Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the President promised that if you like your plan you can keep it; but he hasn't followed that promise, and he followed up with an administering of the plan that is even worse.

Only 172 people have been able to sign up in the one month's 24-hour access to the Web site that is supposed to allow us to sign up. More people are served popcorn and soft drinks during the halftime of an Artesia football game than have been able to get service through this Web site. The losses are extensive:

In Truth or Consequences, Ron says that he lost his coverage and that the replacement is 350 percent to 550 percent higher;

Jacob in Roswell: his whole road crew lost its plan. It is seeing its premiums triple;

Kathy from Silver City, who is on fixed income-retirement: their premiums are quadrupling;

Jen, on Facebook, who is going from $300 a month to $1,500 a month, wonders where she can get the money to pay that.

Maybe you have an answer, Mr. President.

Mr. Chair, I am here to support H.R. 3080 and to compliment the ranking member and the chairman for the work they have done on this valuable bill. I support it because it creates jobs and deauthorizes $12 billion in backlogged projects that are outdated and do not have construction funds obligated.

I do want to point out that there are some issues with the text of the bill that my constituents have brought to my attention. For example, one dam in the Second District of New Mexico is awaiting approval from the D.C. Corps of Engineers office but likely will not get approval until January, with a projected contract awarded in March 2014. I have been assured by the chairman and committee staff that the deauthorization language will not target projects like this one, projects that are in a study, design, or reevaluation phase.

I thank the chairman of the Transportation Committee for his efforts to pass this vital infrastructure bill and for ensuring that the cuts are targeted toward wasteful and unnecessary projects, not those that impact public safety and our economic well-being.

Mr. Speaker, words are very powerful and words are important. I hear the words from our President and realize that he understands the importance of words, also. In the past, he has talked about debt, borrowing, and spending, but now he talks about obligations, because he understands that ``debt,'' to the American public, is a four-letter word. He doesn't want to be tagged with the fact that he is asking for more debt, so now it is ``obligations.'' That is a word that has cleaned up the concept that we are simply borrowing against our future.

But even the word ``borrowing'' needs to be looked at, because that assumes that we have the credit to borrow with; and the truth is no nation can lend us the kind of deficits that we are running right now, so we are actually printing the money.

But even the word ``printing'' has been changed in Washington. Now it is ``quantitative easing.'' It just sounds so much better. ``Printing'' sounds so crass to the American public who might be worried about what is happening to their savings accounts while Washington is printing money.

The word ``negotiation'' is a word that the President is familiar with. He did it 2 years ago when we reached this exact same point. Both sides came to the table and negotiated, and we wound up with a budget that was not as extremely overdrawn as we had faced before. That is the power of negotiation.

But now the word ``negotiation'' is taken out of the President's vocabulary, and he declares that he is being held hostage. Oh, really? This thing he calls being held hostage is actually the American way. It is what our Founding Fathers wanted. They came here and set up a system with a President and two Houses of Congress and two different parties; and those parties would sometimes have all the power, and sometimes they would share the power.

This President says he is being held hostage by the system. That means he doesn't believe in the balance of powers that the electorate cast in the last election. He declares over and over that the election is done--I was elected. The same people that elected him chose to put Republicans in power in the House of Representatives. I think they did that because they were afraid of this debt, deficit, borrowing, and spending.

We are told that we should have a clean CR. There is nothing clean about sacrificing the future of our children and grandchildren. That is what the President wants: a CR where he can spend what he wants to spend without negotiations on anything. We actually, in the House, submitted four different plans before this shutdown occurred. Those plans were just summarily rejected by the Senate, waved off, not really even considered; and yet we find our friends declaring this to be the Republican shutdown, not that both Houses failed to come to an agreement and the White House failed to sit down and negotiate. They just weren't going to be held hostage. So now, then, we need a clean CR, according to some, and we need to stop this Republican shutdown.

Words are very powerful. No longer do we talk about spending in Washington. We talk about investing. We are investing the American public's money. We are investing it in things like studies of the sexual habits of the fruit fly in Tijuana or wherever. ``Debt'' is, indeed, a four-letter word.

