Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it's an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And I want to say that I appreciate the presentation that came from just some of the great team of doctors that we have here, especially on the Republican side of the United States Congress. I occasionally sit with these learned individuals, and I learn a lot from them, and I'm grateful that the American people have been able to review their presentation here tonight, looking at the numbers and the dollars that have come out of the health care because of this great burden of ObamaCare.

You know, I was thinking of the necessity for us to continue to remind Americans, ObamaCare is right now the law of the land. It is the law of the land. And until such time as this Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court should find it to be completely unconstitutional, it will remain the law of the land.

Mr. Speaker, the American people need to be reminded that even though it's creeping in on us, and people are realizing what ObamaCare is doing, a few people at a time, it is an insidious creep of a malignant tumor that is metastasizing and consuming American liberty, and it has to go.

If we look back at the special elections in Ohio 2 or 3 weeks ago, on it were several ballot initiatives. The second ballot initiative was one that rejected the collective bargaining initiative that had been initiated by Governor Kasich. It was a tough loss for Governor Kasich. I think he was right, but he lost in the ballot place because there was a liberal-heavy, union-heavy turnout in the State of Ohio for that special election night 2 or 3 weeks ago. And by 61 percent, the Kasich- initiated ballot initiative that limited collective bargaining was shot down by a union-heavy, liberal-heavy turnout. And they spent a lot of money in Ohio to turn out that type of a base.

But in the same ballot, the next item down, ballot initiative No. 2 was collective bargaining. No. 3 was a constitutional amendment to amend the Constitution of the State of Ohio to protect Ohioans from ObamaCare, to be able to reject the individual mandate and a whole series, about three different points there, to amend the constitution to protect Ohioans from the ObamaCare mandate.

And, with a union-heavy, liberal-heavy turnout in Ohio in which 61 percent said ``no'' to Governor Kasich on collective bargaining, sixty- six percent of that voting universe voted to protect Ohioans from ObamaCare and to reject ObamaCare by amending their State constitution. That's a serious step, to step forward and amend the State constitution. But they did so in an effort to reject ObamaCare in the State of Ohio.

Now, Mr. Speaker, that is a resounding rejection, that two out of every three people that went to the polls rejected ObamaCare. I will tell you that the American people are poised to do so if they're reminded that it exists out there. And there are two things that protect the American people, two stops along the way that can keep ObamaCare from becoming the perpetually institutionalized permanent law of the land, and that would be when the Supreme Court hears the case and yields a decision. I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, that there is no severability clause in all 2,600 pages of ObamaCare. No severability clause.

What that means to the lay person is this: If a component of ObamaCare is found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, then all of ObamaCare is thrown out by the Supreme Court. There's no provision that stipulates that if a component is unconstitutional, then the other components will stand on their own.

That is not just an ignorant omission on the part of the people that drafted and promoted and voted for ObamaCare. They knew it didn't have a severability clause in it. I knew it didn't have a severability clause in it. That means every Member of Congress had the opportunity to know that it didn't have a severability clause. So Congress willfully and intentionally passed an ObamaCare piece of legislation that didn't provide that if a part of it is found to be unconstitutional, the balance of it would be found to be constitutional. And the important component of that then, Mr. Speaker is this. If a part is found unconstitutional, it's all unconstitutional, and all 2,600 pages of ObamaCare then, by a Supreme Court decision, will be rendered null and void.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, there are exceptions to those types of decisions by the Supreme Court. But generally speaking, the court honors and respects a willful decision of the legislative branch. If that willful decision is that there be no severability clause, the Supreme Court should understand that that wasn't an accident. It was an unintentional omission. It was a willful omission because the drafters and the proponents of ObamaCare, of which I am not one, understood that if a part of it is found to be unconstitutional, the rest of it collapses anyway of its own weight.

The components of this that prop up ObamaCare are cutting that $575 billion out of Medicare to fund other parts of ObamaCare and then ending Medicare Advantage. The individual mandate that's in there, all of this is delicately drafted to try to find a way to argue that it could be paid for. And of course, they discovered that the CLASS Act in ObamaCare couldn't sustain itself. The numbers that they had advanced to try to pass it aren't sustainable. And so the administration

has decided they're not going to move forward with the CLASS Act, this piece that is, let's say, retirement home insurance funded out of ObamaCare. They thought that was going to save money; they found out that it was going to cost money. So they'll drop that.

This Congress has passed a couple of repeals of pieces of ObamaCare. One of them is, out of this House at least, is the 1099 squeal form piece of ObamaCare. So it's been taken apart to some degree. And the underpinnings of ObamaCare are starting to cause it to crumble. If the Supreme Court finds any part of it unconstitutional, Mr. Speaker, they will be well aware that no severability clause does not indicate an omission by accident on the part of Congress; that somehow the Supreme Court would re-create on a decision by the Supreme Court. They need to know it was a willful decision, it was premeditated, it was thought out, and the decision was no severability clause because ObamaCare, if any part of it is taken out by it being found unconstitutional--and I believe there are about four areas where it is unconstitutional--then all parts of ObamaCare must go.

I appreciate the doctors that came to the floor tonight to educate the American people on the bad components of ObamaCare. I would like to encourage, Mr. Speaker, the American people to know that we are focused on repealing 100 percent of ObamaCare; ripping it all out by the roots and leaving not one vestige of it left behind, not one particle, not one sign of its DNA. Because if we leave any component of ObamaCare, it will grow back on us like the roots of a bad weed and/or the virus, or the malignant tumor, as I said. I would ask the doctors this. You take out a malignant tumor. If you leave part it, it will grow back. I don't want to leave one part of this malignant tumor of ObamaCare. I want American liberty to thrive. So ObamaCare must go.

Ohioans have rejected it by roughly a 2-1 margin--66 percent. And Ohio is middle America. If you're going to win the Presidency, you must win Ohio. President Obama knows that. That's why he visits Ohio as often as he does with Air Force One. Or, did we call that Fundraiser One. He visits these swing States--about 11 swing States--with the President of the United States flying in and out with Air Force One. Yes, just propping up public policy--no, not campaigning, according to his press secretary. We all know better.

The criticism that came from the Democrats because George Bush dropped into some States that were swing States on Air Force One now becomes the responsibility of Republicans to remind the Democrats that the next time this happens, you will be hypocrites. You actually should retract your statements now to prepare yourself for the incumbent President that will be campaigning around on Air Force One, dropping in some of these places and advancing policy in 2016. So prepare yourselves, gentlemen. Scrub it out of your history now. Recant the things you said about George W. Bush. That way you can defend the President today, and then you won't be such hypocrites in 2013, as I predict you will be. Sure, I would be happy to yield if you had an opinion on that, but I know that you know I'm right and accept that.

So, the job of this Congress, the job of the American people, is this: To maintain people here in the House of Representatives who are pledged to, committed to, and will pass a repeal of ObamaCare again and send it over to the United States Senate, where I'm asking, Mr. Speaker, for the American people to put Senators over there that will also vote to repeal ObamaCare, pledge to do so, and pledge to drive it and push it and use every fiber of their being to rip that malignant tumor, ObamaCare, out of the Federal Register, out of the code, and give people back their American liberty. It's not enough to trust the Supreme Court to make a constitutional decision and sit back on our hands and think that somehow the court is going to save us.

I remember what happened when McCain-Feingold passed and then went to the President's desk. That was President Bush. And the word that came back--and this is rumor and conjecture, Mr. Speaker--was that the President had decided that he would sign the bill because it had such momentum when it got there and political support when it got there because he expected the Supreme Court would find McCain-Feingold to be unconstitutional.

Well, over time, and thanks to Citizens United and their lawsuit, parts were found to be constitutional--not all of it--and the limits that were put on free speech within that were freed up to the degree that they were litigated by Citizens United. I congratulate the people that had the vision to take it to the Supreme Court and win the case there. But no executive officer and no Member of this legislature, the House or the Senate--and, Mr. Speaker, I would send a message also to all legislators in the land, everyone in the statehouse in all 50 States, be you in the State house or the State senate, or in Nebraska in the unicameral, never vote for a bill because you believe that the court will find it to be unconstitutional and protect the citizens from a bad policy or an unconstitutional policy.

Mr. Speaker, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. That oath that we take is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the words and the language that are in the Constitution, not as it would be reinterpreted by someone else--a court-to-be, let's say, appointed later by an executive-to-be elected later to amend by court decision the clear meaning of this Constitution.

I'd give an example of this. In fact, the discussion came up today in the Judiciary Committee with Congressman Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin's bill that goes back to protect the property rights within the States and prohibits Federal funds going into certain programs of States that violate the intent and the literal language of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The famous Kelo decision, Mr. Speaker, I recall that unfolding here in about 2004 or 2005, when I believe it was the city council of New London, Connecticut, had decided that they would condemn property that was owned privately through eminent domain and then hand that property over to another private interest to be developed for a shopping mall or a strip mall because they believed that they would get a better tax base and get a better return than they were from the individual that owned the land.

Now, it directly and clearly violated, in my opinion--and I'll put my opinion up against any Supreme Court Justice that disagrees with me on this issue in particular--the clear language in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that protects our property rights and is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism, the right to property.

It says: ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' And the effect of the Kelo decision by the Supreme Court, which I believe was unjustly found, is to strike three words out of the Fifth Amendment in the Constitution of the United States, the words: ``for public use.'' So, now the effect, after this wrongly held Kelo decision, is for the Fifth Amendment to read this way: ``Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation.'' The ``for public use'' taken out of the Fifth Amendment.

This Constitution has to mean what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification. It has to mean what the clear words mean in this Constitution. It can't be anything else. We can't take an oath to anything else, and we can't be bound by a later interpretation to the Constitution that someone else makes unless there is a clarity that's added to the understanding of the plain meaning and the plain words and the original text of the Constitution and the amendments as they were ratified.

What did they mean when they were ratified? Mr. Speaker, we had a supreme court in the State of Iowa that concluded that they could find rights in the State constitution that were ``up to this point unimagined.'' Seriously, judges wrapped in black robes--no longer any wigs--sitting there saying that they had found rights in the constitution that were up to this point unimagined, and that somehow this contractual guarantee that gets passed

down through the generations and the ages, this contract with American citizenship--with Iowan citizenship in that case--can be breached because they have found rights that were up to this point unimagined? Heretofore unimagined rights.

What kind of guarantee can there be, a court that can discover new rights out of their imagination and declare that no one else had the imagination to discover those rights, but they had the vision to discover rights that were in this Constitution but not discovered before? That says there's no guarantee whatsoever. That says this Constitution becomes just only one of two things: it becomes an artifact of history with no meaning whatsoever, or it's a shield that the Justices can use to protect themselves from the criticism of the unwashed masses, those laypersons that think that they can't read this clear language and understand it.

Mr. Speaker, I'll say the people I represent can read the Constitution. They do understand it. They understand what it means. And they can make the argument with the Supreme Court Justices if they were not intimidated. If they would just read the language, go to the Fifth Amendment, read the language, ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

What does ``for public use'' mean if a local government can confiscate private property and hand it over to another private entity for the purposes of private use? That means they have violated the Constitution. And the bill before the Judiciary Committee today, thanks to Chairman Smith and former Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, fixes that to some degree; but it doesn't repair this Constitution that is so sacred to all of us that we take an oath to it.

And so I'll continue my oath and pledge to this Constitution, Mr. Speaker, and continue to make this point that we have to have constitutional legislation come before this Congress; that when someone brings a bill called ObamaCare to this floor--2,600 pages--that violates so many of the components of the constitutional guarantee, let alone sapping the vitality from this very vigorous American culture that we are, the American people rise up.

They rose up in tens of thousands, came to this Capitol and surrounded the place, jammed the place so heavily that people had trouble getting in and getting out. It was a glorious thing to see, Mr. Speaker, that the American people love their liberty enough that they would come from all 50 States to jam this Capitol to say to us, do not do this. Do not commit this affront to the Constitution. Do not usurp American liberty. These are God-given rights.

And who takes them away? This Congress that was led by then-Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid in the Senate and Barack Obama. The ruling troika imposed ObamaCare on us, and the American people have rejected it resoundingly by sending now 89 freshman Republicans to the House of Representatives. And every one of them pledged to repeal ObamaCare. And all but two of them--because they haven't had a chance to do so yet, they're the special election two--every single Republican in the House and every single Republican in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. And it was bipartisan. Some of the Democrats in the House voted to repeal ObamaCare.

The message has been sent. It's been sent in the State of Ohio; it's been sent by the polling. It goes on and on and on: repeal ObamaCare. Now, every Presidential candidate on the Republican side is running on repealing ObamaCare. Every one of them will sign the repeal if they're elected President and sworn into office.

Now, I'd like to see us put the repeal of ObamaCare, if we can't get it passed before such time as we elect a new President, whom I believe will be inaugurated January 20, 2013, if we can't get ObamaCare completely repealed before then, and whether or not the Supreme Court finds it unconstitutional, honors that there is no severability clause, and throws all of ObamaCare out, it's still exists within the code and it still needs to be repealed.

And the next Congress, being an honorable Congress, needs to send a repeal to the next President to be signed. And even if the Supreme Court throws it out, and even if the current President is reelected, there needs to be a repeal that goes to second-term President Obama's desk--I perish the thought if it unfolds in that fashion. But this Congress needs to act and repeal ObamaCare thoroughly.

And I pray that we're able to put the repeal of ObamaCare on the podium, on the west portico of the Capitol, January 20, 2013, having passed the House and the Senate, not messaged to the White House, messaged to the podium on the west portico of the Capitol, moments-- maybe the instant after the next President takes the oath of office. And at the words ``so help me God,'' I'd like to see the next President sign the repeal before he or she shakes the hand of Chief Justice Roberts, who will be delivering the oath of office to the next President of the United States. We have constitutional responsibilities that we have to live up to. We give an oath. ObamaCare violates that Constitution.

And we have some other things going on here in this government that violate the spirit of the statutes that the American people have pushed through here. And one of them is this. It's the advocacy, Mr. Speaker, of this: I've got a memo in my hand. It's dated 13 April, 2011 from the Chief of the Chaplains of the Navy to Chaplains and Religious Program Specialists. It says this: Go ahead, you Navy chaplains. You go ahead and conduct same-sex marriage services on our military bases anywhere where it's not otherwise illegal.

That's the summary of it. It says that facility usage is determined by local policies. And the Region Legal Service Office, the RLSO, should be consulted to ensure compliance with existing laws and regulations, absent some existing statute, however. This is a change to previous training that stated same-sex marriages are not authorized on Federal property. This memo says they are now authorized on Federal property in direct contradiction with the Defense of Marriage Act, DOMA, that was passed by this Congress, signed into law, clearly is the law of the land.

