Floor Statements

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can tell you that I am pleased to address you, Mr. Speaker, here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and welcome you to this great deliberative body which becomes instantly far more deliberative than it has been over the last 4 years. This is part of it.

As I deliberate and I listened to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader, or another Member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman's words down. However, many of the Members are off in other endeavors. I would make the point that the leader and the Speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress, and I don't believe it can be effectively challenged, and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves for making wild accusations.

I came to this floor, though, Mr. Speaker, to talk about the weather, and as I listened to the speeches that have gone on before in this previous half-hour or hour, it actually changed the subject for me. I think there are many things that need to be brought out and clarified, given this, that we have debated this health care bill. We debated this health care bill for, oh, close to a year. It was announced in Rules Committee earlier today that there were, I believe they said, 100 hours of markup in committee. Well, it wasn't the bill that passed. It was 100 hours of debate and markup on a different bill. They switched bills at the end. That's a matter of public record and fact, also.

But the American public understands what happened. They understand that the Speaker of the House said, We have to pass the bill--meaning ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker--in order to find out what's in it. When that bill was passed, to set the record also straight, I don't think there is another time in the history of this Congress that there was a bill of this magnitude--in fact I'm certain there is not--that passed the House of Representatives without the majority support of the House of Representatives for the bill that was before us.

It is a fact of record, it's a fact of judgment, it's a fact of history, that there had to be conditions that were attached in order to achieve the votes necessary to squeak that bill by and pass ObamaCare here in the House on that day last March. If people forget, Mr. Speaker, what I'm talking about, it's this: Remember, there was a switch on the bill. The bill that was marked up in committee is not the bill that came to the floor, not the bill that had hearings on it and had markup. But there were also conditions. We should remember there were the Stupak Dozen, the Stupak Dozen who said we insist that there be an amendment brought forward that will protect so that the language that's in the bill doesn't fund abortion through a Federal mandate. They held out on that to get that vote. Little did I know up

until that Saturday afternoon that the gentleman who was doing the negotiating had already committed to vote for the bill, and the Stupak Dozen were anonymous people. Furthermore, they had negotiated with the President of the United States who made a commitment and followed through on it to sign an executive order that would pacify or mollify the anonymous Stupak Dozen under the presumption, unconstitutionally and completely outside the bounds of the separation of powers, that the President of the United States could effectively amend legislation by executive order and promise he's going to do so before the bill was even brought to the floor for a vote. That happened in this Congress.

Another condition of that was, this is a condition that came after the then-chair of the Rules Committee, the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), had offered the idea that they should just deem that the bill passed so they didn't have to go on record of voting for this bill; because they knew how bad it was. They knew how politically vulnerable they were. They knew that Speaker Pelosi was making many of them walk the plank. A lot of those people are not here in this 112th Congress because of that action. But as I talked about why this bill didn't have the support of the Congress and in the form that was before us, why the majority did not support it, the majority votes that day in its form, because there also had to be another deal on top of this. This was the deal that the Senate had to pass a reconciliation package which was designed to amend the bill that had not yet been brought to floor of the House for a vote. I don't know that it's the first time in history that there's been a shenanigan like that played, but it's the first time in my knowledge that there has been a bill certainly of that magnitude that came before this Congress that was not the bill that came through committee, that was pledged to be, I put it in quotes, amended by a Presidential executive order, and further amended by a reconciliation bill that would later pass the United States Senate.

That's what we have before us with ObamaCare. And it became the law of the land on that date of March 30, 2010; passed over here in the House, if I remember correctly, on the late evening of March 21 or the early morning of March 22, Sunday night. I remember my long walk home that night. I remember telling myself, I'm going to sleep until I'm all rested up and then I'm going to wake up and figure out what to do.

I didn't sleep very long. I couldn't sleep with that policy imposed upon the American people with the realization that it would become the law of the land. And about 2\1/2\ hours later, I got up and went to my word processor and typed up a request for a bill to repeal ObamaCare. I filed that request at the opening of business that day, the first opportunity in the first minutes of that day.

I want to thank and congratulate Michele Bachmann. I didn't know it, she was awake in the middle of the night doing the same thing, and her bill draft came down within 3 minutes of mine, exactly the same words. That bill draft was turned into a discharge petition with this huge Pelosi majority in the 111th Congress, and the discharge petition gathered 173 signatures, bipartisan by the Pelosi definition at least, Mr. Speaker. And that was part of the foundation that I think actually did shake this country.

There was a statement made in the Rules Committee when they were deliberating on the rule for H.R. 2 that we had said that the sky would fall if ObamaCare became the law of the land, and they said the sky didn't fall. Well, Chairman Upton, now chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said, yes, it did. The sky did fall.

When you look at the 87 freshmen new Republicans that are seated over on this side, the nine freshmen Democrats on this side, I think that any political pundit would tell you there was a political earthquake in America that was brought about in large part by the imposition of this liberty-stealing unconstitutional ObamaCare bill that is before this Congress now.

This Congress was elected to come here and repeal ObamaCare, get a handle on the debt and the deficit and lay the foundation so that private enterprise can start to have faith in the future of this country again and they can create the jobs under the framework that we are hopeful we will be able to bring through.

But we are truthfully not in a position yet where the House of Representatives can lay all of the economic foundation that is necessary for free enterprise to have enough faith and confidence to invest our capital in a robust fashion.

What we are in a position to do now with a new Congress and a new Speaker is to be able to play an effective defense against the existing majority in the United States Senate and the President of the United States, who has frantically been digging holes through his Keynesian economics-on-steroids theory and dug such a deep hole that we have watched Nancy Pelosi preside over an additional $5.2 trillion in debt, and we have watched the Obama administration run that up under their term of only a couple of years of about $3 trillion.

And it has got to stop. The American people did this. They were looking at President Gulliver Obama, and they were the Lilliputians that came to the polls on November 2 and tied him up with all their little electoral ropes and said to the new freshmen class, join those incumbent Republicans that are there and any discerning Democrats that are willing to join, and there will be some join on this vote tomorrow and on Wednesday to repeal ObamaCare, and take the shovel out of the hands of the President and certainly take the gavel out of the hand of Nancy Pelosi. That is what happened.

Now, I take you back through this history, because it is being rewritten again. How can they go before the Rules Committee, stand here on the floor of the House before the American people, Mr. Speaker, and take the position that somehow if they just explain it one more time and one more way, that the American people will now have some left-wing light bulb come on in their head? It is not going to happen.

The American people have seen clearly. They washed the lenses off and they have looked down through the lens of the Constitution and fiscal responsibility and common sense and they were appalled at that liberty- stealing bill of ObamaCare, and they said repeal that monstrosity, because the destiny of America will be forever diminished unless we do.

This is the charge that this new Congress has. It is the voice of the American people, and it is the respect that we must have, and my gratitude for God's gift to America, the freshman class that was elected in 2010 and sworn in here right here on this floor yesterday afternoon, and they will affect the agenda of this country for many Congresses to come; and it will be a responsible agenda that brings us to a balanced budget and begins to reduce the deficit that this country has, not just the deficit spending, but reduce the national debt.

We must get to the point where we can begin to pay down the national debt, and we start with this Congress. We start by rolling back the spending to 2008 levels. We started here today with a vote that cut our own budgets by 5 percent. It is not a lot of money; and, yes, it is symbolic, but it is the symbolism that compels us to follow through. If it is good enough now for those of us in this Congress that voted on that, it is also good enough to bring that policy back through the United States of America.

Well, so what I have heard is the Members on the other side of the aisle that still stand here and defend ObamaCare, the ones that are left, they have four talking points about the bill that they think are compelling, and they must believe that it offsets all of the horrible things about ObamaCare.

First they say that, well, remember, the President had all of these promises about what he was going to do with ObamaCare. And he is the first one that I know of that attached the word ``ObamaCare'' to it in a public way. It was at the Blair House during the health care summit, February 25, 2010, when the President of the United States referred to his own bill as ObamaCare. So that is the shorthand version for all this long thing. They don't want to say ObamaCare. I don't know why. That is how everybody knows it, and that is how everybody understands it.

So under ObamaCare, they say there are four--they don't list only four, they just give you the four--four redeeming components to ObamaCare that apparently offset all the horrible things about it, and these four redeeming conditions are these:

That it requires insurance companies all across America with a Federal mandate to provide for policies that must keep your children on there up until age 26. They think that is something that America has fallen in love with as a really good brainy solution.

Now, I know there are Republicans that support the idea of insurance policies being extended to age 26; but, Mr. Speaker, what a lot of people don't know in this country is there are at least two Members in this Congress that were elected before age 26, and had ObamaCare been implemented before they were elected to office, they would have, could have, been on their parents' health insurance plan.

Now, isn't that a nice thing, when you wean them off of their parents' health insurance plan and you transition them over and put a pin on their lapel and say, now, run the country. They haven't had a single minute of their own health insurance policy until we get here, and actually we have a responsibility for it here. We pay our chunk of the premiums, like any other Federal employee.

But I just think it is ironic that there would be such a strong argument that people elected to Congress could come here, walk in that door, come down here before the Speaker's rostrum, raise their hand and take the oath of office, and at that moment still be on their mommy and daddy's health insurance policy.

I wanted my kids to grow up. When they turned 18, I told them my responsibilities are now done. I am going to nurture you and give you advice and counsel you, and I will help you where I can. But I am not obligated, guys. We did our best for the first 18 years. We will do our best for every year. We will love you all our lives, but you got to start pulling your own load. Now I look at three grown sons in their thirties, all married, five grandkids, each an entrepreneur in their own right, pulling their own load, and I am glad that they didn't have to stay unweaned until age 26.

But if the insurance companies want to do that, you should be able to buy the policy. If States want to mandate, I think it is not a good policy, but they can do so constitutionally, and then if a person is tired of paying those kind of premiums, you can move to another State and vote with your feet. There are some States in the Union here that I would move out of because I can't afford the health insurance in them. There are other States one could think about moving to because of the opposite.

Here is the second point: preexisting conditions. They always tie this preexisting conditions in with the word ``discrimination'' because it is like a civil rights code word. So if an insurance company says I don't want to provide insurance policies to people who have preexisting conditions who wait until they get sick before they buy a policy, the health insurance purchasing equivalent of waiting for your house to be on fire before you go buy property and casualty insurance, how many rational people, Mr. Speaker, in this country, would make the case that we ought to have a guaranteed issue for our fire insurance on our house? Couldn't we then just, you know, set up our little BlackBerry with an automatic send and wait for the fire alarm to go off, and on the way down the steps to bail out of the burning house, you just click ``send,'' and automatically they have to give you a policy so that your house could be rebuilt if it is on fire.

We wouldn't do that. It is ridiculous because it defeats the logic of insurance. The logic of insurance is you want to be insured against a catastrophe, and you want to share that risk with other people who want to be insured against a catastrophe. It is true for fire insurance, it was true for flood insurance until the Federal Government took it over, and it needs to be true with health insurance.

But we will address preexisting conditions; and we will have a legitimate debate on preexisting conditions here in this Congress, in committee hearings, before committees, amendments offered, amendments allowed and amendments offered and debated and voted up and down.

My position is that if the States want to prohibit the consideration of preexisting conditions, they may do so. Our State has a high-risk pool, and we fund part of those premiums with the high-risk pool out of the State treasury.

I think that's a good idea. I have worked to develop that and expand that in my time in the State legislature. I think it's worthy of consideration that the Federal Government could take a look at those State high-risk pools and find ways to help those States provide those kind of backstops because there will always be people that are unfortunate. It won't always just be those that are irresponsible. There are also those that are unfortunate. And so we need to take that into consideration. But to have the whole debate about just those that are unfortunate and not take into consideration those that are responsible, those that are taxpayers, those that are funding, those that are the engine of our economy that are being discouraged by these kind of Big Government, socialized medicine, unconstitutional policies like ObamaCare.

Here's the third one. A 26-year-old with insurance, preexisting conditions. Oh, yes, the discriminatory preexisting conditions policy. It's not discriminatory. It's logical and rational. Would you say that it's a discriminatory policy to not allow people to buy property and casualty insurance if their house is on fire? It's not discrimination. It defies common sense. So I'm not going to let them get by with that word.

Here's a another thing, though. Doughnut hole. They say they fixed the doughnut hole and we would unfix the doughnut hole. The truth is that low-income people have that fix. There is a backstop for that doughnut hole. It's not the hole that they say it is. Furthermore, they raise fees elsewhere to fill the doughnut hole. So it's not fixed. It's just another transfer. So some people are beneficiaries and other people pay the extra money. I am not particularly animated about that, although I thought we should not have had that doughnut hole created here in 2003.

In any case, their next argument is against lifetime caps. If States want to provide lifetime caps, let them do that. But if individuals want to buy policies that have lifetime caps because the premiums are lower, let them make that decision as well, Mr. Speaker. But I envision the day that we have free markets that are engaged in this. We want to preserve the doctor-patient relationship. We want to preserve the free market effect of this so that when people make decisions about their health and their lives, they have some tools to work with.

I want to be able to in this Congress, this 112th Congress, advance the idea and seek to pass legislation that's pretty consistent with Chairman Dreier's. I would expand it a little more. He's advanced the medical savings accounts. I would add we need to advance health savings accounts, HSAs. In 2003, with the expansion of part D, we put language in that established HSAs, health savings accounts. It allowed in the first year for a couple to establish a health savings account with a maximum amount in it of $5,150, indexed for inflation so it could grow. I don't remember what those numbers are today, but that's the calculus, from $5,150 on up.

