions

of the bill also require reports on intelligence matters to

be submitted to Committees that may not have jurisdiction

over the material to be reported on.

Reprogramming Standard: Section 362 of the bill would

modify the reprogramming standard for intelligence activities

in a manner that would render it virtually meaningless. This

change is contrary to the express

bipartisan agreement reached in the Intelligence Reform and

Terrorism Prevention Act conference.

Declassification of Intelligence Budget Topline: Section

364 provides for permanent declassification of the

intelligence budget topline. This provision serves no

demonstrable intelligence purpose, and is contrary to the

express bipartisan agreement reached in the Intelligence

Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act conference.

Review Authority of the Public Interest Declassification

Board: Section 365 would allow any individual member of

certain committees to request declassification review of

certain records. This provision is contrary to the express

bipartisan agreement reached in the Intelligence Reform and

Terrorism Prevention Act conference to restrict such

requests.

Accountability Reviews: Section 401 of the bill would

authorize the DNI or the congressional intelligence

committees to directly conduct or request accountability

reviews of individual intelligence community personnel. This

provision would involve the DNI in individual personnel

matters within intelligence agencies in a manner inconsistent

with the authorities contemplated in the IRTPA.

Inspector General of the Intelligence Community: While I do

not necessarily oppose the concept of greater coordination by

the DNI of intelligence community inspectors general, Section

405 of the bill is a massive and unduly prescriptive

provision that is inconsistent with the contemplated size and

scope of the ODNI and in many respects duplicates existing

oversight by Department inspectors general.

Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency:

Similarly, I have significant concern that Section 425 of the

bill is unduly prescriptive and burdensome with respect to

the organization and management of the office of the

Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Defense Inspector General Matters: Section 431 of the bill

would authorize the Secretary of Defense to prohibit certain

inspector general reviews of intelligence matters within the

intelligence community. I see no apparent justification for

this provision, which we believe could potentially interfere

with the independence of the intelligence community and may

be inconsistent with the intention of the IRTPA.

Confirmation of Heads of Certain Components of the

Intelligence Community: Section 432 of the bill would require

Senate confirmation of the heads of certain IC agencies. This

provision threatens to politicize such positions, which are

often held by career military officers, and could impede the

efficient functioning of these agencies in times of vacancy.

FBI Relocation and Retention Bonuses: Section 443 of the

bill would provide certain authorities relating to relocation

and retention bonuses for the entire Federal Bureau of

Investigation--not just employees funded by the National

Intelligence Program. Such a broad provision is outside the

Committee's jurisdiction, has not been justified to the

Committee, and has not been reviewed for consistency across

the Intelligence Community and federal law enforcement. While

I strongly support line personnel of the FBI, we believe that

this provision must be more carefully reviewed and harmonized

with personnel practices in other intelligence and law

enforcement agencies. Similarly, we believe that section 444,

which extends authority to delay certain FBI mandatory

retirements must be better reviewed, especially for its

implications for federal law enforcement retirement, which is

intended to promote a young and vigorous workforce and should

be applied consistently across federal law enforcement

agencies.

Madam Speaker, I submit the following.

When Will America Recover?

(By Hon. Nick Smith, former U.S. Representative (MI-07))

I just returned from speaking at several British

universities on American politics and the economy. England,

like the United States, has high unemployment and huge

government debt. Many I spoke to believed that the current

global economic mess is all our fault. In a sense, they are

right. As the world's leading economy, our economic health

affects everyone, especially trading partners like England.

We are its largest trading and investment partners at $400

billion last year.

The students were most interested in my opinion on how long

it would take before America recovers economically. Some

White House economists are predicting that we can fully

recover from this recession in a year or two. As I told the

students, however, it will take ten years or more to rebuild

our economy--and then only if we can control spending. It's

not just ``the government'' or even ``the Democrats.'' All of

us, government and consumers alike, have been living on

borrowed money. Our national savings rate three years ago was

a negative number. One bit of recent good news is that

consumers have increased their estimated average individual

savings rate to over five percent, which means less consumer

spending in the short run but a stronger overall economy in

the long run. The Government needs to do likewise.

But Congress not only continues to borrow, it is borrowing

more than ever with no sign of stopping. Deficit spending,

expected to hit $1.5 trillion, is one third of the

President's proposed budget. His budget projects huge

deficits every year for the foreseeable future. Our debt,

which is the sum of all historical deficits, now adds up to

$12 trillion. Interest on that debt consumes almost ten

percent of federal spending. Without dramatic change the

future will be much worse. Interest rates will be doubling

and the unfunded liabilities (what we've promised to pay out

in the future) for entitlements such as Medicare, Social

Security, Medicaid and veteran's benefits adds up to another

$60 trillion debt--in today's dollars.

Reckless spending has mostly been driven by Congressmen

currying favor with voters who demand ever more money and

services from ``the government'' to solve their problems. But

the government gets its money from current taxpayers and

lenders. Who will repay these lenders? Future taxpayers. Each

baby born in this country is instantly saddled with $40,000

of government debt, not including interest.

And that does not include future deficit spending or the

$60 trillion in unfunded liabilities. We have ended up with a

tax, borrow, and spend government that will handicap future

generations. Ten years ago, our federal spending was 18% of

GDP, 4 years ago it was 20%, and today it's over 24%. The

dollar increase will have gone from $1.8 trillion in 2000 to

$3.8 trillion in the President's budget. That is over 200

percent of spending ten years ago.

Washington's over-spending not only mortgages our

children's future, it crowds out business and industry

borrowing today, for research, expansion and ultimately jobs.

As alarming as these numbers are, even more worrisome is

that our political and economic system is nearing a tipping

point that, if reached, will change this country forever.

Today 50% of voters pay less than 2% of the total income tax.

These voters want the government to solve more of their

problems, and why not? It's in their best interest to elect

politicians who will spend more because they don't have to

pay for it, and it's in politicians' best interest to vote

for that spending to get reelected. Meanwhile, countries like

Communist China, which has lent the United States nearly a

trillion dollars, gains more and more influence in foreign

affairs, literally at our expense.

The point is that we're close to losing our status as a

strong economic power. That affects us, our children,

England, and the rest of the world who rely on us for our

leadership and for much of their own economic well being. It

is in all of our interest to be more self sufficient, ask

less of Washington and bring down government spending.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this flawed health bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to vehemently object to the government takeover of health care.

It is bad social policy, bad public policy and bad fiscal policy for the United States.

The health care bills we will vote on today are estimated to cost more than $1 trillion, will expand government bureaucracy, permit taxpayer-funded abortions, increase taxes and cut Medicare. Additionally, it includes egregious sweetheart deals such as the ``Cornhusker Kickback'' for Nebraska, ``Gator Aid'' for Florida and the ``Louisiana Purchase.''

My home state of Michigan alone will be forced to pay $710 million annually for new Medicaid enrollees, money the state does not have to spare. It is verging on denying the state's ability to regulate health care programs and insurance and encroach on its sovereignty in doing so.

Every American is personally impacted by health care. As such over the last year Michigan residents and all Americans have voiced their opposition with the health care proposals in Congress. It is disheartening to see that Congress is blatantly ignoring the voice of the public.

The U.S. health care system remains the best in the world, but still needs reform. Reform can be achieved by targeted measures such as allowing insurance competition across state lines and creating high- risk pools of money for states to support those with pre-existing conditions.

I had hoped that we could work in a bipartisan manner to achieve reform of health care, but Republicans were not allowed a seat at the table.

We do not need the federal government to take over one-sixth of the American economy, and saddle states like Michigan with mandates, tax increases and debt.

Mr. Speaker, in Michigan a situation has developed in which home health car providers have been forced to pay union dues to state because they accept federal dollars.

How can we be sure that the same will not happen to medical practitioners who will be forced into a government-run system?

Additionally, I am concerned that the reconciliation bill that we will vote upon today will completely federalize student lending, leading to lost jobs, tax increases and the elimination of choice.

Mr. Speaker, I will be voting against the bills, and I respectfully submit my remarks for the Record.

Madam Speaker, I rise here today to honor Ludington talk show host George Wilson for a career of service in radio broadcasting in Mason County.

George Wilson joined WKLA radio in June of 1959. Along with his popular morning show, Big George served in a variety of other roles over the years, including sales manager and play-by-play sports announcer. George left WKLA for a brief period to serve as advertising manager at the Ludington Daily News, but returned to WKLA in 1986.

In 2007 Wilson was nominated for induction into the Michigan Broadcasting Hall of Fame, and his name will remain on the Hall of Fame ballot through 2012.

Throughout his morning show broadcasting career, George woke every day at 3 a.m., but despite the hours, he always enjoyed his job, saying, ``If you look forward to going to work every day, then that's a good job and I've always looked forward to going to work at WKLA.''

I have interviewed with George on countless occasions throughout my 18 years in Congress, and have always enjoyed our conversations on issues of the day.

Whether it was through our conversations, watching him lead the Scottville Clown Band or working with him as mayor of Scottville, my wife Diane and I have always enjoyed our friendship with George.

George Wilson's retirement marks the end of an era in Mason County, and he will be missed by all those who tuned in to listen to his morning show during the weekdays.

I thank Mr. Dreier from California for giving me the 5 minutes.

Here we go again. This bill could have been done in July, but it was pulled. This is the third rule that we've had on one bill. It's almost unprecedented; I'm not sure that I have ever seen this before. It was pulled in July because of the controversy surrounding the Speaker's remarks saying the CIA lies, the CIA lies all the time. So it sat dormant as this country was under attack.

When we went to the Rules Committee this week, we had a lot of amendments that we thought should have been put in order. An amendment that would direct the DNI to establish a panel to review the capabilities of Iran--it wasn't important enough to debate that when we went through the debate on this bill yesterday. An amendment that would require the CIA to release publicly unclassified versions of documents relating to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques--that wasn't important enough to debate. What we are going to do with the folks in Guantanamo--that wasn't important enough to debate. What the intelligence community did after Fort Hood and in between Fort Hood and Christmas Day--that wasn't important enough to debate. The process for authorization and notification of covert actions that may result in the death of a targeted U.S. citizen--that wasn't important enough to debate.

But then we see that there is an amendment to be offered by the manager of the bill, the chairman of the committee, 22 pages, including an amendment from Mr. McDermott. And here's Mr. McDermott's own words: ``My amendment would have expanded upon the President's executive order to clearly define what constitutes a cruel, inhumane, or degrading interrogation so that it is unmistakable what kinds of techniques are unacceptable. It also creates criminal penalties for those who use those kinds of interrogations.'' Not a single minute of debate on this amendment, not one hearing on this amendment, and we dump it into a manager's amendment, along with 22 other amendments. Sloppy work.

And how do we know it's sloppy? Because we're back here today for a third time with a third rule pulling it out. It's not because the leadership on the other side believes that this is a bad amendment. They believe it's the right

amendment. That's why they put it into the manager's amendment. That's why the chairman put this amendment into the manager's amendment, because he agrees with it. He defended this yesterday, expansion of criminal penalties only to the intelligence community; on the floor defending this amendment, saying it was the good thing and the right thing to do, and it was consistent with American values. If it's consistent with American values, why are they pulling it out? Because they know it's unfair to the intelligence community.

