Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 34 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 26, 2004, at noon.

Mr. Speaker, I am introducing the Know Your Vote Counts Act of 2004, legislation which will amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voting systems to print a paper record for each ballot that the voter can verify for accuracy before the ballot is cast. This makes a recount possible in the event that a state determines one is needed. Without a paper trail, a recount is impossible.

Current law permits precincts to print ballots for the first time after the polls have closed. Therefore, voters might never get to see their ballots. This creates a risk that the computer record may differ from the voter's true intentions, without the voter ever knowing. Moreover, computer malfunctions or insider hacking might occur between the time of voting and printout, defeating the goal of the paper record requirement. The Know Your Vote Counts Act eliminates these possibilities by clarifying to states that a ballot must be printed at the time of each vote, thus ensuring the achievement of HAVA's goal of electoral integrity.

Electronic voting systems are supposed to increase voter confidence in election results. Without this safeguard, they seem to do anything but. A prominent fear has developed that these machines will facilitate a cyber version of dumping ballot boxes in the river. Software could be set to record votes with no regard to how the votes were actually cast. It is instructive that the Pentagon scrapped an Internet voting project because officials there determined there was no way they could guarantee that voting records could be kept secure. This issue should be a major concern for all of us.

The new Election Assistance Commission has plans to disburse $2.3 billion as early as next month to states for technology upgrades in voting equipment. Complying only with the upgrades required under current law, however, poses future problems for states. Presently, states could purchase machines without the capability of printing ballots for the voter to verify for accuracy.

States have already experienced problems that illustrate the problems created by voting machines without an auditable paper record. In Indiana, a glitch resulted in 5,352 voters casting 144,000 votes. Virginia machines subtracted votes rather than adding them to a candidate's total in some cases. In Florida, 10,844 votes were cast; candidate won by 12 votes, but there were 137 under-votes. Florida state law requires a manual recount of all under-votes in a race with this tight a margin, but no paper trail was available and the recount was impossible. A recent study of Maryland electronic voting machines found that they were all equipped with one of two locks, which keys to the other machines could open. Finally, in Georgia, on Super Tuesday, ten voting terminals were found sitting in the lobby of a Georgia Tech building unattended, in unlocked cases. These machines easily could have been altered during this time.

This legislation protects the integrity of electronic voting systems by requiring a voter-verified paper audit record for each ballot. The voter can verify the ballot at that time, and the paper record created can be used if state determines that recount is needed. To preserve ballot secrecy and prevent voter intimidation, this bill prohibits voters from copying or removing the record from a polling place. The Know Your Vote Counts Act respects principles of federalism and defers to state law, allowing states to make their own decisions about when to require recounts while preventing computer error or deliberate fraud from altering election outcomes.

This is not a partisan issue. It is an American issue. All Americans must know that their votes count. I urge my colleagues to co-sponsor the Know Your Vote Counts Act of 2004 in the 108th Congress so that we can ensure that the votes cast are the votes counted.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence), for yielding to me to address my colleagues and America on this issue.

For many years now, this Congress, in response to the people of the United States of America, have fought diligently to end the most ghastly and ghoulish and gruesome procedure known to modern man. And as we have done so, this Congress has held hearings in the 104th, 105th, 106th, and 108th Congresses. That is over 8 to 9 years if gathering information and data and analysis of the concept of what we call and have defined in this Congress as partial-birth abortion.

Now, for myself, as I thumb through the phone book in the Washington, D.C. yellow pages, I can find in there ads for abortions up to at least 22 weeks, and I believe there are one or two that advertise up to 24 weeks. And if the advertisement goes to that, then you can be confident that those partial-birth abortions are taking place beyond the 24 weeks. And, in fact, in this country, there is a Supreme Court decision that allows for such a thing up until the very last minute before birth.

The circumstances around this law that we have then in this country come to Congress finally passing a ban on partial-birth abortion that was signed by our President. And that was something that was difficult, in fact impossible to obtain under the previous administration. We have it today.

I sit on the House Committee on the Judiciary, and we held hearings and we gathered facts, did fact-finding, due diligence, and gathered data that reaches out all across this country into all of the experts, the best experts that we can find, to bring them forward to testify before congressional hearings. There were people to testify on each side of the argument, both pro and con on this procedure that we know all across this Nation as partial-birth abortion.

And when that happens, these expert witnesses testify, they are cross-examined by nearly every member of the Committee on the Judiciary. At the end of that period of time, then we debate the relative merits of the issue. As that debate flows through, we bring the bill for a vote, and generally through subcommittee, full committee, and then out to the floor. The same procedure takes place over in the other body.

That gathers all of the best expertise that can be gathered, it draws it all out of the United States of America, and then we have the administrative branch that also has their staff and their expertise, and they do their fact-finding.

So when the House of Representatives votes overwhelmingly and the other body votes overwhelmingly to ban that ghastly, ghoulish, and gruesome procedure of partial-birth abortion, and when Congress comes with findings that declare that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to preserve the health of the woman, there is no system of fact-finding or data-gathering that exists in this country today that can begin to match the due diligence of the United States Congress.

So, when word came to me late Good Friday that a judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, had made remarks during the last witness' cross-examination in the case that is one of the three jurisdictions that the gentleman from Indiana spoke about, that the attorneys in the case had done more due diligence than Congress had, that echoed into my ears an hour or two, if not within minutes. When it did, it looked to me that the preparation was at least there to declare that Congress had not done due diligence, that the attorneys in the case had, and that would be reason or justification enough to overturn our congressional ban, our Federal ban on partial-birth abortion.

So the decision was made late that Friday afternoon, and I was in Lincoln at 9 on Monday morning. I make one minor correction to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence): It was round-trip miles rather than one way. It was a little bit to adjust it into my schedule. I walked into the courtroom at 9, and I am confident most of the actors in the courtroom knew I was coming, judging by the reaction in the courtroom. I listened to that case between 9 and almost up to 12, nearly noon, just stepping out for a couple of message exchanges. At noon I went down there outside the Federal building in Lincoln, Nebraska, and held a press conference. I made the statement describing how Congress comes to their findings, what due diligence Congress uses, and that there is no substitute for the due diligence of Congress.

For a single judge to substitute his opinion for the collective wisdom of the United States of America is the height of arrogance. It also exposes judicial activism. It turns the law on its head. There is nothing that we could pass in this Congress that would meet that kind of standard that would allow a single judge to substitute his judgment for the wisdom of the people of America.

That is what that press conference was about. It echoed across this Nation

from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and points in between, and I am hopeful that it echoes into that courtroom and the courtrooms of San Francisco and New York where any activist judge in this country realizes that the legislative power belongs to the United States Congress. That is defined in the United States Constitution. If we allow judicial activism to run its course, there is no point in this body existing. They will have taken away all of the legislative power of this Congress if we do not draw the line.

I would have said a year ago that the line was blurred between the judicial and the legislative branch of government. Today I will say it is obliterated. It has been obliterated in a number of cases not particularly relevant to the ban on partial-birth abortion.

We have the authority as Congress to rein in the run-away judiciary, to slap the wrists of judicial activism. In fact, all Federal courts, with the exception of the Supreme Court, exist because they have been established from time to time by the Congress. Whatever the Congress establishes, they can take away.

So it is conceivable that any of these Federal lower courts are not a requirement of Congress, we could do with them as we wish. We want to do what is prudent and appropriate, but we also have an obligation to preserve the separation of powers. I will continue to do that.

Mr. Speaker, I want to speak to the fetal pain issue as well. I do not think that is hard for any of us to understand. We have heard testimony during hearings of this Congress of a baby that was almost to the last moment of its life reaching its arm out with that fear-of- falling reflex. It is unrealistic to believe that baby did not feel the pain at that moment, at that moment when they are trusting into the hands outside the womb instead of the protection of the womb, to have those hands take the life and drain the brains from that innocent, most innocent little child.

If Members have seen the pictures that have been up on the Internet, particularly on the Drudge Report, during intrauterine surgery, a little hand reaching up, grabbing ahold of the finger of a doctor. Imagine a little hand grasping the hand of the surgeon that is there to protect and save its life, and that little hand and that little body cannot feel pain? Of course it does. For a doctor to say, I have never thought of such a thing, it did not occur to me whether there was pain there, that would not be the case if this were happening with an animal. There would be a national outrage, and there should be a national outrage on this.

We have to play this out in the courts in New York, Nebraska and San Francisco. We are going to see these three inferior courts come with a decision. Those decisions will find their way to the United States Supreme Court where the Supreme Court will in the next year or so be obligated to makes a decision on whether Congress can actually declare findings and declare fact. We have done so.

There are only two questions before the court, I understand. One of them is do congressional findings determine that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to protect the health of the woman; and the other question is did we define partial-birth abortion accurately and precisely enough that one who is providing that procedure, and that is hard for me to say, understands clearly at what point they would be breaking the law?

I think we have a precise definition of partial-birth abortion. It is clear whether it is a head delivery or whether it is a breech delivery. We define that moment when it becomes a partial-birth abortion, and Leroy Carhart or any of those practitioners understand that, and they are simply trying to confuse the American public.

I will stand for life. I stand with the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) and the hundreds of people in this Congress and the millions across this country that understand that innocent life begins at the instant of conception.

Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to thank my colleague on my left, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce), who has pointed out quite accurately and correctly that if one side of the aisle is down here carrying a message to the American people relentlessly, if not logically, day by day by day, that is the only subject matter that Americans have to discuss.

As I sat in here for the last hour preparing, apparently, for this Special Order hour, and I have considered that I really did not have to do that, it was great preparation to sit and listen to the rhetoric that came from the string of Members, I think probably not coincidentally, from Ohio. So I am just going to start up working backwards through the list of things that were raised here while they are freshest in the minds of the people that are listening, the Members of the other body, and those in this Chamber and the people that are listening around the country.

The first is with regard to OPEC and the criticism of OPEC for the position that they have taken to limit the supply of hydrocarbons to the United States. Certainly that has been a factor in the 1970s. It was a factor in our Presidential elections after that, and we came out of that.

Our dependency has increased on foreign oil, and I regret that. But OPEC has taken a position that is going to be reflected by the Saudi Arabians who ruled more of the OPEC oil than anyone else.

I have with me a document that I will just read some quotes.

Prince Bandar has made some remarks speaking for the increase in supplies because he says the President and the Crown Prince have been in touch on this subject for a while now. Both leaders feel strongly that higher energy prices have a negative impact on world economy.