Well, that's a good deal. ObamaCare slashed that in less than half and capped the HSA maximum amount at $2,500. Why? Because they don't want people to be independent, and they don't want them to be able to make their own decisions. If they do that, then they might undermine this effort of expanding the dependency class in America, which is what ObamaCare is designed to do, because expanding the dependency class expands the Democrat Party, and that increases the political base. And it seems illogical to the people. Well, there's the logic I've just applied to it, and now, Mr. Speaker, they do understand that this is about politics. It's about expanding the dependency class. And it's about diminishing the independence and the spirit of Americans.

And so the lifetime caps piece is the fourth one. Twenty-six year olds, preexisting conditions, doughnut hole,

lifetime caps. That's the things they talk about. Four things. That's it? Do they redeem those 2,500 pages of disaster? Do they then overrule and trump the Constitution of the United States of America? I say no, Mr. Speaker. They cannot, they must not, they should not. And I hear this debate also about an increase in our deficit of the number, I think it was $232 billion, if--not if anymore, it's when--we repeal ObamaCare.

Well, that deficit, and they want to know, Will you offset that deficit with spending cuts? Yes, sir. We will be happy to offset a deficit with spending cuts. But I would make this argument instead. When you have an unconstitutional bill in front of you, and if you're weighing $232 billion and you want to debate whether or not that's a reason or not to repeal an unconstitutional bill. You can set no price on the Constitution of the United States of America. If it's a trillion dollars, you repeal the bill anyway because it's unconstitutional. And you don't sit back and twiddle your thumbs and wait for the court to resolve this for you. I'm glad that there's litigation going on in the judicial branch. I'm glad that Judge Hudson found with Virginia on the constitutional component of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I'm glad there are efforts out there in the States to deny the implementation of ObamaCare. All of these things going on.

But we took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States here yesterday. We took it all in good faith. We said so. And when we have an unconstitutional bill before us, Mr. Speaker, it is our obligation to repeal that bill. Our judgment of the Constitution is not a judgment that defers across and down the line of Independence Avenue. We don't go to the Supreme Court and genuflect and say, If you change the meaning of the Constitution, my oath applies. Our oath applies to our understanding and conviction of the text in the original understanding of the Constitution and the various amendments as they were adopted. That's what the Constitution has to mean or it is no guarantee whatsoever to the people in this country.

They rose up and they changed this majority in this House, and they did so because they're a whole group of millions of constitutional conservatives, including the Tea Party groups, and they said, Enough unconstitutional activity, enough of this theft of our liberty. We are not going to pass the debt and deficit on to the succeeding generations. And it was $230 billion was the point, not $232 billion, to make it accurate.

But I noticed today in the Republican Study Committee that chairman Jim Jordan read from an article written by Tony Blankley in The Washington Times, December 20, 2010. And it caught my ear. And so I looked it up. And I'd like to just close with this concept that was delivered by Tony Blankley shortly before Christmas this year. He wrote about an experience in China and how they were worried that if they don't keep the growth going in China that they will create expectations and the peasants in China will be unruleable. If you give them expectations, then you have to meet those expectations. Well, we in America, we trust in our expectations.

And so he writes this. He said what happened on November 2, was that the American people went to the polls and said, I want more liberty and less government. I want more liberty and less security about my future. And he puts it in these words. And I think they're excellent words. No other people in the world would have responded to economic danger by seeking more liberty and less government protection. No other people would have thought to themselves, if I have to suffer economically in order to not steal from my grandchildren, so be it.

I pray we would have come to that decision a generation ago instead of a couple of months ago, Mr. Speaker. But this Congress has come to that decision at the direction and the effectiveness of the American people. And we will follow through on that pledge, and we'll ask them, Keep sending us more people like this freshman class to help get this job done so that in our time we can hand the keys of this Chamber and this government over to the next generation in sound fiscal fashion, sound constitutional fashion, not with diminished liberty, but with expanded liberty, and the pillars of American exceptionalism refurbished by our generation, thanks to the will of the American people.

Madam Speaker, it's always a privilege and an honor to

address here on the floor of the House. And we're in the waning days, waning hours perhaps, of this 111th Congress as many are prepared to go home for Christmas, and by the count of the votes on the board tonight, some have gone home for Christmas.

And I listened to the remarks of the gentleman from Colorado who spoke ahead of me, and I'm not of the spirit to directly rebut each of the points that he's made. I want to stay within the Christmas spirit here tonight, Madam Speaker, and simply address that there is another viewpoint, and that other viewpoint was heard.

We have, over the last 4 years in this Congress, seen significant majorities for Democrats, and there were opportunities for Democrats to seek to pass their immigration legislation which they constantly refer to as comprehensive immigration reform. And that has become what the American people understand; comprehensive immigration reform is a euphemism for amnesty. And even though there were opportunities along the way over the last 4 years under the Pelosi speakership, there hasn't been a significant piece of their version of immigration reform that's passed. And, of course, neither has there been a significant piece of immigration enforcement that has passed, especially over the last 2 years with President Obama in the White House, having made those promises that he would be supporting and working towards the passage of some type of comprehensive immigration reform.

And as we saw the majority shift here in the House of Representatives dramatically, where we have 96 new freshmen coming in, 87 of them are Republicans. And I don't think there's anyone out there that looks at the results of the election and believes that this House of Representatives is going to be persuaded by emotional arguments. The incoming House of Representatives, with the 87 Republican freshmen that are coming in and swearing in here on January 5, I believe, will be a Congress that sets the rule of law in very high respect and is not as swayed by individual anecdotes and more concerned about the empirical data and what really happens to a country over the long term that doesn't enforce its laws. That's what I think we can expect to come.

I am the ranking member of the immigration subcommittee, and on that committee, over the last 2 years, with Chair Lofgren chairing that subcommittee, there have only been eight hearings in 2 years on immigration. That's fine with me because the agenda that they would have driven would have been, I think, an agenda that I would have opposed.

But nonetheless, those eight hearings that have been held, only eight in 2 years, four hearings a year, that's all the activity that's really measurable in the immigration subcommittee.

And so I think when the gentleman from Colorado makes his case, I think it's heartfelt, and I think he is deeply convinced that it's the right policy and agenda for America. As we move close to Christmastime, knowledge that he has is a viewpoint, and I think he'd acknowledge that I have mine. I will stand up, Madam Speaker, for the rule of law.

And the implications of what goes along with the very well named but not very good policy DREAM Act, I think, became more and more aware to the American people. And as they spoke and weighed in and made their calls in the Senate, then this project, this vote that was held in the Senate failed. And when it did, that's the end of it for the 111th Congress. And it's pretty unlikely that it will be the beginning of it in the 112th Congress as the Congress is configured. And so, from my standpoint, I'm looking forward to the work that we must do and the work that we must do to address the immigration issue coming forward.

There is something that I think is a bipartisan interest to us though, Madam Speaker, and that is, I hear on both sides of the aisle, and I began to hear this about 6 years ago, the concern about how employers were victimizing employees who were unlawfully here in the United States, working unlawfully in the United States.

So I began to look at how can we address this in a bipartisan way. And even though it seems as though the Obama administration and Janet Napolitano included are unwilling to enforce immigration law against employees, they are willing to enforce it against employers. Note some of the enforcement action that has gone in and just gathered the information from the illegal employees, but not brought charges against them, nor started deportation, but brought just the charges against the employer instead.

So I looked at this situation a few years ago and put together a proposal, and this proposal takes into account the Democrat viewpoint, the Republican viewpoint. Both of us are opposed, I believe, in principle, to employers victimizing employees, of them flouting the law and capitalizing on the cheaper labor that they are able to hire and compete against their competitors who would be complying with the law. And also it recognizes that this Federal Government has found itself sometimes where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. And sometimes the agencies within the government are working at cross-purposes to each other.

One of those examples would be a Social Security Administration that deals with millions and millions of no-match Social Security numbers or Social Security reports that are duplicated multiple times, the same Social Security number used multiple times, maybe all across the country where we know it's impossible to be in two jobs at the same place at the same time.

The Social Security Administration seems to turn a blind eye towards the implications of the illegal employment and the fraudulent documents that are used for people to work unlawfully in the United States because often those claims on the Social Security trust fund aren't ever filed. People are walking away from it.

If they are working illegally in the United States, often those illegal workers will claim the maximum number of dependents so their withholding on their State and Federal income tax is zero. But they pay the payroll tax, the Social Security, the Medicare, and the Medicaid because they really have no choice with that. But then they aren't going to be in a position to tap into that as an illegal worker in America.

So the duplications that go on and the money that flows into the Social Security trust fund, a significant amount of that is rooted in illegal labor. Social Security trust fund, happy enough getting those extra revenues coming in, and the Department of Homeland Security seems to want to secure some of the areas that are their due, but not reach out and actually put together a network that would address this thing in a broader holistic way.

So I was looking at that thinking, which agency actually does an effective job of enforcing the laws that they have and which one is most respected by the American people? And as I cast my mind across these agencies, it came to the IRS. The IRS has the respect of every taxpayer in America. They don't want to be audited. They fear an audit. Was it 58 percent of the people would rather have a root canal than an IRS audit? Root canals may or may not be all that painful, but that's one of the measures that came out in one of the pollster's numbers, 58 percent would rather have a root canal than be audited by the IRS. I would be among them. I would rather have the tooth pulled myself.

But the IRS does an effective job of enforcing the law, and they do an effective job of going down through a person's books and accounting and coming up with flaws that are there. So I put together a proposal, and it's called the New IDEA Act. The New IDEA. New IDEA stands for the New, and the acronym IDEA is Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits are not tax-deductible for Federal income tax purposes if they are going to an illegal employee. And it gives the employer safe harbor if that employer uses E-Verify.

So if the employer in their hiring of employees runs the Social Security numbers, the identification information that's on the I-9 form into E-Verify, and it comes back and they only hire those employees that clear through E-Verify, then we give them safe harbor. But if they have employees that are on the list, the Social Security numbers will be on the tax form when the IRS comes in to do a normal audit. We don't accelerate the audits,

just a normal audit. The IRS would then punch the Social Security numbers of those employees that are on the tax form into E-Verify; and if it comes back they are all lawful to work in the United States, no problem. If it bounces back that some of them cannot be confirmed to work lawfully in the United States, we give the employer time to cure, the employee time to cure. And if the employer uses E-Verify, again they have safe harbor.

But the IRS then can conclude that the wages and benefits have been paid to illegals, and therefore those wages and benefits are not tax deductible. What that does then is it kicks that business discount, the schedule C business expense, over onto the profit column. When it does that, it makes that income, and the income then is taxable for interest and penalty.

And so the net result will be roughly this: if an employer is hiring illegals roughly at say $10 an hour, and I can do the math on this, Madam Speaker, and the IRS comes in and does the audit and concludes that an employee is illegal at $10 an hour, by time the tax that's applied to that as a business income as opposed to an expense, and the interest and the penalty is applied, the $10 an hour illegal employee becomes about a $16 an hour illegal employee, causing the employer to make the rational decision with their capital, and that is clean up their workforce before the IRS shows up.

There is a 6-year statute of limitations. It's cumulative. The clock would start to tick on that when the bill would become law. And then over a course of 6 years, there would be a cumulative 6-year statute of limitations. That means that employers the first year would see 1 year of exposure, second year 2, obviously, on up until 6 years. And the greater the exposure, the greater the risk and the liability and the greater the incentive to clean up their workforce as they move forward.

But it doesn't pull the plug on anyone. It's not a dramatic change. It is a business incentive plan that I think will move thousands of employers into the legal employment business.

And today it's New IDEA Act, it's H.R. 3580. And I believe it will become, in the upcoming Congress, the most useful and effective piece of immigration legislation that this Congress may consider. And it's likely to be referred to the Ways and Means Committee because there are tax components to it. And I look forward to working with people to get the cosponsorships on the bill and work it through the process and earn a hearing and perhaps earn a markup, and one day see it go over to the Senate, where I would be glad if they would take it up and onto the President's desk. It's something that should have bipartisan support again, Madam Speaker. H.R. 3580 the New IDEA Act, the IRS coming in.

By the way, the bill also requires the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to put together a cooperative team so that they are sharing information so that when the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, we put them together and require that they cooperate with each other so that the right hand and the left hand and the middle hand of the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security all know what each other is doing, all are cooperating towards a common goal of cleaning up the illegal workforce in America through the New IDEA Act.

And I think that that has some promise and an opportunity to one day become law in this Congress. And I intend to work it pretty hard. That's something that I think can be proactive.

Now, I wanted to speak, though, as I came here tonight, Madam Speaker, I wanted to address the situation of a lame duck session. A lame duck session, this lame duck session has been full of all kinds of issues that I think didn't have any business being in the lame duck session. A lame duck session is, of course, for those listening in, it's the session of Congress that takes place after the election.

So the election took place November 2, and there was a dramatic shift in seats here in this Congress. And as in a shift in power, all the gavels are changing hands going over from Democrats to Republicans, including the Speaker's gavel. And this will happen on January 5 of this upcoming year, not very far from now. And as that happens and this dramatic shift is taking place, it's because the people in America have spoken. The people in America have spoken up, and they have said, we want to change course.