We are finally led to believe that default will occur immediately, that we somehow won't pay our obligations, that the American people need to understand that they are still paying their taxes every day and those taxes come to Washington. That is about $2.5 trillion a year. If we do not extend the debt ceiling any higher, then what Washington is going to have to do is it is going to have to prioritize. It is going to decide which of its expenses to pay.

The Constitution demands that we pay our obligations. It says we can't default on those. Washington would have to do the same thing every American family does: it will have to prioritize its expenses if we do not extend the debt ceiling so chaos will not reign. We simply have to live within our means. That is what every American family has to do.

Mr. Speaker, we are here this morning. Many in the Nation have questions about how we arrived at this point. It's not that complex. Different people across the country elect people to represent their viewpoints. Even across my own State, the viewpoints vary widely. I probably represent five or six different demographics, different economic engines, different needs. We are sent here to make decisions, to make hard decisions.

One of the toughest things that the Nation faces right now is that we are on an unsustainable path in our United States budget. Those are not my words. They are the words of a specialist, the economist that we hired to tell us such things just last week, notating that what we're doing is not sustainable.

The one side, I recognized their viewpoints, that they should provide more for more people. Other viewpoints are

that we should live within our means as a Nation, that we cannot continue to borrow from the future to pay for the present.

And so we arrived at this budget negotiation, this way to fund the government, the continuing resolution. What should happen is that we pass 12 different appropriation bills funding the government, one unit at a time, with great insight coming from both points of view, both parties, both sides of the aisle.

About three or four or five of those have been passed out of committee. Some have been sent to the Senate. Those have not been processed, but the House hasn't finished its work. So we were forced into a circumstance caused by both houses, both parties that said, we'll fund the government with a continuing resolution. That is, we will resolve to continue how we spent before. Those are sometimes inadequate, inaccurate reflections of current spending problems, current spending needs. But that's where we were.

Now on the one side, the President said, We want you to just give us the money to spend. Our side said, We will do that, but we want things in return. If we're spending more than the Nation can bring in, if we're spending more than the government has, then we would like to check that spending. We would give attention to the Affordable Care Act, to ObamaCare, that we would choose that in order to relieve the pressure.

The bill is unpaid for. We are printing the money to make government work now. About $1 trillion a year is being printed.

We call it quantitative easing because printing sounds so crass to the American public. So we're quantitative easing $1 trillion a year; and yet we're bringing on another program which is unaffordable and which we do not have the trillion or $2 trillion to spend.

So our side said, initially, we will give you the funding for the government, but on our side, we would like to defund the entire program. That position simply was never responded to by the Senate.

In good faith, we said, okay, we understand your unspoken communication, so we notched down a bit. We will still continue the government funding at the price that you, the President, are asking for. And this time, we'll simply delay the program for 1 year. It's not working. It has problems in many different States. We still aren't certain where the funding comes from.

And, again, the President and the Senate remained silent, not even bothering to show up for work for a couple of days before they sent our first opinion back, simply rejected. The second was sent back.

Last night we were faced with another quandary. We said, we'll notch down one more time. We said, we'll fund the government at the level you're requesting, but we should, on our side, suggest that we would delay the individual mandate.

The President has given many individual exemptions. He's given waivers to companies, to unions. He said to all employers, we're going to delay your input for a year.

Last night the Senate rejected that. That's the reason we're here today.

I call on the Speaker, the President, and Mr. Reid, to gather publicly in front of TV cameras and work the differences out.

Mr. Speaker, for the last few days, I have been in the southern district of New Mexico. I've had the opportunity to visit the devastation caused by the flooding in that area. We've seen houses that have been completely washed off their foundation and completely destroyed. We've had loss of life and livestock, even the ground and certain farms washed away, and the underlying roadbeds washed away 8- and 10-foot deep in some areas.

But in all of that, we see the inspirational actions of our first responders, volunteers, and people who came out and worked around the clock to provide help. In one instance, neighbors knew that a young couple was away from home so they took pickup trucks and unloaded their belongings and moved them to safety before the house washed off its foundation.