I mean, we have, apparently, a directive from the Commander in Chief of the United States military, Barack Obama. He surely has to be the one that has ordered the Navy, you shall send out a memo here to direct the chaplains to conduct same-sex marriages on the bases unless there is some other law that gets in the way. I think that this kind of activity is an affront to the legislative authority that exists by the Constitution within the legislature. This is not an executive decision. This is a decision of the legislature.

We passed the Defense of Marriage Act. I testified to defend the Defense of Marriage Act over in the United States Senate a month or so ago. And if the Senate were able to pass a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, it still has to come to the House, where I'm confident it would not pass. And I don't think it'll pass the Senate either.

But in any case, we have a defiance of Federal policy set by the Congress, signed by the President of the United States, from the Office of the Chief of the Navy Chaplains, dated 13 April 2011, that says, don't be biased by sexual orientation when you're conducting weddings. Go ahead and marry same-sex people on these military bases anywhere where it doesn't otherwise violate a law.

That tells me that that goes worldwide, bases everywhere. I suppose it's probably not happening on a base in Kuwait. They might frown on such a thing, but I don't know, and it's hard to get the facts on this.

But it's hard for me also to imagine a Marine--a Navy chaplain marrying a couple of marines, let's say a same sex couple of marines, whichever sex it might be. And this is going on in the United States of America and on bases around the country, Mr. Speaker, and it needs to come to an immediate halt.

This Congress has acted on this. This House has sent the message, and of course you have the Senate on the other side, run by Harry Reid, one-third of the former ruling troika that now becomes a shield for the President of the United States and the person who carries the water for the President, protects him when he doesn't want to have the confrontation himself. They've gone the other way. Now they've stricken the language out of the code. If the Senate language passes the House, they've stricken the language that prohibits bestiality in the

military in their overzealous effort to try to advance same-sex marriage among our military and use it as a social experiment.

The military's job is to protect our freedom and our liberty. They take an oath to the Constitution. They put their lives on the line, and we give them something that defies the Federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act.

Now, this is bad enough, Mr. Speaker, and I'm going to ask to introduce this into the Record. I know that I have the, I guess I'll say the privilege to do that. I will go on to another subject matter here that's--I don't know if it's more egregious, but it's plenty bad.

This is a memo dated September 14, 2011, Department of the Navy, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center up on Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland. I visited up there and visited wounded a number of times. And this memo is from the Commander of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Subject: Wounded, Ill and Injured Partners in Care Guidelines. Policy Memo Number 10-015. And there's a bunch of other stamped numbers that do reference off of the Web site. And it gives some directive about the purpose, applicability, official of wounded, ill and injured partners visits, how they should be conducted, et cetera.

And policy, according to Patient and Family Centered Care, Mr. Speaker, children in good health under the age of 18 are encouraged to participate. It goes on. Here's how the families should conduct themselves in visiting the wounded. Here's the intensive care units, how we would do that.

Here are exceptions, visits before or after the established hours, how that might work. And then visitation for certain kind of patients, et cetera. Those visiting the WII in an official capacity will make their request 5 days in advance, getting to the goal line.

A number of these provisions, as I read through here, the family, the leadership, members of the executive--this memo directs towards the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary branches of government? Members of the executive, legislative, to include professional staff members, judiciary, active duty, general, flag and senior executive service personnel. It's telling all of us, Members of Congress, the President and all of his people, the judiciary, the judges, the judiciary branch and all of their staff--well, at least the legislative staff--what we can and can't do when we visit the wounded at Walter Reed, including active duty general, flag and senior executive services, celebrities, sports personnel, et cetera, members of the press. All these people that are listed, here's what you can and can't do.

Now, I'll get to my point here on the last page, Mr. Speaker, partners in care guidelines. That's all of us bound by this memo, supposedly. All family visits must be scheduled 5 days in advance, as I said. Group size can't be over five. All partners under the age of 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Okay. Fine. I'm good enough with that. Can't take pictures unless the patient agrees. Fine with that.

Due to dietary restrictions and infectious disease protocols, the distribution of home-produced baked goods to the patients, families, and staff members is prohibited. You can't bring cookies to the patient. Ooh, that's tough.

But I wouldn't be standing here if that was the worst thing, Mr. Speaker. That's Item E. I went A, B, C, D, E.

Here's Item F, and I'll read it into the Record. ``No religious items, (i.e., Bibles, reading material and/or artifacts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.''

Mr. Speaker, these military men and women who are recovering at Walter Reed and Bethesda have given their all for America. They've given their all for America, and they've defended and taken an oath to the Constitution, and here they are. The people that come to visit them can't bring a religious artifact? They can't bring a Bible? They can't use them in the services? A priest can't walk in with the Eucharist and offer communion to a patient who might be on their deathbed because it's prohibited in this memo from the Department of the Navy, the Commander of Walter Reed and signed, Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, by C.W. Callahan, Chief of Staff.

I would also like to introduce this document into the Record.

Office of the Chief

of Navy Chaplains,

Washington, DC,

From: Chief of Chaplains (OPNAV N097)

To: Chaplains and Religious Program Specialists

Subj: Revision of Chaplain Corps Tier 1 Training

1. Chaplain Corps Tier 1 DADT repeal training has been

revised. The current version, dated 11 April 2011, has been

posted on the Navy and Marine Corps DADT repeal websites.

This revised version supersedes all previous versions and

should be reviewed in its entirety.

2. During the initial stages of curriculum development,

several policy questions were raised related to same-sex

marriages. Those questions were forwarded for legal counsel

and approval was secured to commence Tier 1 training while

awaiting further guidance. Additional legal review concluded

that the curriculum did require modification of content

related to same-sex marriage issues as found in Vignette 1

and FAQ 5.

a. Regarding the use of base facilities for same-sex

marriages, legal counsel has concluded that generally

speaking, base facility use is sexual orientation neutral. If

the base is located in a state where same-sex marriage is

legal, then base facilities may normally be used to celebrate

the marriage. This is true for purely religious services

(e.g., a chaplain blessing a union) or a traditional wedding

(e.g., a chaplain both blessing and conducting the ceremony).

Facility usage is determined by local policies and the Region

Legal Service Office (RLSO) should be consulted to ensure

compliance with existing laws and regulations. This is a

change to previous training that stated same-sex marriages

are not authorized on federal property.

b. Regarding chaplain participation, consistent with the

tenets of his or her religious organization, a chaplain may

officiate a same-sex, civil marriage: if it is conducted in

accordance with the laws of a state which permits same-sex

marriages or union; and if the chaplain is, according to

applicable state and local laws, otherwise fully certified to

officiate that state's marriages. While this is not a change,

it is a clearer, more concise and up to date articulation.

Again, consult the Region Legal Service Office (RLSO) to

ensure compliance with existing laws and regulations.

3. The revised Chaplain Corps Tier 1 training is posted on

the Navy and Marine Corps DADT websites. Those websites are

found at: Navy--http://www.dadtrepeal.navy.mil; Marine

Corps--https://www.manpower.usmc.mil/portal/page/portal/M_ RA_HOME/DADT. All prior versions of the curriculum should be

replaced by the current 11 April 2011 version.

4. If you have any questions or require additional

information please contact Chaplain Doyle Dunn at (703) 614-

4437/doyle@[email protected] or Chaplain Michael Gore at (703)

614-5556/michael.w.gore

@navy.mil.

M.L. Tidd,

Rear Admiral, CHC, U.S. Navy.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 37 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, December 2, 2011, at 9 a.m.

Will the gentlelady yield?

I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding, and I especially thank her for leading in this Special Order hour here tonight to discuss the burden of regulation on business in this country, primarily the burden on small businesses in America.

From my standpoint and my background, I started a business in 1975. I remember the fears I had at the time. I knew I could do the work and I knew I could line up the customers. I believed I could turn a cash flow, but I didn't know that I could comply with all government regulations. And little did I know how much I was actually stepping into.

When you begin to enter into a business, you are stepping into the unknown. That unknown turned out to be that I would find out about a government agent after a government agent, one after another. They would show up. They'd send me a little mailer. They would talk to someone else in my business. They would say: Did you meet this one? Did you meet that regulation? Do you have your MSD requirements there? What about the EPA side of this? Do you know you have to post a sign that says that you're an equal opportunity employer. And by the way, that has to be in multiple languages. And in case someone shows up that doesn't speak that language, you may have another regulation to provide that interpreter that's there.

On and on and on it went. More and more of my time went away from producing goods and services that had a marketable value, and instead it was invested in complying with primarily Federal but also State regulations.

So as the years went by, I got better at it. I found out more and more to comply with, and I got greater and greater frustration within me because of this burden of filing reports, meeting deadlines, and making sure that the government bureaucrats had all of their regulations and all of the paperwork that they wanted, all the while, ``To what purpose?'' was my question, because much of that paperwork that I was filling out was going off in some

storage dungeon somewhere never to be seen again unless there was some type of litigation or regulation enforcement against me, in which case then I was confident that they would go dig it up out of the dungeon and pull up that paperwork to see if I dotted the i's and crossed the t's. But what good did it do? What good did most of that regulation do if it simply was going to go off somewhere to go into storage so if, God forbid we had an accident on the job site and OSHA would come in, they would want to make sure that I had all of my regulations in place? But that wouldn't make us more safe, the paperwork would not.

I made a comment here in the Judiciary Committee a month or so ago that of all of these regulations that we have to comply with, if you look across America, there are some really good companies in this country. Of all of them, thousands and thousands of companies in America, hundreds of thousands--actually, millions of companies in America altogether. They advertise everything under the sun that you can imagine. They have banners on their Web site. They will tell you that they are the best or first at--you name anything it is you want. Put it in the Google search. You'll find an American company that will provide it for you, and they'll advertise their quality. They'll advertise their personnel. They'll advertise the efficiency and the cost. It will go on and on and on. But there isn't a single company in America, not one, Mr. Speaker, that has a little banner on their Web site that says, ``We are in compliance with all Federal regulations.'' Not one single company takes that position, and I'll tell you why: because they know if they ever advertise that they are in compliance, there would be a Federal bureaucrat that represented an agency, or two or more, or up to 682, according to the Constitution Daily Web site, Federal agencies--and those are subdepartments and divisions, regulatory entities, 682 of them, and this count is about 5 years old, by the way--that can levy sanction actions against American businesses.

And so the number one fear I had was: Can I comply with all of these regulations? Can I identify them? Can I comply with them? And what do I do about the conflicting regulations where, if you meet one regulation, the other regulation contradicts it? You're bound to be in violation.

So today there isn't a single company in America that advertises that they are in compliance with all Federal regulations. And if they did, I think we should give them the Doo Dah of the Year Award for that because they would be surrounded by bureaucrats, Federal regulators that are in there to inspect, to make sure that they are completely in compliance.

And, by the way, they have to justify their job. So I would predict that any company that would announce that they are in compliance with all Federal regulations probably wouldn't survive beyond about 18 months before they went into bankruptcy because they would be tied up in knots and tied down and they couldn't produce those goods and services that have a marketable value.

Now, there is a tradeoff on this always, and it doesn't mean that we should not have wise regulations. Yes, we should. But they need to keep in mind the regulatory burden of those rules and what it does to slow down production.

Now, I've said goods and services that have a marketable valuable both domestically and abroad. That means, if you run a company, you want to go to work every day, and you look around, what do we do? We produce a product. We manufacture and market a widget. And you want to do that as efficiently as possible. So if you put 100 people out there on the factory floor to manufacture widgets, and it doesn't take but one person to run payroll and answer mail, you're in pretty good shape. You've got one of those 100 people that's tied up doing administrative duties, that's pretty good efficiency. That's 99 percent producing that product, that number one, grade A widget that you're manufacturing and perhaps invented.

But as soon as a bureaucrat comes along and says, Wait a minute. You have to have somebody here that's documenting--let's say the water that's coming in, the electricity that's coming in, the sewage that's going out. You have to have safety inspectors and you have to have safety meetings, so that once a week you line everybody up and spend 15 to 30 minutes telling them what they need to do, which is safe. Not a bad idea, but when the government calls for that, they put more on your overhead and they've shut down the production of that entire plant for that period of time that they prescribe.

And the other regulations that come along in our construction businesses, the Federal Government saying, let's see, you have to pay the Federal Government scale for your equipment operators on construction projects, Davis-Bacon wage scale. That really means union- imposed scale on those projects. And it might change the wages. In the past, I've seen them double or be cut in half, depending which direction you're going. Just going across the highway, you go into a different division and it's a whole different wage scale. The guy running the shovel gets a different wage than the guy that's running the grease gun, different from the guy that's running the machine that's being greased or having the track scooped out on it. And I have to keep track of all of that and do what the government tells me, which means not just is it costly to keep track of it all, but it consumes the efficiency on the project. It makes it difficult, if not impossible.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate that recognition, and I appreciate the input that has come from the gentlelady from North Carolina. I came down here to change the subject, but I wanted to speak about regulation, and I'll just wrap up those thoughts that I had before the clock ticked down and take it over to this.

As I emerged into the construction business that I identified, I found myself doing seminars with other people of the same profession around the five-State area in the upper Midwest with our trade association, the Land Improvement Contractors of America. In that five- State area as I traveled around and held those seminars, I began to ask the questions of self-employed people. Most of them had started the business themselves, and they were employers doing this in the kind of way that we need to encourage more Americans to do rather than discourage them with regulation.

I began to ask them, How many agencies regulate your trade? As I asked that question, there might be 60 to 70 contractors in a room, and we would begin to write down the names of those agencies. And, yes, some of them were divisions within the agencies. You can start with the IRS and the EPA and you go on and on and on. OSHA, the mine regulators. It continues on. But we came to this number of our little narrow trade group, 43 different agencies that regulate us. And we needed to know the regulations from 43 different agencies. We needed to be able to anticipate how they would interpret those regulations and how they would

enforce them, and then you also had to calculate, when they contradicted one another, what the likelihood would be of one entity showing up, one agency to regulate you versus another.

If they had conflicting regulations, then you ran your operation to try to comply with the one that's most likely to show up to regulate in contradiction with the other. That goes on in America every single day. There are floors and floors of lawyers and administrative experts whose job it is to try to keep those companies from avoiding the conflict that comes from Federal regulations and, of course, our State regulations that are part of that as well.