So I happen to know that there is a delegation on its way over to Saudi Arabia right now to thank the leadership in Saudi Arabia for their efforts to increase supplies as a way of holding down increases in costs of gasoline in the United States and thank them for the efforts that they have gone through to help us in the war on terror.

There have been significant improvements in that country over the last couple of months.

So these remarks that are made on the floor of Congress are not conducive to us solving the oil supply problem and I think are not conducive either for us solving this problem of worldwide terror.

I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to give a perspective of No Child Left Behind that is a little bit different perspective for some of the other States, those States that may not believe there is a significant advantage to them.

I have the privilege of being from the State of Iowa, and we rank in the top three every year in ACT tests; and we have for years put out Iowa basic skills and Iowa tests of educational development, that analysis that we do of students every year, comparing them against their growth from year to year, in a number of different subjects and a composite score that we do, something that goes back to the time that I was at least in grade school, and that is some years ago, and before that actually, and those tests have been given around the world, places as far away as China.

So the credibility that the Iowa public school system has worldwide is high, and our competitiveness in our graduates, particularly measured by ACT test scores and also the success of our young students as they go off and go on to higher education, is also high.

Arguably, the public school education in K-12 in the State of Iowa ranks in the top three, maybe as the best in the country; and so because of that long-standing tradition to education that we have, we have those kinds of results and standards, and yet we are faced with a No Child Left Behind policy that is a one-size-fits-all.

Those States that have high excellence in education may not see a significant marginal improvement, but we really do need to help those students in those States like Mississippi and Arkansas. We really need to lift them up and get them back into this educational stream.

I yield to my colleague from New Mexico.

The Shocks to Our Economy

Mr. Speaker, I yield now to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) for his comments.

Picking up on that theme, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks about how sensitive natural gas prices are to the Corn Belt and the fact that the gentleman's background and experience as a dairy farmer and a banker and someone who has been all involved in this economy understands that the very foundation for all economies is that all new wealth comes from the land.

In our State, it is corn and beans and oats and hay and grass in our pastures, and we value add to that as close to the cornstalk as we can, as many times as we can; and we need the energy from the gentleman's State and from the State of New Mexico because we are extraordinarily susceptible to natural gas. We use it to dry grain with, we use it for anhydrous ammonia, our nitrogen supply, and we use it for all the other uses that the rest of the world does as well.

So I am extraordinarily sensitive to that and the significant point that the natural gas pipeline in the energy bill brings gas down now that is already discovered and already tapped into from the North Slope down to the lower 48 States.

The other tax is the outforcing, but I will also declare there is an ``E'' tax on everything we buy. That means there is an energy component. But the ``E'' does not stand for energy, it stands for environmental tax. It has become a cult in this Congress, a religion in this Congress to the extent that we cannot pass drilling in ANWR, as the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) said earlier, which is the most logical place in the world to go get oil. It is up there and identical to deposits on the North Slope.

There has not been a single environmental problem on the North Slope since 1972 when they finally lifted the environmental embargo, which, by the way, kept me from going up there and actually actively participating in real jobs up there. So now today that oil sits under ANWR and we have gas on the North Slope that we cannot get here to the United States. We cannot get gas out of the State of Colorado.

I would be glad to.

An environmental tax.

Mr. Speaker, I would now like to yield to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce).

I thank the gentleman from New Mexico, and I would address some of the cleanup issues here. I would like to point out, also, that as Republicans, we stand here in this Congress together and we work toward a common goal. Those who have been listening here will hear a consistent voice about the progress that we have made, the Jobs and Growth Act, the transportation bill that just passed here in this Congress this afternoon, a number of other initiatives that have been good on balance for all of America. That is not to imply that we think our work is done. It is not to imply that we think our work is perfect. In fact, one of the approaches I have to life is I am always looking back and seeing what should we have done better, the lament I have about how we had an opportunity that could have been better capitalized on than the opportunities that we have had; and those are the things that motivate many of us to go forward into the future and try to perfect a policy that we always recognize is imperfect.

Some of the pieces hanging around out here that do need to be addressed is the regulation burden that is on the backs of American businesses. How do we move to another level? We have the strongest growth of any industrialized country in the world right now. We heard that in the President's speech in this city last night. We have the strongest growth, but that is not good enough. Those who rest on their laurels will soon be swallowed up by those who do not. It puts me in mind of a quotation that I recall, I cannot attribute it to an individual, but someone will know and, that is, that history is the sound of hobnail boots storming up the stairs and silver slippers coming down. That is what we are in danger of, is moving into these silver slippers and being complacent and settling into our easy chairs while those folks that are a little more hungry and a little more aggressive, those folks that will get out of bed and go to work a little earlier, work a little later and will maybe work for a little bit less are putting pressure on this economy. We need to do a number of things to improve our economy in the direction we are going.

We talked about energy. I am pleased with the animation that comes out of my colleagues on energy. It animates me. I was able to go to Alaska with the gentleman from New Mexico to ANWR. I recall flying over that 19.5 million acres of ANWR. Of that 19.5 million, 1.5 million is the area that has oil underneath it. It is the coastal plain. It is an arctic desert coastal plain. The elevations vary just a little bit from sea level across there. We flew over 1.5 million acres of that coastal plain looking for wildlife. ANWR stands for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One would think that place would be teeming with wildlife. In fact, they told us that the caribou come for about 4 to 6 weeks in the spring, have their calves and go back to Canada. The rest of the time they are gone. We looked around for wildlife from that plane ride over and back along that coastal plain, two different routes, all of us searching. I saw two white birds and four musk oxen. I did the math on that. I divided the 4 musk oxen into 1.5 million acres of coastal plain. It comes out to 375,000 acres per ox. I did not see them all. There were some more there, but there is plenty of room for people and for musk oxen and for caribou. In fact, the caribou herd on the north slope, a different herd that has lived now with the pipeline since 1972 when it began, that herd was 7,000 in 1972, and today it is 28,000. Caribou do very well in that kind of an environment.

But aside from energy and the policies that we need to promote ethanol, promote biodiesel. I have got wind in my district. Some of that wind is getting cost competitive. It is not just some States like New Mexico or Colorado that are energy States. Iowa and the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa is an energy export center. All of those policies we need to do to move forward with our domestic production puts me in mind of a commercial that I watched on television. I have to phrase it this way. The apparent Democrat nominee for President of the United States has a commercial that ran in Iowa for months and months. It made three points. It said, I blocked the oil drilling in ANWR, and I will never send your sons and daughters over to the Middle East to fight for foreign oil, and I will create 500,000 new jobs. That was the equation.

There are some smart people in this Congress, but I have yet to find anybody that can put that equation together and reconcile those three points. Stop domestic production and be proud of that and why, I have no idea. I want to promote domestic production consistent with sound environmental science, not religion, but science. And so blocking that production does not help new jobs except exports them overseas. And then never sending sons and daughters over to the Middle East to fight for foreign oil. If you declare it to be a police action, then you can fight on this country and you will turn this Nation into one huge Israel where we can only then guard every theater, guard every bus stop, guard every school and every hospital and every church and still see our women and children blown to bits. This is not a police action. This is not a law enforcement problem. This is a war on terror, and we are not in Iraq fighting for foreign oil. We are in Iraq having freed 25 million people in Iraq. And so that equation does not work.

And creating 500,000 new jobs, well, at the rate this economy is going, in another couple of weeks, we will have that done within the last 6 weeks. I can do the math on that. I did the math. 308,000 new jobs in the last month, times 12, that is just one month of growth, that comes out to be 3,696,000 jobs. That is an annual rate of job growth. I maybe would take issue with a couple of the gentlemen that spoke ahead of me. We do want job growth to go on. If it goes on at this pace, we will soon run out of people willing to do the work at any price. We will not have enough bodies to do it. This is excellent, extraordinary economic growth. I do not know that it is sustainable, but it is awfully good news.

One of the things we need to do to sustain our economy is to reduce this burden of litigation and regulation that is on us. I sat in on a presentation by some business executives, it has been about a year ago now, up in New York City. The presentation came down to this final number: 3 percent of our gross domestic product is being consumed by the litigation process, class action lawsuits. If you eat too many French fries, sue McDonald's, those kinds of ideas. The tobacco lawsuits which put a price on the cigarettes that goes regressively against the people that are the greatest users, Mr. Speaker.

And so as you add up the cost of the litigation in this country, and it adds up to 3 percent of our GDP, and you

think in terms of about 3.5 percent GDP is required in order for us to move forward and grow with our economy and sustain the necessities for the infrastructure that we need to build out, 3.5 percent required for that, but the trial lawyers get 3 percent off the top.

That means we have got to grow at 6.5 percent to sustain that, and I think we need to do some things with regard to tort reform. In the Committee on the Judiciary, we have passed a number of them. Nothing broad enough. Nothing broad enough that may have a real impact on this 3 percent.

Plus the burden of regulation in this country, just Federal regulations that are on the backs of all those businesses, the gentleman from New Mexico's (Mr. Pearce) business and my construction business before I sold it to my oldest son, actually less than a year ago, and the gentleman from Colorado's (Mr. Beauprez) business as well, the burden of those Federal regulations adding up across this country to over $850 billion a year. That is wasted money. That is not productive. It is not things in the productive sector of the economy where jobs are created.

Where we have jobs created in the productive sector of the economy, there are contributions that come from taxes that help to fund government, and when that happens then there is a little money left over for No Child Left Behind, and that is some cleanup.

The gentleman from Ohio made a statement that they are underfunded on No Child Left Behind by $1.5 billion. Well, I hope he is sitting over in his office listening to this, because he needs to take a look at the real process here, and America needs to understand it as well.

There is authorization, and then there is appropriation. Those two numbers do not match. Authorization says we can go ahead and appropriate maybe up to this amount, cap it there, no more, but use judgment to hold this into fiscal restraint. This number that is being claimed by the gentleman from Ohio on No Child Left Behind, this $1\1/ 2\ billion, I can only assume, if it is anchored on anything, it is anchored on authorization, not appropriation. There is not a way that one can calculate that and make that allegation that we owe $1\1/2\ billion to Ohio unless it has been appropriated, and if it is appropriated the money would be there, and the difference needs to be understood.

This claim, by the way, if we look back through the records, the last time the Democrats had a majority in the House and the Senate and the Presidency and they got a chance to fund education to their will, they had an authorization number and then they had an appropriation number, and they did not match. But the folks on the other side of the aisle were not here saying, ``We are underfunded, Mr. President.'' That is the issue here, is the credibility aspect between authorization, appropriation.