These are the things that make America great. These are the things that make New Mexico great. Any time we see calamity, we have the opportunity to see the other side of America, and it shines brightly.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bipartisan bill that brings commonsense management back to our forests.

Since Tom Tidwell took over the Forest Service, he said that he would like to reintroduce fire into the wild. Well, he's done that. This year, almost 10 million acres, more than twice the size of New Jersey. In the years since 2009 when he took over, larger than Ohio, 27 million acres have burned in our national forests.

Instead, this bill creates jobs--jobs in places like Cibola County in New Mexico where Matt Allen used to have a thriving mill but now survives on cutting one-by-four timber, one-by-four boards out of the logs he is able to take out of the forest.

Our streams are choked with mud. Habitat is devastated. A 75-foot deep lake near Ruidoso, New Mexico, that provides drinking water to the city of Alamogordo has 50 feet of fill in that 70-foot lake. Our fish are dead. Our streams are dead, choked with mud because the head of the U.S. Forest Service says, Let it burn instead of cut it. Common sense says cut it. This bill ensures that.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I would make a comment to my friend from Virginia that we in the West are being protected from ourselves, we are being protected from jobs. The devastation is in our jobs.

I have one county--I have 18 counties--one county is 7,000 square miles. That is three times the size of Delaware. It is six times the size of Rhode Island. It has a population of 3,725 people. The jobs have gone away. There used to be 11 rare-earth mineral mines in the southern district of New Mexico. Today there are none. All of those jobs have gone to China.

This is just a commonsense bill that says we are going to go through the process. We have economies that are being devastated, but it's not an environmental devastation. It is from the environmentalist who will sue to stop every single job in the West. We've lost our mining jobs; we've lost our timber jobs. These are areas that are not sitting out here making life unlivable and unhealthy; these are areas that are looking for jobs.

I would urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment with respect to my friend.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment today to H.R. 761, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act.

My amendment is very simple. It only serves to clarify the scope of the bill by stating that it does not impact the rules put in place by Secretarial Order No. 3324, issued by the Secretary of the Interior late last year. That order sets in place buffer zones between potash mines and oil and gas drilling, among other requirements. The Permian Basin's potash reserves are some

of the purist in the world, and our oil and gas drilling plays a key role in the current energy boom that the country is experiencing.

There is a very long history between potash and drilling operators in the region, and the secretarial order helped to clarify some of those issues. I've spent the better part of my career in Congress working to facilitate an agreement between these two industries to ensure both are able to thrive simultaneously. While some have criticisms of the secretarial order, it is an important step in the process of assuring the safe extraction of mineral resources.

My amendment simply clarifies that the text of the bill cannot be used by the Bureau of Land Management to show favoritism for either potash or oil and gas leases within the area laid out in the secretarial order. It does not affect the underlying bill, and it does not cost the American taxpayers a single dime. It brings economic stability to the Permian Basin and ensures that these two mineral resources can be safely and properly developed side by side.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to differ with the gentleman from New Jersey, my friend.

He said that potash is not very high-tech. When you use a scoop shovel to follow the cows around and use the byproduct from the cattle to fertilize with, potash is extremely high-tech.

So, with that one exception, I yield 30 seconds to the chairman of the subcommittee, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Lamborn).

Mr. Chairman, I have no other comments, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding and for his work on behalf of H.R. 1526.

New Mexico is a home to multiple national forests. We see firsthand the effect of our national Forest Service policy. Last year, in the middle of the year, a fire broke out. It was about 4 acres for 2 or 3 days. The Forest Service's policy was basically ``let it burn.''

They let it burn for 3 or 4 days, had enough people to swat it out with whisk brooms, when suddenly the winds got up, as they do in New Mexico always, and blew that fire into 10,000 acres. It almost immediately started burning down homes, 255 homes. It's at that point we began to speak publicly about the Forest Service policies that would create infernos in our western forests.

Formerly, we had a policy in the Forest Service of the 10 a.m. rule. It was, if you get a fire, you put it out by 10 a.m. tomorrow. If you're not successful by 10 a.m. tomorrow, then it's 10 a.m. the next day. You dedicate all the resources you can to putting out the fire.