It is a great frustration to enter into a business wanting just to provide that good or that service and do it with in a marketable, competitive way; to have a margin of profit and control your destiny and raise your family and do those things that are acting out the American Dream, and find out that a lot of your life is really just tied up in meeting with government regulations and serving this Congress and dealing with so many people that can control the destiny of some 300 million Americans, who have never signed the front of a paycheck, who have no idea what it's like to not maybe have any capital and go out and build a little bit with some sweat equity and take that little bit of capital and roll it and invest it, and after a while find enough margin out there and enough customers that you're compelled to hire a person to help you.

Now there's two people working there instead of one. And then you multiply that again and you take some more sweat and your little bit of equity and now you get to double up the equity and now you get to have another employee and another. While that's going on, you're building a capital base that bridges you through the hard times.

And the attitude, especially over on this side of the aisle, is an attitude that employers somehow are victimizers of the proletariats. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Speaker, I would say to you that those folks here in this Congress--and most of them are over on the liberal side of this aisle--believe that employers are victimizers and that employees have a certain virtue to them. I'll just say that we have good and evil in all of us. But the people who risk their capital and many times put everything they have on the line and help stand to lose it all if it doesn't work, they're not taking advantage of the employees. They're giving the employees a job.

Republicans over on this side, we say: jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, yes, we want those jobs. I don't believe that government creates the jobs. I think we should stop saying we need to create jobs. We don't. We need to get government out of the way so that investors can see an opportunity for profit. And if they see that opportunity for profit, they won't just invest their capital or their sweat; they will produce the kind of jobs out there that will sustain people in a market economy.

That's what needs to happen because, first, there have to come profits. You can't pay payroll very long if you don't have profits, which means that you're not going to have jobs unless people make money. So what do we do in this Congress? You people over here, you want to punish those people that are making money. On this side of the aisle, we don't want to call those people that are punishing the people that are seeking a profit because we're saying we want jobs.

We should all say we want to see profit in these companies so that that profit gets reinvested and more people have an opportunity to go to work and receive a paycheck and perhaps a raise and a better benefits package. And maybe, if that profit gets so great in those companies, they'll spin off of there and the people that learn the business going to work for the boss end up in competition against the boss. That's another thing that is the American way.

These kinds of things need to happen organically over and over again in America millions of times. And if they don't happen, then this country devolves itself down into a European-style social democracy. it's hard for me to even say those words and think of America in that fashion. We've moved in that fashion dramatically.

Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States doesn't believe in these things that I have described that I think are good. He's advocated this Keynesian economy on steroids. He's advocated for spending trillions of dollars, borrowing it. About half of that money, by the way, is borrowed from the investors in America, who believe that U.S. Treasury bills are the safest place to put their money.

And actually it may be if you're going to talk about global currency, the other currency has gotten unstable, too. The euro is in a very unstable, unbalanced condition right now. They have spent money in the European Union--money that they didn't have. They have built a government bureaucracy much heavier than needed to be.

I've twice been to Greece this year, and they have their head in the sand, in my opinion. They believe that they are the first of a multiple dominos in the EU and that they're only 2 percent of the GDP of the European Union, and if they're not bailed out by the EU--and that means, yes, loan guarantees, but it gets down to debt forgiveness at a certain point--if they're not bailed out at a certain point, if they default, then they will move away from the euro, the currency, and pick up the drachma again and print their money back in Greece a second time, or again.

If that happens, they think the euro becomes less stable if the Greeks aren't involved in it. They argue that they're a domino. So if they're not held up, propped up by the rest of Europe, then they'll fall as a domino. And if that happens, the euro will start to tumble. By the way, their domino will clip Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, name your country over there.

Well, it may or may not be true. It's hard to look at Greece and argue that they are a domino, and if they fall, that they'll necessarily hit one of those other unstable countries that will also fall into one and the other and the other. And it will start this cascading effect through the dominos of those unstable countries in Europe might not be true. It might be true that Greece could have a firewall built around it; and if they default, they default. And they'd have to rebuild their country from bottom up, inside out, back to production again.

I hope that this doesn't happen in Greece. I hope that there's a stable economic environment that grows out of Europe. We're tied to them financially with hundreds of billions of dollars invested over into the European banks. If they should fail, then it hurts us badly.

We're also highly leveraged in this country. The comparison of us to Greece is one that is considerably disturbing. There is a good side to a potential Greek default, and that would be that it would give this Congress a lesson for what America needs to do to avoid a similar calamity. I would like to see us steer our way out of this, but we're here having a debate in this Congress about minutiae in proportion to the scope of the problem that we are in.

We came into this new Congress with a new Speaker, John Boehner. We have an opportunity with 87 new freshman Republicans that came here. Most of them pledged not to raise the debt ceiling. Most of them pledged to bring us back to fiscal responsibility and fiscal accountability. They all believe that to this day. I don't think they've lost their beliefs. But along the way there were a lot of big decisions that needed to be made without time to analyze. And so what happened?

I said the first thing we needed to do was repeal ObamaCare, repeal ObamaCare, repeal ObamaCare. I can't say it enough. We need to repeal ObamaCare if we're going to have a country that will function and operate economically again. It drives us so deeply into debt that just removing a couple of those components of ObamaCare, according to Denny Rehberg, the chairman of the HHH Appropriations Committee--Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee--it would cut our spending over the next decade by $1.379 trillion. It would solve the whole problem of the supercommittee, that $1.379 trillion cut that comes just from ending the expansion into Medicaid. By the way, the CLASS Act was going to go anyway. The administration admitted that they couldn't sustain that component.

One other component in ObamaCare was the individual premium subsidy for those who were compelled to buy insurance under ObamaCare. Those components totaled $1.379 trillion. So we strike those out, shut off any funding to that, and we've saved that $1.379 trillion. That would more than handle the $1.2 trillion that we're directed in the debt ceiling deal.

But, Mr. Speaker, this went this way. We had a chance coming into this new Congress, this 112th Congress, to draw bright lines and to ensure fiscal responsibility and actually fix the real scope of this problem. Step number one was repeal ObamaCare.

We passed that out of this House, H.R. 2, sent it over to Harry Reid in the Senate, Mr. Speaker, where he set it up for failure and they shot it down.

So every Republican in the House and every Republican in the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare. Congratulations, thank you all for doing that. We didn't get it done, but we got it voted on. And it's on the conscience of the people that voted ``no'' that that monstrosity of a regulation churns its way through, consuming $105.5 billion in automatic appropriations that were written deceptively into ObamaCare in an unprecedented fashion. Oh, yes, the tactic had been used before, but the scope had never been used like that before.

And so that $105.5 billion is in there. And it's around $26 billion in the first 2 years of ObamaCare, this year, next year, $26 billion being churned away. And if we had reached an impasse on our negotiations with the continuing resolution, the CR that hit at midnight on March 4, if that had resulted in a showdown that would have been the President causing a shutdown, that might have seen the lights go off in Federal offices all across the land, Mr. Speaker. But you could have driven around the Federal buildings here in this city and around the Federal buildings across America, and where the lights were on in that eventuality, they would be on because the money that funds ObamaCare goes on anyway; it's automatic, they call it mandatory spending. And we tried to shut that off as well. And we did send the amendment language out of this House of Representatives that shut off all of the funding to ObamaCare. And it went over to the Senate, but it was attached to the bill that went with the CR as an appendage so that they could separate it out and vote it down in the Senate--and that's what Harry Reid did in the Senate also, Mr. Speaker.

And so here we are with a Congress that began kind of on the right foot with an opportunity to force a showdown with the President of the United States and make him defend ObamaCare. We could have legitimately funded all of the functions of government--or we could have responsibly funded all of the legitimate functions of government would be a better way to phrase that, Mr. Speaker--and shut off all funding to ObamaCare. The President of the United States then was predicted to veto a bill like that. Had he done that, he would have had to explain to the American people that his signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, means more to him than all of the legitimate functions of government combined. That would have been the showdown. It should have been the showdown. I believe that we would have prevailed on that showdown. And I think the President would have had to accept the funds that we put on his desk in a CR appropriations bill, minus any funding that goes into ObamaCare, cutting off all the automatic funding that goes to ObamaCare--could have, would have, should have done that, Mr. Speaker.

We moved past that point. The CR was going to be $100 billion in cuts; it didn't become that. That number went down low enough that I'll not utter it into this Congressional Record. It's just not something that people go back and revisit that even voted for it. And then we were going to do yeoman's work and cut trillions of spending with the budget bill that came to the floor of the House, known as the Republican budget resolution, that was championed by Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has done great work here on fiscal responsibility. That budget didn't balance for 26 years, Mr. Speaker. That was all we could get out of this Congress. It's hard to craft a budget that comes that close. He did a lot of hard work on it and laid out some good parameters that we need to pick up and deal with.

But the budget resolution here on the floor of the House was a promise from ourselves to ourselves that we were going to hold this spending down. And this spending allocation was agreed to by this Congress--by the majority of the House of Representatives, excuse me. The Senate hasn't passed a budget in so long I don't remember when. And so Mr. Speaker, that budget was passed, balancing in 26 years, spending too much money, leaving us with $23 trillion in national debt 10 years down the road. And it was a great step in the right direction--not as strong as I wanted it to be, not as strong as the RSC budget, which I voted for, but the one that could pass that could constrain our spending. I voted for them both. The RSC budget that balanced in about 9 years and the Ryan budget that balanced in 26 years left us with $23 trillion in national debt 10 years down the road. That doesn't sound very appetizing to the American public, those facts, Mr. Speaker, but those facts didn't hold.

The promise from ourselves to ourselves went kind of out the window when the debt ceiling agreement was presented to the floor of this Congress and ultimately passed. And in that was a supercommittee, in that was a promise to vote on a balanced budget amendment, and in that was the threat that if the supercommittee didn't produce a product that could pass the Congress and be signed by the President, then there would be the sequestration--which I don't know where the language of that came from, but the sequestration is the automatic cuts that we're looking at now.

I knew when the debt ceiling deal was finally put on paper that we had to go through a number of things. One of them was we had to have a debate about how we were going to define a balanced budget amendment. Well, we had that debate. And I think I won the debate and lost the decision, but nonetheless, the clean version of the balanced budget amendment was brought to the floor. I didn't call it a clean version. I think we needed to have the balanced budget amendment that passed the Judiciary Committee. We should have let the committee work its will. The Judiciary Committee marked up a balanced budget amendment that had a cap at 18 percent of GDP on spending and it had a supermajority in order to raise taxes. It was the right thing to do. It had exemptions there for a declared war or a case of a serious national emergency and other provisions. It was a good constitutional amendment that we could live with that would strengthen this country over the long term. We didn't have a vote on that. We had the one that said that thou shall have a balanced budget and allows for a tax increase to balance that budget. And of course you get to a certain point with tax increases and then you see a decline economically. And I think we are past that tipping point today, Mr. Speaker. That was another one of our struggles.

So now we're faced with a sequestration. I'm thankful that the supercommittee didn't send us a package that couldn't pass the Congress, the House and/or the Senate. I never believed that they could. They concluded they couldn't reach an agreement. There was completely an impasse. Republicans said we're not going to raise taxes and Democrats said we aren't going to do it if you don't raise taxes. They want to punish the people that are producing. They would increase the taxes--you guys over there, you would increase the taxes on the people that are paying the most taxes. You would increase the taxes on the people that are paying the highest percentage. You would argue that it's progressive.

And, you know, you're never going to be satisfied. I know you won't be satisfied. If I can tell you today--and tomorrow is the first day of December--that I have a magic wand, and I promise you all that we're going to give you what you want, and you've got all of the month of December to put your wish list together. And when the ball drops in Times Square in New York on New Year's Eve at midnight and the new year, 2012, begins, here would be the deal--here's the magic wand: Give me a list of all the things that you

want to do to take away the liberty and freedom of the American people, take away the wealth and the capital that has been so justly earned by people in this country and redistribute the wealth in the ideal of Karl Marx or any of the other leftists that you worship, grant all of the wishes that you have, reorder society according to all your dreams, and let you have 30 days to put the list together. And at midnight, when the ball drops at Times Square, stroke the magic wand, give you all your entire wish list.

If I had that power and if this happened in this fashion, I will tell you, you guys would work hard. Your lights are on at night; you're well funded and you're smart people--you're wrong on your philosophy, but you would put together a list, and it would be a long list. And it wouldn't be without some internal fights--and Barney Frank will still be there after all, so there would still be some of those internal fights going on. And in the end, if I granted you your wish at midnight at the new year, but the deal would be that you had to then stop complaining the rest of your life, you would have to live under the rules that you had written that you spent 30 days--all your career wishing and dreaming and working and leveraging for in this Congress, we'd give you everything you asked for on the new year, but you'd have to be quiet then and live under those rules. And I can tell you what would happen. You would stay up all night long on New Year's night thinking, what did we forget? How did he cheat us? We really forgot to leave this in, we need to change the rules. And we're going to want more and more and more. Because, first of all, you don't want to admit to the American people what you really want to do. You're anti- capitalists, you're anti-American liberty, you're anti-free enterprise. There are a number of the pillars of American exceptionalism that you just plain oppose. And here we are, hardworking American people, why do we have all this capital? It never was a zero sum game. It never was. If you look back, where was it when the, let's say the caveman first went out there and brought a pelt back and turned it into a blanket.

There was a little bit of wealth that was created out of the labor that's there. When they were scavengers and foragers, they still made tools. And along the way, somebody else could make a tool a little better, a little more efficient, and someone else could raise a little garden and trade some vegetables for some arrowheads, whatever it might be. Someone else could tan a hide better than the person that hunted for the pelt, and so they traded labor.

And in the middle of all of that, they acquired things. They said, I'll tell you what. Let's do two pelts. You keep one, I'll keep the other. Fine. Now there's two blankets where there had only been one before. And on and on they went, building and building and building capital because we had free enterprise capitalism. We let people invest their sweat, and they turned it into equity.

And eventually they invented the wheel, and along came the industrial revolution, where we built things and we put them on ships, and we traded around the world. And we found that there were resources that were developed in other countries more efficiently than we could here.

Adam Smith wrote in ``Wealth of Nations'' about how they had the wool industry going on up in England and Scotland and in Ireland, and so they should be the ones there that were shearing sheep and turning that into clothing, and put the wool products that they did so well on ships and sail them down to Portugal, where they were a lot better at raising grapes and turning that into wine. And bring back a load of wine and a ship full of wool, and that was the division of labor that he described. And both countries were better off.

Mr. Speaker, whenever there are two people that trade a dollar, and it's a business transaction, or it's two or more, maybe it's three, four, five or six people in this exchange, these business deals are set up because each party benefits. There doesn't need to be a loser in an economic transaction.

And when I hire somebody to go to work for me and I pay them a wage, they get something in return. They want the money; they want the benefits. They might want the challenge. I hope they do. And they want to contribute, and we reach this agreement. It is a contractual agreement between two consenting adults. And so capital is built; wealth is built. It's not a zero sum game.