We asked the question yesterday, what are you going to say to the men and women, the front lines in the intelligence community, when you go and visit them and say you have created a special set of penalties only for them? You know, these rules, this new criminal law, you wouldn't even apply these to your county sheriff, you wouldn't even apply them to your State trooper, but they wanted to sneak them in in the middle of the night, with no debate, no hearing, saying this is the right way to go. They're pulling it today because they recognize, their leadership on this issue, that when they turned around, they had no followers. They didn't have enough votes to pass this. It jeopardized their bill. It was sloppy work to put this in in the first place, and it's an indication of how this bill has gone through the process. This amendment was put in without any consultation with the other side of the aisle. This is a partisan bill. As my colleague said earlier, it creates some real confusion as to whether we're in the law enforcement business or whether we're in the fighting terrorism business.

I'm glad this is coming here today, but we could have dealt with this yesterday. It should never have been in the manager's amendment to begin with. If they wanted to put it up, put it up for a separate vote as a separate amendment. But they knew they couldn't do that.

We asked questions yesterday that they didn't answer. Why does this amendment define a criminal offense that only intelligence community personnel would be guilty of? They wouldn't answer that, they wouldn't engage in that debate. The amendment would make it a crime for depriving an individual of necessary food, water, sleep. How does the bill define ``necessary?'' Participate in acts intended to violate the individual's religious beliefs. Is there an objective standard? Then it gets into phobias. Exploit the phobias of the individual. We asked the other side, please define this for us, and they didn't.

I thank my colleague.

They weren't willing to answer any of those questions or even have a debate or a discussion on what the amendment meant. So that is why we're back here today. But the bottom line is it's a symptom, it's a symptom of the confusion on the other side, the sloppiness with which they brought this bill to the floor. I am glad that they have taken this lousy amendment and they are going to trash it today. It should never have been in there. It jeopardized and attacked our men and women on the front lines who are keeping us safe each and every day.

The McDermott amendment was an insult, an insult to American men and women in the intelligence community.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Yes, in its current form.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Our country and our intelligence community are at a crossroads. Over the last 14 months, we've been struggling as to whether we're going to be focused on defeating terrorists or whether we're going to be focused on a law enforcement approach. This couldn't have been defined more clearly than what it was yesterday when the manager of this bill brought forward an amendment that would have put our intelligence community professionals at risk putting them under criminal statutes that you wouldn't even apply to your local sheriff or your local State trooper.

Thankfully, many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle joined with us and forced the majority to go back and rewrite the rule and come back and strip that provision from the bill.

But that move yesterday should not have been a surprise. It was only last year that the Attorney General appointed a special prosecutor to investigate CIA personnel even though career Justice Department officials had already decided that there was no basis for prosecution. It appears that the majority wants to investigate and prosecute everyone who has been involved in our critical interrogation programs-- except themselves.

The records of briefings have shown clearly and repeatedly that Democratic and Republican leadership of the House were briefed early and often on the use of the same techniques that they wanted to criminalize yesterday. And they never objected. And while there has been a selective release of certain briefing documents over the last few days, the record is far from complete because the administration and the majority have repeatedly blocked requests and amendments to publicly release a full, unclassified briefing of the classified records: who knew what and when.

The motion to recommit would stop the criminalization of our national security policy and ensure that Members of Congress would be as accountable for their conduct as the majority wants to hold the men and women of the CIA.

The motion would ask the CIA Inspector General to conduct an independent review of whether any Member of Congress objected to the use of the techniques to review what steps were taken and to require the release of all of the briefing memos. If the majority was not briefed or raised concerns, it should have nothing to fear from an independent and objective review by the facts of the Inspector General.

And, secondly, the motion would also clarify once and for all that the Director of National Intelligence should be in charge of coordinating interrogation of terrorists and should ensure we have collected all actionable intelligence before reading terrorists their Miranda rights.

This is a proposition that should not be controversial. Why is this in here? It was only on Christmas Day that the DNI, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Secretary of Homeland Security all said that they were not consulted before the Christmas Day bomber was read his Miranda rights.

These provisions are fully consistent with all of the other authorities that have been given to the DNI to coordinate the activities of the intelligence community. It makes no sense for the DNI to be in charge of coordinating all other intelligence activities but then the Attorney General is in charge of interrogation of foreign terrorists.

This motion would place the emphasis back where it belongs. It would align accountability and authority for those who make the decisions with the DNI.

The DNI is responsible for collecting intelligence to prevent attacks. This is where we need to go.

We can answer two fundamental questions with this motion to recommit. Who knew what, when, on enhanced interrogation techniques. Before we go and prosecute people in the intelligence community, let's have a clear record of what Members of this body knew and approved, because basically the administration and this Congress asked the intelligence personnel to do what they did. They were following our orders and instructions to keep America safe.

The second thing is, let's make sure that the DNI, the person with the responsibility to keep us safe, has the final decision on when and how we will interrogate foreign terrorists to keep America safe. It's his job. It's his responsibility. Let's get rid of the confusion. Let's get the alignment. Let's do what's necessary to keep America safe and to protect and recognize the service of our men and women in the intelligence community.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chairman, I yield myself as much time as I shall consume.

Madam Chairman, annual Intelligence authorization bills should be bipartisan legislation designed to address critical national security issues and deal in a deliberate and considered way with legislation affecting the intelligence community, the personnel within the intelligence community. Unfortunately, this bill does neither. I'm forced to rise in strong opposition.

When this bill was first reported almost 8 months ago, the bill failed to address critical national security issues such as Guantanamo detainees, attempts by this administration to convert intelligence and counterterrorism into matters of criminal law and meaningful reforms to the congressional notification process.

In the nearly 8 months since this bill was reported out of committee, our country has suffered two major terrorist attacks and a significant number of near misses. During that time, the majority took no time and no action to bring this bill to the floor.

In 8 months nothing was done to fix the flaws in our intelligence community that were apparent to every American in the wake of the first attack at Fort Hood and, later, the Christmas bombing attack on an American airliner.

In 8 months, nothing was done to clarify who is in charge of interrogation of high-value terrorist detainees, these people that are captured around the world who want to do harm to America.

In 8 months, nothing was done to provide a long-term renewal of our critical intelligence authorities under the USA PATRIOT Act.

In 8 months, nothing was done to, once and for all, stop hard-core, radical jihadist terrorists from being brought into the United States, despite the clear opposition that has arisen to this ill-considered idea from average Americans across the country.

In 8 months, nothing has been done to clarify how covert actions should be conducted or authorized when they could have deadly effects on American citizens. Nothing has been done.

Then, you go through and you take a look at the amendments that we wanted to propose that would have addressed these issues, and all of these were thrown out by the majority, an amendment that would direct the DNI to establish a panel to review the intelligence relating to weapons of mass destruction programs of Iran. Politically speaking, our intelligence community is now to the left of the United Nations as to our assessment of what Iran's capabilities are, to the left of the ill- fated National Intelligence Estimate that came out under the previous administration.

We've asked for an independent panel of experts to give us a red team review. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle said, no, that's not necessary.

We asked for an amendment that would require the CIA to release publicly unclassified versions of documents relating to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, this controversial background as to who knew what when, including some of the leading Members of this body. We asked for those documents to be released. The majority said no.

We asked for the prohibition of funds to bring Guantanamo detainees into the United States. The majority said, we won't even debate it. We won't consider it. We won't allow for an amendment that would do just that.

We asked for a report requiring the DNI to submit a report detailing steps taken to fix problems identified in the President's Fort Hood intelligence review prior to December 25. Why? Because the incident on November 5 had striking parallels to what happened on December 25, and we thought it was fair to ask the question and ask the Director of National Intelligence: With the information that you gained on November 5, what actions did you take that might have helped prevent what happened on Christmas Day? And the answer was, no, we don't think that that would be a worthwhile effort to ask the intelligence community those kinds of tough and difficult questions and be held accountable to this body.

And then we said we had another amendment that said, Don't we think it would be appropriate that we actually establish a process for the authorization and the notification of covert actions that may result in the death of a targeted U.S. citizen? It doesn't get into a debate as to whether that is appropriate, an appropriate course of action. It just says, don't we think that the intelligence community and the executive branch should have in place a detailed process of how these decisions are made, how they are authorized, and when Congress would be notified? And the answer from the majority was no. A process that would give us an idea as to how the administration would authorize and notify Congress when they took actions that might result in the death of a targeted U.S. citizen, a targeted U.S. citizen.

And these are just the amendments that were not considered, substantive, serious issues that the majority is unwilling to debate, to discuss and to address.

Later on, as we go through the day and as we take a look at the manager's amendment and the other amendments, we'll take a look at the striking contrast between what the majority is willing to debate and discuss and to act on, and what they are unwilling to debate and discuss. And it has a direct impact on the safety of each and every American.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, at this time I would like to yield 4 minutes to a member of the committee, Mr. Thornberry from Texas, who will talk about the continued efforts by this administration in what appears to be a war on the intelligence community, a legal war on our intelligence community, the brave men and women in that community.

I yield the gentleman an additional 2 minutes.

I would like to yield 4 minutes to my colleague from Michigan, a strong defender of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Rogers.

I yield my colleague 1 more minute.

At this time, I'd like to yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Texas (Mr. Burgess).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Madam Chair, how much time do we have remaining on each side?

I would like to reserve my time until we are more equal.

Madam Chair, I yield myself 1 minute.

I hope that as we have the general debate on this bill right now that we have at least one person who will come up on the other side and explain exactly what is in the McDermott amendment, what it means and what the implication will be to our men and women in the intelligence community. We hear over and over again how ``we support the intelligence community''--without a single hearing.

Perhaps with about 1 minute of debate on the manager's amendment that has been allotted to that McDermott amendment, we will fundamentally change the nature of the intelligence community, how they work and how they operate by creating new criminal statutes, not a minute of hearings in this committee, and all of a sudden it appears out of nowhere in a manager's amendment.

Would someone on the other side please explain the rationale for bringing that in this bill with having no hearing when it will have a fundamental impact on the intelligence community? What is the rationale, and why was the majority unwilling to have hearings on this issue? Why were they unwilling to debate this issue, and why did they bury it into a manager's amendment with 22 other amendments?

I thank my colleague from California for coming down and explaining her amendments. These are issues that we have talked about in the past, and congratulations for having them included in the manager's amendment. I support those kinds of amendments, because they have been discussed and they have broad bipartisan support.

There are other parts of the manager's amendment which I am strongly opposed to because they haven't even had any dialogue, debate or hearings on that.

To discuss one of those, I yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

Madam Chair, I would like to yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Michigan (Mr. Rogers).

Madam Chair, I yield myself 1 minute.

There are a lot of things in this bill that are not addressed, that were not

allowed to be put in order as we went through the rules process. One of those things is how we are going to deal with the detainees from Guantanamo.