Those policies have been amended by current Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell into saying, We're going to let them burn. We're watching right now wondering if the sequoias will survive this Forest Service policy.

Many of the forests in New Mexico and the West are not surviving. Hundreds of millions of acres are at risk every year. It's not a matter of if they will burn, but when.

As we talked publicly about Forest Service management policies during that fire, then we started getting calls from individuals around the country who had retired out of the Forest Service saying, Yes, keep talking. We, as retired professionals, disagree with the current philosophies in the Forest Service.

We invited one of those 30-year employees--Bill Derr--into our district to run a congressional study and to come up with recommendations. He basically had two, after months of study. He said we should be mechanically thinning our forests--that is, logging in our forests--and, secondly, returning to the 10 a.m. policy.

What are the downstream effects of bad Forest Service management?

First of all, we're losing the habitat for millions of species; we're burning millions of species in the fire. These are endangered species sometimes, but otherwise we're just killing lots of animals.

Also, we're destroying a watershed. In New Mexico, in the Whitewater- Baldy fire, the forest around one of the lakes there that provides drinking water for Alamogordo was at risk. The Forest Service said they should clean it, and instead lawsuits were filed to stop that. The fire burned right up to the edge of the lake, and the lake now has 50 feet of fill in it. All the fish are

dead, starved for oxygen, exactly like the gentlelady from Wyoming said. The streams are now filling with silt.

Forest Service personnel tell us we will be having to empty that lake for the next 15 years. That's 15 years of dead fish; 15 years downstream facing flooding; 15 years without the drinking water that sustains a community of about 30,000. These are what we face.

Also, the West is starved for jobs because of Forest Service policy. The original Organic Act, the act that created the U.S. Forest Service, said that they should be logging to create local commerce and jobs and they should be protecting the watershed. The U.S. Forest Service is negligent on both of the underlying reasons for their existence. We in the West are suffering lost education opportunities, destroyed habitat, and destroyed forests. Those forests will not grow back for 100 years according to the Forest Service personnel.

It's time for us to pass H.R. 1526. I support it.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia for leading this discussion.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of

religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Now, what would be in the minds of the people who wrote those words? It would do well to look at where they came from. They came from countries where kings ruled. The kings could tell you what church you had to be in. They could tell you what you had to believe, what you had to profess. If it conflicted with what you said, they had the ultimate power over you. And so they came here to establish a new government. They wanted this Constitution, this contract with the people and the government that said the government cannot bridge certain lines. And the establishment of religion and the free practice thereof were protected.

The gentleman from Virginia mentioned early in his comments, there was a young couple in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the State that I represent. She had a way with cameras and started a little in-home photography business. Elaine Huguenin and her husband, Jonathan, just wanted to give expression. But they also wanted to defend their rights to believe what they did, so they made a pact between themselves that they would do nothing that compromised their faith, their religious beliefs. The Constitution protects that.

Very soon after establishing their business, they had an inquiry from a gay couple, asking that they photograph their vows. The young couple in the photography studio refused and were surprised when they were taken before the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. They were equally surprised when that commission found they had no rights of religion in this country. The New Mexico Human Rights Commission said that you are guilty of violating a different law, one that did not comport with the Constitution. They fined them $6,000. The young couple appealed to the New Mexico appeals courts, and just recently, the New Mexico Court of Appeals found also that they were in violation--a court of appeals in this country ignorant of what the Constitution protects.

It's exactly these kinds of things that our Founding Fathers were alarmed about--commissions that would show up and tell you what you had to believe, what you had to profess. Catholics are afraid they're going to have to provide contraceptives from a government of the same mind. Doctors who are opposed to abortion fear that this government is going to tell them what they must do in violation of their consciences.

Are we, the American people, supposed to stand by? I think not. I think it's time for us all--not just Congress, not just your Representatives, but all--to raise their voices and speak out against a government that is too strong and that has forgotten its limitations written into that Constitution, especially under the First Amendment-- protecting our free exercise of religion. Speak with us. Stand up and speak with us.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.