Gold got mined out by the Incas and the Aztecs, and Adam Smith wrote about that. And he said the Spanish galleons went back across the ocean with having cut out the cost of labor--he didn't say by stealing the gold from the Incas and the Aztecs. He said they cut out the cost of labor. And once they removed a significant cost of the labor of producing the gold from them, they dumped it into the markets in Europe, and the price of gold went down.

Well, supply and demand, the cost of the capital and cost of the labor goes together to produce any product that we have there. And over the centuries we built ships and we built buildings and we built highways, we built bridges, and we created cash and currency to trade our labor back and forth with a commodity that would be willing to exchange. That's money.

And then the capital that's built in this world now is trillions and trillions. And, yes, class envy sets in and people think they get a case of the ``poor me's'' if government doesn't go hand them a job.

And I hear some of you that say, well, the people that want to work should work. People who want to work should have a job. I would argue that the people that are able to, that the people that are able to work need to sustain themselves, and they need to contribute to the gross domestic product in this country. It is the patriotic thing to do.

America has created now this culture within us that somehow the Federal Government is going to guarantee a middle class standard of living to everybody that lives in this country, legal and illegal.

Mr. Speaker, I know you're going to be astonished at this, but there are 72 different means-tested Federal welfare programs functioning in the United States today; 72 of them. There isn't a single American that can name them from memory. If they can't name them from memory, neither can they describe them.

And if they can't describe them, neither can they understand how they function individually, let alone understand how 72 different welfare programs can interact with each other and function to provide an incentive for people to do the right thing, which is produce for themselves, maybe get an education, develop some job skills, go get a job.

William Bennett told us, when I came to this Congress, that he said he could solve 75 percent of the Nation's pathologies. Get married, stay married, get a job, keep a job. That's 75 percent. You know, if he's right on that, I'd say the other percent is substance abuse.

I'll bet we could get to about 99 percent if people would get married, stay married, get a job, keep a job and not abuse alcohol and reject illegal drugs. You'd solve a lot of the domestic squabbles that go on and this society would go on. We need to be a moral society.

But we are a Nation of doers and achievers, and our culture is being eroded by those who want to expand the dependency class in America.

And that's you folks over on that side of the aisle. You're in the business of expanding the dependency class in America. It goes on over and over and over again. And you do that because some of you believe, maybe even all of you believe, that it is somehow a humane thing to do to take from the sweat of one person's brow and hand it over to someone who won't sweat for their own. But you do it because it expands your political base, and then you pander to and cater to the people that you're promising somebody else's labor to.

And you think that America's going to be stronger? No, we're getting weaker. We've reached the point now where these 300 million Americans that we have, when you add up--we talk about how many on unemployment do we have. Oh, it was 15 million; now it's 14 million.

You look at the weekly numbers of the new sign-ups and that number ranges down there under 400,000 or so.

And we think, oh, it was a good week. We had less than 400,000 new sign-ups to unemployment. And people run off the other end and they expire and they're no longer eligible, and so that number went from around 15 million unemployed down to around 14 million unemployed or a little more.

That's not the number that we should be most concerned about. It is a number. We should add the 14 million that meet the definition for unemployment to the number of Americans that are of working age that are simply not in the work force, Mr. Speaker.

The Department of Labor has that on their Web site. Anyone can go there. I think it's dol.gov, something like that. And on that Web site you'll see different age groups of those working age. It starts at age 16, 16 to 19. There are around 9 million Americans of that working age that are simply not in the workforce. Yes, they may be in school. A lot of us worked our way through school. And I started before that age of 16.

And then you go from 20 on up to 25 or so, there's another chunk. Work your way on up.

Americans of working age not in the workforce, when I came to this Congress not that long ago were 69 million. Then it became 80 million. And about 2\1/2\ months ago the number, for the first time in the history of this country, the number of Americans of working age not in the workforce now has exceeded 100 million Americans--100 million. Think what you could do with the labor of 100 million Americans.

And while that's going on, now we have, what is our number, 11, 12 or more million illegals in America? I actually think it's 20 million or more, but they keep tamping that number down. They keep coming across the border, and the number got lower instead of greater by some analysis.

But in any case, we know this: about seven out of every 12 illegals here in this country work. That's marginally a little greater than the number of Americans that are working. And that seven out of 12 that are there are part of around 8 million, 7 million to 8 million documented, I'll say study-analyzed consensus numbers, 7 to 8 million illegals in America that were working. Now, if they all woke up tomorrow in their home country, that conceivably creates 8 million new jobs.

Well, you know, if they weren't coming into this country illegally, you wouldn't need so many people to go guard the border either, and they could do something productive rather than something that's not contributing economically to this country in the fashion that produces goods and services.

So there's 8 million jobs there. But there are many other jobs out there for the people that will go out there and start a business, go ask for a job, compete in this marketplace. And every one of the 100 million Americans who are not working that puts in 1 hour's work even a week contributes to the gross domestic product of the United States of America.

People who are not working, not producing, are not contributing, unless of course they've got investments that are returning, and then I'll give them some credit for that.

But 100 million. Think if you were on a boat or a ship, and let's say you had 300 people on that boat or ship, and you had to have some trimming the sails, some pulling the oars, some swabbing the decks, some down in the galley, some cooking, cleaning, housekeeping and somebody up there taking care of the captain.

And what if you had 100 out of those 300 people that said, I'm going to sit here in steerage. Bring me my food, clean up my mess. That's the scope of what America is faced with today.

I'd put the people on the oars. I'd put them up there trimming the sails and swabbing the decks, and we will sail a lot smoother, we'll be a lot stronger country, and we'll feel better about ourselves. This dignity of work is there for every man and woman that takes that job on.

And I challenge us all: let's step up, take the freedom we have left. Let's grasp for more of that liberty. Let's grasp more of that freedom, and let's put some of these 100 million people to work so they can contribute to their gross domestic product.

The rest of the world will respect us more. We'll be stronger economically. We'll have more prudent people that are contributing to the ideas in this Congress, and we will get to a balanced budget, and we will start to pay down this national debt, and we will enforce and respect the rule of law.

Mr. Speaker, I would go on for another half hour articulating some of the other pillars of American exceptionalism, but I recognize there is a limit to not your patience, but my time.

I appreciate your attention, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 40 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 1, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, on November 16, on rollcall No. 843, I mistakenly cast a ``yes'' vote in favor of the Woodall amendment to H.R. 822. I am submitting this statement for printing in the Congressional Record to clarify that I am opposed to the Woodall amendment and had intended to vote ``no.''

I was delayed in reaching the House floor because of a meeting in my office and, as a result, I arrived on the floor just before the vote was closed. Owing to this, I cast my vote in haste, which led to the resultant errant vote.

If the gentleman would yield.

I'd pose a question back. What do you think about taking it to zero?

Yes.

Of course we know if the gentlemen would yield----

The folks that are buying food in McDonald's are going to pay the tax if we try to get it from McDonald's. So we know corporations don't pay taxes; they are aggregators of taxes that are paid by individuals, by consumers on the last stop. And so they're efficient aggregators of those taxes. They are actually the tax collectors on behalf of the Federal Government. The corporations that collect taxes don't pay them; they transfer it through them by the way they charge us for the $152 billion a year that it costs to comply with the Federal Tax Code.

And so I find it an act of frustration to seek to try to collect taxes from corporations when what I'm really doing is adding to the administrative costs for corporations so they add the taxes and the administrative costs on to the cost of the goods that have to be competitive in this marketplace, and that makes it that individuals pay taxes. But it also means that jobs go overseas because corporations that are taxed in America are at a disadvantage to the corporations that are overseas who aren't very good aggregators of America's tax dollars, and so they have to raise the taxes here more.

That's kind of the vision that I see that I would lay out here for the gentleman from Georgia. And we've got a long ways to go before America embraces the concept that I think will solve this problem.

Just to explore that a little further and that would be, looking at the corporate tax structure, there's corporate income tax, and then there are all of the wages that are paid out in payroll taxes to the employees. And of course one of the most regressive taxes we've is the payroll tax. And so one might argue that, well, those taxes are paid by the corporation, that half of the payroll, that .0765 that I have multiplied so many times with my employees that I've had over the decades. And of course that .0765 which is half of the 15.3 percent in payroll tax, half comes out of the employer, half comes out of the employee.

However, the half that comes out of the employer would be wages for the employee because it is a cost of doing business, it's a cost of competitiveness. And so when we add into the price of the goods and services provided by corporations, and I don't mean just corporations, they can be LLCs, they can be partnerships, sole proprietorships, you name it, a business entity that hires employees and/or provides goods and services for retail market or supplies to those who do, all of that structure of their taxes is built into the price.

And a fair amount of research brings us to a number that is generally considered to be about 22 percent of the retail price of goods and services sold in the United States as the tax component paid by the suppliers that get it into the marketplace and in the end paid by the consumer.

So those corporations that move overseas have a different tax structure, but those products that come in from overseas have a 28 percent marketing advantage over the products produced here in the United States because they don't have the burden of U.S. corporate taxes, and that includes the payroll taxes that are part of that taxing structure.

So I'd say that if we can remove the taxes from productivity in America, we end up with a 28 percent marketing advantage for U.S.-made products over those made in foreign countries.

And by the way, one more thing: I would not have picked up a nice Georgia company like Coca-Cola to use them as an example, but then that's just me.

If the gentleman would yield, I'd slip another anecdote into this that comes from just last weekend. I was over in eastern Iowa doing an event, and I happened to get reacquainted with a young gentleman by the name of Michael Dicks. Now, he is 13 years old; soon he'll be 14. But when he was 8 years old--I've told this story in the Congressional Record in the past--he saved up his money to go buy a little box of Skittles. So he had his change counted out just right in his pocket--89 cents for a box of Skittles--and had to reach up to the counter, I presume, and got his Skittles off the shelf and put them up on the counter. And he counted out his 89 cents and the checker rang it up and said, that will be 96 cents. And he said, but the price says 89 cents. And the checker said, but you have to pay the tax--that's the sales taxes in Iowa--so that's 96 cents, young man.

And he turned to his dad and he said, Dad, I have to pay taxes on Skittles? What a painful experience for an 8-

year-old young man. But think of what that means if our taxes are transparent. That young man is going to grow up to be a conservative. He's going to put fewer demands on government. He's going to demand one thing--less taxes, less services. We're going to want to have more personal and individual responsibility, and we're going to let people provide for their own security in a lot of ways and achieve on their own. That is a cultural transformation that comes if you have a transparent tax and if you take the tax and stop punishing productivity and put it on consumption.

Will the gentleman yield?

History is replete with the Founding Fathers, literary giants of the time, philosophers of the time, who looked at the Greek democracy and they were appalled at what it had produced. They produced for us a republic instead. But many of them spoke eloquently about what happens when the public would realize that a majority of them could vote themselves benefits from the public treasury. Some of them said democracy ceases to exist; some of them said that will destroy our republic. But I want to guess that most of the people that were providing the wisdom at the time commented on their fear that this country would move towards a majority voting themselves benefits from the public treasury.

So that is one of the reasons that we have a Republic instead of a democracy is because those of us who are elected as representatives of the citizens of the Republic are to have a higher responsibility than to listen to, let's say, people who want the fruits of someone else's labor and don't want to labor themselves.

And so we're at this situation now where, in the early part of this country, there was a policy that you had to be a land-owning male of age and other qualifications in order to vote because they wanted the public policy to be established by people that had skin in the game. And today we saw a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget fail here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I'd like to have seen a stronger one, but it failed here on the floor of the House. And that was a constitutional amendment with a cap at 18 percent of GDP and a supermajority to raise taxes.

Put some of that philosophy back in where it requires a supermajority to raise taxes, there is a restraint there that brings back some of that philosophy that helps offset the disadvantage that the working American has today who's paying those taxes. Your barber is at a disadvantage because some of the hair that he cuts is of people that aren't working. I'd say at least one out of every three heads of hair that your barber cuts is somebody that is in that role of 100 million Americans of working age who are not in the workforce, many of them are voting, they are voting themselves benefits from the public trough.

And I'd suggest that we take the tax off of productivity in America, stop punishing production, put it over on consumption. And I'm just looking around for a bill number that I could attach myself to because I'm drawing a blank.

And I appreciate the opportunity to be your partner in this.

And I would say to the folks on either side of the argument that disagree, they're both wrong, whether they're from the left or from the right. And the bottom line is this: the Fair Tax does everything good that anybody's tax proposal does that is good; it does them all and it does them all better. And I'm happy to take that debate anywhere in this land and have folks that will try that on and we'll finish second in that debate.

I quickly yield back because the gavel is in the air.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 19 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, it is always my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I find it a bit ironic that I'm watching the Representatives from Florida, New York and Texas speak to the Speaker pro tem just previous to you about the election situation. I'm thinking about the 2000 election when it was reported--not substantiated to my satisfaction--but reported that as many as 25,000 people from New York voted both in New York and in Florida either for a President from Texas or one from Tennessee where the Speaker pro tem momentarily ago was from. That's a bit of an irony as I listen to this discussion that's going on about the election process here in the United States.

And I think there's too little concern on the part of my colleagues whom I do respect and appreciate and count as friends in many respects. I think there's too much focus on how you get more warm bodies to the polls as many times as possible and not enough on the legitimate vote.

Now as I listened, the gentleman from Texas said there's no demonstrable evidence that fraud is occurring. I would disagree. I think convictions are demonstrable evidence, and the convictions particularly in Troy, New York, of election fraud. I have seen it in the State of Iowa in a fashion that didn't result in convictions, but I have conviction that it happened. We have paid too little attention to election fraud in the case that I mentioned of people voting in the State of New York and in the State of Florida. If they do both, they surely can't be lawfully voting in each of the States. They may not be lawfully able to vote in either State, but voting in both States.

And how does that happen, Mr. Speaker? This is an unexamined subject matter on the part of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. How does it happen that people can vote someplace where they don't reside? How does it happen that people can vote when they're not citizens? How does it happen that they can vote when they're not qualified to vote? How does it happen that they can vote in more than one jurisdiction for the same election, not necessarily simultaneously, but possibly simultaneously?

And I can answer those questions to some degree how that is, Mr. Speaker. It works this way: the voter registration lists within the States are not integrated among the States. And so if an individual is registered to vote in New York, they can also be registered to vote in Florida, or any adjoining State for that matter, New Jersey, Connecticut, you name it. All we have to do is go in and register in one State and go register in the other State.