You know, at one time they were going to be moved into Kansas; the people in Kansas stood up and said no. They then were going to moved to Michigan, and the people in Michigan stood up and said no. They then were going to be moved to South Carolina, and the leadership in South Carolina said no. Now it is the people in Illinois that are fighting the valiant battle and saying, no, we don't want them in our State either.

There has been a fundamental problem in each case where the administration has proposed moving these individuals into a State; there has been absolutely no transparency. People in Michigan, people in Illinois, people in South Carolina and Kansas have all asked for the fundamental information: Who are these individuals? Why are they in Guantanamo? What did they do to deserve to be there? What has their behavior been while they have been in Guantanamo? In each case, for each of those States we've said, before the States make up their mind as to whether they are going to accept these individuals or not, share these individuals with the policymakers and the decision-makers in that State.

I yield my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry) 1\1/2\ minutes.

Madam Chair, I am going to be the last speaker, so we only have one speaker left.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, my colleague on the other side of the aisle, Chairman Reyes, has said now is not the time to talk about Gitmo. Obviously, the majority has also said now is not the time to talk about getting an independent assessment of what is going on in Iran. Now is not the time to talk about the release of unclassified versions of documents related to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. Now is not the time to talk about bringing the Gitmo folks here. Now is not the time to talk about the time lapse between Fort Hood and Christmas Day and what did and did not happen during that period of time. Now is not the time to talk about a process for the authorization and notification of covert actions that may result in the death of a targeted U.S. citizen.

So it is not time to talk about any of those or to debate any of those issues which are absolutely critical to the effectiveness of our intelligence community and to keeping America safe.

Interestingly enough, it is the day not to talk about but to bury into a manager's amendment 22 different amendments, including one that will fundamentally change the way our intelligence community has to do business. No hearings. No discussions. No debate. Buried in there is the McDermott amendment. We are now limited to, at most, 10 minutes per side to talk about 22 amendments in the manager's amendment, which will come up immediately following this general debate. Yet it is interesting that, in the discussion of general debate, not one person on the other side was willing to defend this amendment and the process by which it was included--meaning no discussions, no debate--or to defend the content of what is included in the manager's amendment.

Is this what the process in the House has now come down to, that we bury these critical amendments between 22 other amendments? If we split up the time equally, let's see. We have 22 amendments divided by 20 minutes. We will, maybe, have 1 minute of debate. We will have 1 minute of debate on this amendment. It will be interesting when our folks in the intelligence community see what our friends on the other side of the aisle have done to them today, our friends on the other side who talk about how they so strongly defend our intelligence community. When they go visit them in the field, I would guess that they are going to get a very cold reception.

The other thing that they are going to do is they are going to have questions, and they are going to expect the majority to explain how they did this with no hearings. They are going to have to explain exactly, Now, what does this amendment do? How does it impact us? What does it mean? How is it operational?

I assume you knew that before you voted on it on the floor of the House, and my answer is going to be, I don't think they do.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I claim time in opposition.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Since the other side doesn't want to talk about this amendment, I find myself having to come back and, once again, bring up the McDermott amendment. I would just appreciate, since there have been no hearings on this and it has slipped into this in the dead of night, just some answers to questions that maybe someone on the majority side can answer.

Remember, we are in a community now where the people at the front lines realize, when they have been asked by Congress and the President to do something, that, 3 or 4 years later, they may be prosecuted for those very activities by following the requests of this Congress.

We are talking about enhanced interrogation techniques. The record indicates that even people as high as the Speaker of this House knew about it. Yet this House is supporting those efforts to perhaps go back and prosecute this. Now we open up a whole new set of legal risk for our people in the intelligence community. I wish this thing just said, ``Follow the rules,'' but it doesn't. It's 11 pages of legalese, creating all types of new and ambiguous rules for our people in the intelligence community.

Would someone please answer the question: Why did we never have any hearings on this? Why no discussion? Why no debate? Why does this amendment define a criminal offense that only intelligence community personnel would be guilty of? This only applies to intelligence community personnel. Answer the question.

The amendment would make it a crime for depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care. How does the bill define ``necessary''? How will we explain that to the people in the intelligence community?

The amendment would make it a crime to require someone to participate in acts intended to violate the individual's religious beliefs. Is there any objective standard to define that term or is it a subjective standard? Is there any requirement of reasonableness?

The amendment would make it a crime to exploit phobias of the individual. Phobias? Could you explain why this would be a criminal offense for a member of the intelligence community but not a criminal offense for a prosecutor who threatens a detainee with increased jail time if he does not cooperate?

These are just some simple questions--questions that I would think people in the intelligence community would ask the next time someone from this body comes and visits with them and tells them how much we support them and how great of a job we think they're doing. I would think they would hold this amendment up and say, Sir, Madam, did you vote for this? Did you understand what it meant when you voted for it? Could you explain it to me? Somebody please answer these questions.

We sure didn't have the opportunity to ask this in committee, to get any briefings on this, to have any hearings, for someone to explain this to us. But, no, if the other side has its way, soon this will be law.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Michigan (Mr. Rogers).

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

Madam Chair, I yield myself 1 minute.

I wish it were plain and simple. It's 11 pages, 11 pages dropped in in the middle of the night. No debate, no discussion, just inserted.

If it's already a crime, why are you putting it in here?

We haven't answered all the questions that we asked before. I notice that the sponsor of the amendment, who was here for an extended period of time, I'm not sure if he wanted to speak on the amendment or not but obviously wasn't given the opportunity to speak on the amendment if he wanted to. It's too bad because I think there's legitimate need for discussion and debate because I don't think it's at all clear that this is just a restatement of current law.

Answer the questions. The amendment would make it a crime to exploit phobias of the individual. Why is this a criminal offense for a member of the intelligence community but for no one else, not a criminal offense for a prosecutor? Why didn't we ever talk about this in committee? Why didn't we ever debate it?

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time

Madam Chair, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to my colleague from Michigan (Mr. Rogers).

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Thank you.

Madam Chair, my colleague on the other side of the aisle is exactly right. The people in the intelligence community are watching exactly what we are doing. And actions do speak louder than words. The actions that they have seen, their colleagues were asked by this Congress, including, the record shows, the leadership of this House and the former administration, to do things on their behalf to keep America safe, and they see their colleagues now potentially being prosecuted because the rules changed under this administration.

As they see the rules changed for them and perhaps their colleagues being prosecuted, they see a global justice initiative coming out of the FBI where we are reading Miranda rights to our enemies on the battlefield in Afghanistan. They see the actions and they see the actions are very, very different.

They see that we are moving KSM from Gitmo to trial in New York City. Thankfully, the people in New York City are saying no way, we are not doing it. And at the same time that KSM is being promised a trial in civilian courts in the United States, they are seeing 11 pages of new vulnerabilities being placed on them after no hearings and no debate.

Yes, our men and women in the field are seeing a real difference. They are seeing a real difference in actions by this Congress and by this administration. They see that they have become kind of a target of this administration, that this is now not about keeping America safe, it is about putting them into a legal framework, an ugly legal net.

Madam Chair, I rise in strong opposition to this bloated Manager's Amendment. Its flaws powerfully demonstrate how the Intelligence Committee is failing to do its work and has in fact become counterproductive to the work of the intelligence community.

This amendment is everything that is wrong with intelligence policy in 2010. It is politicized, it fails to recognize or act on the serious threats that we continue to face as a nation, and it puts off the tough decisions indefinitely. Where it does take a substantive action, instead of taking meaningful steps to fix the problem it blames the men and women of the intelligence community for failing to follow a politically correct policy, even though that policy was ratified by Members of Congress at the highest levels. I think we have heard this story before.

The Managers Amendment contains the text of 22 Democratic amendments, and no Republican amendments. The Committee minority was not consulted on a single one of these amendments--in fact, one of them continues to reverse a bipartisan agreement on notification reform from last year.

Instead of taking meaningful steps to address critical national security problems such as the threat posed by bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States, the flaws revealed in our intelligence sharing by the Fort Hood and Christmas attacks, and the issues posed by American citizens who join terrorist groups abroad, it would require 16 new reports, to bring the total for the bill to at least 57 new reports. And instead of supporting the men and women of our intelligence community, it would create a new criminal offense that not only would duplicate an existing law--it would apply only to our intelligence personnel. How's that for gratitude?

Instead of trying to provide proper procedures are in place to govern the conduct of covert action activities that could impact American citizens, the Majority believes it is more important to order yet another duplicative report on foreign language proficiency when the Committee is already briefed regularly and repeatedly on the efforts that are ongoing in this area.

Instead of trying to fix the intelligence sharing problems that were laid bare at the Fort Hood shooting and shown to be critical during the Christmas bombing attack, the Majority has instead chosen to put its head in the sand and order up a report on events in Argentina between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s.

Instead of resolving the serious problems in coordinating the interrogation of the high-value detainees that became apparent when Miranda rights were read to a foreign radical jihadist, the Majority has chosen to require the intelligence community to write up not one, but two new reports and a ``Task Force'' on cybersecurity even though the Committee is in the middle of a series of comprehensive briefings and hearings on the subject and has conducted repeated oversight.

Madam Chair, I can't think of a single terrorist plot that has ever been disrupted by a report to Congress.

In addition to these more fundamental issues, I need to note for the record some specific serious problems with this amendment.

First, the amendment does even further damage to the bipartisan agreement that had been reached on reform of congressional notification. Instead of providing a mechanism that respects the separation of powers and the various equities of the President and the Congress, this amendment has ceded the decision of which Members of Congress will be briefed on sensitive covert actions entirely to the President, apparently to avoid the White House's veto threat on the bill. That is ironic for a majority who has claimed so long and so loud--despite clear records and the recollection of others to the contrary--that it was never briefed on intelligence policies that they explicitly helped to ratify on a bipartisan basis.

Second, the amendment does even further damage to years of carefully developed practice and procedure for how the congressional intelligence committees conduct oversight by attempting to cede its responsibility to the GAO. The original bill was flawed because it would have provided the GAO with virtually unfettered authority to insert itself into intelligence community matters without applying

the same rules that govern the congressional intelligence committees or limiting the dissemination of any work product to protect sources and methods.

It was so bad that even the Obama administration objected that the bill ``would fundamentally shift the longstanding relationship and information flow between the IC and intelligence committee members and staff.'' This Managers Amendment makes these problems even worse by allowing the Comptroller General to unilaterally develop procedures for handling of highly sensitive material with no requirement that it follow House or Committee rules, and in fact would allow committees other than the intelligence committees to request GAO review of the intelligence community.

This is contrary to the Rules of the House and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. How many times do we have to learn the simple lesson that intelligence oversight is most effective when it is conducted by the intelligence committees--at least when those committees do more than just require new reports.

Third, buried deep within the 22 amendments contained in this Managers Amendment is an extraordinary provision that would create a new criminal offense that would only apply to the men and women of the intelligence community. Title 18 of the U.S. Code, section 2340A, already gives effect to the Convention Against Torture and makes torture a criminal offense in the United States. Torture is already against the law.