They watched President Obama digging this hole economically, socially, I think a radical social agenda, I think a radical economic agenda, foreign policy agenda that I don't quite have a theme figured out for. But the President's agenda, the agenda of Speaker Pelosi, the agenda of Harry Reid, the American people said, Stop, you have been digging a hole. Been digging a deep hole with roughly $3 trillion in spending that's over and above what would be normal spending here in this Congress. And the American people went to the polls November 2, and they took the shovel out of the hands of President Obama by means of shifting the majority here in the House of Representatives and changing the gavels from the hands of Democrats into the hands of Republicans.

When the people of America say stop, it's enough, the people that are serving in this Congress in this lame duck session, this session between November 2, the election, and January 5, which is the swearing- in of the new Congress, the people serving in this Congress need to understand when the American people said enough, that's too much, stop, this Congress needed to respect the will of the American people and stop.

Stop digging, stop moving the radical social agenda. In fact, stop moving the radical socialist agenda. Harry Reid should stop, Speaker Pelosi should stop, Barack Obama should stop, and this Congress should have only dealt with those issues that were necessary to keep this government functioning in its proper fashion between November 2nd and January 5th.

This Congress could have passed a simple continuing resolution like this House did today that would have bridged the gap through November, December, maybe even January and February, but have gotten a smooth transition over into the next Congress, a respect for the voice and the will of the American people, as Republicans essentially did in the year 2006, respected the will of the American people.

This has not been to be. One radical thing after another. Don't Ask, Don't Tell comes through here on the floor. That is a piece of policy that had all the last 2 years to be brought forward, if that was the will of the majority. But the majority was afraid of the wrath of the American voters.

They were afraid of the wrath of the American voters, so they didn't bring a budget. It is required by statute. Since 1974, the first time this Congress hasn't passed a budget, the House of Representatives since 1974. It didn't happen this year.

The process was shut down, Madam Speaker, so that first the thing that went away was the open rule that allowed any Member to offer an amendment on an appropriations bill that could cut spending down or plus spending up and make some reasonable changes within the germaneness rules of the policy of the appropriations rules. But that was shut down in the second year of the Pelosi speakership.

And then there were the appropriations bills themselves shut down, and they began to run this government on continuing resolutions, omnibus spending bills. The omnibus spending bill that was brought up in the United States Senate, $1.72 trillion, full of pork, chuck full of earmarks, 6,600 earmarks, pork that just dripped with fat in the United States Senate. And the American people finally rose up and they let the Senators know it is no longer going to be business as usual.

The American people have risen. They have packed this Capitol with tens of thousands of people, and they come with their American flags, their yellow Gadsden flags, the Don't Tread on Me flags, Constitutions in their pockets, patriotism on their heart, tears in their eyes at what they see is happening in this country. The American people have done everything that you could ask them to do in a constitutional fashion. The American people have peacefully petitioned the government for redress of grievances. It is constitutional.

And, Madam Speaker, this Congress' heart was hardened. They refused to listen to the American people. They rammed through out of this House the cap-and-tax bill, cap-and-trade some call it, a debilitating bill that punishes American industry and American investment and American entrepreneurs and rewards other countries, puts us at a disadvantage with emerging economies such as India and China. It passed the House and not the Senate, thankfully.

I am thankful for the filibuster that exists in the United States Senate. There is a complaint that it has been used too much and that something needs to be done to put an end to the filibuster or to alter it. Well, I would submit, Madam Speaker, that the reason the filibuster has been used this much is because of the radical agenda that has been driven through the Senate, promoted by the President, promoted by the Speaker of the House and driven and managed by Harry Reid, the majority leader in the United States Senate, who looks like he will stay as majority leader in the United States Senate.

Cap-and-tax out of this House floor. ObamaCare. We watched the President come in and nationalize the banks, the insurance companies, the car companies, Fannie and Freddie, the student loans. All of that swallowed up, 33 percent of the formerly private sector economy swallowed up by the Federal Government. And then ObamaCare, the nationalization of our skin and everything inside of it.

The American people came and surrounded this Capitol. Not one deep with arms stretched out as far as they could go, six and eight deep all the way around the Capitol. We don't have a picture of that because of air security, or there would have been news helicopters up above taking shots of the human ring, six and eight deep all the way around the Capitol that was formed to tell this Congress stop. Stop. You are spending too much. You are taking away our liberty. You are passing legislation that is unconstitutional, or at a minimum constitutionally suspect. All of that taking place before the election.

And then at the election, the American people poured forth and filled up the voting booth and put their mark down on their ballots, no, no, no, no, to the radical social leftist agenda that has been driven through this Congress, and that message should have been heard loud and clear before the stroke of midnight on the 2nd of November.

And the new day comes forward, the new day came forward and we see nothing but dig in, drive that agenda and drive that agenda. I, Madam Speaker, am here to speak up against it, and I am hopeful that in any succeeding lame duck session that we have, whether it would be Republicans in the majority or Democrats in the majority, that we respect the will of the American people and stand down and bridge the gap between the election in November and the new Congress in the early part of January with just the minimum amount of legislation necessary to make that transition.

If the majority holds the same and there is work that needs to be done and not very many seats have changed dramatically, then in that case it is a little bit different question. But when the majority changes and the majority changes dramatically, as it did this time in a way more dramatic than 1994 even and as dramatic as going back to 1948 and another previous election, then no.

There have only been three or four times in American history that this Congress turned around the way it turned around this time, and at no time to my knowledge has there been such an aggressive agenda driven in a lameduck session, including the idea of taking up a treaty in the United States Senate. I don't believe that has ever been done.

So, Madam Speaker, we have had the food safety bill today, the food safety bill that is a $1.3 billion bill or $1.4 billion bill that is another big reach in government that brings in about 17,000 new government employees and inspectors.

We have the safest food in the world, and we need an army of 17,000 additional inspectors so that we can satisfy the urge to expand the nanny-state? It is the only reason I can think of that we would have a policy like that. The safest food in the world and the largest army to inspect the food, and now out of the House goes the food safety bill, another irresponsible safety and growth in government and unnecessary solution in search of a problem, Madam Speaker.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, one of the few policies that Bill Clinton endorsed that I thought was a good policy that actually was working. Another solution in search of a problem. It is a political agenda. It is a social experiment in our military.

Our military needs to be able to fight. We need to listen to them. And when we hear the modified positions of our top military officers, one can only suspect that it is a possibility they are taking orders from the commander-in-chief. How about that. What would that mean, if a multiple-star general was taking orders from the commander-in-chief and decided that he would have a position on Don't Ask, Don't Tell that was less clear than it might have been 2 or 4 years ago?

The passage of ObamaCare, as I mentioned, is another piece that came along in this past year, although not in a lameduck session. I look forward, Madam Speaker, to the repeal of ObamaCare as it passed here in late March of this year, late into the night. I was the last one to leave the Capitol here at night, which isn't new, but it happened that night, I am confident.

As I walked home, I told myself, I am going to lay down and rest. I am exhausted. I spent weeks fighting this with everything that I have. And the rest didn't last very long. After about 2\1/2\ hours I was up thinking about what can we do?

It is extraordinarily unusual to have a piece of legislation, especially a high-profile, hard-fought piece of legislation like ObamaCare, extraordinarily unusual to ever see anyone introduce legislation to repeal the legislation that has just passed. But I got up and I drafted a bill draft request to do just that, to repeal ObamaCare. And, curiously, without coordination, the same thing was going on in the office of Michele Bachmann, and our bill drafts came down within 3 minutes of each other.

Identically, the same 40 words that conclude with words pretty close to this: Repeal ObamaCare--a little more language--as if it had never been enacted. That's the quote, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That's a pretty complete way of talking about repealing a piece of legislation.

There were those that thought that it was just an act of protest, an act of frustration. They maybe thought that neither one of us were enough of a statesman that we could accept losing on a vote like that and walk away and fight on another issue another day. But, truthfully, it was simultaneously coming to the same conclusion, the same conclusion that America cannot reach the next level of its destiny if ObamaCare is going to be a component of that destiny because it ties us down, because it anchors us, because it takes away and diminishes our options as individuals, because it mandates that we buy insurance. There are, I think, four constitutional violations in ObamaCare itself, and some of that is in the middle of being litigated right now.

The commerce clause is the clearest and easiest one, and I am happy to see the decision by Judge Hudson in upholding the suit that was brought by Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, and others. And I look forward to the decisions that will unfold from the Florida suit. And it looks like about 25 States have joined in this litigation in one form or another. And I'm hopeful that when our new Governor in Iowa is sworn in, that one of the first acts in office he will have is that Governor Branstad will join in the litigation against ObamaCare in whatever capacity he is able to do that.

There are three ways to undo ObamaCare, Madam Speaker, and one of them is through the courts and every means of litigation at our disposal, and that path is following pretty well. But we learned--we knew this actually going in, but it was very clear--McCain-Feingold was one of those examples, a piece of legislation that perhaps was signed by the President in anticipation that the courts would overturn it. I don't know that. I just say

perhaps. But anybody that believed that the court was going to save us was disappointed in the short term and mildly pleased in the longer term. But one should never vote for and never sign a piece of legislation that they believe will be unconstitutional because that leaves it up to the courts to do the job that we need to be doing as a legislature.

However, I believe the litigation needs to go forward on ObamaCare and that if the courts finally find all components of it unconstitutional, we can at that point perhaps wash our hands of it and we should pass, then, a repeal to get it out of the books so it's not sitting there waiting to be litigated again.

But I'm looking at the courts for relief--short-term relief, injunctive relief--and I'm hopeful that all of ObamaCare will be ripped out by the court. I believe that it has enough unconstitutional components and no severability clause, so that would tell me there's a possibility that it all could be removed by its violations of our Constitution. That's one of the ways to address the repeal of ObamaCare.

Another way is for our States, our Governors, to refuse to implement ObamaCare and to refuse to invest those State tax dollars in the high cost of increasing Medicaid that it imposes on the State and essentially throw a wrench in the works and resist the administration's determination to implement ObamaCare, and do that from all of our Governors' offices across the country where we have people that oppose it. That's another component of this opposition that can be effective.

The third one, and the one that's the most essential and the one that, if it's completed, is the most certain is a statutory legislative repeal of ObamaCare. Since the tax bracket bill came through last week that extended the 2001 and 2003 tax brackets for 2 years that provided for a $5 million exemption for the estate tax and a 35 percent rate, fixed a few other things and caused a lot of other problems, but since that tax bill went through and there's an agreement that's made on it for 2 years, then I'll submit, Madam Speaker, that the most important piece of legislation that the new Congress can take up, and I'm hopeful that incoming Speaker Boehner will elect to make H.R. 1 the first piece of legislation here in the House of Representatives, H.R. 1, the standalone repeal of ObamaCare, a 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare; legislation that would stand on its own, that would be very clear, that would put up a vote in this House that would allow for a full repeal of ObamaCare in H.R. 1.

Just to put a marker down and declare the approach that I support, since I have taken this issue on in a personal way and filed a discharge petition where I have 173 signatures on that discharge petition, I thought it was important that I articulate the legislation that I would like to see come forward in the 112th Congress. And in my consultation with Congressman Herger of California, I looked into the language that he put together after I had introduced the repeal language, and he did so after the reconciliation package that came from the Senate.

There were two pieces of legislation that came together to make up ObamaCare. One was the bill itself, and the other one was a reconciliation package that passed several weeks later. That reconciliation package needed to be included. So I added the component of the Herger legislation repeal to the repeal language that I've introduced and the same repeal language that I added that Michelle Bachmann introduced. And she and I filed that bill last Friday, just to add some clarity and unity to the language we support for the repeal of ObamaCare, with the complete agreement of Congressman Herger from California, who agrees with the language and encouraged me to file the bill.

So that's there as a marker, so anyone that wants to take a look at it and see what it is that we want to repeal, it's ObamaCare; it's the reconciliation package that came from the Senate. They did that in order to circumvent the filibuster. I thought that it was legislative sleight-of-hand myself. And that's what we got.

I'm committed to the full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. I believe that our leadership is committed to the full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. And yes, there will be a lot of different ways to look at this strategically. But to march down through this beyond the repeal piece of legislation, which I anticipate will be very early in the new Congress, my proposal is that we shut off spending in every appropriations bill; that we put language in every appropriations bill that no funds and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. If we do that with all the appropriations bills going through the 2011 calendar year, the 2012 calendar year, by the time we arrive at the Presidential election in November of 2012, it will be pretty clear that ObamaCare has not been implemented, it has not been enforced, none of the dollars would be allowed to be used for that.

And I'm hopeful that we will elect a President who runs on the ticket and calls for the mandate from the American people that the first order of business for the next President of the United States who would be inaugurated on January 20, 2013, would be to have Congress put on his desk the repeal of ObamaCare and sign that as a first order of business as the next President of the United States. That's the goal. It can be done. It isn't a futile effort.

I've had some people say, Well, why do you think you can repeal ObamaCare? The President would veto it as soon as you pass the legislation. In the first place, if the House passes the repeal of ObamaCare, there's no agreement the Senate would take it up. But surely, they're not going to take it up unless we send it over there. So we need to pass the repeal, send it to the Senate, build the pressure so that they can perhaps find a way to take it up in the Senate. If they do so and the repeal of ObamaCare gets passed by both Chambers in the same form and it goes to the President, yes, I, like every other thinking American, would expect President Obama to veto such legislation, but we would have people on record. We would have an agenda that would be laid out. And that lays the foundation to unfund ObamaCare, and it lays the foundation then to take us to the point where we can elect a President who will sign the repeal. That's the strategy. It needs to be done.