I yield to the gentleman from north New Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, another subject matter I would like to raise is in rebuttal to the remarks made by the previous speakers from the Ohio delegation, and that would be with regard to unemployment and the very strong statements made on why we need to extend and expand unemployment benefits. We have done that in this Congress, and it has been up for a vote twice in a little more than a year that I have been here, and I will tell the Members that I come to the table with a little bit different viewpoint on that.

That is, first of all, the demand on a minimum wage increase and possibly the discussion that has to do with a living wage; and I want to argue that there is hardly a legitimate minimum wage in this country at all. Most people are working for more than the minimum wage. Our economy has grown past that, and the minimum wage itself sometimes keeps people from getting in entry level.

I pointed out that it used to be one could drive into a gas station anywhere and some young person would come out there, entry-level job, and wash the windshield, check the oil, check the air in the tires, and fill the gas tank up and bring them their change and send them along their way. That was kind of a nice service, and they learned a work ethic. We do not do that anymore, and one of the reasons is because of minimum wage.

But labor is an equation just like any other commodity. Labor is a commodity, and it is like corn and beans or oil, as we talked about earlier, or gold or shares in the marketplace. The value of labor is predicated upon two things: the supply and the demand of labor, just like the supply and demand of gold or oil, controls the price. So

when we start to interfere with that cost and we raise that cost of entry level labor up, then we are going to have some people who lose out on jobs.

If we can legislate, by the way, a minimum wage, then I would challenge then the next step is legislating a living wage. As I hear about living wages, then I say, well, if we can raise that price up, and living wage used to be claimed to be something like $8.56 an hour. So if we could legislate a living wage, then why in the world could we not just go ahead and legislate prosperity? If it does not cost jobs, if people are not going to get unemployed because of raising a minimum wage or moving up to a living wage, then let us all just be rich and let us set that level someplace at $20 or $25 or $30 an hour, and then we can all just share in this prosperity that would be legislated by the wise people from over here on the other side of the aisle.

That does not work, because it is supply and demand. It is working. That is why the real minimum wage is substantially higher than the legislative statutory minimum wage.

Transportation, we passed that today. That puts dollars and jobs out there. Transportation is the fundamental, foundational first building block in economic development. Transportation, education, high-speed telecommunications are those components today. Transportation was the first component. It is the most essential component. We have now started down the path of providing for those jobs and building the American economy, but it can be stronger, and the bill could have been better.

I cannot leave this closed without addressing some things that need to be better, and that is the environmental burden on the transportation cost. Eighteen point four cents of every American's gas, when they put the nozzle in their tank, goes into this highway fund. But of that 18.4 cents out of every gallon comes about 28 percent just to feed the E-tax, the environmental monster, the cult, a religious type of environmental cultism, rather than a responsible way of dealing with our environment. We cannot even inventory the offshore natural gas reserves off the coast of Florida because of the barrier here in this Congress because of the E-tax that is on us. So there is an environmental piece to this.

Then there is a wage scale piece to this, the Davis-Bacon wage scale. That will increase the cost of wages from 8 to 38 percent and actually some statistics show 5 to 35 percent. But I will just say average that all out and that comes to about 23 percent of this; this is higher than it needs to be because of federally mandated wage scales. So we add the 28 percent for environmental, let us say 20 percent for the wage scale. So we are at 48 percent, and we have not even dealt yet with mass transit, bike trails, money for scrubbing the graffiti off the walls. Come on. Do we not have some people in our prisons that we could give them a wire brush and send them out there? Why are we imposing that upon the taxpayers of America to clean off the graffiti? Is that not a local issue?

So when we add all these pieces up, I will argue that we can come to 68 percent, maybe 71 percent of this can go somewhere else to be funded if, in fact, we believe it should be a priority whatsoever. I want every dime possible out of those transportation dollars to go into concrete and earth moving and pipe work and transportation that can be used to grow our economy, and I pledge here and now to move forward with this over the next 6 years if they send me back to do so in order to try to turn those dollars in a more responsible fashion for transportation.

We are doing a lot of the right things, Mr. Speaker. We need to continue improving on every single component where we claim credit. We will get better, and we have got a lot to claim credit for, including 308,000 new jobs just in this past month alone.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's assumption that I came here asking for you to yield and saying that that is where my heart is and my head is. Without preparation, I did want to also listen to your presentation, which I did last night on C- SPAN, by the way, and I know millions of Americans were listening as well. I thank the gentleman for the leadership he has provided on this issue.

In this Congress and in politics around the country, whether it is State legislatures or city councils or county supervisors, there is a thing that has to happen in the dynamics in order for good public policy to be formed, and that is that there are always two sides to an issue, or it would not be an issue. As those issues get pulled and tugged and massaged and people in the middle start to weigh in for and against the increments of that policy, over time, that policy is shaped in such a way where you finally get to the point where there is enough agreement where we can pass such a policy. We are a long, long ways from that in this immigration policy in the United States today.

I look back to the years when Pat Buchanan was running for President and he insisted that we have a nationwide debate on immigration. I regret that we were not able to move that debate forward at that time, shape this policy before we got to this critical situation that we are in today, with massive numbers flowing over the border and not a policy to deal with it.

I understand the President's motivation. I think his head and his heart want to go down that path to help 10 or 12 or 14 million people. The other side of this equation is one the gentleman from Colorado and I agree on, and many, many members of this Congress and even a greater percentage of people across the country that intuitively understand, that an immigration policy which by Constitution is vested within the responsibility of the United States Congress, an immigration policy must be designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. What other purpose would we have?

I look at some things that happened in my State. We have an affirmative action program within our universities that has been approved by the board of regents. It is an 8.5 percent, we cannot call it a quota, it is an 8.5 percent minority ``goal.'' Well, this minority goal almost moved some State legislation that would have imposed the equivalent of a high burden on the taxpayers of the State to try to reach this 8.5 percent. In Iowa, we have about a 3 percent minority, but we would do an 8.5 percent minority goal.

Well, in an effort to reach that goal, within one of our regents' institutions, that institution set up a recruitment center down in San Antonio, Texas. I would like to be recruiting those folks of the same ethnicity if we need to do that from Iowa. We have sufficient numbers that are not accessing education, but yet the recruitment office in San Antonio was recruiting Hispanics to meet part of this 8.5 percent goal for minorities, and then they got overzealous and they went across the border and they brought in Mexican nationals from Mexico City to meet a goal for a minority set-aside in Iowa.

What is going on, America? I cannot connect my logic with this.

I will go back to affirmative action. If we take it back to its inception, it was designed to correct the institutionalization of segregation of American blacks in the South. That was the specific, narrow goal of affirmative action, and it is preferential treatment in jobs and educational opportunities. I do not know how we would have fixed that. That is a sin against this Nation. And maybe there was a better way, but I am not wise enough to tell what we should have done. So I am going to let that one pass for a moment and just say we needed to fix that. And we have, to a large degree, repaired the institutionalization of segregation of American blacks in the South. Now they are coming up in job opportunities.

But that affirmative action program that was instituted then, for what arguably was a good cause, now has grown into this monstrosity of a policy that decides that every family reunion has to take place in the United States; it cannot take place in any other country. So we have a repatriation policy that allows someone to reach out and bring their family members into the United States, and that does not fit that equation of what is good for the economic, social, and cultural well- being of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I would add to that there is a different philosophy today than there was when your grandparents came here or when mine came here. My grandmother came over from Germany.

I remember her advice to my father who went off to kindergarten on his first day speaking German only and when he came home from the first day, walked into the house and said hello to his mother in German, and she turned to him and said, speaking German in this household is for you from now on verboten, because we came here to be Americans, and you are going to learn English in school and bring it home and teach to it me.

I wish I could say that in German today, but it conveys a philosophy of buying into this culture and this civilization. Yes, there are many immigrants that come into this country who do buy into the philosophy; but sadly, millions of them are met at the border with radical multiculturalists, the cult of multiculturalism with, I used to say hundreds of millions of dollars funding, and now today I say it is in the billions of dollars, funding this multiculturalism that is infused into every level of our curriculum, every level of our lives, and it rejects a greater American civilization. It rejects the very concept that America is a great Nation or that we have the lead culture, economy, and military in the world, or that we are the unchallenged superpower in the world. They focus on the things that they can be critical of, what they call America's failures.

Mr. Speaker, multiculturalism draws a new line. This new line is, everybody belongs to a group, except for the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) and myself and other folks who fit in our category.

I went to a college campus, and before I went there to speak, I went to their little search engine on their home page and I typed in ``multiculturalism'' and I hit search. What came back was 59 different multicultural groups registered on campus, starting with Asians, ends with Zeitgeists, and in between, and every one, virtually, a victim's group. As I talked to those young people and I said, look at this. When you arrive here as a freshman on the first day, there might as well be 59 card tables set up out here in the parking lot and you can go down through here and choose your victims group. Start with Asians, ends with Zeitgeists, you will belong to 5, 6, 7, 8, or 10 of them before you get down through this line, and everyone will tell you why you ought to have the sweat off of somebody else's brow, everyone will tell you that you are a victim and you deserve special rights and group rights by virtue of this merit of being a victim.

But if I might conclude, then, so your grandparents and my grandparents that came here did not see themselves as victims. They saw themselves as being extraordinarily fortunate individuals that had the opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I yield back to my colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I think I have an anecdote on this scenario that I painted here. That is, some years ago I drafted some legislation, and I began to identify these same things. What is great about this Nation and what are the weaknesses that we have within our educational system that does not infuse this into the minds of young people anymore like it was infused into our mind as we grew up? It was part of our family and educational system, something we learned in church as well.

I drafted legislation, and I called it the God and Country Bill. It simply states that each child in America shall be taught that the United States of America is the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, and we derive our strength from biblical values, free enterprise capitalism, and Western civilization.

Now, unless you have been there you cannot imagine how many names I got called, how many nasty letters and e-mails and phone calls came my way for stating something that I believe ought to be obvious to the vast majority of Americans. One particular e-mail came, and I noticed it had an educational e-mail address. It said, ``We get plenty of Western civilization. You are trying to impose something on America, and we do not really believe we are the greatest nation in the world.'' It gave a whole list of these things.

By the way, it was not friendly toward Christopher Columbus. I point that out particularly.

But, nonetheless, ``We get 2 years of American history. We get enough Western civilization. We do not need to teach anymore.''

I thought, okay, I am going to help this student out. I did not know how to explain it, so I just typed back an e-mail response that said, go see your teacher about Western civilization. Your teacher will explain to you what Western civilization is.

The answer I got back was, ``I am the teacher.''

There is the problem, at least one of the problems.

Mr. Speaker, initially I would like to thank the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Rogers) for bringing this bill before us. It is something I have looked at for some time, and it is something that I certainly support.