Right now, emerging technologies critical to our readiness and the safety of our soldiers has developed 23 major range and test facilities within DOD. Recently, a problem has come to our attention, and that problem plays out in the White Sands Missile Range that's in my district.

Basically, this center piece of the range is controlled by DOD, the land and the air above it. These pieces here, the north and the south, the air is controlled by the Department of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, but the land is controlled by the BLM. And the BLM recently has approved an encroachment across this land which threatens 33 percent of the missions in White Sands.

There's a launch facility that is up in this very northern corner, and we use the entire 140-mile length. It's the largest overland test base, and we use that to test these new emerging technologies. With the encroachment, then it endangers fully one-third of the missions of the base.

So our amendment simply says that no Secretary of any agency should be able to come in here and put at risk these tests of the 23 different sites located with DOD and with a split jurisdiction like we have here. It's a very simple amendment. It simply says that you've got to go through the process and ask the people here.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Black) 1\1/ 2\ minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop).

Mr. Chairman, again, the situation is quite simple and quite transparent. We're just trying to resolve who can make the decisions on land that is owned by one agency and aerospace owned by the other.

Nowhere else in the U.S., nowhere else in the world do we have this long, uninterrupted range in which we can test weapons. The recovery of the bodies of those weapons gives us great insight into the failures or the successes. So if we're going to preserve this national asset, this ability to test new and different weapons, then let's get a clear line of understanding.

I would urge passage of the amendment and yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and we will hold those comments quietly between ourselves here.

You bring up a point that absolutely must be discussed in public. We need to highlight those things that are going on right now from our government towards its citizens.

Our Founding Fathers understood this policy very well, this concept. They said:

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When

the government fears the people, there is liberty.

I hear constantly from people in America right now that we fear the government, we fear the retribution, we fear that they're going to come in and take things from us, that they're listening to us at all times. Many would discard that as simply paranoia, until now.

An 83-year-old grandmother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who I've known for the last 15 years, since I've gotten into political circles--she's probably the most joyful, ebullient person in all of politics because she's here for what comes in the heart, not for what it can do for her. You see, she's a naturalized citizen who was born in Indonesia.

She came here and ended up, from ages 12 to 16, spending time in the Japanese internment camps because of her origin, though she's not Japanese herself. She has experienced the government that would become heavy-handed in a time of war. But the government that would become heavy-handed over political processes is a completely different government than that during World War II.

She helped establish the Children's Freedom Scholarship Fund, where she hands out patriotic coloring books to youngsters in the Albuquerque area. And because of these activities that got the attention of the IRS, they came in and audited and harassed this 83-year-old grandmother.

I had an email before the scandal broke about one of my constituents in Socorro, who said: I was audited and we couldn't figure out why. I talked to my accountant. During the audit, we couldn't figure it out. There was no unusual question. But during the audit, I noticed a handwritten name across my file, and I just made mental note of it.

After an audit that asked nothing specific, the auditor asked, Do you know--and he read the name. The guy says, It doesn't ring a bell to me. It did not. On the drive home, he said, Wait a minute. That's that meeting I went to 3 years ago. That's the meeting where I said, I don't want to be a part of this group. They're interested in the Constitution and the debt. I know about all that stuff. He writes a small check, leaves and never goes back. One meeting with the guy who later formed the Tea Party--it wasn't even formed--causes an audit.

When our government knows this kind of minute information and is willing to single you out, to veritably persecute you, because persecution is when we're dealt with differently, we have a different set of rules, that then qualifies as persecution. When this government is willing to do that, it causes us to say, Wait. This is not paranoia. This is justifiable fear of our government.

A small school in my hometown wanted to charter itself and submitted a 501(c)(3) application. The application was never handled. It went on and on and on. Our office made a call, and then the person listed on the organizational chart was called in for an audit.

I will tell you that we were told by the administration spokesman yesterday, Mr. Lew, the Treasury Secretary, that there's absolutely no indication that this was anything political.

There's absolutely no indication that it was anything but political, Mr. Lew. Regardless of what you all say down the street, understand that the American people are frightened of the government. They also think, with respect to the idea that we're going to hold people accountable--we hear that: We're going to hold people accountable; we're going to bring them in; we're going to look; we're going to find the facts, and then we're going to hold them accountable.