If the American people are going to reach the next level of our destiny, we cannot have ObamaCare as an anchor that's tied around our leg that continuously sinks the entrepreneurs, sinks the small businesses, grows the taxes, creates lines, rations care, prohibits us from buying the insurance policies of our choice. The list goes on.

Mr. Speaker, I am well aware of the time of the season that we have here, and I am thinking about the families of all of those who are on their way home tonight and of those who will be on their way home tomorrow and perhaps the next day.

All the staff that works here in this Congress and the people who are here as this team is tonight, recording every word that comes from any Member of Congress and who are in the middle of this debate constantly, making sure that everything is precisely, accurately quoted and coordinated in this Congressional Record, are top-notch and the envy of the world. Of the team that is here, many of them I have worked with for years, and I don't know if they're Democrats or Republicans. I know that they respect the institution and the people who serve here. I appreciate them, and wish all of them a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

While I look around at my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, and know some of their families and our staff from our offices, who toil sometimes in oblivion, I think of all of that contribution that's there, and I am grateful for them all.

I also cast my mind's eye overseas to some of the places that I have gone to visit our troops and our personnel. It just so happens that, a little over a year ago, I missed a family event that was of high importance to us because of duty here, and even though there were quite a number of calls expressing sympathy for that, a month later, I found myself in Afghanistan. As I was seated in a late-night briefing, one of the generals--and I probably asked one too many questions, and got a little bit close to the personal side. He will know

who he is, but I won't utter his name into this Record, although I have great respect for him as a patriot, as a warrior and as a servant for America.

He said, though, in that night conversation in Afghanistan, I was deployed when they served divorce papers on me from my first wife, and I started a new family. I have a girl and a boy. My little boy is 5 years old, and I have been deployed for three of his first five Christmases.

I sat there and listened to that, and it had been about a month since I had missed a very, very important family event in my own family. I listened to that officer tell me of being deployed when he received divorce papers, of being deployed for three of his son's first five Christmases. I think he is deployed right now.

I think about the men and women who put on the uniform and who are deployed in harm's way around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan and in other places around the world.

I was watching as the USS Harry Truman docked here in the last day or so. The sailors who got off of that ship were seeing babies born, their children born--babies they had never seen since they were born. Little babies were put in their arms. They'd kiss their wives quickly and pick up and marvel at a little miracle that would be 2 or 3 or 6 months old who they had never seen. Their own child. They weren't home for the birth of the child. They missed weddings. They missed funerals. They got back when they could, but they were deployed; they were at sea. They were serving America.

That's true on the USS Harry Truman. That's true in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the world where we have our men and women in uniform--our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines--in harm's way every day, at risk of death, at risk of sacrifice, some losing their lives. While all of this is going on, sometimes we get wrapped up here, and we think ours is a sacrifice.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that ours is a duty and a service and a privilege and an honor, and sometimes it is a sacrifice; but when we think about our sacrifice here, I ask all to think about the sacrifice over there, which is far greater--far more family time lost and missed, moments that will never be recaptured again, limbs lost, and lives lost . . . never to come back again.

So, with all of that in mind and with the Christmas season upon us, I would like to close with a poem that was written by the greatest respecter of our warriors in this Capitol building--Albert Caswell--who can be seen around this Capitol, giving tours to the wounded on a daily basis with eagerness and enthusiasm and a profound respect for those who have served us so well and especially for those who have been wounded and for those who have been lost. Sometimes he sits up in the middle of the night and will write a poem. I think he gets started, and he can't stop until he finishes it and brings it to a conclusion. This is a poem that he wrote just a few days ago. It's called ``This Christmas.''

``This Christmas . . .

``As the snow falls to the ground . . .

``And all the children dance, with songs of joy so

all around . . .

``With stockings hung by the chimneys with care . . .

``With hopes and dreams, of Santa there . . .

``With Christmas dinners and fires all aglow, as

before this family a feast lies so . . .

``'O Holy Night! A Child was born, for all to know!'

``Joy to the world, let Heaven and nature sing, but

remember . . . remember . . . remember all of them, and

all of those . . .

``Those families! Those patriots of peace!

``The ones, who'll this Christmas . . . will not so

together be!!

``Who upon battlefields of honor fight!

``So far away from our country tis of thee, this

night . . .

``Men and women of such honor bright, who for all of

us so carry that fight . . .

``Why there can be peace on Earth, because of their

light!

``Who now so live with such heartache and death . . .

``Who upon each new day, their honor our lives so

bless!

``As they so bless us one and all, with all of their

gifts of most selfless sacrifice . . .

``And all of those lost loved ones, who lie in soft,

quiet, cold graves . . .

``Teaching us all the true cost, the price of freedom paid!

``Precious daughters and sons, husbands and wives . . .

``Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers who gave

their lives . . .

``That last full measure . . . as for them we cry!

``Whose loved ones' pain, will never die . . .

``Who on this Christmas morning, sit with but tears

in eyes . . .

``As they listen to their children cry, 'Mommy,

Daddy . . . I wish you were by my side.'

``With one less place at the dinner table this

year . . . they all so begin to cry . . .

``And all of those who have come home, without arms

and legs, who did not die!

``Without eyes and faces, with burned in all

places . . . in hospital beds they try!!

``Blessing us all with their fine gifts they gave!

``Making us all so see, just how magnificent and

inspiriting a heart can be!

``And remember all of those, whose loved ones lie far

across the shores . . .

``As with each new day, brings such great worry . . . so

for sure!

``But, waiting . . . but waiting for, that knock on the

door . . .

``That phone call, that they now so pray not for . . .

``Quiet heroes, one and all!

``Watching them from Heaven, the angel's teardrops

fall . . .

``Lord God, Lord God . . . bless them . . . bless them all!

``For these are the families, who have paid the cost!

``Bore the burden, carry that cross, that cross of

war!

``This Christmas, as you hold your families tight . . .

``And all seems so fine, and all seems so very

right . . .

``And you see all of those smiles upon your

children's faces, so bright . . .

``Give thanks! Give praise! As upon your knees as

you begin to pray . . .

``For all of those families, who have so

sacrificed . . .

``And remember their blessings, their gifts of

freedom . . . this night!

``This Christmas . . . ''

Mr. Speaker, I wish all of us a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. May we reconvene in the 112th Congress with a new spirit--a spirit that keeps in mind the price and the sacrifice paid by our veterans and our families that support them, the legacy that they have left for us, the duty that we have to honor their sacrifice. May we come back and join together in that task in January of 2011.

May we go home and give great thanks for their sacrifice and the blessing of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 40 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, December 22, 2010, at 11 a.m.

I thank the gentleman from Missouri for bringing his insight here to the floor of the House so many nights in a row when others might decide to call it a day. There are Americans that are lying awake that are worrying and concerned about what happens here in this United States Congress, this great deliberative body, and the future and the destiny of this country established here often on the floor of the House of Representatives, and that's why every word that's spoken by the gentleman from Missouri and others is essential and it contributes to the direction that America takes.

And as I listened to the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Akin, present this very cogent and factual presentation here tonight with the charts to back it up, and I remember my good friend from Minnesota, Congressman Gil Gutknecht, who used to say that if you have a chart to back it up you're 40 percent more believable. And of course I don't know how you improve upon being completely believable, which is the case with the gentleman from Missouri. But I was inspired as I listened to the gentleman's discussion about the estate tax and what happens, and I think it's so important that we think about the function of tax policies.

And I listen to the class envy on the other side of the aisle. And there are many over there that are steeped in class envy and think that if a person works their entire life and compiles enough money to be worthy of the trouble of the tax man stepping in and taking a chunk of it, as much as they can get, that somehow there's a justice

at the end of the generation to take the earnings of that generation and spread it out amongst the other people instead of allowing it to go to the next generation.

And I think about my ancestors that came across the prairie in a covered wagon. I think about my great-grandfather who arrived here from Germany on March 26, 1894, and he had four or five of his children with him, and the balance of his nine children were born here in the United States, the ones that survived. And his dream was to be able to homestead, buy and build a farm for each of those children, nine children that reached maturity. And he bought nine quarter sections of land, 160 acres each, and that's what it took to support a family. You need to raise, oh, six, seven, eight, nine or ten kids on 160 acres.

And he had a diversified farming operation that had a few milk cows, some sows. He raised some corn and later on some soybeans and some oats and some hay ground, and everybody went to work and they built their future and their destiny on that land. And the dream was: Can we hand that land over to the next generation? Can we take this unit and deliver it to the next generation? And his dream, with nine children, buying those nine quarter sections of land was, if he could set each of them up on 160 acres of land that they would inherit from him, that if they took care of the land, they took care of the livestock, it would all take care of them, and they could raise their children, and the next generation could go build upon the equity that was earned in his generation.

And if I would say that if he was sitting in Germany in 1893 planning his trip here in 1894, thinking he was faced with tax policy that would confiscate his life's earnings and pass it back to the government and distribute it to the people that were not engaged in the free enterprise--

Or 55 percent. Even if the ball drops at Times Square and we don't get this thing resolved, taking away half of what he'd earned in his lifetime, he would have not had that dream. He's unlikely to have even come to the United States. But he's really unlikely to have bought those nine quarter sections of land, because he would know that before he could hand it off to the next generation, the tax man would come in and swallow up half of it.

And so here's the scenario. I mean, unfortunately for my great- grandfather, he lost all of that land when the stock market crashed in 1929. He didn't lament that. He'd engaged in free enterprise, capitalism, and commerce, and it didn't work out for him. The timing was wrong, and he lived the rest of his life in Pierson, Iowa, a lonely man in a tiny little house. But he had the dream. He had the chance to access the dream. And it didn't work out for him, but his children received the vision of his dream and they went to work and they built, and they raised their children with the same dream that brought him here to the United States.

And so I think today, even though it hasn't worked out for my family in the way that it was envisioned, and there isn't wealth on either side of my family that counts as taxable in the estate tax configuration, no matter what it is, it inspired them nonetheless. They worked nonetheless. They invested capital anyway, and they went to work. And so--

Well, in the succeeding generations, the dream was passed on even though the equity was not, because they didn't build the equity but the dream was there. The obligation and the duty and the appreciation for America embracing my ancestors coming here was passed on to me, and it said stand up for this United States of America, this free enterprise dream. And today, the families that it's worked out for, those who have made that investment, that hung on to that land, that spent two or three generations or more building a family farm--and let's say now, today, it's not 160 acres that it takes to sustain a family but 1,000 or 1,500 acres that it takes to sustain a family. And that's more accurate.

Let's just say that that unit that was put together, two sections of land now, 640 acres a section, 1,280 acres altogether.

Mr. Speaker, and I would ask the gentleman from Missouri if he would mind sticking around here for a seamless transition into this dialogue. And I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. It is always my privilege.

And I would pick this narrative up where it was left off in the transition component of it, and where I was, with 1,288 acres now required to sustain a unit of operation, that would be these acres, and a home place that was built with grain storage and transfer equipment and livestock facilities and those things that make it a system and a unit. Maybe some rented land out there, some rented pasture, some hay ground, some rented crop ground that keeps this system that is a viable and effective unit. And now, let's imagine that.

And let's say five kids. That is a good number. Five kids, and they are raised on this farm.

Now, two sections of land, paid for, and the 90-year-old patriarch of this family has reached the end of his life and he is watching how his life's work that is the legacy of his predecessors, the life's work of almost a century of his memory adding all up to this point where, if he passes away in the first minute of next year, the taxman hovers over the death bed and reaches in and pulls out, aside from the $1 million exemption, 55 percent of the asset value.

That means that half of the land that has been accumulated goes to pay the taxman. The other half of that land, the five children that would inherit the balance of what is left, would have a 20 percent equity share in the land that is left, 20 percent equity share in 45 percent, roughly, of what was left. None of those children then, on that basis, have enough equity to hold that system, that unit, in place.

And so they look at this and they would think, do I want to be in debt the rest of my life trying to retire this debt, trying to borrow the money to buy the section of land that it takes to pay the taxman and buy the 80 percent that is left that they don't have equity in, that goes to their siblings, and to be able to turn the cash flow to retire it to serve the interest and principal on those two sections of land? And the answer that they will come away with, and a rational banker will tell them: You can't hold this land. I am sorry, but you have got to put it before the auction, sell this land off, pay the taxman, and then distribute the rest of the proceeds amongst your siblings and you get your 20 percent that is left over after taxes.

That means that a century of work, three generations or more that have compiled these assets, is gone, taken away, because of the class envy that comes from the leftists in this Congress and the people that think that the American dream isn't about building equity, and that you shouldn't be able to transfer wealth from generation to generation, and that somehow, because someone else worked and created the capital that this Nation thrives on, you should be punished in the transfer of that wealth into the next generation. The gentleman from Missouri knows this. I know this in the Midwest. They should know this all across America.

The gentleman is completely correct on this. I would add to this point. Let's just say that a entrepreneur has a bright idea, and let's say 10 kids. That is a good start on a family, I tell them. And this bright idea from the entrepreneur starts a business, and they build their equity base because of the creativity and the energy and the conviction and the productivity and the competition that they put into the marketplace. This individual reaches that age of 45 or 50, and they can look ahead and say: I can check out of this. I can sell out my business and I can make the rest of this on really solid, stable investments, and I don't have to worry about the rest of my life. And, furthermore, if I continue to work, continue to take risk, continue to produce and expand the capital base of America, everything that I work for, for the rest of my life, is going to go off to the taxman to be redistributed among people across America, and I can't even give it to my children.