It would be my endeavor to bring individual amendments to the appropriations process if we needed to in order to reestablish the pre- eminence of the military on our campuses across this country.

This is something that started back in the 1970s as part of the protests against the Vietnam War; and, slowly, this kind of policy that has been a resistant to recruitment and ROTC on our campuses across this country has used every tool available.

Well, I want to announce that this is about discrimination, this issue is; but it is about discrimination against young men and women in uniform. Whenever somebody stands up in a uniform, we will find somebody with another agenda trying to find a way to erode the values that put them in that place; and so the argument was made, for example, the Boy Scouts would be one, and of course, all our men and women in uniform in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the Coast Guard are also victims of an effort that is keeping us from recruiting good people because the campuses have lined up against the recruitment on campus.

I look forward to the day that ROTC or any recruiter can set up a card table on the commons at Harvard University on the exact location where George Washington received his commission as commander of the Continental Army. I find that a real offense to the United States, not to have the freedom to do that and to promote it.

A statement was made by the gentlewoman earlier that in no other field can a person be fired for being gay. Well, no, probably not; but most people in this country are at-will employees, and they can be fired for no reason or any reason at all.

It is not a matter about open discrimination.

I would like to relate a little story, Mr. Speaker.

State Senator Jerry Behn from Iowa asked the question, when lobbied by the gay lobby, answer me this: Am I heterosexual or am I homosexual? They looked at him for a while and they said, well, we do not know.

That is the answer. You cannot tell. Keep it private.

Madam Speaker, as I sat here and listened to this debate tonight, a number of things crossed my mind. I would like to pass backwards through the comments that were made by the distinguished members of the Congressional Black Caucus and address some of the subject matter. As you sit in your living rooms this evening and you consider what you have heard, you have heard our President's name used over and over again, never in a complimentary fashion, not particularly derogatory, given some of the evenings I have seen in this Chamber, but we need to keep in mind that the apparent Democrat nominee for President is a Member of the other body. According to the rules of this House, I cannot nor can any Member use the name of that Member of the other body and designate them in the same fashion that the Members we have heard here tonight have the latitude to speak about our President, our Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world.

And so that is a restriction that I have. And when I reference the apparent Democrat nominee for President, you will know who I am speaking of. However, what we have heard here is that the Congressional Black Caucus budget has fiscal responsibility because they offer a balanced budget. But the

balanced budget that they offer is balancing the budget by raising taxes, putting a burden on the private sector. By the way, there are two sectors to this economy. There is the private sector where the jobs are created, where the dollars get invested, and where Americans make a decision that they are going to save up their money and invest it and maybe buy some stocks, some mutual funds or start a business or go borrow that money and invest it in a business, which is what creates new wealth and which is what creates jobs.

It is not a zero-sum game. It is a multiplier. We are always seeking to promote the maximum productivity of our citizens. That is directly proportional to the strength of this entire economy, that is, the sum total of the productivity of all of our citizens, all of our citizens working together, the maximum number of them going to work every day, producing the maximum amount of goods, the maximum amount of services multiplies itself through our economy and promotes our export markets and competes with our import markets and provides for the technology and the training and the capital investment and the higher education and all of those components that make our economy grow.

When we raise taxes to balance the budget, there is a huge presumption in the minds of the people that advocate such a thing because they are presuming that the economy is going to move along in the same fashion as it did and that tax increases are not going to provide a disincentive for people that get out of bed and go to work.

I can tell you as a businessman, one who started a highly capital intensive business with a 100 percent loan back in 1975 and went to work every day and operated that business with the checkbook in my shirt pocket and provided a service and collected the money and paid the bills and dealt with the Federal Government and the IRS and the regulations and all of the burdens that are there, and paid the taxes, of course, that there is a limit to how much anyone is willing to risk their capital, risk their sweat equity. At some point if you punish people for their work, if you punish productivity, you will get less productivity. Ronald Reagan said, What you tax, you get less of. What you subsidize, you get more of.

If I just address the tax side of this, if we tax and tax and increase taxes to balance a budget in a time of recession, and we are coming out of that recession today, we will get less productivity. Less productivity equates to less revenue for the Federal Government and what you have done, then, is you have discouraged the goose that lays the golden eggs. And so I would point out that we are coming out of a dip in a recession.

If I can direct your attention to this chart on my left, this is what I am going to describe as the dot-com bubble. Right about in this area here and if you were watching the economy grow as I did and as many of the investors did and they put their money in the information age and in technology, because we had an ability, a growing ability, a dynamically growing ability to store and transfer information more quickly and more efficiently and more cheaply than ever before in history, in fact, beyond the imagination of most of the predictors back in the earlier years in the nineties. So we invested in the ability to store and transfer information. People were investing in dot-com businesses, betting that those businesses would turn over and that this economy would continue to grow.

Well, it grew and a lot of this economy here was speculative economy. It was an economy that grew like a chain letter as people invested more money in more dot-com businesses and in more technology and in more things that did not really reflect the value of information technology. Because, this was the major misconception, just the ability to store and transfer information in and of itself has value. I will point out that that is not the case. The marketable value of being able to store and transfer information is to the extent of two things: Can you take that information and improve productivity? And can you deliver that product more cheaply and more efficiently? And to a much smaller degree, what can you market this information for for recreational purposes?

So information has value for research purposes because that information then allows us to be more effective and more efficient. That is the good thing on the economical side, but the recreation side is when people get on the Internet and they pay their $21.50 a month or their 40, 50, 60, $70 a month, depending on their service because they like to be able to get access to entertaining Internet information. That is a marketable value of information. The others are to be able to produce the good or the service more efficiently than before.

So what we have with the dot-com bubble is this bubble right here was bound to burst. As some of us saw this coming and talked about how long we could sustain this level of this growth, it was a lawsuit that started against Microsoft that popped the bubble. I believe it would have popped of its own just of the sheer stress and tension of the dot- com bubble as it grew and inflated higher and higher. Sooner or later it would have burst because of its own pressure. But what happened was some of the States attorneys general got together with some other interests and entities; and they sued Microsoft and when that happened, this dot-com bubble burst and the money that was invested in this economy came tumbling down, and we lost billions and billions of dollars' worth of wealth all the way through here. That happened through this stretch.

If you look here, you can see what happened when we got to September 11. George W. Bush was sworn in here, and then we had the September 11 attack, which came about right in here. The economy was already racing down; and when our transportation industry came to an immediate and screeching halt within hours of the attacks of September 11, that stopped also a huge sector of our economy. We have had to recover from this bubble being burst and being dropped down into these levels. If you look where we are today, the Bush Jobs and Growth Act, which we passed in this Congress a little over a year ago, has grown us, then, back up to essentially the level where we were before.

We have dealt with this dot-com bubble, made the adjustment to it and the real economy today is the economy of the ability to be able to produce goods and services more efficiently than before and the growth in our gross domestic product. But it is not the time to increase taxes, punish businesses and convince them that they should pull in their capital investment and produce less to avoid the tax liability. It is the time to make the tax cuts permanent, the time to be able to send the message that we are a business-friendly world where jobs are created by the private sector, not by government.

As I listened to the gentlewoman from California and she referenced the Bush administration, and our President in particular, she said with regard to jobs, ``They don't have a clue.'' I would think that statement would be accurate, not with regard to the analysis of our President's statement, but with regard to the person who uttered that statement, not a clue on what creates jobs, if you cannot believe that private sector investment creates jobs and that is where the wealth is.

That is part of the sector of our economy. The other one is the public sector. The public sector of the economy is the anchor that drags our private sector economy. We have people that get out of bed every day and produce a good or a service that has value and they market it in the marketplace and every day they try to figure out how to be more competitive, how to produce more of that good, more of that service for a more competitive price. Surely they are trying to maximize their profit; but when they do, they have got some money left over then to invest in technology, higher education, capital investment so that they can be more competitive and be able to provide that good or service even more competitively yet.

That is going on around this economy millions of time every day. It is part of the equation that is in the minds of our managers and our workers, all in the private sector. The public sector, which now I am a member of, and my lifetime and my career and my training have all been in the private sector where I have competed for those jobs, public sector jobs are often in the regulatory section. Regulators are people that get out of bed in the

morning. They go out to look over the shoulder of the people who are producing a good or a service that has a value that is marketable in the marketplace. In essence you have to take from the profit from the private sector to pay your public sector regulator, the watcher of the work, the one who regulates the work and sometimes the one who obstructs the work. So there is always a drain on the private sector to fund the public sector jobs.

What I heard mentioned over here this evening was a whole series of public sector jobs, from police officers, more teachers, on down the line. I did not hear anything that would address a way that we can create more jobs or fix the climate so that the private sector can create more jobs.

It was all public sector requirements, all burdens on the private sector always to wear down this economy, always to make it harder and harder for us to recover from this place that we are in today, which is not too bad a spot and we are moving up.

And another proof of that would be, if I go to chart 2, the unemployment rate that we are dealing with. This would be the early days of the Reagan administration. About the time when Ronald Reagan took office, we had extremely high unemployment, extremely high inflation. And with the Reagan plan, we were able to drop this unemployment level down to under 6 percent for the first time in about a decade.

And then, as the unemployment grew through the 1990s, this would be about a third of the way through the Clinton administration, then it went down, and we were arriving at about a 4 percent unemployment rate. But historically that was an unemployment rate from the year 2000 back to 1970 that we had not seen in that period of time. In 30 years we had not seen unemployment as low as this, corresponding, by the way, with the dot-com bubble that burst at about this point.

And now we saw unemployment go up. These were technology jobs, by the way. And we had import foreign labor, H1Bs, a lot of technology people. And now we are back here at historically about standard level, at about 5.6 for our unemployment rate. But we have made significant progress.

We can expect these things to happen. The growth is on the way. And we should feel comfortable and optimistic about the future of the United States economy.

The reference to No Child Left Behind, I come from the State of Iowa, and we can argue that our K-through-12 education system, in our public schools in particular, ranks at the top or very near the top in education. If we measure our Iowa basic skills test, which, by the way, are taken all over world as far away as China, and if we measure our ACT test scores compared to the students from the schools in the other States in the Union, we can argue that we are either at the top or maybe there are two other States that can argue competitively with the success of the public school system that we have. And yet we are dealing with No Child Left Behind in the same fashion as some of the States that are at or near the bottom in their K-through-12 education.

So I hear a lot from the teachers in Iowa about the burden of having to fill out a lot of paperwork and meet the administrative requirements on No Child Left Behind, and yet we do not want to leave any child behind. There are States like Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama that need this help, that do not have the commitment to education that I happen to have the privilege to live within and have been the beneficiary of.