The American people look with a little bit of curious disregard for those statements.

Why would Americans be suspicious of the government, that they won't actually do anything to the people who are involved, that they won't actually get to the bottom of it? Well, there's a track record in the last 5 years that has caused the American citizens to look with disdain at any promises that there will be penalties, that the wrongdoers would be punished.

You can start with the Fort Hood shooter. He has not yet been brought to trial. He murdered dozens of people, and he has drawn $287,000 in pay because they can't take him off the payroll until he comes to trial. Meanwhile, the victims can't get their pay from the government that they're supposed to receive, and the American people understand an injustice is occurring from this White House because they will not pursue convicting a man that everyone knows has committed murder.

Well, it's said that's one instance. We can, then, take a look at Fast and Furious. I was one of the first to call for Attorney General Holder to resign, and we should look more closely at his participation in the Fast and Furious,

where rifles were sent across the border and came back and killed an American employee of the Border Patrol. Yet no one has been held accountable for that action there.

I think the gentleman's points are well made, and to continue the discussion of why Americans might be skeptical about whether anyone will pay any price for what has happened in the targeting of certain groups in this country by the Internal Revenue Service, it's also important that we look at other cases that have not yet been prosecuted and in which wrongdoing occurred.

MF Global was a commodities trading firm. Jon Corzine, a Democrat- elected official, took over that firm. It's against the law, when you have your money in these trading accounts, whether it be Merrill Lynch or whoever, it is against the law to take your money out and use it for corporate governance activities, for corporate organizational activities. And yet Jon Corzine reached down into customer accounts and pulled out $1.5 billion of money from account holders and spent it trying to keep his failing organization together. His efforts failed. MF Global filed bankruptcy. That was in 2011, and still Mr. Corzine has not had to answer any questions, has been convicted of no wrongdoing, hasn't been brought to trial, and hasn't had a grand jury impaneled.

Bernie Madoff, we saw him take billions from investors. And for decades, the regulators had reports that he was doing it, and not one regulator has been held accountable for their oversights and omissions. No one has ever checked.

So when we hear the administration say, Trust us; we're going to get to the bottom of this IRS scandal and we're going to hold people accountable, there is an anger building among the American people that says we don't think that Washington will hold anyone accountable.

You have the AP reporters whose phone records were gotten, and not just the ones who were involved, but the broad pool of reporters, and yet nothing is happening to the people in the Justice Department who did that.

Benghazi is another element where we believe no one will ever be held accountable. In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says, What does it matter?

What it matters, ma'am, is that someone allowed American soldiers to be killed without reinforcements. C-130s were within flying time. Drones were there. Lasers were locked onto the artillery that were firing rounds into that compound, and no one says a word.

And so we have the Internal Revenue Service investigating and holding audits for law-abiding citizens like this 83-year-old grandmother. Meanwhile, there are over $1 billion of unpaid taxes by Federal employees. Why doesn't the Internal Revenue Service go after the Federal employees who refuse to pay their own taxes.

The highest profile case is Mr. Geithner, who became Treasury Secretary; and we were told that he's such an important person, he can't be held to account for small actions like that. Yet one political party, one political viewpoint has been singled out by this administration in order to put the chill on people who might be involved in activities that would disagree with the government.

We've seen governments like this before in American history. We've seen tyrants before. We've seen tyranny before in world history, and I think Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are going to stand up on these issues and demand accountability from Washington. I think the American people are coming together with a will and a backbone that will stand up and say, You, the people who perpetrated these evils and these crimes, will be accountable.

That's what makes this country great. That's what makes this country the envy of all other nations because we have a Constitution that our Founding Fathers put in place which gives the people the power. The government is working at the approval of the American people. I think the American people are coming together across racial lines, across party lines, across religious and cultural lines to say that we demand accountability from our government officials, that we will not allow any citizen to be treated this way.

The Nation spoke this way when it was Richard Nixon, and I think the Nation will speak this way under this administration. The parallels are extreme. When the government gets too strong, it's time for the people to stand up and say, No, you are not all powerful, that we the people do establish and ordain.