Apparently, that's not enough for the Majority--it has to have a special offense that would apply only to the men and women of the Intelligence Community--just as Attorney General Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate them. There is no legal reason to do this--it apparently exists only to make a political statement. The intelligence operatives on the front lines deserve our thanks and our support for doing hard things in hard places, like the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice this year in Khost, Afghanistan. They do not deserve to be singled out for special criminal offenses. I believe that this is wrong.

Madam Chair, I strongly oppose this amendment.

Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I would like to yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Madam Chair, this is a very straightforward amendment. I thank the Rules Committee for making it in order. It basically says that for not later than 30 days after the enactment of this act, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency shall make publicly available an unclassified version of the report of the Inspector General entitled ``Procedures Used in Narcotics Airbridge Denial Program in Peru.''

Many of you may remember that this was a very tragic incident where, with the assistance of our intelligence community, two of my constituents were tragically killed in Peru, shot down by the Peruvian Air Force. We need an unclassified version of this report being made available to the public, and more importantly, to the families, the families of those who were killed.

You know, it wasn't that long ago, it was within the last month that there was a discussion about an accountability review. Almost 9 years after that tragic shoot-down, there was an Accountability Board that had been convened. And its results have been made or were reported to our committee. Roughly 4 weeks ago I asked the Director of the CIA whether the families of those killed would be briefed on what was found in the Accountability Board and the accountabilities that were put in order. To date I am yet waiting for an answer.

This has been unfair to these families, it has been unfair to the American public that when we have had such a tragic failing in the intelligence community, which included, from my perspective, an attempted coverup by the previous administration or by the intelligence community as to exactly what happened, how it happened, and how these Americans were killed, that we have been so closed in sharing that information with the American public and the families.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the chairman for accepting the amendment, my colleague from California for the kind words that she had to say. We worked on this program for a number of years together. And it has taken us such a long period of time to get the answers that help understand but do not explain what happened.

This amendment is intended to get more information to the American people, more information to the families. I do hope that over the coming days that the Director of the CIA, that the people in the intelligence community decide to give the families full access to the Accountability Board.

I appreciate the support of the chairwoman of the subcommittee, Ms. Schakowsky from Illinois. This is a case where we have worked uniquely in a bipartisan way to address failings within the intelligence community, to try to right those wrongs, and to try to move us forward in a constructive and positive way. I thank my colleagues who have enabled that process to work and to work effectively.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, I'd like to claim the time in opposition, although I will not be opposed to the amendment.

I would like to recognize my colleague from Texas (Mr. Thornberry) for 1 minute.

Madam Chairman, I yield myself the balance of the time.

Madam Chairman, I will not oppose the amendment. I support the amendment. I think the report on highlighting the progress that we have made or that we may not have made toward our objectives of increasing the diversity within the intelligence community is something that is needed and something that my colleague has been championing for all the years that we have served on the committee together. I support the amendment and urge my colleagues to support it as well.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I rise to claim the time in opposition.

Madam Chair, I will not oppose the amendment. Although, I do believe, and I would hope that my colleague from Michigan would agree that, perhaps, when we are talking about the scope of this amendment, it is broader than what is just written here.

One of the things that we are very, very concerned about which, I believe, should be included in this--because, like you, I believe, if the intelligence community had worked properly, perhaps we could have stopped this attack; but this is not just a matter of connecting databases and those types of things. It is also about missing clues that we had that were highlighted before Christmas Day.

What am I talking about?

We have known for quite some time that Awlaki was a concern. We saw kind of a mirror image of what happened on Christmas Day a couple of months earlier at Fort Hood, where 14 Americans were killed and where 14 Americans died in a tragic terrorist attack, linked to Awlaki, linked to al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

I had an amendment that went along those lines, but it was not accepted by the majority, and I think it may well have fallen within the scope of the amendment of yours, Mr. Schauer, which you are offering, which says:

If we had had these insights into al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, if we had had these insights into Awlaki's involvement with Major Hasan, if we had had these insights into the communications, the emails, between Hasan and Awlaki, what did we do between November 5 and Christmas Day to target Awlaki, to target al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula and to use this information that these individuals and this group might be targeting the U.S. and whether we missed opportunities in those 2 months to identify the threat and respond to it?

Are those the kind of questions that you might see which could also be addressed in this or are these outside of the scope of what you are looking for?

I yield to my colleague from Michigan.

Reclaiming my time, I thank my colleague for that clarification because I think that is probably the bigger untold story here of how much and how many insights we might have had into al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula and how we failed to act on that intelligence and how we failed, as we've now been saying for a long period of time, to connect those dots, to be able to put in preventative measures and to actually have stopped Awlaki and al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula from carrying out this attack on Detroit and on the State of Michigan.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I will not oppose the amendment. As a matter of fact, I will support the amendment in its larger context, recognizing that this report by the DNI has to include the time prior to Fort Hood, the Fort Hood attack, and then the time from Fort Hood until Christmas Day. That is the area that we have been trying to get information on from the intelligence community over the last 3 or 4 months, and it has been the area that they have been most reluctant to provide us information on.

As a matter of fact, when I was in Yemen on New Year's Day, less than 2 months ago, I was specifically prohibited from getting information on exactly those kinds of questions as to what did the intelligence community know about Awlaki, about al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. The individuals both in the intel community and with the Ambassador were specifically instructed not to share that information, which tells me that there is some information there, and for some reason, they have not wanted to share that information with us.

So, with the understanding that that type of information will be shared with Congress in this report, also then recognizing that this may end up being a classified report which you may not have access to unless the committee agrees to provide you access to it, I support the amendment. I look forward to the DNI's completing this report and to his submitting it to the committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, tonight I come to talk about a variety of issues.

You know, clearly the country faces tough times, clearly our States face very, very difficult times. And over the last few months we have had the opportunity to go and to listen to our constituents at the State level talk about some of the issues that are important to them.

My home State of Michigan is struggling today with 15 percent unemployment--the highest unemployment rate in the country. And one of the things that we consistently hear about is, you know, Washington made us do this. I hear people talking about, you know, our State needs to raise taxes. Why? So we can get the Federal highway dollars. And what we forget is that those are our dollars to begin with. Those aren't Federal highway dollars. Those aren't Michigan highway dollars.

As a matter of fact, for 53 years, a State like Michigan has received 83 cents on the dollar--83 cents for every dollar that we sent to Washington for our gas tax. And now Washington tells us in tough times, to get that money back, you have to put up a State match. That is wrong.

In 2001, President Bush passed--with this Congress' help--legislation calling for an improvement in K-12 education. It was called No Child Left Behind, and it put the Federal imprint on our K-12 education system across the country and across the State of Michigan. That's wrong.

Why? Why do we need the Federal Government telling us how to run our schools at the State and at the local level? It's a community issue. It's a family issue. It's not a Federal issue. It's also not very efficient.

Just like in the highway bill, the Federal Government forces a State like Michigan to build things we don't need. We build overpasses, but they're for bicycles. We build fences not to protect motorists but to protect turtles.

You wonder and say, why are we doing this? This is our money. This is not the priority for our State to get our State moving.

So you have got issues with highways, you have got issues with education.

And it's not only that the money is being spent unwisely, but it's also being spent inefficiently.

Let me talk about No Child Left Behind, K-12 education.

I see my friend is going to join me. I welcome him. And, you know, I am talking a little bit about the bureaucracy and the need to return to federalism, and let me yield.

Let me reclaim my time for just a second. I want to make it clear to the people in the Chamber, and I want to make it clear to the people around the country and the people in Michigan, No Child Left Behind was a bill that I voted against because I believed in parental control, I believed in local control, and I believed in State control. I just want to make that clear because I might not have done that as I was describing what this Congress was doing.

I had voted to get rid of the Federal highway program or to basically deconstruct it. I want to deconstruct the Education Department and return the rights back to the States so the States can focus on what they need to do, but more importantly that the Federal Government can focus on what it needs to do, trade policy, national security and those types of things. I will yield back.

Reclaiming my time, I think you and I have had a discussion about this. But I really do believe, and I want to build off the thought that you had, is that our constituents want us to deconstruct Washington. They don't want us to tear it down. They want us to constructively go through the process and shed the things that are not Washington issues, move them back to States, move them back to communities, and move it back to individuals. And if we don't do that, they want to be able to hold us accountable.

You and I sat through much of 2009 where we saw an abomination probably much bigger than No Child Left Behind, the health care bill, which was going to take from you and from me, from our doctors, our hospitals, and our States the right to set our own health care agenda. And we were going to probably construct, not deconstruct, but construct a new building here in Washington, D.C., probably several new buildings, filled with bureaucrats, who were then going to make the decisions that you and I historically made about our health care. I will yield.

I have seen this up close and personal in Michigan. And you may have remembered over the last 18 months that as President Obama was developing his economic strategy, he had the Governor of Michigan sitting next to him quite frequently. And I thought that's a good strategy because he could then ask and say, Governor, did you try this in Michigan? And if the answer was ``yes,'' he would say, well, we won't do that at the Federal level.

But it seems to be that whether it's cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, whether it is health care, what we have seen is in

Washington, we have adopted many of the same policies that our Governor in Michigan adopted, and the end result is we have seen unemployment grow, we have seen huge deficits that at the end of the year are fixed but they are cut, they are massive cuts in the size of government, we are losing population, so we are seeing our citizens leave.

And now we are starting to see that at the Federal level. We are going to have a whole set of massive new tax increases that the President and the Democrats in Congress are going to let the tax cuts expire, meaning it's an effective increase in taxes. Was it 41 new taxes in the budget? I don't remember what the number was. Do you know?

Trillions of dollars. And you and I at the beginning of 2009 we saw unemployment at just under 8 percent.

Right. And we are now at?

I want to talk with you briefly about an experiment. You and I have had the opportunity to briefly discuss this idea. What is happening right now in grass-roots America is very, very healthy. People are engaged. And as they have gone through the last year, they saw the passage of a stimulus bill, $787 billion, then they saw a cap- and-tax bill passed in the middle of the night where they added 400 pages in the middle of the night at the last minute.

Then they give us a 2,000-page health care bill, and it gets over to the Senate and they give the Senator from Louisiana $300 million.

The Louisiana purchase. Then we have the deal for Nebraska which says even though you're, as a State, you're pretty healthy--you only have an unemployment rate of under 5 percent--but you don't have to pick up this unfunded mandate that the other 49 States are going to get. As a matter of fact, those other 49 States, including the State of Michigan, are going to pay for your unfunded mandate because I need your vote. So you get your deal.

Well, we know what they think because we saw it a couple of weeks ago in Massachusetts where they said this is absolutely wrong and we're going to stop it. And effectively what the people of Massachusetts did, in that momentous Tuesday night, they had the opportunity to change history, because after watching this House, this Senate and this administration for 12 months, they said, No more. They effectively recalled their Democrat Senator and replaced it with someone who they believed would listen more closely to their demands and their desires and to start deconstructing Washington.