We have a tradition in Iowa on education that I believe roots back in about 1878 when the general assembly of the State of Iowa, in a series of about three different pieces of policy, put together a policy that no child would grow up and have to walk more than 2 miles to a school. So it set up the rural school system, our country school system, and my nearest one was a school about 1\1/2\ miles down the road from me, which I just missed going to by 5 weeks, the way the transfer of people in schools went. But there in those country schools where if no child was going to be more than 2 miles from a school, then the school districts were often, especially in the flat country, 4 miles wide and 4 miles high. So that would be 16 square miles to a school district with a school sitting right in the middle. Sometimes the farmer could not get out of sight of the school from his tractor, his team of horses, but they sat on the school board.

The property taxes for that 16-square-mile chunk of that school district funded the entire school, and the school board was elected from the property owners that lived and raised their families and farmed within that 16-square-mile section. And so the elected school board then approved the curriculum, hired the teacher, built the school, carried in the coal, carried out the ashes, fixed anything on the playground, and pretty much it was a community center for that area.

But as we watched those young people grow up in the country schools and get that education with a single teacher in grades K through 12, and then later on the high school students would go on to the nearest town to go to school, but as that happened, we established a commitment to education, a tradition for education that I believe is second to none in the country, primarily because it is rooted in that commitment to education to the extent that in our State budget we commit 62 percent of the entire budget to education.

If we did that in this Congress, there would be a lot of thunder to pay, and I would hear a lot from over on this side, but it is important to not let children fall behind. And as the President addressed the ``soft bigotry of low expectations,'' let us push all of them to reach their expectations.

And I will say this: I would not have voted for No Child Left Behind had I been in this Congress when that bill came up, because it was not something that Iowa needed. But we have it, and we are going to meet the regulations on that. And there is funding for No Child Left Behind, but we have it because we want to lift those students up in those States that do not have that kind of support, whose States are not committing 62 percent of their budget to education. And I am committed to reaching out to those students because we want to again maximize the sum total of the productivity of our people. And education equates to prosperity and prosperity equates also to freedom, and I am all about the freedom.

But when we hear that it is underfunded, do not buy into that. There is a difference in this Congress between authorization and appropriation. Authorization is a number that says, all right, we can appropriate up to this number, but there is a cap; do not appropriate beyond that.

So authorization almost always is higher than appropriation, and when we hear over here the criticism that No Child Left Behind is underfunded, that is the measure of, well, it was not appropriated up to the level of the authorization, it was somewhere down here.

And if we look back at the criticism we have seen with the Bush administration, tracked through the previous administration, and I can say his name, President Clinton, in 1994, the last time that there was a Democrat in White House and a majority in this House for the Democrats and also for the other body, I have to say, the authorization for the education bill was higher than the appropriation. They had the chance to do it, and they did not fund it; but they are not willing to accept the criticism that it was underfunded education then. And we did not argue that it was cut. Now I am hearing an argument that would not have fit in 1994. If the shoe did not fit then, it does not fit now.

With regard to Homeland Security, Homeland Security was formed by putting together a number of different agencies into the Department of Homeland Security. And it was done quickly, and it was done in the climate of the beginning of the war on terror and in an effort to find a way to reach out and gather together the information and the data that we needed to quickly establish a way to protect and secure this country from what we anticipated very soon would be another domestic attack.

I want to compliment our FBI and our law enforcement people and Homeland Security to the extent that they were all involved in protecting this Nation; and we have intercepted a number of terrorist attacks on our soil. There

has not been a significant one on United States soil since September 11, 2001. We have to call that a success. We have to believe that al Qaeda wants to hit us. In fact, if we look at Spain, it is pretty clear that they are going to be turning their sights on us in a far more aggressive way. Maybe a little more on that later.

But Homeland Security, FBI, to the extent that the CIA has turned out information that has helped us overseas in the war on terror, we have been safe in our homes and on our streets from these attacks, not at a small cost, at a high cost. Those agencies that were put together for Homeland Security were put together with an effort to save money. Merge these agencies, get rid of duplications of services, provide those savings, and then be able to roll those savings into more appropriate ways to spend money.

Looking at 2 years' budget in the Department of Homeland Security, we are looking at nearly double-digit increases each year. And where does it stop? And when we build on a 10 or 12 percent increase, we have got the line in the graph going up dramatically. The next year we are up here, and we build again another 9\1/2\ percent on homeland security, I do not believe we have the mechanisms in place to be sure that we are spending that money appropriately.

I believe there is a significant amount of money that is wasted in Homeland Security, and I happen to have information that we have bureaucrats there who are making $150,000 a year, in another department, retired, took their golden parachute, their $100,000 a year, and went on to answer the phones at Homeland Security and started to cash a $150,000 check. That adds up to about a quarter of a million dollars to answer the phone, and I think we can hire people in this city for $25,000 a year to do that, not $250,000 a year.

That just addresses the wage waste that I believe is there; it does not address the inefficiencies that I believe are there. And I do not think that we are able to scrutinize Homeland Security enough because all of us in this Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, live in fear of another attack; and if there is an attack on this country tomorrow, we can bet the fingers will be pointed at me for even uttering criticism.

But I think we have a responsibility in this Congress to hold each department responsible to prudently spend tax dollars, and if they cannot do that, then we cut their budget until they find the savings. We are looking also for waste, fraud, and abuse, but each department will find them if we squeeze their budget down.

And, by the way, I do not get all that motivated about being able to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That just does not get me to charge the windmills. I want to balance this budget, and I supported the Republican Study Committee budget today because I think it goes closer to what we need to do to put fiscal accountability in.

We need to grow our economy. We need to make the tax cuts permanent. We need to do a lot more to take this burden of the public sector off the backs of the private sector. But we need to move this country towards a balanced budget sooner rather than later.

This budget we approved tonight moves us in that direction. I would have preferred that it had been more dramatically, but I am absolutely opposed to the idea that we can raise taxes, balance the budget, and there are not economic prices to pay. Certainly there are.

So I listened to some of the other debate tonight. The discussion about the Bush administration, again using that outsourcing, because unfair trade practices are costing us jobs within this country. Yes, we are losing jobs in this country. We are losing some of our manufacturing base, our textiles industry. And I am wondering why that should be a mystery to anyone when we look at the tax burden that we have, the regulatory burden that we have.

Over $850 billion is the weight of the regulatory burden from the Federal Government alone, and so when we are paying a tax burden that has a 22 percent embedded cost in anything that we might export overseas and we are competing against foreign countries who have 68 cents an hour with the same kind of equipment on the lathe or the punch press, and they are producing products coming into the United States, it is not just unfair trade practices. It is people working far cheaper than we are willing to do, and we cannot compete with those kinds of wages in perpetuity without improving our productivity for every single worker. I do not know how we can do that, especially in competition with developing nations in the lower-skilled jobs. So we can expect that we are going to be seeing jobs drift overseas.

What I want to do is slow that loss of those jobs and I want to incent the creation of new jobs, high-tech jobs, and I want to hold the industrial base in this country. We have got to hold some industrial base. If we do not, we will not have the facilities to build our military equipment, and that makes us vulnerable to the rest of the world. But outsourcing jobs, it is competition, and there is a reason why those jobs are going. I will come back to that in a moment.

I also want to associate myself with the remarks made by the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) tonight with regard to the nuclear power. It is about time somebody stepped down to the floor of this Congress and spoke about clean energy, nuclear energy, the accident- free energy and the environmentally friendly energy. I compliment the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) for those remarks, and I think we need to raise this kind of subject matter continually until the public begins to realize the safety and the efficiency and the cleanliness that we get with our nuclear fuel.

But it is not the only kind of environmentally friendly fuel, not the only kind of fuel that is good for our economy. Being from Iowa and being from the number one corn-producing State, I have to raise the issue of ethanol. Ethanol does those things, too, and we produce not quite 3 gallons of ethanol out of every bushel of corn, and we are producing millions and millions of gallons of ethanol in Iowa and across the country.

I have some numbers here that I think will be of interest. In Iowa, we produce ethanol out of an estimated 262 million bushels of corn, and that is a lot of corn. In 1980, we produced 175 million gallons of ethanol. Today, in this country, we have 74 plants, and they have a capacity of 3.1 billion gallons of ethanol production. As we develop and build that production, we believe that that production will go to 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol for the year 2004, which is a 25 percent increase over 2003 in ethanol production.

This ethanol does a whole series of good things for this country. One, it is a value-added ag product and it is multi-pricing its value close to home, close to the corn stalk; and that value added there creates jobs, jobs in a location where we have been losing jobs over the last 20 to 30 years. It puts the dollars back in, keeps them there, there are good paying jobs and we add value to that.

We are able to take the byproduct from the ethanol plants and feed it back to livestock. Whether it is distillers grain or gluten, it has a tremendously high demand for the feed value. I happened to run across a lady just yesterday who has a whole series of recipes to take the distillers grain and turn it into cookies and bars and neat little things like that. You will not know what you might be eating within the Capitol cafeteria here in the next couple years if we can find another way to add value to our corn.

Ethanol is clean, clean burning and environmentally friendly. It replaces MTBEs. MTBEs are declared to some degree to be a likely carcinogen. I would ask you, would you rather drink a glass of ethanol, or would you rather drink some MTBEs? But it is environmentally friendly.

We have an energy crisis in this country. The gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) and I are addressing the energy situation here tonight. As we look across our entire economy, I will tell you that there is a component, there is an energy component in anything that we do. Whether you are producing a product or a service or delivering it, there is a production cost of energy, and there is a transportation cost of energy.

So I am going to tell you that I think there is an E-tax on everything that we

buy, and it is related to the energy cost. But the energy is not what the E stands for in my E-tax; it is the environmental cost, the unnecessary regulatory environmental cost that goes on top of all of our energy in this country.

Natural gas is critically important to us. In our part of the country, we use natural gas for all the traditional things that it gets used for in all the rest of the country with regard to heating our homes and our factories and providing the energy to manufacture those goods that we are marketing.

But also we use natural gas for drying grain in the fall, and we use natural gas for producing nitrogen anhydrous ammonia so we can raise more corn in the spring. Sometimes in the fall we have fall applications too. That makes us more vulnerable to natural gas prices than maybe anyplace else in the country.

In addition, natural gas is used to produce ethanol. So there is a component of that gas price that is a cost of every gallon of ethanol we produce. When natural gas prices are unnaturally high, that puts a burden then on the Midwest, on the corn belt, and really on the rest of the United States, because the ethanol we have goes into 30 percent of the pumps across America, and it is going to get to be more and more as time goes on.