I think the people of this country are going to question this establishment and are ordaining. I appreciate the opportunity to speak.

I am. I've been there many times. They're people concerned about small government. They're concerned about the debt and the deficit. They understand that these are the biggest risks that we face, and they speak articulately and coherently about that. They are also groups that hold elected officials accountable for their actions. I think those are positive things.

We had been listening. Before everyone recognized it was a nationwide scandal, we were hearing these reports. No matter that we disagreed with the Obama administration on policies, we never believed these reports to be true. So we investigated, but you could never substantiate. And now, then, 2 and 3 and 4 years later, to find out that it was systemic, that it was intentional, and that it was politically motivated causes one to fear for

the very institution that we call our Constitution and our government.

Yes, I would agree with the gentleman. Something seems awry.

The American people have a fascinating intuitiveness about them. It's reported that the unions spent $40 million to defeat Scott Walker. The reason Scott Walker won, he won 40 percent of the union vote.

People who are supposedly represented by the union bosses understand that when their leadership begins to take this country in the wrong direction, that they will exercise their voices and they will speak up; and that's the very powerful reminder that we, as people, have at the ballot box.

When the American people are left without government interference, without government threats, without the IRS intimidation, the American people choose rightly an awfully big percentage of the time. So I have the ultimate belief, because I'm hearing Democrats here on Capitol Hill as outraged as Republicans. I heard Republicans under the Nixon administration as outraged as Democrats.

It's when we come together in a common belief that our Nation, regardless of political viewpoints, represents all viewpoints, that we all have a right to speak, that we all have a right to compel. That's what's made us strong through our history.

And so those Democrats who now are saying that the IRS and this administration have gone too far are the strength of this country, as Republicans were under the Nixon administration.

So I have the ultimate belief that we, as Americans, are coming together again in our core principles to understand that no government, no matter which party, is powerful enough to come in and have watchdogs over us, to allow members of their party to take $1.5 billion from segregated accounts without being held accountable for the criminal actions.

They understand that we cannot break the laws of this Nation and other nations, sending guns to a foreign country illegally; not even the government can do that.

And they understand there's something intrinsically wrong when we hear the pleas of our four embassy personnel saying we need help, and we refuse it.

The American people have had enough. It doesn't matter that it's Democrat. If it was a Republican, it would be enough too. And I think the American people are coalescing into an idea that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And I believe that coalescing is going to provide us the framework for a new political institution. Don't know what it'll look like, don't know how it's going to shape up, but the American people are saying that enough is enough. Enough corruption. Enough scandals. Let's start cleaning out the mess. And that's what I hear from constituents from both parties every week I'm at home.

We're going to continue our work here, but I thank the gentleman for yielding and appreciate his bringing this issue to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 142, I am not recorded because I was absent from the House of Representatives for personal reasons. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 137, I am not recorded because I was absent from the House of Representatives for personal reasons. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. Speaker, April is National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. In fact, today is National DNA Day, where we commemorate the discovery of DNA's double helix and the subsequent scientific advancements.

DNA has revolutionized public safety and criminal justice in this country. It helps solve unsolved crimes. Since its inception in 1994, the DNA database system has solved more than 200,000 cold cases that provided closure to over 200,000 families. It assists prosecutors in taking criminals off the streets. It also exonerates the innocent, having freed more than 300 convicted criminals.

Katie Sepich was a 22-year-old graduate student at New Mexico State University in my district. In August of 2003, she was brutally raped, burned, strangled to death, and abandoned at a dumpsite. But Katie Sepich was a fighter, having the DNA of her offender under her fingernails. Through DNA, they were able to find and convict her offender and put him in jail.

The bill, which was signed into law here in this Congress last year, helps the State collect evidence. DNA has transformed our justice system and provided closure for families.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall 39 I was unavoidably detained, due to a public hearing scheduled by the Administration in my district. If I had been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

On rollcall 40 I was unavoidably detained, due to a public hearing scheduled by the Administration in my district. If I had been present, I would have voted ``yea.''