In fact, in my own State, it was the case--and probably is not still the case--that the voter registration list does not integrate itself county to county in a definitive way. If John Doe registers to vote in Washington County and goes over to register to vote as John M. Doe in Jefferson County, there's two registrations there, and John Doe can vote in both counties, both by absentee.

In fact, in my State where there's 99 counties, it's possible to vote in 99 counties simultaneously by absentee. If you just simply register yourself to vote, put up an address that is perhaps a false address, but an address of someone else, and if the voter registration is unique in any way--the initial could change, it could be ``John,'' it could be ``Jonathan,'' the middle name can change, and that's all it would take. The same person could vote multiple times in a State. Now think how many times that can happen when they're crossing the State lines.

No one has yet calculated how many times an individual could vote in the United States if they really wanted to game the system. And we do hear credible stories of buses taking people across the State lines and buses taking people from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times. And who have been the advocates for same-day registration? Who have been the advocates for lowering the integrity of the vote itself? It's been the people on the other side of the aisle. It's been the Democrats.

The things that Republicans bring to establish credibility and integrity in the vote are undermined by the Democrats on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. And why? Because they say that people are disenfranchised from their vote. And I would argue that legitimate voters, American citizens who respect the law and vote one time, one place in their legal residence, are watching their vote be canceled out by illegitimate votes. That happens in this country. Because we don't have convictions for people voting in multiple locations for the same election isn't an indication that it doesn't happen. We do have some convictions.

We don't have large numbers of convictions as the gentleman from Texas may have implied but not specifically said. And the reason for that is because our voting laws are so open, so lax, and so insecure that it's nearly impossible to get a conviction.

For example, in the State of New Mexico, if I were working the voting booths as an election worker in New Mexico, and I opened the polls up at, say, 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'm sitting there for the list of people that come in, and they say, I'm John Doe, I'm Jane Doe, I'm Jim Smith, if one of them walks in and says, I'm Steve King and I live at the address where I live, and I have not yet voted, I am compelled, even as an election worker, to let that false and fraudulent individual vote under my name. It's against the law in New Mexico and other States to challenge an illegitimate voter even when you know that they are illegitimate, even to the extent that they allege they are the person who is checking them off the list. They still have to let them vote, and they can't challenge them.

That's how open these laws are. That's the kind of thing that you have promoted, the kind of thing that you won't defend, the kind of thing that I will yield to if you've got a defense for opening up and eroding the integrity of the vote in the United States.

And many of these are State laws, I recognize that, but we give direction and leadership. We have the HAVA Act, the Help America Vote Act, that opened it up even more. And I think the gentleman from New York, who

spoke within the last half hour--and I do agree on this. There should be a paper trail so we can audit the votes that are cast. Now, we've agreed on that. We've worked together on that cause. We have not arrived at that as far as a conclusion for this Congress is concerned that can be passed into law, but I think there should be a paper trail. And the gentleman from New York and I are in conceptual agreement on that, Mr. Holt. I appreciate that push. I do think it's out of the right spirit of his head and his heart, but it might also be from suspicion that the people that produce the electronic voting machines-- they may be Republicans, they may be Democrats, and that seems to color our judgment. Mine is. Don't give anybody a chance to cheat. And don't let the electronic voting machines be offered in such a way that some programmer can jigger the machine to give an advantage to either party.

I think of the election situation that took place in Florida in the year 2000. I spent 37 days focusing on that. I was the chairman of the Iowa State Senate State Government Committee. It was my job to see to it that Iowa didn't become a Florida, the fiasco in Florida. So, therefore, I chased all the way through the Internet, everything that I could find, all the research that I could come up with on the election processes State by State, 37 days of focus. And then after that, not quite as focused, but I followed through on legislation which passed the Iowa Senate, and I discovered a significant amount of election fraud in this country. This is in the year 2000, well before the American public had heard of ACORN. I found, I believed, a significant amount of election fraud.

There were a pair of brothers in Florida that had done research on election fraud in Florida, the Collier brothers, both of them now passed away. They've written a book on this and did a video on it, as I recall. And part of that video was walking into the maintenance shop where they took care of the machines that counted the punch-card ballots, the notorious punch-card ballots that were prevalent in Florida in the year 2000. And they have the video of the former election commissioner, who had retired from that and handed it over of course to his successor and gone to work maintaining the vote-counting machines, the machines that you would feed in a stack of punch-card ballots and it would run through, and the machine would read it and it would spit the number out the other side. And on that video--and it was available at the time. I don't know if it's available now. The man walked through his shop and pulled out of the drawer a gear. And he said, here's how we do this, we just grind one tooth off of this gear, and then every time 10 ballots go through it kicks an extra one in on our side. On videotape, there it was. And of course they got nervous afterwards and tried to do what they could to suppress it.

Those kinds of things have gone on in America. They have gone on in Florida. They've gone on in other States. And the people that advocate for or defend more open election laws and process are, whether they realize it or not, enabling election fraud in this country. I want it to be as clean as possible, as legitimate as possible. I don't want a single qualified vote to be canceled out by an unqualified vote, let alone one that's designed to be fraudulent. I don't want buses going across State lines loaded with people that are in there to do same-day registration to vote and disappear.

We had voters in Iowa that registered from a hotel room where the campaign had out-of-State workers. People don't live in hotels in these kinds of neighborhoods. It may happen in the inner city. It doesn't happen in a hotel in the neighborhoods I'm talking about in Iowa. These are people that come and stay a couple days, or 4 or 5 days, maybe a week, and they're gone again. These are folks that have a home of their own. It isn't a residence. When you register to vote from a hotel, where they didn't have a single guest that stayed longer than 2 weeks in the last year, we're pretty sure that if that's the hotel where they put their campaign workers that came from out of State, it's a pretty good bet that those votes that were registered in that hotel are votes from people that are not legitimate to vote within that precinct, within that district, or probably, in almost each of those cases, within the State.

Here's another one, the statement made by the gentleman from Texas: If you have no Texas driver's license, you have to get someone to take you to the polls. Well, is that person a recluse? Don't they have an opportunity for an absentee ballot? Do they ever go to town, for example? And if they do, can't they time their trip to the grocery store to go on election day and vote?

And the concern about the primary part of this, yes, I think there are some fraudulent primaries that take place, and there are some that are stacked up that I'd like them revisited. I'd like to see the Granite State revisit their primary process that lets people go to the polls and vote and--say the Democrats go to the polls and vote in the Republican primary. We in Iowa have a caucus system for our President, and there we require that they be registered either as Democrats or Republicans. They have to pick one or the other. And they don't get to switch sides that easily, although it is possible in the State of Iowa.

But here's what needs to happen in this country. We need to have voter registration lists that are free of duplicates, free of the deceased, and free of felons where the law applies. And they need to be certified to be citizens, not a motor-voter law that people go in that don't speak English, that get their driver's license and then they ask them a question, check this box, check that box. If they don't understand English, they don't know what they're saying yes to. They don't realize that they are under penalty of perjury if they claim to be a citizen and they are not. And so they will say yes; they get the nod; now they're registered to vote. Now a noncitizen--quite often illegal--is in a position to cast a ballot.

And we saw 537 votes be the difference in the State of Florida in the year 2000 on who would be the President of the United States; the Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world decided by 537 votes in the State of Florida. Now, every time they recounted those votes in Florida, I think that Republicans on this side and Democrats on this side will agree that it came back to that same number. And if you've got some other narrative, again, I'll yield to you, you can tell me what your narrative is. But the consensus now, after all this analysis, is we've got a legitimate vote there. George Bush was not the appointed President; he was the elected President. But it was very, very close in the year 2000 and it did pivot on Florida. But how far apart would that election have been if one could actually know which of the votes were fraudulent and which were not?

The last time I came to the floor I heard the minority whip come to the floor and make the statement that we didn't have evidence--again, as we've heard from the gentleman from Texas--no demonstrable evidence that fraud is occurring. And the gentleman from Maryland's statement was close to that, although not exact. I'd argue the opposite. We have ACORN--ACORN that admitted to more than 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations, more than 400,000 confessed-to fraudulent registrations.

This is the acorn that I carry in my pocket, Mr. Speaker. I carry it in my pocket every day to remind me what happens to this country if we let organizations like ACORN or advocates that seek to diminish the integrity of the vote take over. If they do that, then they erode the faith of the American people in the election. You can have fraudulent elections, but as long as we believe that they're legitimate, the American people are going to accept the results because we do have great faith in this constitutional Republic, which is guaranteed to us from Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, by the way, shall guarantee a republican form of government.

But this country respects the election process, and that's why we accept the results of the election process. And if we lose faith in the election process, legitimate or not, then the very bedrock that the foundation of our country--the Constitution--sets on crumbles and the Constitution itself crumbles, and we crumble into some form of anarchy because we will have lost our integrity in our election process.

Now, is it too much to ask that if someone goes to the polls that they

would bring with them a picture ID? I wonder if any of those folks have ever gotten on an airplane or if they've ever gone to rent a movie and they're asked for an identification to support their credit card when they rent a movie. That's not too much to ask. I've never heard anyone come to this Congress and say: I demand my civil liberties. I demand that I be able to rent a movie without any identification, without any credit card. Why can't we just do that on my word? I'll walk in and sign this paper that says, I'm Joe Blow and I live at 100 Exotic Avenue and I want to rent an exotic movie, and I don't want to have to have identification to do that. We've never had anybody ask for that this Congress. They know they don't have a civil right to do business in this country without identification.

If the merchant requires that identification, they willingly supply it. And yet to choose the next leader in the free world, the Commander- in-Chief, the President of the United States, the advocates that have stood on the floor have said to the effect of, anybody that walks up there and attests that they are a living, breathing human being and that they live somewhere, they can vote and they can register on the spot, and they can vote and they can walk away not showing any identification whatsoever. And in some cases it just takes someone to attest to that they are the individual that they say they are.

So they don't really even need to misrepresent themselves. They can walk up and say, I'm Joe Blow, I want to vote here, and I live in this precinct. They sometimes will lie about where they live, but they can actually say who they are. And then they can walk to the next precinct and say, I'm Joe M. Blow, and then I'm Joe N. Blow at the next precinct and O. Blow and P, Q, R, right on down the line. They could put a number in for their middle name and vote in 99 counties in the State of Iowa, and they can do it in many of the other States as well.

We do not have the integrity in our election process that we need. I know that it's being gamed. I also know that we're not getting the convictions and the prosecutions because we don't have the structure in place even to get those convictions because we've eroded the integrity to the point where there's not a basis there to bring that kind of a prosecution.

But then we watch George Soros invest in the campaigns of multiple secretaries of state across the country. And where was it? Swing States. And what happened in those close elections where George Soros was a campaign contributor?

We know what happened. Those real close elections, in the last minute votes showed up that were surprises, and the election turned. We have at least one Senator down the aisle in my neighborhood that arrived in that fashion, Mr. Speaker.

And so I am disturbed about the results of these elections if they do not reflect the actual will of the American people, the actual will of the people within the jurisdiction that should be voting for those candidates; and I believe we need to enhance the integrity of the ballot.

I would shorten the terms that a person could be asking for an absentee ballot, and I would tighten the conditions and so that if it's reasonable for you to vote in person on election day, do so. These elections should not be a drawn out, 45- or 90-day absentee ballot affair. The more we do the absentee ballots, the more we cast our ballots from afar, the more likely it is we're voting for a candidate who's passed away during the campaign, and the less likely it is we will know all the things we need to know to make a reasoned judgment about that candidate.

In fact, at spots we have elected a United States Senator who was, who had passed away in a tragic plane accident. And I regret that that happened, but the people went to the polls and voted to elect that person who was passed away.

I'm for a voter registration system that's free of duplicates, deceased and, where the law applies, felons. I'm for a picture ID, a government-issued picture ID that has legitimacy, and I'm opposed to motor voter. I'm opposed to satellite voting, and I'm opposed to same- day registration.

And all of these components of the election process, I add to that again, there needs to be a paper trail for the ballots. Let's have integrity. Let's have a certification that they be citizens from the secretaries of state of each of the States. And then, if we don't have enough integrity in our ballots, something's got to happen where we crunch the databases of the voter registration against those of the other States to find out how many duplicates there really are. And there would be many.

So I have less faith in this than most of the American public does; and if they had the exposure to what I've had the exposure to, I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that there wouldn't be the confidence in this election process that the American public has; and that lack of confidence might result in a different kind of a result here within this Congress and within the States. I think that they would impose more integrity in the ballot process.

And so I didn't come here to speak about that. I listened to the gentlelady and the gentleman that spoke in the previous period and felt that I had to express the other viewpoint. I actually came here, Mr. Speaker, to talk about how we transform this economy here in the United States.

And being from Iowa, I've listened to the economic proposals of each of the Presidential candidates. I listened to them make their pitch for their vision for America. And I said last January, February, March and on throughout the summer, clear into August, at least, that we don't have a Presidential candidate on the Republican side of the aisle that's put together an economic recovery plan. Yes, they have pieces. Yes, they have components, and they do tweak it around the edges, and they'll argue that one piece or another is what it takes to bring our economy back around to where it belongs.

Well, I've watched this economy devolve downward, and it has. It's a deep trough. But worse than the deep trough is the length of this trough that we're in. And it is an economic fact that if you look at the patterns of economic growth and decline throughout the history of the free market world, one will see that whenever there has been a Keynesian economic theory applied, the more vigor with which it is applied, the longer is the trough for a recovery.

If one will look at the grandest experiment of Keynesian economics we had seen up till this point it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new deal that he unleashed on the American people, starting at the beginning of his term. The Stock Market crashed in October of 1929, and we saw Herbert Hoover caught up in the throes of that climactic shift economically that was a global trend.

Herbert Hoover had--everything he'd touched had turned to gold up to that point. He believed that he could steer government to solve the problem. Well, he went to work to try to steer government, and it went the other way on him.

Cool Cal Coolidge had a pretty good handle on it earlier, in the previous century, and that was: Don't just stand there, do nothing, because the free market system will recover itself.

Well, instead we had Smoot-Hawley; we had trade protectionism. We had then the New Deal that flowed out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We had billions of dollars that ultimately were spent throughout that period of time, at least in today's dollars. And the CCC camps, the WPA programs, the TVA, the list went on and on and on that came out of Roosevelt. Throw another plan at it, throw some more money at it, borrow some money, grow the Federal Government and put money into the hands of people. And if you do that, the theory was, according to John Maynard Keynes, who was the most influential economist of his time, and his curse lingers on us in this Congress today, that if you would get money into the hands of people, they would spend it and that would stimulate the economy and the economy would recover. In other words, we could spend ourselves into prosperity, according to John Maynard Keynes.