What does a rational person do in a case like that? And I will submit to the gentleman from Missouri and the Speaker that a rational person would come to the conclusion that it didn't pay to continue to produce once you reach the level that you could take care of yourself for the rest of your life, because you couldn't pass it along to the next generation. That destroys the American dream, and it blows the entire thing up.

I see my friend, the Judge and the gentleman from Texas, who concluded that legislating from the bench was the wrong thing, and coming to Congress to legislate from here is the right thing. And I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

And a place in eternity.

Well, I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I look at the configuration of this proposal that is coming to the floor tomorrow and I am troubled by it. There are some good things in it.

To ensure that the current tax brackets can run for 2 years, that is a good thing. It is not as good as it needs to be. It mitigates the damage of the increase that is impending in the death tax, but it doesn't address and fix the problem. It just makes it less egregious. So those are the good things about it.

I am one who supports the credits for ethanol and biodiesel. I could make that argument, and it is not a bumper sticker argument. But the Federal Government has said we want you to invest your private sector capital in producing renewable fuels, and if you will do that, we will make sure there is enough there to get you started.

Well, they invested, at least in my district, 3 years in a row over $1 billion in renewable energy, and now we are looking at that rug being jerked out from underneath the people that trusted the Federal Government. We may or may not agree on that policy here, but I think the government needs to be consistent.

But in any case, here is what we are really looking at: We need to make the current tax structures permanent. We need to eliminate and abolish the death tax, because it is an immoral tax.

And into this bargain, what do we get? We get an increase in the death tax that goes from zero on up to a $1 million exemption with a 35 percent tax, and that ax that is hanging over the head instead is a $1 million exemption and 55 percent.

The current tax is zero. George Steinbrenner's heirs paid zero in death tax, and those who pass away in this year pay zero, no matter what the amount of their equity. Actually, these are the goods things about this proposal.

But the bad things are this: That the unemployment extensions that are there take it out to 99 weeks. We have gotten along for about three generations with 26 weeks of unemployment. We know that that bridges people over a seasonal job, it gives them half a year to find a job. And when you look at the time that people that are on unemployment spend to search for a job, it is about 20 minutes a day in the first weeks of their unemployment, and as that unemployment winds down into the 26th week, it is about 70 minutes a day that they spend looking for a job. They are far more likely to find a job the first week after their unemployment runs out than they are to find a job in the first week that their unemployment starts.

So there is a huge transfer of wealth that takes place there, paid for out of borrowed money that comes from the Chinese, the interest and principal that is dumped on our children, and that is about $56.5 billion that accumulated there.

Then we have about $40 billion with the transfer payments. These transfer payments come in the form of refundable tax credits. Refundable tax credits is money that goes off budget, 100 percent of it is borrowed, and a lot of it from the Chinese, that pays people that are do not have a tax liability for the child care tax credit that is there and about two other credits that transfer wealth.

You add this up, that is about $40 billion in that category, and $56.5 billion in the other category. So we are in the area of $101 billion or $102 billion in transfer of wealth, before you get to the pay control component this, which troubles me.

They lower the payroll tax by 2 percent on the employee side, but not on the employer side, which distorts the equation of a dollar out of the employee, a dollar out of the employer. And most of us see this as that is all money that is earned by the employee. As an employer, I will make that case. But when you distort the equation, then you are presuming that the employer is making money and the employee is not, and the favor goes to the employee side of this. It will take awhile for economics to balance that one out.

But in the end, we have a 2-year extension of current tax structure for personal income tax, which if you think about it from a business perspective, if you have a business plan and a business model and you are going to invest capital in order to try to get a return on that capital, which means make some money, and in the process of doing that you create jobs, if you have a business model that has a 2-year ROI, return on investment, if you have got that kind of a business model, you have already invested that as fast as you could come up with the idea and come up with the capital to invest it. But most of this on the other side, most capital investments are 10 or 15-year returns on investment.

So if you have got a 2-year extension and a tax increase on the other side of that, it doesn't release the capital in such a way that it is going to create the jobs. So we don't get anywhere near the kick out of this for our economy that some of the economists say that we do. And the day will come at the end of these 2 years, we are in the middle then of a presidential race, congressional races, House and the Senate, and the debate then engages again, do we do President Obama's Keynesian economics on steroids, do we continue and add to the $3 trillion in wasteful spending that has come from that? And they are going to say, well, we gave you your tax model for 2 years and it didn't work. Therefore, we need to go back to spending money like Morgenthau admitted was wrong.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri. I see we have 3 minutes left.

Reclaiming my time, we have the 87 freshmen Republicans and however many Democrats are coming here who are the cavalry coming over the hill, and we ask them to bring the freshness of their convictions here and weigh in. I believe they need an opportunity to weigh in on this tax policy.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas and the Speaker for his indulgence.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Thursday, December 16, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

I rise in opposition to this rule and the bill, H.R. 5281. I agree with some of the presenters before me. It is not a DREAM Act. It's a nightmare act. It's one of those pieces of legislation that if the proponents actually understood the components of it, some of them would peel off, some of them would change their mind, and some of them would wish they could but they're on record and can't.

The nightmare act is amnesty. Now, we need to come to an agreement on what amnesty is. I have long said that to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. This legislation seeks to reward those who are, under the law, eligible for being sent back to their home countries.

Now, it's everybody that says they came in on the day of their birth until the last day before they turned 16, but

we don't have any way of verifying this. The certification and the background checks are completely impossible. About 50 percent of the people that come into the United States across our southern border don't have a legal existence in their home country, meaning they don't have birth certificates or a track of their life like we normally have here, so it's impossible to do background checks. They can say who they want to say they are. They can propose whatever they want to propose. They can say they were born in the United States or were brought into the United States. And they can say they had done so when they were 15 years old, they could have come into the United States when they were 29 years and a day old and still be eligible under this bill because there is not a way to verify. So this is the thing that is designed to tug at our heartstrings, and it opens the door for amnesty, and it lays the foundation for a whole series of other pieces of amnesty components.

But truthfully, this process is illegitimate. This is a repudiated, rejected 111th Congress. The American people went to the polls in unprecedented numbers, and they voted an unprecedented number of people out of office and put new faces in here. This lame duck session should never be used for a large agenda, and it has already been invalidated. Keep faith with the American people. Lame duck sessions are to provide the functions of government that can't be legitimately provided until the new Congress is gaveled in on January 4.

This process of no committee hearings, no subcommittee hearings, no subcommittee markup, no full committee hearing, no full committee markup, no access to this legislation that has changed four times-- there are four different iterations here on the floor--and now a same- day rule up before the Rules Committee that still is the only committee that I know of on the Hill that meets without cameras, without the public presence knowing what is going on up there. I look forward to an open door and sunlight on the Rules Committee.

But this CBO score that they tout as actually a plus for the government ignores that the CBO score says it is a $5 billion deficit spending in the second decade and likely for each decade thereafter. It ignores CIS, the Center for Immigration Services score, which scores the cost to local government, State and local government, at $6.2 billion annually for the cost of providing education to the people that would otherwise be eligible for deportation.

It triples the number of green cards. And it provides safe harbor, safe harbor for ``any alien'' who has a pending application under the DREAM Act. So if someone comes in, they can be 79 years old or 99 years old, they allege that they are younger than that, file the application under the DREAM Act, and now we have to go forward and adjudicate and determine you really weren't 16 or a day before 16 when you came into America, and you really weren't under 30 when you filed this application. But it is certain if this becomes law, there will be people into their late thirties and perhaps into their forties that would be granted citizenship underneath this because it takes that long to process.

There are exemptions for fraud, exemptions that go so far as to reward it in a way that if someone falsely claims citizenship and was deported, they can't be adjudicated under this.

This DREAM Act is an amnesty act, it is a nightmare act, and it must be opposed. There is more to be said in a broader debate, and I hope to engage in that.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

I rise in opposition to this bill, to this bill that has a nice name. But it is really not a dream; it is a nightmare. It is a nightmare to the rule of law.

As the gentlewoman from California said, we do write the laws in this country, and we have written the laws that limit people from coming into the United States illegally. And it seems to be forgotten that under even this legislation that is proposed, someone who is one day short of their 16th birthday could sneak across the border in the United States, claim they were here for 5 years, they could go on a Web site, how about www.diplomacompany.com, get themselves a GED, and qualify for the DREAM Act if they were just accepted into a tech school, to, say, go to barber school or plumber school. That is kind of the minimum.

And it isn't they are doing this on their 16th birthday. They can do so the day before their 30th birthday. They can lie about their age. The comments about there being biometric information and a background check, we can't do background checks on people that don't have a legal existence in their own country. About half of the people that are born south of the border don't have a birth certificate, unless they were born in a hospital. It is about 50-50, which means no legal existence. There is not a way to do a background check.

The score on this, the cost, is a lot higher than the proponents would like to admit. They argue it is a marginal savings. It also says in the same CBO score that in the second decade it is estimated at $5 billion, and likely $5 billion for each decade after that. That is probably not a big deal in the context of this spending, Mr. Speaker, but it is a big deal when you look at the Center for Immigration Studies' score, a cost to local government at $6.2 billion. That is every year; at least the first couple of years they have estimated this.

It triples the number of green cards, it provides safe harbor for those who file for a number of things, and ties up our courts and our litigation system that we have. There is an exemption for even fraud against immigration laws in the United States.

So what we really have is this scenario, this scenario, Mr. Speaker. This is the moral and ethical conundrum that cannot be reconciled by anybody in this Chamber, or anybody in this country, for that matter.

When you have the recipients of the DREAM Act, should this become law, sitting in a classroom, a community college, a university, being the beneficiaries of a de facto scholarship, and in California it is free, no tuition for a California resident, and next to them at a desk will be a husband or a wife who is aggrieved, having lost their spouse fighting for our liberty in Iraq or Afghanistan, paying out-of-state tuition, in California $22,021 a year, paying out-of-state tuition for defending our rule of law, while someone who is being rewarded for breaking it is getting free tuition.

That is just California. In Iowa, it is a little different. It is about a three-to-one break, in-state versus out-of-state. That is what this necessarily brings.

If you support this nightmare DREAM Act, you are actually supporting an ``affirmative action amnesty act'' that rewards people for breaking the law and punishes those who defend America.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, when my grandmother came over here and landed at Ellis Island, 2 percent were sent back. We had a merit system, and you had to meet those standards.

I believe in an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. This immigration policy is for America. We can't relieve all of the poverty in the world. That is completely impossible.

Today, our immigration structure is this: between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration is based on merit, and the balance of it is out of our control as far as setting any standards. If we are going to be a great Nation we have to have a policy that is established to promote American exceptionalism. This bill does not. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and the opportunity to express some things that are on my mind, perhaps while others are sleeping and perhaps while others are having trouble sleeping, for they see what happens around this Congress.

I am very, very grateful to the C-SPAN cameras and the transparency that exists here in the House. And I think back those years now, maybe as far back as almost 20 years ago, maybe even more, when I sat in my living room, and I watched what was going on in this room. And I listened to the speeches, and I analyzed the presentations that came from the various Members of Congress on either side of the aisle.

As I sat back, as an American who was busy building a business and creating jobs and meeting payroll for 1,440 consecutive weeks, trying to build capital where there was none that existed and shape that together so that we could take care of the longevity of my family and that of the families of the people that I had hired that worked for me and did so well to help build the business with us all together, while all that was going on, I was watching what was going on in Washington, DC, in Des Moines, Iowa. And I saw and heard the voices of the people that came forward to tell America there was something wrong in this Congress. And as I listened to them, they inspired me. They inspired me to get more involved in public life, to get engaged in politics, that there were a lot of decisions that were being made in this city and in the capital cities in the States across the land that were affecting the very lives of the American people down into their families. And a lot of folks didn't know it. They weren't paying attention.

So I started to pay attention. And from those years forward, I saw what was going on. The irresponsible spending that was taking place and the dysfunctional Congress that had rolled itself up into a point where it no longer represented the American people, but it seemed to exist for its own purposes and not for the purposes of serving the American people. And as this unfolded, personalities that were here on the floor--Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey and a number of others that stand out in my mind and cause me to think that I might be able to make a contribution at some level, whether that be the State level or the Federal level--but they convinced me that there was a broad philosophical disagreement in America. And on the one side of the aisle, you have people that believe in growing government, that government is the solution and that higher taxes are necessary in order to fund this growing government. And if there's a problem that exists out there, even if it's for a single individual, there is somebody over on this side of the aisle that will try to pass a law to fix that problem for a single individual, and government grows. And they won't look at empirical data, by the way.

I offer study after study, and they turn a blind eye to those studies. They simply want to try to reach out and touch people's heartstrings and tell the anecdote, the single anecdote. And with 300 million people, we always have someone who got the short end of the stick. That's this side of the aisle. The case of the people with the ``poor me's,'' the ones that think that these greedy capitalists are victimizing the poor proletariat, and that it's a zero-sum game, and the glass is half empty, and it would have been maybe three-quarters or maybe, let me say, it would have been not as empty as half empty if these people that went out and got out of bed and went to work every day and produced something hadn't been taking from that glass. It might have been full from them, they wouldn't have had to do anything.