That's the proposal that I have in that I said I've been through this before. I was through this in 1993 and 1994. I introduced legislation back then. I called it a voters' bill of rights. And as I was sitting with constituents in my district, and I heard them say, Congressman-- most of them call me Pete--and they said, Pete, we call our Senators. We talk to them about the stimulus bill. We talk to them about health care. We talk to them about cap-and-trade. We talk about them bringing Gitmo to Standish, Michigan, and we always get the same thing. They answer, they are rude, and then they hang up. And then they said, Pete, there's nothing we can do to hold these folks accountable. The earliest we can do anything is 2012 and these bad things may happen.

And as I've been listening to them, I asked my staff to go back and get these voters' bill of rights, because I introduced them, we thought through them. It's populism. My colleagues here on the floor don't like it. But one of the lead things that we proposed in 1994, 1995, and 1996 was a bill that said one of the keystones of the voters' bill of rights says that when you call your Senator or your Representative, and they arrogantly answer the phone, are rude, then hang up, and then vote wrong, which traditionally means they are voting for bigger government and taking rights away from the individuals, rights away from the States, you now have an option.

The option is that when you leave the meeting where you're talking about this and someone gives you a piece of paper that has a few lines on it and you say, get some voters to sign those lines, and then at the top it says, this is a recall of Senator so-and-so, or a recall of Representative so-and-so, it allows the voters to exercise accountability throughout the process. I wrote an op-ed that hopefully we are going to get published soon. What it does is it allows the people to take back ownership of their government.

Michigan is a recall State. I had a mini-town hall meeting yesterday, and I ran into a township official. She is being recalled. It's very, very tough for people when they're recalled. But it clearly humbles people when they recognize that the voters can come back and if they don't like what we are doing, the voters can stand up and say, no, it's time for you to come home because you no longer understand who you work for, and it's time for us to have an opportunity to send someone to Washington that will listen to us.

It's about making it more efficient. You and I know that with No Child Left Behind, when the taxpayer from Michigan, the taxpayer from Lansing, the taxpayer from Detroit, the taxpayer from Holland and the taxpayer from Sault Sainte Marie sends a dollar to Washington for education, it goes through the bureaucracies. It goes through the State bureaucracies. And at every juncture, a PacMan comes out and takes a piece and takes another piece; and by the time it gets to the classroom, there may only be 60 to 65 cents left.

That's a scary thing, and that is exactly the type of process that people don't like. And they don't like the fact that when the President comes out and says during a campaign, when we get to the health care negotiations, it is going to be on C-SPAN so that we can see whether the gentleman is arguing for his voters, fighting for his constituents, or whether that person over there is fighting for the insurance companies or fighting for the unions or whatever. And it is kind of like, we get to there and you are watching C-SPAN at 11:30 at night, and someone walks up to the microphone and says, Hey, we have got a deal.

It is like, you are announcing this at 11:30 at night and there is only a few of us that have nothing better to do and we are watching C-SPAN so we know, but nobody else will, and they'll find out in the morning?

But that is the transparency. That is where I think this concept of recall gets real power. Recall says I think two things. It says to Washington, stop the midnight deals.

The other thing I think that provides a tremendous amount of power and authority is it tells Washington, stop the power grab. Stop taking the stuff away from the States and away from us as individuals.

We need to put something back in the process so that the ``rights of States'' has real meaning, has real teeth. Right now, we go through the appropriations process, the States are all at the pig's trough, the feeding trough, trying to get as much money as they can, get more than the next guy. It is kind of like, no, don't send the money here, ever. And if we have the opportunity for citizens to potentially recall their Representatives and their Senators, it creates potentially a whole new dynamic of putting States' rights back at the forefront.

You are exactly right, and this is where Governors need to stand up and say no. I think with the health care bill, I think wasn't there a movement in like 29 States or something where State legislators were saying, No, we don't want it.

And why? In the State of Michigan, we calculated, or Heritage or someone calculated that the unfunded mandate for Medicaid alone was $700 million.

It is a huge amount for a State budget. But it happens every program. You know, we promise health care for all. No child left behind. No worker left behind. Everybody has a job. We put a little bit of money into the pot and then we pass it down to the States, and then the States get it and they say, Whoa, we thought you were going to pay for all of this.

That has been the biggest complaint about No Child Left Behind. Right? All of these mandates, and you didn't give us the money to implement it. Give us more money. It's kind of like, No, don't give us more money. Let us keep our money. Get rid of the mandates, and we will run our own schools.

It is a novel idea.

Over 600. We counted them. Across the government, there were over, I think, 650 different education programs, and you say, Why?

No. We don't trust them.

So what we do is we tell Ypsilanti, we tell Midland, we tell Traverse City, At least a portion of the money that you get from Washington, you will all run it the same way. And it is kind of like, Wow----

These are three very, very different communities with very different needs and challenges right now. Why are we trying to put them all into one straitjacket? Don't we really trust the local officials? And, more importantly, are you telling us you don't trust local parents to take ownership over their schools?

Dick Armey, our former colleague, used to say, The people that I want running my schools are the people who know the names of my kids. That is the local folks.

It paints a picture. Because if you come to Washington and you ask, Do you know the kids in the fifth grade at South Middle School or West Middle School? And it is kind of like, What town?

Well, in Holland.

No, I don't. And they have gone through consolidation and all of that.

The names of the schools aren't that important. What is important is, Do you know the names of the kids at Muskegon Heights? in Bay City? in Mackinaw? And the answer will be, No. As a matter of fact, I can't even find some of those places on the map if I have to look, is what you will get from the Education Department.

I have always wanted to go to the Education Department and start with the Secretary, say, Mr. Secretary, what State are you from? Well, I know he is from Illinois. He is from Chicago. He is not far from Michigan. He actually probably understands the Midwest and he understands large, urban school districts.

Okay. Do you have anybody in your office, the secretariat or whatever that is from Michigan?

No, I don't think so.

Then you go to the undersecretaries. And, Do you have anybody that is from Michigan?

How far do I have to go down before I find somebody in the position of authority that is maybe from my State that may have a little bit of understanding of my State? Now, we have over 9 million people living in Michigan, so that person might understand a piece of Michigan but not the whole State.

And then you kind of go through and say, I wonder how long it would take me to find somebody from the Second Congressional District. Then, I wonder how long it would take me to find somebody from my hometown who understands that right now the community is facing a $2 million shortfall, that we have got issues with our public schools. The public schools are asking for a $70 million bond issue, and that they would understand the challenges. I don't think I will find anybody from Holland.

To Washington, our kids are a number at best. In Holland, it is ``Aaron.'' They know the names of the kids.

I can tell you, we worked with the NEA, the National Education Association. We worked with them, Barney Frank and I. Barney Frank, one of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle, we fought this issue, and he came at it from a very different standpoint than where I did.

We came at it from the right and the left. But we came together because we both saw the inherent problems with this bill, and we had an amendment that we were hoping that if the NEA, if the National Education Association had joined with us and supported it, I think we would have passed our amendment and we would have a very different No Child Left Behind framework than what we have today. But they were kind of neutral. They didn't take a position, which also tells something to our constituents: If you are not involved in the process, someone else will decide the future for you.

What the NEA found out is that they didn't participate actively in fighting this bill. And now, I just talked to a group of students, I think it was Monday morning, or they were at one of the lunches. There were 18 students there. They were there with their teacher. They were advanced AP students, out of school. They were there at lunch in Wayland, Michigan.

I said, I voted against No Child Left Behind. And that always surprises a lot of the teachers in my district, because they thought that I was just lockstep with the President. Of course Hoekstra voted with the President. No, I voted against the bill. And the loudest applause comes from the NEA member, the teacher, because he has seen what it has done to his local schools. And we have just gone through, and we are in the process of duplicating exactly what happened with No Child Left Behind with this new program called Race to the Top.

What does Race to the Top do? In Michigan--and I just kind of laid back a little. If people asked me, I would say, If I were you, I wouldn't go for the money. But the State went for the money because you had to do some reforms. The reforms were good. But if the reforms were good, we should have done them anyway. We should not have waited for Washington to bribe us to do this, because now that we are involved in this Race to the Top process, we are also finding out, well, this is No Child Left Behind all over again. Because what Race to the Top does is the same thing as No Child Left Behind. It promised a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And now local school districts are starting to take a look at this and they are saying, This isn't so good. No one told us that we are going to get X amount of dollars, but that to implement the mandates that come with Race to the Top it is going to cost us more than X. So, actually, we are going to get this Federal money and we are going to get the mandates that come along with it, and now to implement these mandates it is going to cost us extra money to do it when we are already being squeezed.

Sounds like No Child Left Behind. Sounds like health care.

It is kind of like Charlie Brown. How many times are you going to pull the football away?

And what you will see again is the States becoming incubators of ideas. Missouri or Michigan, we will compete, and you will get some great ideas, we will get some great ideas. You will have some bad ideas and we will have some bad ideas. We will try them. Some things will work, some things will not. And then we will be looking around at the other States and saying, Hey, what are you doing that works? And when we find something that says, Your community is not exactly like ours, but if we kind of take what you have done, there is a lot of good stuff there, and if we put that into place in Grand Rapids, with a few tweaks, we think that is going to help us; we think that is going to help make our schools in Grand Rapids better.

The other thing that we will see is we will see that at a State level you can respond. When something doesn't work, you change it. You and I are both very familiar that there is a key component of No Child Left Behind that does not work. What is it? It says we are going to measure this year's first grade class and their performance, and we are going to compare it to last year's first grade class and their performance.

I say, well, you know, this could be 27 kids and this could be 27 kids, but they may be very, very different kids. And as a matter of fact, I was looking at that. And right after No Child Left Behind passed, I went to one of my schools, because they invited me to come in. And I knew where the school was, and I thought that this was in a relatively stable neighborhood. And they were explaining to me some of their issues. And they said Congressman, you know, we don't even have these 27 kids all year. We have 27 kids when we begin the year, we have 27 kids in this class when we end the year, but there may be 20 to 25 kids that have come in and out of this class. And you kind of look at them and say I thought this was a pretty stable neighborhood. They said you don't understand. We have got these types of things in the neighborhood, and this is a very transient population.

Right. But the standard has been in place for 8 years. Everybody knows it is wrong and it doesn't work. Technology has moved to the point where it says we can track Johnny individually. And if he moves from one school to another, we can track his specific performance. We ought to be tracking the specific performance of every kid in the classroom versus a group of kids that is in and out and all of that.

But after 8 years, what is the measurement? The same one that passed in 2001 that everybody agrees doesn't work. But it is what, it is implemented in all 50 States, and it is the criteria that determines whether you are a good school or you are--only Washington can use these terms--a failing school.

For the teachers that are in this school that have a 70 percent turnover of kids in their classroom during the year, you know, they may not measure up very well to the arbitrary standards that were put in place here in Washington, D.C., but they may be some of

our most committed and talented teachers because they are dealing with different kids in the classroom.