Now, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bought into the Keynesian economic theory with more vigor than George W. Bush bought into the Henry Paulson stimulus plan, or should I say the TARP plan. $700 billion tossed in there to pick up toxic debt was the plan. But back in the thirties it was FDR's plan

to follow Keynes' directive, which was put money into the hands of people and get them to spend and you'll stimulate the economy, because they believed that our economy was consumer-driven.

Well, Mr. Speaker, every Keynesian experiment that I know of in history, and that includes Roosevelt's New Deal, it includes the Japanese, and it absolutely includes Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, plans his approach to this.

And by the way, the President, President Obama has told us directly, face-to-face, that he believes that Roosevelt lost his nerve; that he should have spent a lot more money in the thirties; that because he lost his nerve and didn't spend more it brought about a recession within a depression, and unemployment went up because Roosevelt didn't borrow and spend enough government money.

Well, I know what it's like to compete with a government that has more money than the private sector has. I know what it's like to try to hire somebody off of unemployment. I know what it's like to train employees, put them on a benefits plan, and have them finally in a place where they can be a full-time employee that can yield a return on the work that they're doing and you can count on them being to work every day, and look at how their career is laid out working for your company, and have the Federal Government or the State government, or the county government, or even the city government come in and outbid you for those services.

And how do they do that?

Well, they do that by looking around and thinking, here's this trained employee. What's it take to get them? And they will up the ante until they can hire this trained employee, and inevitably that employee will take the offer of the higher paycheck and a benefits package that competes or exceeds the one that you can offer from the private sector and go to work for the government where they don't have the responsibility, where they don't have to work as hard, where the hours are more predictable, where the risk of employment is less and it's more stable.

I recognize that. But better wages and better benefits and all of those comforts that come with a government job work against the private sector.

And so private sector employers then find themselves faced with having to go out and hire more help and train more help and see that those employees roll over into the government employment.

The real downside, though, is this. Where does the government come up with the money to pay more wages and pay better benefits, which they have been increasingly doing over the last generation? By raising taxes. The government raises taxes. It raises taxes to get the revenue to bid against the private sector. And then the government comes out and makes an offer that says we're going to extend unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks.

Now, it makes it harder yet for the private sector to recover because they're competing with the government's offer, the government's offer to hire employees away or the government's offer to pay people not to work. And where does that money come from? This Federal Government borrows it.

This Federal Government borrows it. It borrows it from the Chinese, borrows it from the Saudis, borrows it from multiple countries around the world. And about 50 percent of it, to be fair, comes from investors within the United States domestic funds that are invested into U.S. Treasury bills, for example.

So a government that believes that it can stimulate an economy by stimulating consumption and completely ignores the part of the equation that requires that there be production for the economy to function. And I would point out that if no one is producing any food, clothing, or shelter, if no one is producing any transportation links out there in the private sector, if no one is making available any of the recreational facilities that will attract those dollars, there's not production. If there's not production, there's no place for anyone to spend their money.

This economy is production-driven, not consumption-driven. And we must, to grow out of this economic situation that we're in, we must produce goods and services that have a marketable valuable, both domestically and abroad. When we do that, and we will eventually do that, this country will grow out of this problem that we are in.

But we must get government off of our back. We must keep a competitive tax rate for the rest of the world. We must reduce our regulations. We must stimulate our entrepreneurs.

And this Republican side of the aisle has now for about 3 years been saying, Where are the jobs? Mr. President, where are the jobs?

Well, I've heard that echo many times in this Chamber and across through the media outlets in the country.

But I would submit that there is something else out there that's required before there will be any jobs, and that's the prospect of profit. Investors, employers, entrepreneurs must have a prospect for profit before they will invest their money or put their time in or take the risk of hiring employees, especially with ever more regulations, especially with ObamaCare pouring down over everything that we do. We are not going to get to a recovery until investors, entrepreneurs, and employers can see an opportunity for profit and begin to realize that profit because you can't write paychecks for employees from deficit spending very long. You must have profit in order to pay employees.

So if there's going to be jobs, and we want Americans to go to work, you must have profit in order to fund the wages. And I don't know why I don't hear that from anybody else. It's as if this word ``profit'' is a dirty word. No, it is a very good thing. America is a country that has to build itself on profit, on free enterprise, capitalism.

I just took a look in my desk drawer today. There are flash cards in there that were published in 2008. These are the flash cards that enable one to be trained for naturalization here in the United States. So if you want to become an American citizen, and you come to America legally, get yourself a green card, and what you do is you have to take the test. And part of that test is, what's the economic system? Free enterprise capitalism. That's on the test. It's a little head's up, Mr. President. I hope you could pass that test.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It's always my privilege and an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor. As is often the case, I come here and hear the end of the debate that has gone on before me and feel compelled to address it from a bit of a different perspective.

As I listen to the gentlemen and the gentleladies talk about the right to vote, I think it would be important for us to remind the body that there has to be a qualified voter. It isn't that everybody has a right to vote. You have to be old enough for one thing, and you need to be an American citizen for another. As I've watched things change over my adult lifetime, the integrity of the vote has been damaged.

The gentleman from Maryland made the statement that there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. I know that it's difficult to put this into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, but I would hold this up as, let me just call this, evidence number one:

This is an acorn. It's an acorn that I carry in my pocket every day. I carry it there every day to remind me of what that organization ACORN has done to the integrity of the vote in the United States of America. How much more widespread would you have to be than operations going on in nearly all, if not all, of the 50 States--the major cities--and millions of dollars spent to pay people to go out and fraudulently register voters? There are over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations that this acorn symbolizes that they have admitted to going out and purchasing on a commission basis: We're going to pay you to get these fraudulent voter registrations. Oh, they can be legitimate, but they can also be fraudulent, and ACORN didn't differentiate between the two. They just paid out in commissions. They violated the laws of the State of Nevada, and they violated the laws of the State of New York.

This Congress shut down the funding to ACORN, and the national organization of ACORN collapsed. So for the gentleman to say--and I quote--there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, I think there is massive evidence of widespread voter registration fraud, and from that flowed fraudulent votes as well.

We have watched the integrity of the voter registration and the election system be undermined over the last generation in almost a calculated way. Issue after issue has eroded the integrity of the qualified voter in these ways: motor voter during the Clinton years. If you show up for a driver's license--and we know how well that works. How many of the--I think it's 15 of the 19--September 11 hijackers had driver's licenses, that breeder document for false identification? You show up for a driver's license, and they say to you in their native language, Do you want to register to vote? If you answer in the affirmative in any language, they put you down and register you to vote.

People don't understand that they're bound by perjury laws. We don't know about the prosecutions that may or may not be taking place. It's not considered to be as serious an offense by, let me just say, the Department of Justice as it should be. After all, they have their prosecutorial discretion. They have testified before the Judiciary Committee, where I serve, that they select which laws they want to enforce and which ones they do not want to enforce.

With regard to voting rights in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, we know how that works. They have a policy that has been testified to under oath under several different scenarios that they will not move a voting rights case if it damages a minority. That's the policy of the Department of Justice, and it's the policy of the most recently departed Loretta King, who found that, in Kinston, North Carolina, that voted like 70 percent of the communities in America to have nonpartisan local elections for mayor and city council, they voted to abolish the partisanship and go to nonpartisan elections. So that would be a common practice, and 70 percent of the cities and municipalities have done that. But in Kinston, North Carolina, they were forbidden by the Department of Justice because, if you read the Department of Justice's agent's letter on that--and that was Loretta King--African Americans--no, she said ``blacks''--wouldn't know who to vote for if they didn't have a ``D'' beside their names. Therefore, she forbid them from abolishing partisan elections in a city council and mayor's race in Kinston, North Carolina. That's one example.

There is another example of the intimidation that took place with the

New Black Panthers of Philadelphia, who were standing out there, calling people ``crackers,'' smacking their billy clubs in their hands, taking an offensive posture in paramilitary uniforms. That's all on videotape--most of America has seen that--and we saw this Justice Department write off the case. The case was made. The convictions were there. This Justice Department canceled those convictions and released everyone except for the one individual, the most egregious violator, who got the tiniest little message. He got an injunction: Don't do this again right here in this city at least for the short term. That was the injunction.

Tom Perez, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, testified under oath that that was the most severe penalty that they could have under law. Not true. Under oath, he uttered words that were not true, and we should bring him back before the committee and call him to account for this.

So, Mr. Speaker, I want every American citizen who is qualified to vote. I don't want anybody slowed up at the polls and intimidated because of any reason. But to imply that people are denied their right to vote in this country as if this were 1960 all over again really is a false premise to establish this on. We're all about legitimate voters, and I'm all against illegitimate voters that erode the vote and dilute the vote of the legitimate voters.

I just mentioned motor voter. Absentee ballots themselves have been stretched out, and they can pass through numerous hands, and the various States have different policies. And whenever a ballot goes from one hand to another hand to another hand, it opens up the opportunity for fraud. I can remember a case in Iowa where near the end of the election, they found 444 ballots, absentee ballots that had not been turned in yet that were--where did they find them? Oh, Democrat campaign headquarters; 444 absentee ballots. So, Mr. Speaker, there is an example of the election fraud. I would call it widespread voter fraud that is taking place. There are convictions in Troy, New York, for example.

I also listened to testimony before the Judiciary Committee by the Secretary of State of the State of New Mexico who had to admit under oath that if I were working the election board and am a resident of New Mexico in good standing and am registered to vote, if I went in to work and figured that I would vote at the end of my shift, and somebody walked in, and they said that they are Steve King--me--and they lived at my address, whatever it might happen to be in New Mexico, even if they alleged that they were me, and I am working the board, I can't challenge them by law in New Mexico. That's a law that encourages voter fraud.

So what happens when they call up an hour before the polls close and they say, Sally, we know that you voted, but your husband, Joe, is registered to vote, and he's not been in to vote yet. Can you send him down? And Sally says, Well, no. Joe is in a truck in Maine. He isn't going to be voting. And 15 minutes later, somebody shows up and says, I'm Joe, and he votes as Joe. How do you catch that? How do you police that? I suggest you do so with a picture ID, a government-issued picture ID.

We need to have a number of things go on. We have people voting on the rolls that--dead people are voting. People are voting in New York and voting in Florida; that happened in the year 2000. We know about those cases. When you have fraud within the States and that fraud flows over State lines, and when people get in buses and take a ride across a State line and go into the polls, and they vote same-day registration in voting, it opens up the door again for fraud. And the people that want to game it and invest money in it are marginally winning those close elections.

So this acorn that I carry in my pocket every day, it isn't because I have such an abiding dislike for ACORN, as an entity. But it's because I understand--and I want the American people to understand--what happens to the United States of America if the people that are perpetrating widespread voter fraud get their way. And it's this, Mr. Speaker: the Constitution of the United States is the foundation of this country. It is the foundation of our law. It is the supreme law of the land, coupled with Federal law that's written within the guidelines of the United States Constitution.

We often look at it, if we hold on to the Constitution--because if we fail, our Republic will fail and collapse as well. And I embrace the Constitution. I hold on to it. I have one in my pocket every day, and I refer to it on a regular basis. But there's something underneath that Constitution.

When you think of the edifice of a building, and you go down and you build a foundation, a foundation on sand, for example, or a foundation on something unstable, no matter how good your foundation is--the Constitution--no matter how good that foundation is, if it's on unstable soil, it will collapse. No foundation can be sustained just by the strength of the foundation itself. And the underpinnings, the bedrock upon which this foundation of our Republic, called the Constitution, sits is free elections, honest elections, legitimate elections, elections where qualified voters, American citizens go forth and redirect the destiny of the United States of America.

But they have to be free elections. They have to be open elections. They have to be legitimate. They have to be fair. And we cannot have noncitizens voting. We cannot have fraudulent votes. We can't have dead people voting. We can't have transients that are not American citizens voting. If that happens--and it is happening--and if America loses confidence in the election system that we have, this bedrock that upholds our Constitution collapses. That bedrock of legitimate elections collapses. And if it does, the Constitution itself falls with it, Mr. Speaker. That's why it's important that we have voter registration lists that are free of duplicates.

And where the States have laws prohibiting the voting of felons--like Iowa, for example--free of felons, free of deceased--free of deceased, duplicates, and felons, we require a picture ID, and we need to require that the Secretary of State certify that the registered voters are citizens, and we need to enforce it, and we need to police it. And we need to say to the Department of Justice and the attorneys general within the States that have jurisdiction to bring these cases, that you must set this as a high priority.

Prosecutorial discretion, when there's an assault on the bedrock that is the underpinning for the foundation of the United States, the Constitution, when that assault comes, it must be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. And this society and this culture and this Congress should rise up and demand that we have legitimate elections in this country.

When you think, Mr. Speaker, that a single State and a handful of votes, 537 votes in the State of Florida in the year 2000, determined the President of the United States--it may well have been for the next 8 years rather than the next 4 years--and each recount of those votes in Florida came back to the same or a very similar total--there's not a legitimate argument any longer that Al Gore really won that race. He did not. History cannot write that. Even the recount down by The Miami Herald comes back to George Bush winning marginally by very nearly the same number that the Secretary of State certified by 537 votes.

But how many votes in Florida were fraudulent votes altogether? How much closer was that election because of election fraud? How many people voted in Florida that also voted in the State of New York? How many deceased voted? How many felons voted? We've got some records of those. And even though the felons that are voting that we know of are not in great numbers, this could have come down to a handful of votes. This could have come down to one vote. And if a State doesn't have a legitimate election process, and that State's electoral votes determine the President of the United States, and we would stand here and argue that anybody that came into the polls should be allowed to vote because, if not, their vote might be disenfranchised even though they took no responsibility to register themselves to vote, to go to the right polling place to vote, that they should be motor votered and same-day registration votered and walk into any precinct and vote, and that can be sorted out after the fact.

That happened in my State. My former Secretary of State, Chet Culver, who later became Governor, amazingly gave the order that anybody could vote in any precinct at any time, and they would sort that out afterwards. So the election that he presided over--where Iowa is the first-in-the-Nation caucus, we were the last in the Nation to certify the vote. And he is the one that also supported an executive order to grant the felons the right to vote, even though a State statute specifically prohibited such a thing.

I came to talk about a different matter, Mr. Speaker, and I will endeavor to do that. But legitimate elections with integrity in our voter registration rolls, requiring citizenship, and devoid of duplicates, deceased and felons, where the law applies and a picture ID where the people that maybe can't figure out how to vote under the rules that every other citizen can meet, such as a picture ID, will pop out their picture ID to rent a movie, for example, or to get on an airplane is another example. They can have their picture ID, but they can't be bothered to show up with that.