This environment tax is a challenge for us, and it is an unjust burden for the cost of our energy, and I am sensitive to this environmental burden. For example, the transportation bill, we have with Federal user fee on a per gallon of gas, which is 18.3 cents per gallon, out of that 18.3 cents, that money goes then to build our roads.

Well, that is okay with us. When we put the hose in the tank, we expect we are going to pay 18.3 cents for Federal, and whatever your particular State gas user fee is. In Iowa I think our numbers add up to 41 cents or 43 cents a gallon. The 18.3 is Federal.

Of that, and according to a very well-informed chairman in this Congress, 28 percent of that amount goes to pay for environmental costs, what it costs to go around a wetland, what is costs to build a bridge across a river from hill to hill so you do not go down a scenic area, for example, or any of the environmental burdens of going in and doing the archeological study, doing the environmental impact study.

All of these costs that are obstructions along the way of building our roads take 28 percent out of that entire user fee that we think we need to, and we do need to, go out and build more roads, because transportation is an essential component of economic development. It is the very first component of economic development.

Now we have taken 28 percent out of transportation fees to spend it for environmental interests, and nobody knows that. The American people do not know that, that when they put the gas hose in their tank and squeeze down on that nozzle that for every dollar's worth of gas that they buy, or every dollar that goes to the Federal Government for the road fee, 28 cents of that is going to take care of the environmental demands.

The environmentalists have become an obstruction to the economic growth in this country and raised the cost of transportation. They have raised the cost of natural gas.

We have a lot of natural gas in Colorado, but we cannot get it to market because the environmentalists block it. I have yet to see a natural gas well that polluted anything. If you have a leak, the gas dissipates, and if you have a spill it dissipates. From my perspective, maybe they object to the idea of looking at a derrick for 4, 6, or 8 weeks while there is a well drilled that will tap into the natural gas. Then you tear the derrick down and put a little head there and run a line to it, and there is your gas well. There is no logical reason why we cannot develop natural gas wells in Colorado where we have a good supply.

Last year on the energy bill in this Congress, we had an amendment on the energy bill, and this amendment simply would have inventoried the natural gas offshore for Florida, just to go out there and calculate how much is there, and then if we can calculate how much there is, maybe we can also know we have a reserve and start to plan our energy development strategy and not be dependent upon foreign energy. But we could not pass the amendment that simply inventoried natural gas reserves offshore for the State of Florida. That tells you how strong the environmental interests are and how much of a religion it has become.

My life, by the way, has been about soil and water quality and environmental issues. I spent 35 years of my life building terraces and farm ponds and waterways and wetlands and enhancing mother nature and sending the rain drop down through the soil profile, which is what purifies the water. My life has been about soil conservation and water quality, and I would not be supporting a policy that undermined our environment. But I believe it has morphed into a religion rather than logic.

So we need to promote this ethanol market, and we need to move the energy bill, and we need to promote natural gas drilling in the lower 48 States and where we can tap into this gas, up on the North Slope. We have got to move this energy bill that is over in the other body. Remember, I cannot say that, the people over there in the other body. We need to move that bill so that we can get our ethanol production up and going, so that we can get our biodiesel production up and going, and so that we can bring a natural gas pipeline down from the North Slope of Alaska into the lower 48 States to be able to slow this increase in gas prices.

That is part of the energy component. But, in addition, the oil exploration in the United States has diminished significantly within the last year. We have gone from a 10 percent share of the world's investment in exploration down to a 7 percent share. We have the same environmental concerns.

I saw advertisements on television that showed beautiful forests, and it said ANWR. The ANWR up in Alaska stands for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But when you see that it says Arctic, when you see an advertisement that shows you pine trees and a beautiful forest and mountain scenery, do not fall for that if it says it is ANWR, because Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that word Arctic is a key phrase.

If you go back to your 8th grade geography, you have the equator around the middle of the Earth, and you have the Arctic and Antarctic. When you ask the question how did they define the line around the top and bottom of the globe that defined the difference between the temperate zones and the Arctic, that was defined by that line of the Arctic Circle, the point north of which trees could not grow.

So if you see a picture of trees and it is identified as ANWR, you will know that it is not, because trees do not grow up there. I went up to take a look at ANWR to verify this for myself.

By the way, I flew over the North Slope oil fields. As we looked down on those oil fields, and I have worked in the oil fields and know a little bit about that, but I looked down from the air and they said we are flying over the North Slope oil fields.

Well, I do not see any oil pumps down here; I do not see any oil wells, roads or collection systems. How do you know that we are over the oil fields in the North Slope?

The answer was, well, look at those little square white patches down there. We were at about 750 feet in altitude, and you can see them clearly. They are white patches, patches of white rock that are about 2 to 3 feet above the Arctic coastal plain, and those are pads that work over rigs, have a place to pull up and sit on the level, if they have to go into a casing and pull a submersible pump and maybe do some repair work there.

But there is not a pump jack out there that you can see anywhere, the old traditional oil pumps. There is no leakage going on around the rod that some people think is going to drip on the soil and pollute the soil. These are submersible pumps with a collection system that is invisible; and when it gathers that all together and goes off to the terminal and then off to the refinery, the only place you see is the terminal.

Then you see the Alaska pipeline, that large pipeline. You can see that go across the Yukon River. But there are not roads to each one of these wells, because we only go in there in the wintertime on ice roads, and then the ice melts and there is no sign of damage.

Another thing that is a misnomer, a mistake, a misunderstanding and a perpetration of something that is an untruth, is the argument that well, you

will never get the tundra back. Once you tear up the tundra it is gone forever.

We met up there at Kaktovik, a small little Eskimo town of 290 people right on the Arctic shore, not a tree in sight, I will remind you; and there the President of the Eskimo Corporation, and his name is Fenton Rexford, pointed ought to us they have reestablished tundra, and it is not that unusual.

But if it should get torn up, and some of that has happened over the years in his lifetime experience, and he was about 56 or 57 years old, they would go in and drag that smooth and seed it over; and in 5 to 6 years, the tundra had grown back again. I saw some of that from the air. The difference that I could tell was that it was a little brighter green. You know how new seeding looks after you plant your grass in the spring before it gets established? Five or 6 years later it all flows in, so we can reestablish tundra. We will not damage tundra. We are going to have ice roads.

There is no logical reason not to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We should be ashamed that this Congress cannot step up and put up a vote that allows that to happen.

This House approved, took a look at an amendment, that would have allowed for the disturbing of only 2,000 acres on 19.5 million acres. That is all they really asked for to go in and start to develop that.

I had people on the floor of this Congress on that night come up and ask me, How much is an acre? How much is 2,000 acres? And my answer was, Well that is not even a good-sized farm where I come from. A tiny little spot on 19.5 million acres. And even that would not be disturbed, but only just a little bit.

Then there is the concern about the environment. What do we do if the caribou herd is decimated by developing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Well, we developed the oil wells on the North Slope of Alaska, not very far from there, in the same type of topography. The caribou herd in 1970 was 7,000 caribou.

As I was up there last August, that caribou herd is 28,000 caribou. So it cannot be argued that we damaged the environment for the caribou; and it can be argued that we improved it, that they come up on the pad where they are not having calves down in the swamp, where the calves might freeze and die, and they get up where the breeze can blow the flies away, and they like to get next to the warm pipeline. All of those things were improvements in the living area, the living room, living space of the caribou.

When I pointed that thought to a reporter sometime back, he said, well, of course the population went from 7,000 to 28,000 caribou, because those pipeliners went up there and shot all the wolves, so they did not have a natural enemy any longer.

I had a little trouble keeping a straight face with that. Of course, that is not the case. If any pipeliners had fired a gun at any animal, they would be gone in a hurry and punished severely.

We need a comprehensive energy policy. We need to develop our natural gas from an inventory off the coast of Florida, access the natural gas in Colorado, build the natural gas pipeline from the North slope of Alaska on down to the lower 48 States, and we need to renew our efforts to drill for oil in ANWR, and we need to promote all of the ethanol we can promote and all of the biodiesel we can promote.

By the way, the wind is a pretty good project too. One day I went up to a groundbreaking ceremony for an ethanol plants in Cherokee County, Iowa. We turned over a couple spades of dirt there and congratulated each other. By the way, that project is moving along very, very well.

As I drove from there across country through about 20 miles as the crow flies from the grand opening of an ethanol plant, I drove through 259 wind chargers that we have on an area called Buffalo Ridge producing electricity, surrealistically spinning in the wind and pumping that electricity down for collection in the feeder line, and from there down to a second ethanol plant, all within about 20 miles.

And the thought occurred to me, the area that I represent, 5 to 6 years earlier had no, no energy production whatsoever, and today we are an energy export center. We are an energy export center that takes some of the burden off of importing foreign oil and enhances our environment, and it multiplies and value-adds to our economy. It does all the things we need to do environmentally and it replaces MTBEs.

Now, those are all good things that come from technology and capital investment. By the way, these are private sector investments, not public sector subsidies.

I have another issue with regard to transportation in my part of the world, the Missouri River. In about 1952 there was a huge flood that flooded the bottoms all the way from north of Sioux City clear down through Missouri. There was a tremendous effort put together and it ended up being a fixed loan program to build six dams on the upper Missouri River to control flooding, to control flooding and to generate hydroelectric power, and to be able to promote some, some irrigation, and to establish barge and transportation traffic along that corridor of the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, all the way to St. Louis.

That project is an amazingly efficient hydrological engineering accomplishment. It has worked very well since 1952. We have not had the flooding damage that we had had in previous years; it solved the flooding, it has given us our barge traffic, it has kept the cost of transportation on the rail lines and on the truck lines down, and it has produced economic hydroelectric energy that comes out of the dam where the turbines are.

Well, we are going through a drought cycle and because of that, there was an unanticipated economic piece up in the Dakotas and in Montana. When they built the reservoirs, they stocked them with walleye, and so folks from all over the country would go up there to fish for walleye. Now, when the drought came, the water table went down, and it went down to 25 feet and maybe a little more below that static water table where they would have liked to have been able to maintain the pool. That, of course, diminished the habitat for the fish, diminished the recreational aspects of it and caused some of the docks to be 1 mile or more from the water.

Well, that is unfortunate and that is a tragedy, but we cannot make it rain. And when it rains, it will fix that problem. There is nothing we can do to enhance the water tables upstream; even if we shut our dams down all winter long, we can only gain about a foot of water a month. But the recreational interest in the Dakotas took a look at how they would build a coalition.