You know, every couple of weeks a new child comes in, a couple leave, and it is like, wow, this kid has different skills than the two that have left. I have got to figure out exactly, you know, is this kid excelling in math? You know, he has got great math skills, but I got to help him in reading. You know, you got to do a whole assessment. But the current model doesn't allow for those kinds of differences.

Absolutely. What you want to have happen is you and I both want accountability. But as technology changes, and as teaching changes, and as practices in the classroom changes, you know, I want Missouri developing an accountability model, I want Michigan developing an accountability model, I want Illinois developing an accountability model. And then every year I want to get together and say, you know, here is what is working for us, but we got some problems in this area. We just don't appear to be getting it right. What are you doing?

And then Missouri may come back and say, well, you know, we had those same kinds of issues 3 years ago, and here is what we did, and this appears to make our accountability system better. But you know, here is where we are running into a problem right now. So you have that learning going on, and then you get together and you say, you know, well, what is the best way to put in performance pay for teachers? How do you recognize the differences in a classroom where you begin the year with 27 kids in the classroom and at the end of the year they have the same 27 kids? You know, how do you measure teachers' performance in a classroom like that versus the teacher who is in a classroom where they have got the 70 percent turnover? You can't treat them the same. You can't have the same kind of measurement. You know, how do you deal with that? That is the kind of ingenuity and creativity that we need to be seeing going on across the country.

Someone sent me an email message tonight talking about the video learning, the high-tech learning and those types of things. And there are people that are experimenting with that at higher level, at the community colleges, our high schools and all that. You know, it is like somebody ought to really try that and see what works. Do a little experimentation.

And I am not saying that bonuses for teachers are the way to go. But we ought to be working with teachers, with parents, and with others to have these laboratories around the country. And that doesn't mean that every class is a laboratory and you are trying the whole thing brand new. It means what you are saying is every year, every month, every week we are going to be focused on having continuous improvement. That if we can learn from other States, if we can learn from other schools, if we can learn from other countries we are always going to be on the cutting edge of improving our schools.

Right now where are we? Where do our superintendents look? Where do our State education bureaucrats look? Now they have to look to some old bill that was passed in 2001 that tells them how to run their schools. You won't find that in business anymore. You won't find businesses operating on a model that was in place in 2001. If they were still operating in the same practices, the same technology and all of these kinds of things that they were operating on in 2001, guess what, in 2010 they would be out of business. They could no longer compete.

So whether it is education, whether it is infrastructure, you know, the whole gamut. You want to do the same thing with job training. You know, as a starter, I have got bills to do this. It is kind of like highway money goes back to the States, the gas tax money. It doesn't need to come here. Send a penny out of every dollar, let the 435 of us here fight over one penny of gas tax, not a dollar of gas tax.

All right. Then same thing with K-12 education. Send us the money back. We will get 35 cents more of every dollar to put into the classroom. And then it is really a win-win. You know, send me 90 cents of every education dollar. You save 10 percent, I get 25 cents more going into the classroom. It is a win for all of us. Get rid of the bureaucracy and the paperwork. Put the emphasis on the kids. And then do it with job training. I have got bills on all three of those areas. And the bottom line is if you don't do it, recall.

Absolutely. You know, because you take a look at a State like Michigan, and I think it is probably the same in Missouri, and you take a look at the State and you say, well, my State this year is starting the year off with--or they are looking at their next budget year and they are saying we are going to have somewhere between a $1.2 and a $1.4 billion deficit for the next budget year, which they got to get done later this calendar year. And you look at it and say, well, you got a $47 billion budget. You know, finding $1.2, finding $1.4 billion in savings, you know, 2, 3 percent? That shouldn't be that hard.

And then you start looking at the reality and say, well, out of that $47 billion, 19 of it is direct money from Washington, D.C. All right. Well, that is off the table. Then you take a look at it and say, well, but you know, with that highway money we get that is part of that $19 billion, it requires that we have the State match. And this money that we got for K-12, you know, that comes from No Child Left Behind, it controls some of the spending of the rest of the budget.

And you start looking at it and saying, well, now all of a sudden I have got a $1.2 or $1.4 billion deficit and I have got maybe $10, $11 billion that I can work with. And it is like, no, there are

efficiencies that we can find in all of those areas if that money never left the State and we were given the authority.

Because you know, the other thing that we talk about, the money comes from Washington, but what then happens? That is not the end of the line. If the money comes from Washington, then--actually, Washington collects the money.

You and I paid it and our constituents paid it. All right. And it is gone. It comes to this place here. We then decide what we are going to do with it.

Now, if our people in our communities or our States want to get the money back, a lot of times what do they have to do? What do they have? All of my school districts have what they call grant writers, somebody they pay $30 to $35,000 to, and there is a very good performance measure.

You know, we are paying you $35,000 a year. If you get $36,000 in grants coming back to the school district, you have been a good investment. So they have to apply for the money. And they may not get it. But you know, a lot of times it is a competition to get the money. So a lot of the application money is wasted. The money then comes back to the State, goes to our local schools, we lose 35 percent. Once it is in the classroom, once it is being built to build a turtle fence or build a bike overpass that we don't need, then we have to send a report back to Washington telling them what we did with the money. I have always wanted to find the person who reads it. Okay. Does anybody really read the report?

And then every once in a while, and perhaps too often, you will find the next thing. You will find the auditor going back to a local school district or a local government agency and say, ``Prove it. Prove that you spent the money the way that you applied for it and the way that you developed and moved it forward.''

Actually, we don't have the same kind of problems. Our problems are much more severe than anybody else's. We lead the country in unemployment. And we have done that for a number of years.

I think the last unemployment number in Michigan was 14.8 percent. But for the last 12 to 18 months we've been in the 14, 15 percent unemployment. Well above any other State. That really doesn't include the people that have stopped working. It doesn't include the people that are underemployed. It also doesn't include the number of people-- when I come here to Washington every week, I'm always amazed by the number of people who are on the plane, or as I'm talking to the people in my district, the number of people who I run into and say, Pete, I'm in Michigan. I'm committed to Michigan. But I'm gone 2 weeks at a time from my wife and my kids because the only place I can find a job is somewhere else. I'm working somewhere other than Michigan. Some of them stay because they're so committed. Others stay because, obviously, in a State that has declining population, by definition you have a housing surplus, meaning that it's hard for them to sell their homes.

The vision that we have for Michigan is to bring Michigan back. Michigan is a great State. Missouri is a great State. This is a great country. I think you and I are committed to believing that with the right kind of leadership either at the Federal level or at the State level, there's no reason we ought to be enduring 10 percent at a national level or 15 percent at a State level. Go back to the principles that we employed back in 1994. It's accountability back to the people. That's what the Contract with America was all about. I tried to get recall as part of the Contract with America. I wish we had. I wish voters today had the opportunity to recall their representatives and their senators.

But what we did in 1995 and 1996, we didn't increase spending, we didn't do a stimulus bill like that, we didn't do cap-and-trade, we didn't do health care. We didn't do all these massive government spending programs. We basically froze spending. We cut taxes. We reformed government. We reformed welfare. And we did it with a Republican Congress and a Democrat President. We were able to focus on what the American people wanted, what they needed, and we had an era of prosperity that helped a lot of people. But the formula is simple: Give more money back to the American people, reform government, and control spending.

I don't think people are tone deaf. I think people in the State sense that----

Just like the gentleman demonstrated in Massachusetts, the people are not tone deaf. They think we are. And they know Washington is.

Gentleman, that's the problem down here. Washington, D.C., as an institution has become tone deaf. And you've got solutions. You know what the solutions are. You can fix the problem in Michigan, you can fix the problem in Missouri. It's as simple as what JFK did, what Ronald Reagan did, what Bush did, and that is get off the spending, get off the taxing, and give the American public a chance.

Here's how we start our op-ed. I like our title. Of course, I helped write it. We call it ``Storming the Castle.'' On January 19, the people of Massachusetts stormed the castle of the political elite and toppled it to the ground. After months of abuse and neglect and being shut out of the lofty parapets of the U.S. Senate, they took a stand and sent a strong, undeniable message to the Democrat-controlled castle of American politics. Enough is enough.

I think that sums it all up. That's where the American people are today. That's where grassroots America is today. That's where they were in 1993 and 1994. In 1993 and 1994, they got involved. When I meet with these folks, I do ask them the question: How different would this country be today if the involvement that we saw in 1993 and 1994, the insightful, knowledgeable involvement--I mean these people understand the issues. They know where they want to go. If that involvement we saw in 1993 and 1994, and the involvement that we're seeing in 2009 and 2010, how different would this country have been if they had stayed involved through that whole timeframe?

And that's partly our responsibility by not motivating them enough and inviting them into the process. But if they would been involved in the process, we wouldn't be talking about whether we should be passing legislation or passing a constitutional amendment that would give them the authority to recall their Federal elected officials. We'd already have it. It would now be working its way through the States. I think it's so healthy to have these people involved in the process

and involved in a knowledgeable way, because they do recognize that if they don't show up, someone else will run this country. They recognize that government is run by those who show up on election day.

I thank my colleague, Congressman Akin. This is a time where we've got the great State of Michigan, the great State of Missouri, the Show-Me State. It's now time for this Congress to show the people of Missouri, to show the people of America, and to show the people of Michigan where we're headed. And if we don't do it, guess what? They will show us on election day. And they will storm the castle by saying, Enough is enough.

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 8 o'clock and 39 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, February 4, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I rise here today to recognize the retirement of Dawn Phillips-Hertz.

Dawn has served as General Counsel to the Michigan Press Association for nearly 30 years, offering free legal advice to anybody from the more than 300 newspapers in Michigan, including those located within Michigan's Second Congressional District.

Journalists throughout the state admired her for gracefully offering a hotline to answer tough questions with thoughtful and accurate answers to any number of open government questions.

She was committed to the cause of freedom of the press, and was a staunch advocate and aggressive defender of it.

Her knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act and all laws pertaining to open government meetings helped countless reporters, editors and publishers to fulfill their duty of providing citizens with information necessary for them to know the activities of their elected representatives and other government officials.

She helped countless editors and reporters from committing troublesome mistakes whenever it was necessary, fully understanding at times intense deadline pressure.

She also helped elected officials understand potential pitfalls in introducing or voting upon legislation that would impact the public's right to know.

Madam Speaker, I congratulate Ms. Phillips-Hertz on her retirement following a successful career in supporting journalism endeavors in Michigan.

I thank my colleague for yielding.

Madam Speaker, today, I met Theresa. Theresa had a sign that read: I love my country. On the other side, it read: My future. Her brother, Xavier, had a sign that read: Give me liberty, not debt.

If we pass Pelosi health care tonight, tomorrow morning, we will still all love our country; but we will have jeopardized Theresa's future. A bailout, a stimulus, cap-and-trade, and Pelosi health care have jeopardized her future. For Xavier, we will have given him debt: another $1.2 trillion on top of the $1.4 trillion we gave him last year.

I will vote ``no'' because I believe that that's the vote that says: I love my country. I will vote ``no'' because I believe that that is the vote that preserves our future. I will vote ``no'' because I know that that will preserve Xavier's liberty and not give him more debt.