When we're choosing sometimes by a handful of votes the next leader of the free world within the jurisdiction of the States, that if one single State has a corrupt election process, even one that isn't as clean as it can be, even one that's just sloppy where illegitimate, illegal voters cancel out the votes of the legitimate voters and, thereby, by a marginal vote--like we saw in Florida, perhaps--change the results in that State and by doing so shift the electoral votes over to one side or the other for the Presidency, and America gets a President that we really didn't vote for because we didn't have integrity in the voting process.

And we could watch, not so much just the fraud, but if America loses confidence in the electoral system, if we don't have faith that the decisions of the American people emerge through the election process, then we lose confidence in our Republic altogether, and that's when the United States, our Constitution, could collapse, Mr. Speaker.

So this is a high and important goal that we have. And ACORN was cut off from Federal funding by a massive outpouring of votes in the House and the Senate. When they saw what was going on inside ACORN, even some of the strongest left wing Democrats that sit over here voted to cut off the funding to ACORN.

I had introduced the first amendment to cut off ACORN about 4 years earlier, but I'm going to carry this in my pocket because they're reforming. They're reforming in localities and cities and States across the country again. They're coming back, some of the same faces with a little bit different names. They're organizing, by the way, in the Occupy Wall Street effort in New York. Should've known. You know, we could have called that shot early from the beginning.

But, Mr. Speaker, I want to make a couple of comments in a transitional discussion here. I didn't set myself up with a segue, and so I'll just jump right into it, that is, I have the privilege to represent a good part of Iowa here in the United States Congress. And I've had the privilege to be involved in and engaged in the first-in- the-Nation caucus process for quite a long time now.

It came about somewhat in this way, and that would be an Iowa legislature from years gone by decided to establish the first-in-the- nation caucus. A lot of the rest of the country didn't pay much attention to it. It didn't attract the Presidential candidates in the fashion that they would have envisioned early on.

But in 1976, a little-known candidate and low-profile candidate for President who was the Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, came to Iowa. He saw that opportunity that the first-in-the-Nation caucus provided and Jimmy Carter spent a lot of time in Iowa. He traveled the State and got to know people. He built a network and organization and friendships within the State. By the time the caucus rolled around in 1976, Jimmy Carter won the caucus in Iowa, which was a surprise win. People didn't see it coming. The polling didn't show it. And that surprise win was a springboard that launched Jimmy Carter on to the nomination of the Presidency out of this little-known, first-in-the-Nation caucus we have in Iowa.

And the State law that was introduced says that we shall be the first competition in the Nation, and it automatically moves the State of Iowa forward if any other State moves their date. This year it will be on January 3. So it's earlier than usual, earlier than I would like; but it will be a significant competition that evening that will give the country the first look at what Iowa activists think about who should be the next President of the United States.

Taking us back in history also, something to reflect on, and that would be Jimmy Carter in 1976 won the nomination because of the springboard of the Iowa caucus. If he had lost the Iowa caucus, I don't think we would have heard of Jimmy Carter after that. His campaign very likely would have died. That was 1976. That was the year, by the way, that Ronald Reagan challenged unsuccessfully Gerald Ford for the nomination of the Presidency.

Well, 4 years later, Ronald Reagan was a player in the Iowa caucus, but he didn't work Iowa very hard. George H.W. Bush did work Iowa very hard, and Bush won the caucus in Iowa. Reagan expected to, but he took Iowa for granted and George Herbert Walker Bush won the caucus in Iowa in 1980, and then Ronald Reagan had the pressure on him when they went to New Hampshire. And there in New Hampshire Ronald Reagan had the famous line: I'm paying for this microphone, and he pulled the microphone forward, and that was the shot. That was the vignette that went around the country and around the world, and it exemplified the authority with which Ronald Reagan came to the debate and the authority with which he had governed as Governor of California and the authority with which he would later on become the best President of the 20th century. But that moment in New Hampshire was a moment for Ronald Reagan that launched him out of New Hampshire and on to the nomination and on to the Presidency.

But if you'll remember, Mr. Speaker, Gerald Ford was under serious consideration for the nomination as Vice President of the United States. And I'm actually glad they didn't make that decision. A former President as a Vice President would be too much friction, too much conflict, and not enough room for the new President to operate. But George Herbert Walker Bush was nominated and became the Vice President under Ronald Reagan, for two terms, 1980 through 1988, or 1981 through 1989 would be another way to describe that. And was, of course, the nominee and was elected to become the President of the United States.

So I would just speculate, Mr. Speaker, that had it not been for the Iowa caucus victory of George H.W. Bush, he very likely would not have been named the Vice Presidential candidate since he ran a competitive nomination competition against Ronald Reagan. Gerald Ford was not named Vice President; George H.W. Bush was. He became Vice President for 8 years, and then President for 4 years. And would we have had a President George W. Bush? Had we never had Bush 41, we maybe would never have had Bush 43.

So the continuum of history has shifted itself dramatically on the results of what was prior to that time a very low-profile, not-very- significant caucus in Iowa. Now since that period of time, it has been leveraged up again and again and again. And in the last caucus, we saw what happened with Barack Obama emerging. His movement began in Iowa. Iowa gave him his launch to New Hampshire. It wasn't my choice, obviously, Mr. Speaker; but there's a legacy that will play itself out again January 3 of this year.

I'm watching all of the Presidential candidates, and I'm watching how they perform and how they resonate with the voters. I have said since January, concluded that it was a slow start on the Presidential race. You know, most people weren't yet clamoring for a Presidential race. I thought we should start seeing and we should be seeing more activity, and so we did some things to initiate Presidential activity in the State, including hosting a Presidential event on March 26 at the Marriott Hotel in Des Moines. That seemed to galvanize and launch this caucus process.

A number of the Presidential candidates came there and made their presentations, and we intermixed it with good thinkers on policy issues of the day. That was one of the things that took place. But even then, as I listened to the Presidential candidates, and as I have the privilege to talk with them and get to know them, and it is an extraordinary privilege to know these Presidential candidates in this way, I like them all. I respect them all. Mr. Speaker, every one of them, in my opinion, would make a better President than the one we have. I will have no hesitation about endorsing and campaigning for the eventual nominee.

But there have been a couple of things missing. One of them is an economic policy plan. As I listened to the candidates, they would talk about what they would repeal, but I wasn't hearing very much about what they would do on the proactive side. So I even toyed with this idea, Mr. Speaker, and the idea of advancing some of those repeals in my own way. But as I watched the Presidential candidates, they want to tweak the tax policy some and they all want to repeal ObamaCare. I think that looks like plank number one in the platform of the nominee or any of the candidates as they compete for the nomination going forward. Plank number one, repeal ObamaCare.

Then they have their tax cut plan and how they would structure the taxes. But I have not seen all year long a significant economic proposal. One of those that has emerged now that people can identify with is Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan. The 9-9-9 is a bumper sticker that does get people's attention. They can remember it. It has a unique ring to it, and it causes them to pay attention and look into it and understand each of the three components. Well, there's a marketing brilliance in the 9-9-9 plan. I'm going to try to avoid discussing the economic components of it, but there's a marketing brilliance.

Then Mitt Romney had, prior to that, a 59-point plan. Mr. Speaker, I'm sorry, I can't get through 59 points. What I can't memorize, I can't defend and explain. But subsequent to Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan, then Rick Perry's 20/20 plan. Let's see: cut, balance and grow, or pretty close to that. I call it the 20/20 plan--that also caught people's attention--to go to a flat tax. Steve Forbes is one of the advisers on it. It looks like Art Laffer is one of the advisers on Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan. Both are very respected economists.

I'm one who goes for a fair tax, so it's hard to move me on these other policies. But we're starting to see now the Presidential candidates differentiate themselves on their economic policies.

But, Mr. Speaker, what I bring this up for is that I'm looking yet for a candidate for the Presidency who can articulate a vision for America on what their view is, what their vision is on how to take America to the next level of our destiny. What does America look like in a generation if they're able to bring their policies into play and lead with the bully pulpit of the Presidency of the United States? What does America look like? What are our fundamental principles that can be inspired by a President with that kind of vision? And how does that mesh in, how does that couple with the policies that they would advocate?

I take you back, Mr. Speaker, to Ronald Reagan, again, who for his entire political career talked about America as the shining city on the hill. He didn't talk about the shining city on the hill that he promised we were necessarily going to have. He said, America is a shining city on a hill and standing strong and true on a granite ridge. That is pretty close to a Reagan quote. It may not be exactly right, Mr. Speaker, but this gives you the concept. All of his political life, he had the vision for America as a shining city on the hill. He articulated it. When we heard it from him, maybe we didn't see it with the clarity that Reagan did, but we knew he saw it with the clarity. That was the vision thing. That is what inspired America to come behind Ronald Reagan, and that's what inspired America to become, again, this resurgent Nation where the malaise speech was put behind us and the imagination, the hope and the robust future for America unfolded from the Reagan administration. That's the biggest reason why we see him as the greatest President of the 20th century.

The next President of the United States needs to articulate a vision, needs to tell us what America looks like, what are our foundational principles, how they will refurbish those pillars of American exceptionalism, how they can strengthen the measures of life and marriage, how they can strengthen the family, that basic building block of our civilization, and how they can restrengthen the constitutional understanding. I want to hear from Presidential candidates how they would make appointments to the Supreme Court of Justices who will read and interpret the Constitution, the text of the Constitution, to mean what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification.

We have a President who is intentionally nominating activists to the Federal courts. It's a tragedy that those kinds of judges would remove the understanding of the Constitution from the American people. And so far we've kind of moved forward accepting the idea that the people in the black robes understand more about what's written and what is meant in this Constitution than other people.

All of us in here took an oath to this Constitution. Our Federal workers take an oath to this Constitution in the executive branch. Our troops all do the same thing, and many of our State officers do the same thing. You can't take an oath to a Constitution that is living and breathing. You can only take an oath to a Constitution that means what it says. And some of them take the oath and set about seeking to amend it de facto, amending the Constitution by redefining it.

I want a President who understands the pillars of American exceptionalism, who can articulate them and can transfer them into the future as the timeless values that have gotten us to the present; one who can articulate the great, great difficulty of moving to a balanced budget, how we get a balanced budget amendment that will guide this Congress so we can be bound by our obligation to our constituencies; one who has an understanding of foreign policy; and one who has a full and complete tax plan that transforms America.

All of those things are things that fit within the vision. And the vision, right now, is what I've tuned my ear for. And I'm hopeful, Mr. Speaker, that we will be able to hear this vision come from the Presidential candidates and, before we get into January, that we'll understand or hear with that clarity from the next President what their shining city on the hill speech is for us.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 45 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 2, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 806 I was delayed in leaving a meeting with a constituent off the House floor during this two minute vote series and was unable to reach the floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 802 I was not present to vote because I was participating in a public meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers regarding the historic flooding that we have experienced along the Missouri River this year. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 801, I was not present to vote because I was participating in a public meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers regarding the historic flooding that we have experienced along the Missouri River this year.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, it's my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor. And before I go into my presentation, I want to go into the subject matter the gentleman from Texas has led this previous Special Order on, just as a means of discussing a way to look at victims' rights.

For me, I was caused to reexamine the situation as a victim. I had had some heavy equipment that was destroyed by vandals back in the year 1987, a year that shall live in infamy. It was in the middle of the farm crisis years. A lot of that damage was uninsured, but we did catch the perpetrators. A long, long story; it was hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. I followed through on everything, seeing myself as a victim who had an obligation to assist the prosecution as a citizen and a victim would and should. And I remember sitting in the courtroom in Sac City, Iowa, when they brought up the trial of one of the perpetrators. The bailiff announced to the court: This is the case of the State v. Jason Martin Powell. And I sat there thinking, how is it the State versus the perpetrator? I'm not in this equation. I'm not even the versus; I'm just here as a spectator. And so I began to examine what that really means. What it means is that the State and the law enforcement component, in this case the State, is the intervenor. If you have a grievance with someone, and I certainly had a grievance with the people that destroyed my equipment and nearly destroyed my business, before the law and order days, that would be settled in some other fashion, likely in some violent fashion. And if you go back a couple thousand years or 3,000 years before the law was established, like Mosaic law, or Roman or Greek law--but as law was established, it was to eliminate the vigilante component of this, and the State stepped in and intervened.

Another way of looking at it would be when everything was owned by the State. The subjects in, let's say, old Western Europe, old England, the subjects were the property of the king. The State supplanted the king. The subjects and everything they owned were the property and the ownership of the king in England, so when you see old English common law and you see how it transfers into the United States, and it becomes the State v. Jason Martin Powell, the perpetrator, convicted perpetrator, I will say, and I can say his name in the record here now, that transfer was, if you committed a crime, you shot one of the king's deer, if you murdered or assaulted one of the king's subjects, you were committing a crime against the king. So in our society when you commit a crime, you are committing a crime against the State.

I'm taking us all to this point, Mr. Speaker, because once the State is satisfied that they have established justice, the victim doesn't really have anything more to say about it. The victim is not in that equation. My position needs to be developed more than it is, but my point is if the State is going to intervene, then the State has to enforce the law, then the State has to protect the citizens adequately. And when they fail, then what's the obligation of the State? They are not ensuring us to be protected from violent crime. They're simply doing the best they can without a consequence for the State. All the way around that circle is this.

Back in those years, I remember a study that was done, and that study will come to me in a moment. It was a 1995 study. In that study, they put a value on each crime. And I remember that a rape victim--they valued murder at around a million dollars; rape at about $82,000. Now, I can't imagine who would submit to rape for $82,000 dollars, but that was the quantity.

Then they also put in that study that a criminal who was loose on the street--an average criminal loose on the street--would commit $444,000 worth of crime in a year. Well, it costs about $20,000 a year to lock them up. They do $444,000 worth of damage to the society in a year. But that damage is not compensated. That comes out of crime victims in great, huge, whopping chunks of their lives, their security, and their property.

So I would just suggest that if the State were liable for all of the damage that's caused by perpetrators, we would have a more effective criminal justice system. I'm not advocating that we bring that forward in this Congress, but I just discuss that way of looking at this, how we got to the point where the State is the intervenor. Because the State is the successor to the Crown in old English common law, and a crime committed under the Crown was a crime committed against the King, because he owned everything, and it damaged his ability--even if it was the serf--to produce.

So we are now the successor philosophy, but we've forgotten this part, that victims are paying the price. The State is not paying the price. It's no longer a crime against the State, even though the State is the intervenor.

I would yield to the gentleman from Texas and thank him for presenting this. It just sparked that memory, and I wanted to put that into the Record and let you know how I think about crime victims.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for making those points.