But truthfully, Mr. Speaker, it's not a zero-sum game. And anybody that thinks their glass is half empty, their resolution of that is to go to government and ask government to tax the person whose glass has got the same level in it. But theirs, over here on this side, this is the half full side of the

aisle. These are the people that believe and understand that it's not a zero-sum game, that this is a growing economy, that we don't have all of this capital that we have in the United States of America because it was a zero-sum game. We built things. We produced goods and services that had a marketable value to each other, yes, and to the rest of the world, certainly. We exported a lot of that, and America became more wealthy, and we developed our skills.

This idea of a zero-sum game that's over here on the Democrat side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is a self-defeating philosophy from which you could never build a great Nation. It's already a self-defeating philosophy. If you get up every day and you think you have a bad case of the ``poor me's,'' and somebody is out there working industriously and taking from this pool that you have some right to for not earning it--if you have that attitude, you're not going to be contributing to the whole. And our job--and it should be our job on both sides of the aisle--is to increase the average annual productivity of all of our people.

Now, it doesn't mean that we won't have some people who aren't producing at all. Some can't, and we need to take care of them. Some won't, and they need to take care of themselves. And some aren't doing enough, and they need to do more. But if we increase our overall productivity, that increases our average annual productivity, that increases our gross domestic product, that strengthens us economically. It puts us in a position where we're no longer borrowing 41 cents out of every dollar we spend from somebody--often the Chinese. It puts us in a position where we can balance a budget. And, by the way, the people that are out there working and producing every day, every working day, at least--and hopefully taking Sunday off to worship-- those folks aren't putting pressure on government for services.

They just say, Take the taxes you have to take from me and don't take any more than you have to take, and leave me otherwise alone. I will take care of myself and my family. That's the American spirit. That's the American way. It's part of the American Dream.

And so as I use that word, Mr. Speaker, ``dream,'' the American Dream, we saw a bill come across this floor today, turned through this system with lightning speed. Who says the House of Representatives can't move quickly if the Speaker of the House determines it shall move quickly? Let's take the word ``American'' off of it and call it the DREAM Act. They can't call it the American DREAM Act, because that would be a high level of hypocrisy. They just called it the DREAM Act, which we described as the nightmare act.

This is an act that's been churning through the publics here for a good number of years. And what it is, it's designed to give a path to citizenship to young people that came into this country before their 16th birthday, who have resided in the United States for perhaps as long as 5 years, who are willing to enter into an institution of higher learning or sign up for the military, and it would give them a path to citizenship, give them a green card right away. It would triple the number of green cards in America right away.

And these young people, they were young maybe when they came here, but still it's an amnesty bill. And amnesty, to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. Now, somebody comes into the United States illegally on the day before their 16th birthday, this DREAM Act gives them amnesty.

We have lots of people that sneak across the border that aren't 16 years old. Some of the accomplished coyotes are under 16 years old. Some of the accomplished drug smugglers are under 16 years old. You have got a murderer down in Mexico that was reported in the news who is--I will call him a serial contract killer that's just been arrested that apparently--I mean, it's alleged, and he is not yet convicted, that multiple times he has executed people in the drug wars, and he is 14 years old.

So this DREAM Act would give everybody that came into the United States illegally, whether it was on the first day of their life, perhaps they were born across the border and they came into the United States on the first day of their life and were nurtured here and went to school here, gives them--the result is an in-State tuition discount to go to college or perhaps go off to the military in the United States on a path to citizenship and the ability to bring all their families in on the family reunification plan. All of that offered to somebody that maybe was brought into the United States on the first day of their life.

But it also is the same reward for somebody who came into the United States on their own illegally, as well, on the day before they were 16 years old. And that's good up until such time as they are 30.

So let's see. We can do the math on this. Fourteen years, and if this bill becomes law tomorrow, and it's possible, because it passed the House in lightning time. The Senate may or may not take it up. There is a cloture vote apparently that's scheduled. I don't think they have the votes. They should not have the votes.

But in any case, if someone comes into the United States the day before their 16th birthday and this bill becomes law the day of their 30th birthday, they would be covered under the DREAM Act. They would be able to apply for an application--that's presumed that they would have entered into an institution of higher learning. So you don't have to be going into a 4-year college to go off and become a brain surgeon. You could simply be entering into a tech school to become a plumber or an electrician or a barber or a beautician or whatever it might be that would be a 12-month study or more. Enter into it.

You don't have to get a degree. You have to have a high school degree, which can be gotten. A GED can be picked up, and then you could have never gone to school. You could pick up your GED and then apply to go off to beautician school. Those things are all that's required, and you would get approval for your permit that would give you immediately a green card, access to the welfare system, and the ability down the line in a little ways to bring in, through family reunification, all your family members. They could number in the scores, of your family members, all come in. This reward for somebody that next week might turn 30.

And the chairman of the Judiciary Committee tells me never fear, because they have good background checks and they have good, solid biometrics that they are using--checking out his word here--biometric information that's there with a good background check with the FBI doing this good background check, Mr. Speaker.

Well, I will tell you that it doesn't do lot of good to ask the FBI to do a background check on somebody that came into this country before or after their 16th birthday that doesn't have a legal existence in their home country. If they were not born in a hospital in Mexico, for example, it's almost all the time there is no birth certificate. And about half of the time they are not born in hospitals.

So with no birth certificate, there is often not a record of their existence. And they could be anybody saying they were anybody coming here, declaring that they came here at any time without a record to back it up. All the way to 30. And they will say, well, I came into the United States. My parents brought me in against my will the day before my 16th birthday, and next week I am going to be 30. I am qualified. I am signing up. And they will give them protection under the DREAM Act.

That's what they have passed off the floor of the House of Representatives tonight. It is a reward for lawbreaking. And it isn't for kids alone. These are old kids, a lot of them. Old kids that are in their twenties, kids that are in their thirties, kids that will perhaps be as near as--very close to or even possibly in their forties by the time that they would receive the citizenship that's promised to them under this DREAM Act.

Would we do something like that? Mr. Speaker, Thomas Jefferson once said that large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities. Well, this was a slender majority here tonight. It came very close. The vote was tied up on the rule, within one vote for a long time. There were 37 Democrats voted ``no'' on the rule.

Thirty-eight Democrats voted ``no'' on the bill, almost all of them Blue Dogs.

A lot of the Blue Dogs have been defeated in the election last November 2, and they are here for this week and next week. And for most of them, and possibly all of them, it will be the last time they serve in the United States Congress. And most of them are pretty good people, and they were pushed into this hardcore leftist agenda by Speaker Pelosi. They had that San Francisco agenda shoved at them over and over again--to use the Speaker's expression, I believe it was--made them walk the plank.

Well, the Speaker tried to get the Blue Dogs to walk the plank one more time tonight on this DREAM Act, this not aptly named, the wrongly named nightmare named the DREAM Act. It's a nightmare act. Tried to get the Blue Dogs to walk the plank, and they said ``no.'' They said ``no'' in numbers of 37 on the rule, 38 on the bill, because they are not going to go out of this town having handed the Speaker another victory that goes contrary to the best wishes of America and contrary to the American Dream.

Now, I believe in an immigration policy that's designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States of America. I believed that for a long time. And I think that American leadership has believed that, perhaps not articulated that the same way, but believed that for a long time.

And I reflect upon my grandmother coming over here through Ellis Island. And as I went through that tour at Ellis Island, it would be about 4 years ago--not quite--3\1/2\, I learned a good number of things. They gave everybody a very quick once-through physical. They watched them walk. They watched how they moved. If anybody was obviously pregnant, they put them back on the boat. If there were people that weren't good physical specimens, they went back on the boat. If they had signs of disease, back on the boat. If they had signs of not being mentally stable, back on the boat.

They screened them before they got on the boat in Europe and looked them over and gave them all those same kind of tests before they even let them board, because the United States of America, even at the height of our immigration heyday, at the peak of Ellis Island--in fact, the peak of Ellis Island was April 15, 1905--excuse me. I have got to get this year right. Think about it. April 15, 1907, when they had the largest processing of legal immigrants in the history of the country poured through Ellis Island on that day. April 15, 1907, 11,557 were brought through into the United States across the floors on the Great Hall.

On average, you could do the math, cut it down 2 percent, went back on the boat and went back to Europe, wherever they came from, because, they didn't meet the standards. Even though they had been screened before they got on the ship, they were screened before they could get off Ellis Island. And I don't know how many were screened out before they boarded, but I do know that 2 percent got sent back.

Why do we do that? Because we had it in the immigration system that was designed for America. It was designed to improve the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America. Because we believed in something then that the folks on this side of the aisle believe today.

We believe, and I believe, in American exceptionalism. We are an extraordinary country, Mr. Speaker. We are extraordinary for a lot of reasons.

There are a series of pillars of American exceptionalism, beautiful marble pillars, stable, solid pillars that have been carefully cut and hewn and polished and our Founding Fathers understood that and they set them in place. And I think God moved the Founding Fathers around like men upon a chess board to shape this Nation.

When I look out across the world, and I think down through the heritage of nation after nation, and I look for a country that has a history that's even similar to the history of the United States--and I don't mean that as far as the chronology of the events that took place, the wars, the depressions, those things that happen--the foundation of our country. The foundation of the United States of America is absolutely and completely and utterly unique to any of that in the world.

If you look over the last 250 years or so, the most successful institution in the world, part of it, has really been our religious institutions. But arguably the most successful institution has been the nation state, nation states that emerged out of city states when they were merged together.

What did they come from? Peoples that had a common language banded together from city states into nation states and that's what brought about all of the myriad of nation states in Western Europe, for example. That's what has set up the boundaries of our nations across the globe.

If you speak Russian, you lived in Russia. If you speak German, you lived in Germany. It's not true, Mr. President, if you speak Austrian, you don't actually have--no one speaks Austrian. But if you speak German in Austria, chances are you are home. And Czech in Czechoslovakia and the list goes on. French in France, Spanish in Spain--it's not too implicated when you think about it.

But why do we have the nation states? Because people with a common interest, commonalities, banded together, protected their interests, defended their boundaries and their borders and made sure they took care of each other and they built their nation states.

England, you speak English. United Kingdom, they spread their language throughout the United Kingdom all the way into Asia and out into the Pacific and over to the Americas. They believed in their culture and they did glorious things for the world. Wherever the English language went, freedom accompanied the language.

But still no nation has been founded upon these principles of liberty and freedom like the United States of America. And you could say that we had a continent that needed to be settled, and you could argue that it was the quirk of history that brought this about, but, Mr. Speaker, it's far more unique than that.

If we look around and we could think South America was a continent to be settled, so was Central America. And what's the difference between the United States and Canada? I could give you a few, they are pretty close to us.

And then we could roll our vision down to Australia and see a continent there that's about the size of the United States that had to be settled, settled with a Western European influence. Still, they don't have the rights, they don't have the liberty that Americans have. The dynamics of their country, however good they are, they have been very good to us as allies, don't match that of the United States.

The things that bless this country are completely unique. We are founded on a core of our Judeo-Christian principles. The settlers that came here came here for freedom of speech and religion, freedom to worship as they saw fit. They wanted to get away from King George, and they wanted to come to a place where they could be free to worship God in their way.

It's true that Old English common law and these concepts of Western Civilization and the English-speaking component of the age of enlightenment were established there in old England. And that old English common law arrived here in the New World.

In fact, there is a plaque down here at Jamestown, Virginia, I think I will get the year right, and may well have been 1607, or really close to that--that old English common law arrived in the New World, Jamestown, Virginia just down the coastline here a ways. All those things, gifted to this Nation, blessed this Nation, made us unique, is American exceptionalism.

And the rights that emerged in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, religion, the press, freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, the Fifth Amendment property rights, the right to be protected from double jeopardy, the concept of federalism that pushes those rights, rights of government that are granted to government by the people and rights that come from God. Now those are new concepts. Those concepts still don't exist in the world in the way they do here in the United States.

So when we get into these debates where people want to undermine the

rule of law and tell me that their version of compassion is worth risking these beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, that we ought to have enough compassion that we could just, for the moment, set aside these values that made this a great Nation. How can people think like that?

The thing that we should protect the most is our core faith and these beautiful, marble pillars of American exceptionalism. We must protect them. That's our oath. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. That's our commitment.

You can't take an oath to a Constitution that's living and breathing. You can't take an oath to what some activist judge might decide it's going to be in a year or two or five or ten. The very last nine people on the planet that should be amending the United States Constitution are those nine Supreme Court justices. But occasionally they, in effect, do amend the Constitution. And I don't believe there should be anybody sitting on the bench that doesn't adhere to the deepest conviction that the Constitution means what it says and it means what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification or the ratification of the succeeding amendments.

That's what the Constitution is. It's a contract. It is a guarantee. And our Founding Fathers made it very clear, our rights come from God. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Our rights come from God, and the rights come to the people and the people grant the right to govern to their elected representatives and the Constitution guarantees us not a democratic form of government, not a democracy, as some would say. The United States Constitution guarantees us a Republican form of government, and I mean that as a representative form of government that's not designed to put our finger into the wind. It's designed to elect representatives who owe their constituents and everybody in this Nation their best effort and their best judgment, and we have to keep that oath to uphold the Constitution.

These are just some of the foundational principles of this great Nation, and its concepts of American exceptionalism, which is at risk because of what we saw happen here tonight, the people that would undermine the rule of law and reward people for breaking it and give them a free college education at the expense of people who are having to pay for it and don't have the access to that benefit are undermining the rule of law. They are damaging the concept of American exceptionalism and rewarding the people that have undermined our rule of law itself, American exceptionalism, and it comes from these things that I said.