I heard the name of these species for the first time in October of 1993: The least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon, three species that I had never heard of before, and they were species that were either threatened or endangered that lived and relied upon the Missouri River for their environmental habitat.

In 1993, we had a massive flood in Iowa. The Missouri River did not flood, but almost everything was under water regardless. I came out here to Washington, D.C. in October of 1993 to a Midwest flood reconstruction and cleanup conference. There, the Director of Fish and Wildlife, who was the lead agency on the flood recovery team, Molly Beatty, and a fine young lady who tragically passed away of a brain aneurysm some years ago, but she came before us and she said, Agriculture looks upon this flood as an economic disaster; frankly, we here at Fish and Wildlife look upon it as habitat rehabilitation.

Madam Speaker, that did not make me happy when I heard that. That put animals ahead of man. We are to have dominion over this Earth. We have a Missouri River master manual plan that denotes how the water flow will be managed, and it was going to be altered and changed in the interests of these three species, and I wrote them down: the least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon. In October of 1993 it was in my notes, and I have not forgotten those species since, and we are still battling with them. By my calculation, this came up about 12 years ago. We are still on it. And they are still using the species to try to alter the flow, try to do a spring rise with the idea that if we raise the water table in the river and let it charge down the river long enough and hard

enough, it will wash the willows off the sandbars and then, when the river goes down, that is a place for the birds to nest.

The environmentalists will not let the Corps pick up the nests and move them out of the way of the high water that could take them out. That would not be natural. The pallid sturgeons have to be floated out into the Ox Bows so they can lay their eggs out there, and then the river comes back down.

Well, they swim around the Ox Bows all summer long and the ones the pelicans do not get, we have to raise the river again and go out and round them back up again. Surely we have negotiated a little bit and some of this logic does not connect as well as it did 11 years ago when I dealt with it.

But this diminishes the efficiency of the river, and I must stand on the flood control, the hydroelectric, and the transportation side of this, and I will do so. We need to continue to work with the Corps, and this Congress will ultimately, I believe, have to address the situation.

There is another issue before our economy, and it is an issue that the American public speaks very little of, but it is a burden that we all carry. And that is this burden of litigation that is on the backs of this entire economy. Some time back I sat down at a meeting at the boardroom table at Merrill Lynch up in New York City. Their building was the nearest building to Ground Zero of the September 11 attacks, the nearest building to survive. They lost the glass out of that building, something like 32 stories up, and you cannot look over that railing and believe that we are not in a war. That was a war zone.

But that briefing focused on tort reform. And in that briefing, there was a compelling case made that convinces me that 3 percent of our gross domestic product is being consumed by litigation, by the trial lawyers, by lawsuits in this country, 3 percent of our domestic product.

Now, if we want to grow this economy and grow this economy at a reasonable rate so that we can have enhancements in technology and improvements in transportation and improvements in our infrastructure and be able to educate our young people so that they can pick up the balance and they can do the same, if we want to do that, we have to grow this economy an average of about 3.5 percent.

Fortunately, today, we are running on about a 4.1 percent growth, so we are ahead of that curve just a little. But even though we have that 3.5 percent growth, it is not enough, because the trial lawyers get 3 percent right off the top. So we have to grow at 6.5 percent to sustain, to sustain our way of life and to have that extra revenue that it takes to meet a growing population and the demands on our infrastructure. Three percent off the top to the trial lawyers.

There is a series of malpractice pieces that we have dealt with in the House Committee on the Judiciary and brought to the floor of this Congress. One of them is medical malpractice. There are awards that go way beyond anything that is logical. We can go back to the cup of coffee and the fast food chain that was looking at a huge settlement because the lady spilled hot coffee on herself and seemed to be surprised that it burned her. That has been negotiated back some. But we have had to step in, this Congress, and defend those fast food chains, not because of the hot coffee, but because of a calculated nationwide strategy that is driven to us by the class action lawyers that they are going after the large industry of fast food, that large industry that employs 12 million people in this country and is viewed as having very deep pockets, to tap into them. Because why? They super- size our french fries.

Now, what a surrealistic world we live in when we debate on the floor of Congress how we are going to protect people because a group of class action lawyers, and also working sometimes in conjunction with the State attorneys general, are going to file a lawsuit to sue people who serve food in a healthy and efficient fashion. As if it is a surprise to any of us that if we eat greasy foods, it might clog our arteries.

We accept that, but I reject the idea that it should clog our courts. It should not go into our courts whatsoever. It is a frivolous lawsuit, but yet in this Congress, we have to step forward and protect the fast food chains or they will be decimated in the same fashion as the asbestos companies have been decimated.

We have lost 60 companies in the United States due to asbestos litigation, and now they are going into the second phase and they are filing suit against the successor companies.

I am calling upon the people in this other body, those folks over there with 100 people that go to work doing the same thing we do here, let us get the asbestos legislation moved. Let us protect those people. Let us save those Fortune 500 companies that put their capital up and lifted those bankrupted asbestos companies out and put them back into some kind of production.

There is not any kind of responsibility that can be put on our Fortune 500 successor companies with regard to asbestos, and it is essential that we move forward; and it is essential that the other body move forward quickly before this cannot be resolved and the horses are all out of the barn.

So medical malpractice, another one. I will say that we went to California for a model. It is not the first thing I advocate. But in this case, in California, they established a limited medical malpractice of $250,000 for noneconomic damages. We assure, in our medical malpractice limitation that we passed here in this House of Representatives, we assure that anyone who is injured by medical malpractice is made whole. They get their medical bills paid and they get made whole economically.

But when it comes to punitive damages, not just pain and suffering, but punitive damages, we cap those. We cap the noneconomic damages at $250,000. It takes away some of the incentive to go out there and go ambulance chasing, and it still allows the patients who need relief to receive that relief. That bill needs to move from the other body as well.

This economy is being dragged down because we are not able to get the litigation reform, the malpractice, and the asbestos and the fast food chains and all of these reforms, we are not able to get those into place. We have to get that done. If they can move those over in the other body, then we will bring more here in this Congress. We are actually holding back because we do not want to stack up too much work over there.

The same subject matter, a runaway judiciary. In 8th grade civics classes we learn that we have three branches of government. We have the executive branch, which is the President and all of the people that support his endeavors, the Cabinet and their agencies. We have the legislative branch, which is us in this Chamber and the folks in the other body. And then of course we have the judicial branch, and they are all three designed to have a separation of powers, a healthy, static tension between them, and a bright line between the separation of powers.

Today, what I have seen happen in the judiciary branch is an ever- growing activism, an activism that, I would have said a year ago had blurred the line between the legislative branch and the judicial branch of government. But today I will tell my colleagues, the line is no longer blurred. It is literally obliterated. We have an activist court that believes that they can take any responsibility into their hands and they can usurp the authority of the United States Congress or any other legislative body within the United States of America.

That separation of powers is something that threatens our Constitution and our way of life itself. It is essential that we redefine this line of the separation of powers between the judicial and the legislative branch. If we do not, we will have a constitutional crisis, and the government of the people and by the people will perish from this Earth if we fail to redefine this line. I declare that an impending constitutional crisis.

A couple examples would be the affirmative action cases, the University of Michigan, when Michigan was bestowing a certain academic value to being a minority. The case of Grutter v. Bollinger was one of the Michigan cases. The Supreme Court ruled that diversity, as indexed to ethnicity had, if the university believed they had the right critical mass, that that diversity had academic value. The Supreme

Court ruled that the diversity had academic value.

Now, I will argue that diversity of human experience may have academic value if it is a good and essential and positive experience that can be shared in a classroom. And it is good to interact with people of all ethnicities from all over the world, and the more of that experience you can get, the better your educational experience is.

But ethnicity does not have academic value. The Supreme Court ruled it did. They concurred with the University of Michigan and said, you reached that critical mass, you can be the sole determiner of that critical mass of diversity. Then, what we will do with this is, we are going to let you continue down this path, although you cannot have just a formula that spits something out of a spreadsheet, you have to have something that deals with each one of these individual students.

Well, okay, so it takes a little more attention to get the same result. But, in the end, the court suspended the 14th amendment, the equal protection clause that is established in our Constitution, suspended equal protection so we could have a critical mass of diversity as defined by the university, because that diversity, as indexed to skin color, had, in the minds of the court, academic value. And then the court, in its majority opinion, ruled that perhaps in 25 years, we can go back and we can revisit this subject matter of preferential treatment and affirmative action, revisit this subject matter and maybe, perhaps, this civilization, this culture, this American populace, will have moved forward into the new world far enough that we can then reestablish the 14th amendment equal protection clause, and maybe we do not need to have critical mass of diversity that we are going to declare to have academic value again.

Where does that come from, Justices? How do you believe that you can suspend the 14th amendment, for academic value on skin color and think we will be able to adhere back to our Constitution again? And if this Constitution does not mean what it says, if it can be suspended as simply myopic as this idea of critical mass of diversity, if that can happen, what meaning does the Constitution have whatsoever? Is it simply a document that happened to fall in our laps that the Founding Fathers stumbled across and stumbled into, and it happened to be a convenient thing that got us through the first 220 or so years of our existence?

Or is it something that means what it says? Is it something that has a provision for amendment for a reason that we are to adhere to the Constitution, the letter of the Constitution and the intent of the Constitution and not deviate from same unless we are willing to step forwards and amend it? That is what our Founding Fathers intended, but it is not what we see happening here in the United States Supreme Court, and it is not what we see happening in the inferior courts that have been established by this Congress.

It is not the only example. And by the way, many of these examples are using foreign courts' opinions. Zimbabwe, Jamaica come to mind as places we can go to be further enlightened on how to better evaluate the original intent of the Constitution and the letter and the intent of our Federal law and our State laws and constitutions and legislation.

Foreign case law imposed upon United States of America? It is impossible to anticipate how the courts will rule given just U.S. court decisions let alone foreign, and some of these countries by the way do not let their people have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or freedom of religion or they cannot go to the polls and elect a leader. So those decisions in the courts will not reflect the will and the character of the people. We need to redefine this line.

The Congress is also culpable; and I will hold them, in fact, more accountable because I think it is natural if you are a member of the executive branch of government, you are going to wanted to expand the authority of the executive branch. That is where you have got the most leverage, and that is where you have the most faith. And if you are a member of the legislative branch, as I am, I wanted to expand the power we have here because I think it reflects the voice of the people; and that voice of the people should be preeminent. And if you are a member of the judicial branch, I cannot image why human nature would not also apply there. And if you are a member of the judicial branch I would think you would want to then expand the power and leverage that you have in the judicial branch.