We the people have vested our authority in our government, and that's how that transfer takes place. But I remember clearly the bailiff saying, ``The State versus,'' and that rang my bell; and I looked back through history to understand the root of that.

I would point out also that the $82,000 for a rape victim, I believe, was quantified in this way--loss of work, medical treatment, psychological treatment; that kind of impact that was just simply the economic impact on her life, not the emotional impact and the trauma. But even still, to quantify that--and the Department of Justice has quantified crime also with different values. And I don't recall them well enough from that chart, but I know there's a 1992 Department of Justice study that laid some values out.

I think it would be a plus for us, even though pain and suffering and the loss of life is immeasurable in a dollar form, if we could quantify it in a way we begin to understand what crime does to society. That would be helpful if we could move down that path. It's been a long time since there's been a real broad study done in this country that laid out the complete loss of all of the crimes in the United States that are committed. I would think it's in the billions of dollars. We accept it because it's a victim here and a victim there. It's not like they're all coming together in one large group. It's scattered out across our society. And the higher the level of crime in your community, the higher your tolerance has been because of the continual incidence of that violence.

I appreciate the sentiment from the gentleman from Texas, and I wanted to add some words to the sentiment that you brought to the floor here tonight in this Congress.

Reclaiming my time, again, I thank the gentleman from Texas.

I came here to talk about a couple of other subject matters, Mr. Speaker. The one that's on the front of my mind that I want to make sure I address is the Missouri River flooding that has taken place all down the Missouri River drainage area all summer long. I think for the rest of the country it hasn't been brought to their attention how bad and how devastating this flood is.

You can pick your river in the world and you will know that every river has flooded in history. That's what they do. That's why we have river bottoms. They're flattened out because of the floods. Whether it's the Mississippi River flood or the Missouri River flood or any of the floods that we've had up and down--the New Jersey floods, for example, and the other floods in the northeast part of the United States--they have been devastating; and we have watched on television as we've seen people scramble to get above the waterline and to sandbag to protect the assets that they have.

We watched as the water flooded into New Orleans several years ago with Katrina and the human suffering that went on down there. Some of us went down and did what we could. Myself, I've made four trips down after Katrina to try to lend a hand down there. I've contributed in some way, and I say humbly, in a small way, Mr. Speaker.

But this summer, Midwesterners--people in Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana--have all suffered from the greatest runoff experienced in recorded history from the Missouri River. This greatest runoff is accumulated this way. It wasn't particularly dramatic in snowcap in the wintertime, not particularly dramatic by March 1 as they measure that snowcap, but several things contribute to the runoff. It's the snow up in the mountains all the way up into Montana; it's the rainfall that takes place there; and it's any dramatic rainfall events.

All of those things came together in the perfect storm fashion--late season, significantly higher snowcap up in the mountains, and then early spring rains that saturated and became a significant runoff. On top of that, a very heavy rainfall event around particularly the Billings, Montana, area where they got 10 to 12 inches of rain; 8 inches, I think, in Billings and 10 to 12 across a vast area, some of it up to 15 inches in some areas.

So the circumstances were that we had all the snow that needed to come down--a large, large amount of snow. We had a lot more rain than expected. The ground was saturated so it didn't soak in. That was running off from broad rains across that had taken place in April and in May. And then on May 22, the massive rainfall that fell in the Billings area and around that was unprecedented in its volume. All of that together created a runoff that if you think of it in these terms, that the largest experience that they had seen was actually 1997. Prior to that was 1881.

In 1881, there were 42 million acre-feet of runoff. That's water a foot deep over 42 million acres; all of that volume, if you just calculate that volume, running off into the Missouri River.

There are six dams that have been built in the upper Missouri River, reservoirs created by them. And these six dams start in Montana and string down through North Dakota and South Dakota. The furthest most downstream one is Gavins Point at Yankton, South Dakota, and that would be the last valve that controls the flow of the Missouri River from that point, just upstream from Sioux City, all the way down to St. Louis. That's the control valve at Gavins Point.

Forty-two million acre-feet of runoff in 1981, 49 million acre-feet of runoff in 1997, 61--or I guess they said last night 60.4 million acre-feet of runoff this year in 2011, roughly 20 percent more than we had ever experienced before. If you would exempt '97, it was a third more than we had experienced in 1881. These six dams were designed to protect us downstream from serious downstream flooding in the largest runoff event experienced. That was 1881.

He used the commonsense logic of the floods of 1881. The floods in 1943, the floods in 1952 accelerated the construction of the Pick Sloan program. By 1968, we had built the six dams. They were completely operational for the full season of 1968. They were built to protect us from serious downstream flooding, and they were designed to the design elevations necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever.

And the Corps of Engineers has always held 16.3 million acre-feet of storage as the volume necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever, 1881. That hasn't changed. Over five different versions of the master manual, the document that governs how they manage the river, hasn't changed at all; but neither had the largest experienced runoff in history, 1881.

Now, I have to quantify that. The 49 million acre-feet in '97 was for the

breadth of the year. You compress the 1881 into several months--I believe 4 months of runoff, but it was a shorter period of time. So the monthly volume of runoff was greater in 1981 than it was in 1997. And so the Corps of Engineers had managed this all these years. In 113 years, we had not seen the kind of runoff that we saw in 1881. But it was designed to protect us from the largest runoff ever.

This year, we have the largest runoff ever, and the discharge that previously, coming out of Gavins Point, that last valve to release into the river that goes all the way to St. Louis, the largest discharge was 70,000 cubic feet per second. This year, because of the large volume, the discharge became 160,000 cubic feet per second, substantially more than twice as much volume as we've ever seen before coming through Gavins Point. Designed for a large amount of that, it did hold together and the system held together very well upstream.

But here's their problem, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the Corps of Engineers has determined that this runoff this year is an anomaly, that it's a 500-year event. And so in a 500-year event, they wouldn't change their management of the river substantially because they argue that it's unlikely that it will ever happen again.

My response to that is, a year ago, standing here, no one knew we were going to get the runoff in 2011. The odds of this kind of flood happening that has happened to us in 2011 weren't any greater than they are for the same thing happening next year. And it's the equivalent of--the risks for 2012 are the same as they were for 2011 for a runoff of that magnitude for a number of reasons, but the simple one is this: if you flip a coin twice in a row and it comes up tails twice in a row, what are the odds it will come up tails three times in a row, the third time?

Now, that's just one of those classic examples of statistics. You might think that the odds get to be one in six or something like that; but, truthfully, the odds are 50/50 that that coin will come up tails the third time in a row. If you flip it on its tail six times in a row, what are the odds that it will be tails the seventh time? Fifty/fifty, because we don't know next year whether there's going to be any more or any less runoff than we've had this year. The odds are the same, except that because of the damage to our system, our levees, and our storm protection, because of all of that damage, we're not as prepared to deal with a runoff of that magnitude as we were coming into 2011.

So the risk is greater, even though the odds of it happening again next year are the same. And no one, no mortal that's looking at 113 years of records--and maybe a little more than that--can tell you what a 500-year flood event is. It's not within the capabilities of mortal man.

And the reasons are, because if you're going to calculate the odds of a 500-year event, you would have to look across several thousand years to try to find a pattern to see if you could make that prediction. How many times did this kind of runoff happen in the previous 2,000 years or the previous 3,000 years? I mean, 3,000 years would only be six different increments of 500-year events. Would it happen six times over 3,000 years? Who knows. We have no records to go by. So it's a judgment call made by somebody sitting in an office somewhere--probably in Omaha--that this is a 500-year event. Therefore, they're not going to change the way they manage the river. They got by, okay, for 113 years--not managing the river all that time, just since 1968. But this time we got burned really badly, Mr. Speaker.

And I want to make this point, that to visualize this, this thing that Members of Congress haven't seen--not very many of us--the public hasn't seen hardly at all, think of this, think in our mind's eye of what it looks like to go up near the northwest corner of Iowa, South Dakota border--Sioux City, Iowa--and look at a Missouri River bottom that was flooded with water all summer long from around the first week in June until the first week in September.

That's a mile and a half wide where normally it's a few hundred feet wide. And go downstream a few more miles and the river is 8 miles wide hill to hill. And go down stream a little further to Omaha, right where Interstate 680 goes across, and the water is 11 miles wide. And once it goes through Omaha, Council Bluffs and Glenwood, that's compressed it down within the levees that miraculously held or we would have had a similar-to-Katrina event in Council Bluffs where we had at least 30,000 people living below the water level in their homes. If there's a breach in that dike, they get flooded like they did in New Orleans.

But downstream from there, the river that was narrow enough to go through the cities widens out again four or five, six miles wide on down into Missouri--and Sam Graves can tell you the rest of that story. Now, that's water from hill to hill in many cases, and water that's not sitting there stagnant, Mr. Speaker. This is water that is flowing out in the channel, 11 to 12 miles an hour, and out against the hillside, oh, let's just say six miles away from the channel, or seven. That water is still flowing at four to five miles an hour, and 12, 14, 16 feet deep. Farm buildings, businesses flooded up to the eaves--they're built on the highest piece of ground in the bottom, by the way--this water flowing at four or five miles an hour, dropping sand, debris--not as badly as I thought, but debris--and sand now that's laid out over thousands of acres, some of it 6 feet deep, everywhere, drifts of sand, dunes of sand that are 10 or 12 feet deep.

The trees that are up and down the river that have stood in water for 3 months, most of them will be dead next year. Farms have been destroyed. Thousands and thousands of acres have been destroyed. That's the magnitude of this flood.

Now we have to put the pieces back together, and some people have lost a lot and they can't be made whole again. There are others that will find a way to put it back together. There is a lot of indecision with floods; that's the nature of floods. And we have trouble getting definitive answers to people. But if they're under water June, July, August, into September, if their building sites are surrounded by an ocean--and I have boated to these farm sites. I've flown over it a number of times, and they are sitting in the middle of an ocean where it might be five miles to dry land. And that's the happy family home where they've invested their future.

We can, at the minimum--even though we have some programs, we have some individual disaster assistance, there is some ag assistance, there is also some public assistance for the public utilities that are there, but there is not enough to put the pieces back together. The least we can do is manage the river system so that this doesn't happen again with the similar runoff that we have this year.

We built the Pick Sloan program, the six reservoirs to protect us from the largest runoff ever experienced. Now we have a larger runoff. I cannot comprehend how it isn't just simply an automatic to lower the water level marginally in the upper six reservoirs to have the storage capacity to protect us from this type of runoff.

And just to do the math on it, the bill that I've introduced requires the Corps of Engineers to manage the river to protect us from serious downstream runoff in the event of the largest runoff in history. All it really does in the end is it replaces 1881 with a 2011 flood year.

It is not particularly complicated. Yes, they have to lower some water levels; but if those water levels are lowered, the effect of that isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the people have described.

First there were some, I will say, some things that alarmed people when the Corps announced that they would have to lower the water levels 12 feet, and that was too much, and they couldn't manage the river. I looked into that. It was 12 feet on the upper three reservoirs, not on all six; and that was with 70,000 cubic feet per second at discharge at Gavins Point, that lowest valve that we have there just upstream from Sioux City.

After a series of questions, they did another analysis. They raised the flow of discharge up to 100,000 cubic feet per second, and just the adjustment of that in the upper three reservoirs changed the 12-foot lowering level elevation down to six.

We should be able to deal with six because, historically, since 1968, on average, Fort Peck has been 7.4 feet below

the target elevation. We just lower the target elevation 6 feet; it's still higher than the average of what Fort Peck was. That's also true of each of the dams in the top three, which are the only ones they wanted to adjust because they're the largest.

So that's the effect of the bill, but it also has the effect of protecting us from flooding, serious flooding downstream. And I'm asking my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to sign on to this bill, particularly those who represent the Missouri River bottom area, those of us who have been affected by the flood, those of us who represent Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. And by the way, all the delegation in Iowa, Democrats and Republicans, have signed on and endorsed the bill. Most of Nebraska has. A lot of the Missourians that are affected have.

I'd ask the others, take a look. This isn't complicated. The red herrings that have been drug across the trail have been addressed and corrected. And the meeting last night in Omaha was, I will say, volatile and dynamic with people that have suffered all summer long. They want to be able to make plans on whether they should be investing in trying to put their farms back in shape. They can't do that, Mr. Speaker, unless we give them some assurance that we're going to manage the river to protect them from serious downstream flooding.

And while that's going on, we just set that highest priority up. Congress has the authority, in fact, we have the obligation to set the standards for the Corps of Engineers. If we fail to do that, they are, then, whip-sawed by all of the litigation that comes of all the special interests. Those special interests can be taken care of below the level that I'm suggesting, and they can have those same levels of priorities that they had within that--irrigation, barge traffic, electrical generation, recreation, fishing. All of those things can work at that level without hardly even noticing it upstream. But you notice it downstream, and the billions of dollars that it takes to put this back together from the damage can never be matched by the recreational investment that goes on upstream. They'll have it anyway. It won't be diminished in any appreciable way. We need to have the protection.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that's H.R. 2942. I have trouble remembering that bill number. I could be wrong. It's the King bill, and I appreciate all those that have cosponsored it; and I'm hopeful that the rest of the Missouri River Representatives will take a look at it. I'm under the understanding that there will be a companion bill introduced in the Senate. Hopefully, it will be bipartisan. That will give us some more incentive to get this done this fall while there's still time to address this issue. If we fail to do so, this river will be managed for another year the same way it was in this past year.

Could I inquire as to the amount of time I have remaining?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I will then just conclude this discussion on the river and not address any other subject matter.

We have not, as a Congress, looked at this Missouri River issue. It's a natural disaster that has been, to some degree, mitigated by the Corps of Engineers. Some of those decisions were awfully tough on a lot of people, and I believe we have an obligation to manage this river system, to protect us from serious downstream flooding, to set that priority and to set the levels, not at 16.3 million acre-feet anymore, that was 1881, but to increase those million acre-feet, not all that much, but enough to protect us from that serious downstream flooding.

If the Members of Congress that represent those areas come together unanimously, we can move a piece of legislation through this Congress, and I would think we could do it under suspension. It's a no-cost piece of legislation. It is a commonsense piece of legislation. It really isn't all that tricky, although we went through all 450 pages of the master manual, and it was hard to write; but now it's a pretty simple solution to a complex problem. I would urge my colleagues to take a look.

I would thank all of those involved for their public statements last night in Omaha and all the meetings that will be taking place up and down the river. I thank the Corps of Engineers for their cooperation in getting me accurate data to work with. And I look forward to resolving this issue, at least for the long term, while we help put people back together in an individual basis in the short term.

With that, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.