They are the Bill of Rights, most of them. All of these rights, freedom of speech, religion, right to keep and bear arms, property rights, no double jeopardy. The list goes on. The Bill of Rights has most of them. It leaves a couple of them out.

One of those is free enterprise capitalism, the ability to be able to--and I mentioned property rights, Fifth Amendment property rights. But the ability to own property and know that if you pay the property tax on that property, government can't come take it away from you and that the assets of that can be used as collateral to leverage, to invest in businesses and start jobs and do the things we choose to do.

There are a myriad of individual decisions. That's another foundational concept. The free enterprise component of this, why is it, Mr. Speaker, why is it? At country after country, they don't form capital. They might start businesses, but they are in a little subsistence business where they are selling trinkets or selling snacks. But they are hand to mouth, getting by, not investing that capital, not building let's just say if you have the hot dog cart out there, they just go every day and sell the hot dogs.

But they're not turning it into a franchise. They're not building a restaurant, not building a chain of restaurants, not getting an idea on now I have all this equipment in here; I can start a stainless steel shop that will build all this restaurant equipment and market it to the world.

Americans are full of ideas. We're a dynamic people. We're not suitable to live under any other form of government because we are a robust, vigorous society. And since I've gone through this list of reasons for American exceptionalism, and it's not exclusive, I have this other piece, Mr. Speaker, and it's this: Americans are full of vigor. We're the cream of the crop of every donor civilization on the planet that sent legal immigrants here. We're the cream of the crop.

The reason we are, when I say ``we,'' I'm a descendant of, but the biggest reason we are is it was hard to get here, but there was a great reward that you could earn when you got here. And some people came here believing the streets were paved with gold, and others came here and paved their own streets with gold because there was room to achieve in the United States. And the people that came here had an extra vigor because their dream drove them to do that.

And so there's a filter that's been set up worldwide. It sets up at the borders of the United States, this the sovereign Nation, with our borders, and you can't be a nation state if you don't have borders and you can't call them borders if you don't defend them. But our borders were set up and people had a hard time getting here and getting through the system.

They had a hard time, like my grandmother, walking across the Great Hall at Ellis Island, and getting, being granted entrance into the United States of America, but they had vigor and they had a dream. They had things they wanted to build, and they didn't waste time. They didn't let grass grow under their feet. They went to work, and they committed themselves so much to this country, that they expected that the first one of my family that passed away here, the rest of them will be buried around her, and to a certain extent that seems to be the case. And I don't know the whole history of it and so I'm cautious about speaking it into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. But I do know that my grandmother came here and sent some of her sons back to Europe to fight in the war against the fatherland. She was committed to America. She directed my father, who went to school, not speaking English, to never speak anything but English in the home so she could learn it because she said, I came here to become an American, and you shall go to school and learn English and bring it home and teach it to me.

English needs to be the official language of the United States of America. A common language is what binds us together. And this vigor of Americans that comes from every country in the world and every walk of life, this unique vigor, because of this filter, kept the slackers out. The doers got here because it was hard to get here and it helped to be inspired by a dream, and they came.

And so every donor civilization contributed to America, their vigor, the cream of their crop. And now here we are. We are--some people will disagree with this, but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we're a race of people. There is an American race of people. We're not just sometimes what we look like, all of these colors and different configurations of God's creation in his image. We're more than that. We're a lot more than that. We have common interests. We have a common bond. We've experienced a common history. We have common rights, common privileges and a common dream, and that's to leave the world a better place than it was when we came and pass it along to our children so they can do the same. It's in our culture. It's part of our being. It's who we are. We are a common race of people as far as looking at us as Americans, but we are uncommon as compared to the rest of the world because of all of these reasons that I have said.

And we need to understand that. We need to understand what made us great. We need to preserve and protect and defend and polish those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism. We need to understand what made us great and protect it and preserve it and enhance it.

And these things that go on here in this House of Representatives, in this lameduck Congress still being driven by the repudiated majority, that can take a bill that they call the DREAM Act that's been rejected by the American people over and over again, at least in the polls and of those that understand what it is, and suspend the

proper function of this Congress and bring a bill like that to the floor, how?

Well, here's the proper way first, Mr. Speaker, in case that's not something that you've had an opportunity to evaluate. The proper order is this: some Member of Congress comes in, writes up a bill, says I think we need this in the law of the land. They go down here and file the bill here at the well at the Clerk's location here at the well, and then that bill is referred to a committee. Now, if it gets enough legs, if it gets enough cosponsors on it where you think it has some substance, there can be a hearing before a subcommittee or two or three or four.

The subcommittee then can take action on it and perhaps vote it and pass it into the full committee. The full committee can then hold one or two or three or four hearings also to inform all the other members of the committee. And they can then, when I say pass the bill, at each point of committee action it's an unlimited number of amendments that are germane and in order, but an unlimited number of amendments that can be offered to seek to perfect the legislation.

That's how it's been set up. It's got to be set up in such a way that you can actually fix a bad bill before it gets to the floor. And so a bill that's introduced goes through a hearing and markup process in the subcommittee. Then it goes through a hearing and a markup process in the full committee. Then it goes up to the Rules Committee, the hole in the wall up here on the third floor, where sometimes they run into a little trouble because those folks don't work out in the light of day. They work sometimes at night. There's no television camera in there. Reporters don't go up there; they think it's a little boring and maybe it's not really news. If they'd come up there more often I might go up there and make some news, Mr. Speaker, because I think it would be nice to let the American people know what's going on.

So then the Rules Committee passes a rule that sends the bill to the floor. Actually, it sends a rule to the floor. We debate on whether we want to accept the rule. If we vote the rule down, it goes back up to the Rules Committee and we say get it right and send it back to us again. So we deport the rule back up to the Rules Committee in the hole in the wall, just to keep it descriptive in my language, and they come back and try again. It doesn't happen very often that a rule comes down, but once a rule is there it sets the parameters by which we debate a bill.

And our Speaker-designate Boehner has told the world, and I'm very glad that he has, that we are going to have far more transparency and far more open rules on our bills. So that allows Members to offer amendments and try to perfect this legislation. That's how it's supposed to work.

So a bill would come to the floor, in theory, under an open rule that would allow any Member to offer an amendment, debate it here on the floor, force a vote, force a recorded vote, or require a recorded vote. I shouldn't use the word ``force.'' It should be a process that people in this Chamber are willing to go through and are actually eager to improve legislation that otherwise might not be as good as it can be.

And then, once the amendments are all heard and voted on and resolved, then the bill can be certainly debated in its form, final form, and placed upon its passage or, if the House passes that legislation, we message it to the Senate, right down that hallway, and they either take it up or kill it. If they take it up, they go through a similar process. That's how it's supposed to work.

The DREAM Act, this nightmare act, had an entirely different experience than I've just described, Mr. Speaker, because it didn't really exist in this House of Representatives anywhere in the form that it came to the floor today.

It worked out like this: Speaker Pelosi decided that she wanted to go along with the majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and they would force a vote on the DREAM Act, whether it could ever become law or not. And so, instead of going through the hearing process and the markup process, subcommittee, full committee up to the Rules Committee and down, they just went to the Rules Committee. At some 3 this afternoon, this bill that I don't know that anybody had an opportunity to read it before it was presented to the Rules Committee. I know that I didn't, but I maybe could have caught up with it a couple of hours earlier.

In any case, all these versions floating around, nobody can figure out what's going to move. Down from the Speaker's office comes a bill, dropped into the Rules Committee. They take this up. A little e-mail goes out to some of our staff to let us know that they're going to be hearing testimony on the rule. No amendments allowed. Some Members, myself included, go to testify before the Rules Committee. We know they're going to say no to any suggestions that we make, including any amendments that we might try to offer, even though there wasn't really time to configure them upon notice.

They report out a same day rule that says, this Congress is going to hear this bill right away. So the Rules Committee meets on a bill we haven't seen at 3 in the afternoon. A few hours later it's here on the floor for a vote on the rule. A few hours later it's here on the floor for 30 minutes of debate on this side, 30 minutes of debate on this side. And an amnesty bill that's twice the size of the 1986 amnesty bill passes off the floor of the House of Representatives.

Now it is messaged to the Senate where Harry Reid has asked for it. And this sunlight? This is a responsive Congress? No, this is an act of a Congress that has been repudiated for the same reasons. There is a reason why so many Democrats are going home. And I for one feel a little bad that some of the best are the ones who are going home. Some of the Blue Dogs are some of the best to work with. They reflect American values in my view more than a lot of the others. They have been defeated because of these kind of shenanigans, these kinds of tactics, these kind of acts that close the system down, lock the Members out so the franchise, and there are 435 Members of the House of Representatives, and there is not anybody who sits in these seats whose constituents deserve less representation than anybody else. Everybody's franchise deserves to be heard, and the will of the group should be brought up through the leadership and should be manifested in legislation here on the floor, sent to the Senate. If it comes back and it doesn't match, we should have our say as well. That is not what has been happening. The right way is around the corner--I think we take it up in January.

But we Americans, we Americans that believe in American exceptionalism, we Americans who take an oath to uphold the Constitution, we Americans that adhere to and uphold the rule of law, which I believe is implicit in our oath to the Constitution, reject the idea of this nightmare act that I believe turned into an affirmative action amnesty act for 2 million or more people that could be tripled.

And our immigration policy that we have here, Mr. Speaker, is already so bad. It doesn't reflect the best interest of America. It doesn't reflect the economic, social and cultural well-being or enhance it in the fashion I believe it should. Existing immigration law is set up in such a way that merit is almost out of the question. To evaluate the people coming across Ellis Island and turn 2 percent of them back after they had already been screened and filtered on the European side before they got on the ship tells you there was at least a merit system.

But here in the United States, if you look at the legal immigration, and the legal immigration number will range up to 1.5 million a year, there is no country that is even close to as generous as we are with legal immigration. But of all of that, some place between, and this is testimony before the immigration committee, some place between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration is based on merit. The balance of it is out of our control.

So that means that between 89 and 93 percent of our legal immigration is in the hands of the people who are deciding they are going to come here rather than in the hands of Americans who would decide which people would come here. It is completely out of sync with the values of a lot of the other Western civilization countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. They have immigration policies that are designed to bring the best people into

their country and not put burdens on the taxpayers and their society.

I can't make the grade to go to Canada because I'm too old. I would be relying on the government to feed me too soon, and my education level is not high enough. I don't know about my years left to work, but you put it into the score system they have, I can visit but I cannot go live. That is how they would be. So if they reject Steve King in Canada, we should be able to say no to some folks that want to come to the United States, especially those who broke our laws.

This legislation, this DREAM Act, this nightmare act, has a number of things in it that the American people need to know. It is a hardcore, leftist, liberalism piece of amnesty legislation. It provides for protection for people who have broken the laws in this way: They would still get a DREAM Act registration that would protect them from deportation even if they had been alien absconders, people that were set for deportation hearings and skedaddled and didn't show up, those people who were going to be adjudicated for deportation, alien absconders, they will be protected. They can sign up under DREAM, and then they are shielded from being prosecuted and deported. Even if they were an alien absconder, even if they were guilty of document fraud, no problem, we will give you a college education, sit you at a desk. If you have false claims of being a United States citizen, that is no problem either. You are still eligible under the DREAM act. We will give you a college education, too, even though you have lied about your citizenship. Even aliens who have been deported who would sneak back into the United States and the deportation records are there, they sign up for the DREAM, they will not be deported either. What a reward.

So there will be all kinds of people who will sneak into the United States who will go ahead and sign up right away for this DREAM Act because they will be protected from deportation. Even though it requires that they be no older than 30 at the time of enactment and that they came into the United States before their 16th birthday and they have been here for 5 years, who is to know? Who is know whether it is valid or whether it isn't? Who is to know how old they are if they don't have a real birth certificate? Who is to know if they have a high school education, a GED? Who is to know if they have completed a 2-year education at a tech school?

But I know that I did receive in my email a Web site tonight that is in the business of selling these false documents, these false diplomas, helping people be in a position where they can qualify already where the States have made these provisions.

It is a big business. Fraud and corruption is a big business. It is a big business in the countries they are coming from, and it is becoming a bigger business in the country they are coming to, the United States of America. We have been a clean country that respects the rule of law. We are a proud nationality. We are a race of people. We have a common cause, a common belief system. We believe in the rule of law. It is our job to uphold that, and this bill, this DREAM Act undermines it.

And it costs a lot of money. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, put out a score that has been touted by the other side that somehow it turns into a plus for the U.S. budget because some people will get a better education, and they will earn more money and pay more taxes. I don't think this thinks this through very far, but I can tell you in the second decade even the Congressional Budget Office says that it is going to be a cost of $5 billion to the taxpayer. And I can tell you that the Center For Immigration Studies, CIS, has done a study on the cost for State and local government, and that would be $6.2 billion a year. That is each year. That doesn't necessarily project out over a decade, a couple of years perhaps, maybe longer. They only did a couple of years: 6.2, so $12.4 billion is pretty close to what I think they will commit to.

And the tripling of the number of green cards, the billions of dollars in debt, the people who get a safe harbor who are alien absconders, any alien who has a pending application will be protected from deportation. And this amounts to a de facto scholarship for those who, if ICE were required to deliver that de facto scholarship and before they handed it to them, they would have to apply the law and make sure that they woke up in a country that they were legal in within a few mornings. Those are the facts.