I do not blame them for that. But I will ask the courts, please rein it in because if you do not rein it in, sooner or later this Congress will. We do have the authority to do so; and if we exercise that will, that sets up a conflict between us. And I would rather see that be resolved in a peaceful way, a willing way with the best interests of the American people than I would want to have to impose that upon the courts. In fact, I am a little apprehensive that we cannot find the will in this Congress until it becomes a crisis.

Speaking of a crisis, the filibuster rules in the other body have set up another impending constitutional crisis. When we have a justice that is appointed to a Federal court and the Constitution requires that the President when he makes his nomination seek ``the advice and consent of,'' and now I have to save the other body, that advice and consent clause that is in our Constitution is something that is very well established. We do not have any problem with the advice part. We get plenty of advice from those people over there and some of it is down right offensive to the nominees. In fact, some of it is just plain out and out religious bias. It is character attacks. Declaring a nominee to be a Neanderthal is beyond the scope of what someone of that position ought to be in.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate your attention tonight and I will take this issue up at a later date.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, March 29, 2004, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debates.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 81 I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address a subject matter, and that subject matter has to do with Spain.

First, I would like to thank the Spanish people and the Spanish leadership that they have had over the past several years for their allegiance to the principles that built this great Nation that we have the privilege to live in, their commitment to free enterprise and their commitment to the allies that we have pulled together in Iraq.

I have watched their economy grow in Spain as free markets took hold, and I have seen that Spain has become a competitor with us and made us both be stronger economically. They stood with us in times of toil, and they stood with us in times of terror. They have stood with us in Iraq, and the warm feeling we got when President Aznar was here to speak before this Chamber was a heartfelt appreciation for a nation that shares with us many of the same ideals and principles.

However, there has been a situation which has changed things dramatically in Spain. We also stand together with the Spanish people in their grief for having lost 201 of their citizens and hundreds of them wounded in the cowardly bombing attack on the trains in Madrid just 2 days before the election. There are not many people on this planet that do not believe that the elections were profoundly changed because of those terrorist attacks.

We know not what went on in the minds of the voters in Spain that would bring them to the conclusion that going down the path of appeasement was preferable to going down the path of fighting terror wherever we find it. But that decision was made by the Spanish people, and we respect their decision. However, the challenge to our President that has been issued by Prime Minister-elect Zapatero that they would withdraw their troops from Spain and realign themselves, and presumably realign themselves with some of the nations in Europe that have opposed our policy in Iraq is a regretful situation.

And we have not seen a leader of a foreign country challenge a seated President in the time of an election as we do on this particular circumstance. In fact, the question I think has been answered, the question of the apparent Democrat nominee for President in this Nation has stated that he has the support of foreign leaders. He will not name those foreign leaders, but I believe one of them has come out and made the endorsement to support the Democrat candidate for President of the United States, thus injecting himself into our domestic politics, thus identifying an individual that might have been referenced by our candidate; thus taking them both down the path to appeasement.

This is a regrettable circumstance. The headline I am looking at is from the Salt Lake Tribune and it says, ``Spanish socialist supports Democratic-apparent nominee.'' Spanish socialist, that should tell us something. Spanish socialist appeaser. The legacy of Neville Chamberlain hangs in the atmosphere across all of Europe today, and the message sent to the terrorists is, you have won.

Al Qaeda understands they have won the election in Spain by blowing up innocent civilians and moving the electorate in Spain toward the socialist candidate, the appeasement candidate.

I do not know what goes on in the minds of voters in a time of grief, but I have to believe and I have to pray that American voters, if confronted with the same thing, will react in an entirely differently fashion. For the last 3 weeks, I have been warning the people in my district and across the country that I fear a terrorist attack in this Nation prior to our Presidential election and an effort to change the election results in this country and elect the candidate who has been endorsed by the socialist from Spain.

Well, I believe the character of the American people is different than the response that we have seen by the Spaniards; and I believe that we will stand up, if that tragic time comes to pass, and now they have certainly been encouraged to attack us in this country because of their success in Spain. I believe we will stand up, and I believe we will stand with George W. Bush, our President, the man who understands terror, defines terror, and knows we

have to fight the terrorists wherever they are, the one who said if you are not with us, you are against us; you are either a terrorist, and if you are a terrorist, we are opposed to you. If you harbor terrorists, if you support terrorists, if you fund terrorists, you are a terrorist. Now there is some habitat in Spain that might cause terrorists to settle in there, and that might potentially be a risk for more terror to come out of there. Maybe they will leave the Spanish people alone, but that does not mean the rest of the people are safe.

So we are confronted with appeasement over there. We need to stand together here. We need to stand together with our allies who have come together behind the United States. No other nation out there seems to be willing to crack and go off in that direction.

We have a large job ahead of us, to stand with our military, those who have given their lives and limbs, those who have given years out of their lives to protect us and protect our freedom.

I will continue to defend our President in this country, and let us be ready for any attacks. If we have to do it, let us go to the polls and defend our war on terror.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today not only because of St. Patrick's Day but because it is also National Agriculture Week. Iowa ranks number one in the Nation in corn, soybean, pork and egg production, and second in total

agricultural exports. We have a fertile State with some of the richest and most productive soil in the world. And we use this resource to provide the safest food supply in the world.

This week I am asking Iowans to celebrate our rich heritage of agricultural production; but I also want us to look with anticipation to the future of agriculture, value-added agriculture, and our youth. Iowa agriculture is no longer just about growing commodities that we ship away by truck, train, or barge. Farmers in western Iowa have realized that if we do all of our business this way our small towns and cities will lose its youth, a very precious resource.

As I look at the youth of my district, I want them to have all the benefits of growing up in a farming community. And I want to see them in our communities making a difference, choosing to raise their families in western Iowa for years to come. There is no better place if we can continue to be innovative in agricultural development.

Our farmers and community leaders have led the charge to develop this new generation of agriculture because we think differently in Iowa. Let us use National Agriculture Week to thank them not only for rich heritage of agriculture production but for looking to the future and building a foundation for a new rural western Iowa.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, I stand here on the floor of this Congress, and I sometimes think I have passed through the looking glass. I wonder what our Founding Fathers would think if 200-some years later we would be standing here with a piece of legislation on the floor debating about someone ordering a super-sized order of french fries and not being able to push themselves away from the table soon enough so that that personal responsibility, so ingrained in the American character, is being pushed off across the entire American society. We might have to add on to every order of french fries if we are not able to protect these food suppliers.

I declined to sign onto this bill, although I support it, for that reason, that if we have to go down the path of protecting individuals and individual professions, we will never get done. I would like to see some blanket reform. But I stand in opposition to the Ackerman amendment.

A couple of points I would make. The Department of Agriculture, on balance, even though they have been more aggressive on downer livestock than I would have cared for, has done an excellent job in response to the BSE. The beef supply in the United States of America is the safest in the world, and the credibility that is there with our producers and the quality of that beef has been established by the confidence, as has been demonstrated by our consumers. That is what has held this market up.

The system we have in place does not need to be shaken up, nor does it need to have the safety of our food supply challenged on the floor of Congress when it has got such an outstanding record. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the Ackerman amendment. The purpose of H.R. 339 is to protect the food industry from having to defend themselves from frivolous lawsuits. Baseless lawsuits drain away our economic productivity and interfere with economic growth.

It is important to point out that this bill does not change the fact that anyone legitimately injured by substandard food can sue. However, the Ackerman amendment would open the door for countless groundless suits that could potentially bankrupt our agra businesses and our farmers.

I believe this amendment is a schematic way to gut the purpose of the entire bill, allowing Americans to continue to avoid taking responsibility for food choices.

With that said, I am opposed to the amendment that defines a downer animal. I am from western Iowa. In my State, we raise about 25 percent of the pork. This amendment would put market hogs in the same category as older cows that are to be tested for BSE; but as clearly stated by the gentleman from Texas, there is no linkage there between a downer animal and a diseased animal.

Market hogs can suffer unintended injuries on the way to market that cause walking problems and thus subject them to this amendment. But these injuries have nothing to do with the safety and quality of the meat we eat. It is also important to note that hogs are not subject to neurological diseases like BSE. So I urge the body to oppose the Ackerman amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) yielding me this time, and I profoundly appreciate the work of the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Hart) on this issue, as well as the work of the chairman and the subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot).

I urge Members to vote against the Lofgren substitute amendment. At issue today is whether there is one victim or two. When a pregnant woman is murdered, there are two victims. When a pregnant woman is injured and her baby dies, the law must recognize that and punish her violent attacker.

Pregnant women deserve the full protection of our laws. When Laci Peterson and Conner Peterson were killed, there were two victims. This substitute treats Laci's child as if he never existed. Conner did exist. Laci and her family were looking forward to his birth. If we allow Federal law to recognize only one victim, we are guilty of covering up for the criminal who robs an expectant mother and in other cases the father and the rest of the family of their baby. Grieving family members need to know that criminals will pay the full price for killing their son or daughter and that society recognizes their loss. No woman should ever be told she has lost nothing when she loses her unborn child to a brutal attacker. Women deserve better than this. We should recognize her injury, and we should pursue justice.

Roe v. Wade may, and I pray temporarily, provide for a woman to decide temporarily the fate of her unborn child, but this does not affect the Roe v. Wade decision. What we are proposing is someone else stepping into the shoes of the mother. I urge Members to vote for Laci and Conner's law, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and I thank the sponsors of this bill, the chairman of the committee, and the folks who have worked so hard.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Israel's security fence. Next month the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague is scheduled to hold hearings on the international legality of Israel's security fence and it is my hope that the court will rule Israel's security fence a necessary measure to protect their people from the people who believe that their way to salvation is by killing Jewish women and children.

The construction of the temporary and defensive barrier is a legitimate means of protection and the lawfulness or appropriateness of this measure is not the issue. At issue is simply the question of whether complex and contentious issues can and should be placed before the International Court of Justice. The United Nations should not be imposing their politics on the sovereign nation of Israel.

The ICJ has been acting in an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalistic and anti-self-defensive manner. The court does not mention the fact that Israel is building the security fence to protect Israelis from over 20,000 attacks and that they have the right of self-defense and the attacks are the result of the Palestinian leadership's failure to take measures to prevent terrorism. Furthermore, the Palestinian government glorifies homicide bombers as martyrs and Yasser Arafat, the agent of terror, is still calling the shots and is a clear obstacle to President Bush's road map to peace.

Congress must send a powerful and clear signal to the U.N. and to the Palestinian Authority that the United States will not allow either to compromise the freedom and safety of the Jewish people.