With that, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.

I thank my colleague for yielding.

As we are moving forward now--and it looks like we are going to move forward on this debate and vote on the Pelosi health care bill, and we're going to have a massive government takeover--I would just like to have a dialogue with my friend to talk about some of the issues that the American people need to consider.

Before I came over, I think I heard my colleague talking about some of this, and I know what a fan you are of this document right here, called the Constitution.

You know, as you go through the Constitution and as you go through the first 10 amendments--the Bill of Rights--people wonder, now, if you can build a Nation off of 37 pages, why does it take more than 2,000 pages to build a health care system? It's very simple.

If you go through and take a look at the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are all about enshrining freedoms: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated. It's all about ``the government shall not.'' ``The government shall not.'' Again, it enshrines your freedoms and my freedoms.

The health care bill is 2,000 pages. What's in that bill? What's the difference between that document and this document?

If the gentleman would yield, I was having this discussion with a friend of mine.

He said, You know, you've got to get away from that term ``empower.''

Actually, that's exactly it. It's empowering the very foundation of American society and American Government. We made that decision more than 200 years ago that, in America, we would empower the individual, and the Constitution enshrined that, and it has worked phenomenally well.

This bill--I don't have it with me. I don't take it with me because you don't carry it too many places. It's 20 pounds. Tomorrow, we are going to unroll this bill. We rolled it up as a scroll. It's more than a third of a mile long, meaning that I could leave my district in West Michigan and go to Chicago. I could stand on top of the Sears Tower, and then I could put the Washington Monument on top of it. I could drop it, and it would be from the top of the Washington Monument on top of the Sears Tower, and it would just about get to the ground. That's how long this bill is. It's more than a third of a mile if you lay the pages from end to end. The Constitution is just 37 simple pages.

Like you said, which is a great way of putting it, the Constitution chained government and put limits on government. This health care bill chains you and me and each and every one of our constituents because, in this bill--I've not counted them all, but I think someone has said that it has the word ``shall'' in it--what?--over 3,000 times.

So, where the Constitution has in it the words ``shall not,'' I would bet that those two words ``shall not'' do not appear together very often in this health care document, but over 3,400 times it says ``shall.'' It's the Health and Human Services ``shall,'' and most importantly, it is the commissioner ``shall.''

What we've done is we've taken the rights from this. We've taken them away. We've put them into this health care bill, and we've said the commissioner now shall make these decisions; shall make the decision as to what kind of insurance policies are available to you and to me and to our constituents and which ones are not; shall determine what benefits are going to be in a basic plan and which shall be available in a premium and in a premium plus plan.

The commissioner shall decide whether you and I can get health savings accounts. Actually, we've already made that decision. That's a decision that we in this House shall decide because health savings accounts will no longer be available.

So it is a great transfer of power from where the Founders wanted it to be to where now this House believes it should be, because this House now believes or may believe--I hope we stop this bill because, before I came here, you outlined some issues. They're not simple. They are complicated issues--tort reform, competition, availability, and those types of things.

But those are the types of things that we could do that would address the specific problems that we have in the health insurance market and that we have in the health care area today that would specifically fix those areas and make insurance more affordable and more available for the people who don't have it today, whereas this new massive bill says it's going to change for all of you. The commissioner shall decide.

For those of you that have a health care plan, you can keep it for 5 years maybe. But after 5 years you can be pretty well assured we all shall have a new plan that shall be determined by the commissioner, and we shall not be able to buy anything else.

You and I have a tremendous amount of background in dealing with legislation that has a lot of ``shall'' in it. We can go back, you and I weren't here, but we can go back to a very novel and noble idea, the highway transportation bill back in 1956 under the administration of President Eisenhower. The goal was very, very good-- build an interstate highway system, something that was very, very much needed, and we built it. That thing still exists.

Now what has it become? It has become this massive bill, this massive process where we take all of this money from the States, so a State like Michigan, and I don't know if you are a donor or a donee State.

All right. Let's explain to our colleagues and our visitors in the gallery exactly what a donor State means. It means that Michigan, we send, on every gallon of gas, there is something like a 19-cent tax. For the 53 years that this program has been in existence, for every dollar that we have sent to Washington, Michigan has gotten back 83 cents. People wonder why roads in Michigan aren't in great shape.

I had a constituent a couple of weeks ago come to me and say, Congressman, why can't our roads be like West Virginia? We checked. For the average of 53 years, West Virginia has gotten $1.74 back for every dollar that they put in. That's a pretty good deal. No wonder their roads are better than our roads in Michigan, because they get $1.74 back. Michigan gets 83. I don't know what happens in Arizona.

They whack a little piece off, it goes into this bureaucracy. Then they allocate it according to people who may be more powerful than others, that's why your State and my State, why we are donor States. At one point in time it was to build an interstate highway system. Today that money is used for all kinds of things. That money now comes back to Michigan, and we've got to put up matching funds. Two years ago the money came back and it had to go to highway enhancement. You kind of look at it and say, What's highway enhancement? Well, our Governor figured out, working with the Department of Transportation, that the ``shall,'' you shall use this money for highway enhancement meant that rather than improving our interstate highway system by expanding capacity, perhaps putting on a new interchange, perhaps extending it into an area where we needed it extended, the ``shall'' meant you shall build a turtle fence.

And what's a turtle fence? Well, in Arizona, you probably don't have many turtles.

Well, in Michigan we have quite a few. It was $400,000 for you shall build a turtle fence, you shall not use it for an interchange, you shall not use it to fill potholes, you shall build a turtle fence. I didn't really know what a turtle fence was. I had an idea, but I asked.

A turtle fence is exactly what it's intended to do, what you would think when you hear the term. A turtle fence is intended to keep turtles from crossing the highway.

I don't know if a snake can go over a fence or not. But in Michigan, they decided to make sure that this fence would be turtle- proof, to make sure that no turtle would go over the fence, they built it about 3-feet high and then they put one of these round things over the top of it, 3- or 4-inch diameter, to make sure that for those turtles that were climbing turtles, they couldn't climb and climb over the fence.

The irony of this whole thing is I still drive that road and I drive it quite often; and I still see turtles that have been hit by cars. You say, now, how can that be? We've spent all of this money. We spent $400,000 to build this turtle fence and to study it. Why are there still turtles being hit on that highway?

Then you think about it and it's like, I know why, because this protects the turtles that are outside of the fence, because they can't get to the highway. But it's really a bad deal for the turtles that were fenced in. They have nowhere to go. They can't get out. Most of their living area now is the median, and a little bit of land on each side of the highway before you get to the fence. But for the turtles that are in the fenced-in area, they can't get to the river anymore, because that's fenced in, and they can't get out anywhere else. The only place they can go is stay in the median, or if they want to move at all, they get on the road. It really didn't work that well. The Federal Government, in its infinite wisdom, saying you shall spend it on a turtle fence. And the people say, Pete, why do you bring this up in the context of health care? Why are you and Trent talking about this?

We will see the same kinds of decisions in health care. The money will come here, and it will not be fairly distributed to the States, just like you are a donor State and we are a donor State, and there are other States that are getting an unfair share. The same thing is going to happen to health care.

One of these days a Congressman from Michigan is going to come back home and someone is going to say, I was traveling through West Virginia, we got sick, and why do they have such better medical care, and their facilities are so much better than Michigan?

And the answer will be, well, you know, over the last 30 years of this Pelosi health care, West Virginia got $1.74 back for every dollar that they sent in taxes and Michigan and Arizona, they got 83 cents. There will be an inequity in health care.

Then the other thing it will be is we'll start spending it on foolish things because people here in Washington will all have their pet projects, whether it's rattlesnakes or whether it's turtles, they will start siphoning the money off and growing it to something it was never intended to be.

Well, it is.

You and I have another program that I believe you and I fought together: No Child Left Behind. Congress in its infinite wisdom in 2001, again with the noblest of goals, just like building an interstate highway system, just like making sure we left no child behind, just like making sure we want everybody to have quality health care? What did we do in 2001? You and I voted against it, I believe.

We said taking power from parents, and you and I are working on this constitutional amendment together that enshrines in the Constitution that parents have the right to raise and educate their kids, protecting parental rights.

Again it says, Congress shall not, government shall not infringe on the right of parents to raise and educate their kids. We are enshrining rights. No Child Left Behind took rights away from parents and gave them to government.

Washington now forces States and local school districts to go through this paperwork and determine this process. Well, we'll determine whether your kid is making progress or not.

We'll tell you who is a good teacher or a bad teacher, what school is a good school or bad school.

You know what? I don't need to send money to Washington and have them come put a bunch of paperwork and try to tell me that.

You and I in 2001, we didn't call it the Pelosi nightmare, we called it, in not so many words--maybe we're a little kinder--but we both genuinely felt it was the President Bush nightmare for education. What have we found out? There were 41 of us, 41 of us that I believe stood up for the Constitution, stood up for parents, stood up for local public schools, stood up for the States and voted ``no'' on No Child Left Behind.

Eight years later, there are a lot of people who now recognize that program doesn't work, it's leaving more kids behind, it's wasting money. And the answer some people have now is, we've got to spend more. And it's kind of like, no, when you're sending a dollar to Washington and the thing that you highlighted, Washington skims off the top or bureaucracy skims off the top.

We now know that under K-12 education, when we send $1 from Michigan, whether it's from Holland or Lansing or Detroit or Pontiac and it comes to Washington, before it ever gets back into a classroom, we are actually doing what education dollars should do, which is educating children. We figure that we lose about 35 cents of that dollar in wasted bureaucracy.

I tried to talk to the superintendent--he and I have not been able to connect yet--the superintendent of Pontiac public schools. I give him credit. They took the Federal Government to court and said this is unconstitutional; it is unfair and inappropriate for the Federal Government to have these kinds of mandates on our schools, because what's the other thing that they do? When they say in No Child Left Behind, you shall, they don't give them the money to do it.

He said, or the school district said, you can't put all of these unfunded mandates on us, because what you are forcing us to do is to spend money on programs that we don't think are a priority for our kids. We know our kids. We know their names. We know what their challenges are. We have got these sets of priorities that we think we need to spend on our kids. That superintendent and those teachers and those parents and that community, you are right. They know those kids' names. They know what those kids need, and they want to spend the dollars to get the most advancement for those kids.

The bureaucrats here in Washington, what do they know? They know the book of rules and regulations and say, sorry, it says right here, Congress says you shall do these things. All I can do is make sure that is what they do. That is, again, exactly what is going to happen in health care.

Yes. What we have seen in the highway system is where the money comes to Washington, it gets distributed unfairly, and it comes back to States with mandates on it as to where they will spend it.

It is hard to believe. You send the money to Washington, and to get it back you have to have matching funds. So now they are also starting to impose taxes on the citizens of each of our States so we can actually get our own money back. So there is the infringement and the intrusion of the Federal Government on the highway system.

The same thing on education. Michigan has now gone through a process and they are considering some spending bills. And part of the spending bill is, well, you know, if we do this, we can get more Federal education money back, or we can get more Medicaid money back.

It is kind of like, why do we have to put up our own money to get our money back in the first place? And think if we left it in the States.

I think this is where we as Republicans lay out our vision for the future. I think one of the parts we are going to see on health care, on transportation, it is going to be devolution. Leave the money in the States. Send a penny out of every dollar to Washington to let them maintain and, if necessary, expand the interstate highway system. But leave 98 or 99 percent of the money in the States.

We ought to do the same thing with education. Devolve education responsibilities to the States. I don't need to send a dollar here and only get 65 cents back for the classroom.

Do the same thing for Medicaid and health care. Don't take health care down the same failed road of moving all of this power away from individuals, away from communities, away from States, to bureaucrats in Washington who will distribute it unfairly. The powerful will take more to their States. They will give less to the other States. The powerful will then establish the mandates so that we will run health care the way they believe it should be run, not the way that markets or individuals who want to direct their health care want it to be run. And they will be inefficient.

The bottom line is, it won't work. You and I know it. And we have seen the numbers. No Child Left Behind is not working. We are leaving more kids behind.

They also can opt out. They do two things in Canada. They cross the border and come across into Michigan to take advantage of our quality hospitals and our quality

health care; and for those that have a little bit more money, they fly down to Arizona, especially in the winter, and take advantage of your quality health care. They have got an escape valve.

If they have the resources.

We are not going to educate them, and we are going to put a huge debt on them. Yes. Thank you.

The amazing thing is they have made up their mind. The bill has been around for all of 8 days, and we have never had the opportunity now to take it home to any of our constituents or whatever.

But I was struck by reading the same comment. It was also laced I think with some profanity and saying, we don't care. We have made up our mind. The inference was, I think, we could have 100,000, we could have a million people out there. We don't care.

Unbelievable. Who do these people think they work for?

If the gentleman will yield one more time, I think maybe that is why we are doing this on Saturday, because they will finish the bill tonight, sometime tonight, and file it, I would guess, sometime through the night. And since most people have Saturdays off, maybe the Speaker is figuring that maybe everybody can have Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon to really study this bill, and if they have some input they want to give us, if they have some input they want to give us, they can maybe do it before 6 o'clock on Saturday night, when we are currently scheduled to vote.

That is actually brilliant on the Speaker's part, because I think most Americans are going to be just eagerly waiting to get this bill and go online and read it tomorrow.

Well, when they added 400 pages.

If the gentleman will yield, I think we also put this in the context of already what's happened in this year. Very early on this year, we spent $800 billion to stimulate the economy. It hasn't worked. Today we saw the numbers. They came out, 10.2 percent unemployment. If you include those who have stopped looking for work or those who are maybe working part-time because they can't find a full- time job, that goes up to 17.5 percent. So 17.5 percent of the American people are either unemployed, stopped looking for work or underemployed. You know, that's the effect of our stimulus bill that was passed. I don't think any of us voted for it.

Then we put on top of that the cap-and-trade vote that my colleague was talking about, which is going to just hammer manufacturing and put a huge tax on every American again and every business out of this new carbon tax. Then you put the health care bill on top of it, $1.2 trillion, and people are wondering, Why isn't the economy coming back? Because we put so much uncertainty into the business climate. We've loaded up the debt. People were talking about, you know, the debt under President Bush. In 1 year they've tripled the deficit from what, $450 billion. And that was the deficit under the Democratic Congress. I think the last time Republicans had control, the deficit was around $250 billion. It was going the other way. It was going down. Ever since the Democrats have been in charge of Congress, it's been going up, so that we are now at $1.4 trillion in a single year deficit.

All of these new taxes and new spending out there--the deficit is projected to be what, $1 trillion every year for as far as the eye can see, and people are wondering why there's not job creation? It's not hard to figure out. I yield back.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank my colleague for yielding and I think you made a great point. It's not about the quality and the quantity of health care; it's about control. That's why you see such a difference between the Republican proposal and the Democrat proposal. Because the Democrat proposal says we're going to totally wipe, out over a period of time, private sector health insurance and we're going to take the freedom that the American people have to direct their insurance, to direct their health care, and we're going to move it over and we're going to put that responsibility, that authority and that control in the Federal Government.

This is their bill, but that's not all of it. That's their bill. This is their bill. This is almost all of it. I don't have the last 40 pages that the Speaker added to it last night. But when you're going to take over health care and move responsibility from you and me and our constituents and move it to government, it takes you 2,000 pages to describe what you're going to do, create the 3,000 times where it says the commissioner shall, will or must, because those are new decisions that the Federal Government is going to make and we're not going to make.

If you want to fix health care and address the problems, this is all you really need. That's the Republican proposal.

The Republican proposal says we want to do tort reform, we want to deal with preexisting conditions, we want to do some stuff with competition and those types of things.

This fixes health care; takes steps toward improving and fixing the problems that we have identified. This creates massive government bureaucracies. This represents a loss of freedom. And this says we're going to fix the problems that are out there.

They've got to be approved by this new bureaucracy, the czar.

So what we've got is this 2,000 pages, but it's still an outline. This outline creates that which is going to make all of the decisions. And when you take a look at all the bureaucracy and paperwork that's going to come out of here, this is only the beginning. This is not the end. This is the beginning of government-run health care in America.

Does the gentleman mean it's not all going to health care?

It is kind of interesting. We did a telephone town hall tonight, and we had a thousand, 1,200 people on the phone. People were asking, When is this bill going to come up?

And we say right now the plan is to have it come up on Saturday.

They say, Why?

The Senate has now said they are not going to vote on this bill, or they are not going to vote on health care reform until when? I think the majority leader has said in the Senate they are not going to do this until after the first of the year.

So we have 1,990 pages, plus 40, we are supposed to not only read this but understand it in 7 days, and we will not have any opportunity to go back to our constituents and say, What do you think of this? Or explain it to them and explain the difference between the two bills, the difference in approaches, government takeover of health care, freedom for you and more opportunity for you to select your health care.

These folks, they are outraged, saying why don't you take an extra week? Why don't you taken an extra 2 weeks? We are supposed to be home next week for Veterans Day, why not schedule a whole series of town hall meetings? We saw some of the impact of this yesterday where people from around the country sent a clear message to the White House and to the leadership of this Congress saying we don't like the arrogance with which Washington is treating our concerns and our issues. This stuff, we are not going to have an opportunity to provide an insight or a perspective on these bills to our Representatives in Congress. They are just going to ram this through.

The end result is they sent a clear message and they sent it across the country. They sent it in Virginia and New Jersey and in Michigan, all across the country, saying if this is the change that came as a result of the elections last year, we sure don't like it and there is an arrogance that is saying we are going to force this down Congress. We are going to force this on the American people without providing them with the opportunity to provide feedback.

This is why my colleague and all of us are excited about this process, saying if we can't take this bill to the American people, the American people are going to come to Washington tomorrow, and I think my colleague from Iowa wants to talk about this house call that hopefully the American people will participate in tomorrow.

As we were meeting in a Member's office last night we got a call, and it was two people from Oregon saying, We are coming. We will be there on Thursday. So late Tuesday night, they were wondering what can we do to have an impact.

I think another one of our colleagues reported, because we really don't know how many people are going to show up tomorrow. Yesterday he said there are 10 buses coming from New Jersey. Tonight he said 24 buses are coming from his congressional district in New Jersey tomorrow to be here with us. We don't know exactly what is going to happen, but it is a clear indication that in 4 or 5 days, we have touched people around the country who want to come to this press conference or some call it a rally, or whatever. But it is a press conference.

We have touched people from around the country. They came here in August. They came for the tea party and those types of things. This is another opportunity to express our opinion, and hopefully by coming to the Capitol and meeting with our Representatives, they will finally get the message that we want freedom, we don't want government health care.

If the gentleman would yield, I don't think that is the Constitution. That can't be the Constitution. I mean, if that is the framework for how we run this country, if it takes 1,990 pages to do health care, it ought to take at least 20,000 pages to be the Constitution. How many pages are in the Constitution?

When you are talking about freedom, it doesn't take very many pages, does it?

How many pages?

I think the point is made when you are talking about freedom, it doesn't take a lot of pages. When you are talking about government control, it takes a lot of pages and a lot of bureaucracy.

I thank the gentleman. You made a great point.

You made a great point.

If the gentleman would yield, what is the other document in front of the gentleman here?

I thank my colleague, and I thank him for sharing his copy of the Constitution. We made the point that the Constitution establishing this Nation and the amendments to the Constitution are 44 pages. This is 1,990 pages, but I think more powerful is what this document says.

When you are protecting freedom, it doesn't take a lot of words. When you're limiting government, it doesn't take a lot of words. Think about the difference. This document, the Pelosi health care document, I think, over 3,000 times says ``the commissioner shall,'' ``the commissioner will,'' ``the commissioner may.'' That's all losing authority.

If you take a look at the Constitution and if you read what the Constitution says, the Constitution puts limits on what government will do, and it protects individual rights. Here it says that Congress shall make no law a limitation on us--not on the people.

This expands government.

Shall not be infringed. No soldier shall without the consent. The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches. No person shall nor shall private property be taken. The accused shall enjoy. This. This document. It protects the American people from invasive and from overintrusive government. That's what the Founding Fathers thought.

They would be horrified by this bill to see that the commissioner shall develop the health care plans that you and I will have the opportunity to choose from. The commissioner shall establish penalties for those people who don't buy insurance. The commissioner shall develop this. The ombudsman shall do this. There are no limitations on government in here. This is all about the expansion of government, and our Founding Fathers were all about limiting government. This is night and day. This is 44 pages guaranteeing our freedoms. This is 1,990 pages taking freedoms away.

Many have called and said, Congressman, is this actually constitutional?

Maybe they'll find a court that says this is constitutional; but in the spirit of the Founding Fathers, they would have been horrified by what this document does and how it limits individual American freedoms.

We'll have to take a look and see if we can't--although, I think the people who will be at our House call tomorrow understand this document, and they understand the night and day difference between this document and what Speaker Pelosi is trying to do here with this document in that this shreds the Constitution. It shreds personal freedom. It gives power to Washington and bureaucracies and, in one vote, 16-18 percent of the economy. That amount of freedom moves from our constituents, and it moves to Washington, D.C. It goes flying right through this House, and it goes right into unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.

I yield back.

We have three.

This is the 44 pages that our Founding Fathers put together to establish this country and articulate and lay out the freedoms for the American people. This is a document of freedom.

Right. And this is the document that Republicans have proposed to fix health care, the parts of health care that have been identified as being broken, 232 pages.

Right. And then this is Speaker Pelosi's bill, most of her bill, 1,990 pages introduced last week. It doesn't have the 40 pages of the manager's amendment which were added to the bill late last night. This is the document that contains in it the phrase ``the commissioner shall'' or ``the government shall'' something like 3,000 times.

The Constitution is all about freedom. This is all about the loss of freedom.

I thank my colleague for doing this session this evening.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, November 5, 2009, at 10 a.m.