And, furthermore, the most egregious aspect of this is this: this is going to provide for in-State tuition discounts for people who are today illegal in America. And they didn't all come in because their parents brought them. Many of them came in on their own, coming across the border at age 12, 13, 14, 15, turning 16. Many of them will be up to 30 years old saying they were brought into the country when they were 10 or 12. There will be no records to prove that. Here is what happens. Those people who are here illegally that are eligible for removal are today and would be under this act sitting in college classrooms with a taxpayer-funded college education, sitting at a desk. And in California, a resident of California, zero tuition.

But if my son or daughter-in-law wanted to go to California to go to college, they would have to pay out-of-State tuition. Out-of-State tuition for California institutions annually would be $22,021 a year. Can you imagine writing a check for $22,021 a year to go to college in California, and sitting in a classroom at a desk next to someone who is unlawfully in the United States who is getting a free education paid for by the taxpayers? How much that would burn you if you are an American citizen in good standing, a taxpayer, an individual and a family that has funded and contributed to this government in the way that most of us do.

There is no justice or equity there, and it cannot be reconciled. I would add to this that it gets even worse, and if this bill passes, I am convinced it will exist all over this country.

People who are illegal here in America will have their taxpayer- funded and, in some States, free education. In Iowa, it costs them about $3,000 a semester, and it costs the out-of-State people about $9,000 a semester; but in some States, it's a free education. They'll be sitting at desks in a classroom, next to a grieving widow, who has lost her husband in Iraq or in Afghanistan and who has elected to go across the State line in order to go to college out of State, and she is paying out-of-State tuition. It's $22,021 in California. A grieving widow of an American patriot, who gave his life defending our liberty and our national security, a grieving widow who maybe has children who have lost their dad, maybe now is going back for training because she knows she is now the principal breadwinner in that family. She is paying out-of-State tuition, and is sitting at a desk next to someone who is unlawfully in the United States, someone who is getting a free college education that is paid for by the taxpayers.

That is what this DREAM Act sets up. It is irreconcilable. It is an impossible conundrum that should not be visited upon the American people. This DREAM Act must be killed. We wounded it here in the House: 37 Democrats voted ``no'' on the rule, and 38 Democrats voted ``no'' on the bill. Due to health reasons, we had some Republicans who weren't able to vote. Otherwise, it would have been closer. I actually look out and think we were close to mustering enough votes to defeat this poorly named ``DREAM Act,'' which really is the ``affirmative action amnesty act in America.''

We should know better. We can do better. I am hopeful that the United States Senate will step up, will speak up and will vote down this DREAM Act when the majority leader in the Senate brings it up, which may be tomorrow. I suspect what will happen is that he won't have the votes, but he will try it anyway, because this has all been political from the beginning. He has realized it is not going to become law, but he made a promise to his constituents: If you will reelect me, we will give you a vote on this DREAM Act.

The gentleman from Chicago, who had pushed on this so hard, got his vote today. We saw the results of it here in the House in this lame duck Congress, in this repudiated 111th Congress that has been led by Nancy Pelosi.

I think about Thomas Jefferson, who once said large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities. Well, this was a slender majority, and this is a large initiative. This initiative

of amnesty under the DREAM Act is so large that it's twice the size of the Amnesty Act of 1986, and we have seen the fraud triple the estimates. So, if that's the case, this could become--pick your number--3 million to 6 million people who would get amnesty. Then they will start bringing in their extended families over and over and over again, generation after generation.

It gets out of control, and this poor America, which has between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration based on merit, based on people who are going to encourage and enhance and develop the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America, starts to fall apart a little more. It gets undermined a little more, and the principles that make us great are undermined a little bit more.

We need to be in the business of refurbishing those pillars of American exceptionalism, of not getting out the jackhammer and chiseling away at them as was done here today by this Pelosi-led Congress.

So, if Thomas Jefferson said large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities--and he did--he didn't contemplate about large initiatives being advanced by repudiated Congresses that have been voted out of office and by Congresses that should go meekly out the door in respect for the will of the American people. They should do nothing that violates a sense of decency and the will of the American people--nothing. Only provide the functions that are necessary to get this government bridged over to the other side so that the new Congress can be seated and so that those new 87 freshman Republicans and however many Democrats there are--nine or so--can take this oath of office here on the 4th day of January and go to work, go to work fixing and saving America from the debacle that has been visited upon her by a dysfunctional Congress that writes bills in the Speaker's office, that brings them zigged through the hole in the wall of the Rules Committee and zagged down to the floor, bills with no amendments and with 30 minutes of debate on each side to try to resolve an issue. There is no time to penetrate with a concept in 30 minutes. You can't fix a bill with talk and with being denied a motion to recommit, which is standard practice in this place.

So there is no possible way to put up a motion that is going to fix a bill here. It is a bad bill. It damages the rule of law. It grants amnesty. It costs tens of billions of dollars. It rewards people for breaking the law. It gives them a tuition discount, an in-State tuition discount. If it's Iowa, it's $3,000 a semester versus $9,000 a semester in round terms. If it's California, it's free tuition versus $22,021.

That's the America they are building. Americans saw what was going on--debt and deficit, irresponsible spending, damaging the rule of law, breaking down the American culture and civilization--a Constitution demolition crew at work every day. They said, You're digging us a hole, and we aren't going to take it anymore. The American people rose up and took the shovel out of the hands of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and they made it a lot harder for Harry Reid.

So what do we have going on?

Nancy Pelosi is still digging because, technically, the shovel is not out of her hands yet. She lined up all of those Blue Dogs, and said, I'm going to make you walk the plank one last time before you go home for the last time. They said no. They stepped off the side of the plank, and voted against the rule and voted against the DREAM Act, and they sent a statement as they walked out the door.

Well, I think there are a lot of them who deserve credit for serving America in the fashion they have. Those who stood up to the courage of their convictions deserve our thanks. Those who came to this place to work in good faith deserve the gratitude of the American people. As for those who disagreed with me and who made a good argument, I hope, if you're right, it prevailed. It is my privilege to have served with people on both sides of this aisle as I think that the debate is essential and important.

From my standpoint, I will stand up for the things I believe in and will debate them with those folks who have beliefs that disagree with mine, believing as our Founding Fathers did that, in that debate, we will sort out the right policy for this country.

But when you shut the debate off, when the iron fist of the Speaker shuts out the committees and writes the bill in her office and sends it to the floor with no amendments and no motion to recommit, you end up with a terrible piece of legislation. You break faith with the American people, and you break faith with the franchise of every other Member of this Congress on both sides of the aisle. That is what has happened here over and over again over the last 4 years, and it has gotten worse each year.

This is one of the starkest examples. Who would have thought that in a lame duck session, when we had big things to do and big things to worry about, the Speaker would push an amnesty act out here in a lame duck session in a repudiated Congress and not give all of those freshmen an opportunity to weigh in on this? They are the new voices. They are the new voices for America. They are the new vigor. They are the convictions of this United States of America.

I look for good things from them, big things from them. I want to see them empowered to the maximum. Their fresh ideas and their energy and the cohesiveness that I hope is that class. I believe they will put a marker down in history that will meet that standard perhaps of the 1994 class--of which some are here, still here--and take us on up to another level. In that class, I expect we will see committee chairs and we will see new majority leaders. Maybe there is a Speaker in that class. Maybe there is a majority whip in that class or a conference chair, maybe all of them. There might be a President of the United States that's coming into this Congress that will be sworn in here on January 4. All of those things are possible, and most of them are likely, Mr. Speaker.

I look forward to the new breath of fresh air that is arriving in this Congress. I look forward to Speaker Boehner, who will be offering transparency here in this Congress. I look forward to the voice of every Member being heard with respect. And those ideas that can prevail in the arena of ideas, which is here in this debate on the floor of the House and in our committees, are the ones that are the best ideas for the American people.

We will get there. We've got a lot of things to reconstruct. We've got a lot of undoing to do. And it's not going to be an easy job and it won't be a short job. We will be undoing perhaps for the next 2 years while we elect a President that will help us do in the following 4 years.

America will never be chiselled to perfection, but it's our charge, it's our struggle to work on it every day, to get it as close to right as we mortals can so that when it's handed off to the next generation, they can be proud of the toil that we did here and understand there was a vision and a commitment, and that we kept, in this new majority, our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence and attention here tonight and the opportunity to address you here on the floor and close out the business for the day, 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 11 o'clock and 41 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 9, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this great deliberative body that we are. And it is a blessing and a gift to the American people that we can have our debates and our discourse that rages back and forth here on the floor of the House. And sometimes we're not so polite to each other. I regret that. But the passions arise here rather than have them arise in the streets of America.

So in a way, we take a lid off the pressure cooker here in the House. And we vent these issues, and we find a way to at least sort out the policy that can be accepted or accommodated by the other side. And often we're able to come to a good product that's good and right for the American people.

Madam Speaker, I come to you tonight with a number of things on my mind and the primary issue that concerns me is what took place here in the House yesterday with the debate on the rule and on the bill and subsequently the vote spent another $4.6 billion, unbudgeted, unauthorized, unacceptable--and not just 41 cents out of every dollar borrowed, a lot of it from the Chinese and the Saudis--but all of this money, all of this unbudgeted funding is a hundred percent borrowed money because it goes above that level. It was unnecessary money to be spent. So every bit of it was borrowed money.

And by a vote of 256-152, this lame duck Congress, this invalidated Congress, this reputed Congress, this rejected Congress, has gone down the path over and over again of spending money that we don't have for causes that don't have the support of the American people spent by a Congress that's no longer the valid representatives of the people. That's why it's called a lame duck. We should have shot this lame duck a long time ago. It still limps along and it still flares up, and it still steps in and goes against the will of the American people.

Now, I would submit, Madam Speaker, if this Congress had reflected the will of the American people, the gavels would not be changing hands come January 4 of 2011. They'd stay essentially in the same hands with a smaller switch in seats.

But we can see this happen over the last 4 years as the San Francisco agenda began to manifest itself here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And it didn't really get enough traction that the American people really understood what was going on until such time as President Obama was elected and his agenda matched up so closely with that of the Speaker's agenda here--that San Francisco agenda--that the American people could see clearly. By the way, coupled with that of the gentleman from Nevada from down through across the rotunda on the Senate side, the three of them, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama. I said this more than 2 years ago, 2\1/2\ years ago, If you elect this ruling troika, they will be able to go into a phone booth and do what they will to America, and they won't be accountable to anybody. And I should have said, Until the subsequent election.

Well, the American people did elect Barack Obama, and they sent Nancy Pelosi back here in a position to become the Speaker, which she was, and Harry Reid maintained his position as the majority leader in the United States Senate. And they did to the best of their extent what they could to America.

There's a whole list of things that aggrieve me and very much that must be undone. Some things that passed the House that didn't make it through the Senate were painful votes for some of the Members that will be going home. And I regret some of the friends that I have made on the other side of the aisle that I'm saying goodbye to this week and the next week and the next week. There are some good Americans that have served this country well that were voted out of office because of the anchor that was attached to them by the San Francisco agenda.

But there's this agenda, this agenda that I've called modern-day slavery reparations. And some think that might be a rhetorical stretch. But, Madam Speaker, I'll point out not only did John Conyers, as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, hold impeachment hearings for President Bush and Vice President Cheney--he said they weren't impeachment hearings but they were, in fact, impeachment hearings, the basis of it I still don't know but I sat in on them--not only did he hold those, he held hearings on a whole number of things including hearings on slavery reparations.

And I made the argument that you cannot fix something that happened a

century and a half ago. You can't go back and put the blood back in people's veins when they've paid in blood to put an end to slavery. And you can't hold the generations, six and seven generations hence, responsible for the sins of the great great great great great great grandfathers.

And the chairman, Mr. Conyers, a respectable individual whom I count as a friend and have always had a good personal relationship with, told me, That's why we're having these hearings to find out. You think we can't fix these problems by providing reparations, and we're holding hearings and we're going to see if we can figure it out.

Well, that's the mindset. I mean, if we're actually having a discussion about whether you can compensate people for labor that they did while they were slaves in the first half of the 19th century and earlier to those descendents, how do you sort out who's descended from slaves and who's not? They don't know how to answer that question. They just think somehow there should be a redistribution of wealth.

Well, this redistribution of wealth is something that also comes out of the mouth of our President. It was very clear when he made the statement to Joe the Plumber when he said, Share the wealth. And it's been very clear as he's played the class envy card time after time after time and divided Americans against each other for a whole series of reasons--and a lot of it that has to do with how much money each of us make, forgetting that it is the American Dream to become a millionaire, to pile another million on top of that, the second million is easier since the first. How long has it been since we've heard that? It might be harder than the first because this President wants to punish that first million and the second million and the third million. Hopefully, that gets resolved this week. We've reached a bit of an impasse on it. But the redistribution of wealth goes on.

The hard-core leftist agenda is still driven. The leaders and many of the Members of this lame duck 111th Congress, if they got the message, their message back to us is a spiteful message against the American people, which is, So you didn't like debt and deficit and you'd like to have jobs and a better growing economy. Well, on our way out the door-- you've thrown a lot of us out of office--on our way out the door, we're going to give you a little more of what you didn't like. They're saying to the American people, Oh, you didn't like what we gave you in the 111th Congress or the 110th Congress, you didn't like what we gave you under President Obama. Well, if you didn't like it, here's some more. That's what's going on in this lame duck Congress.

If the American people don't like what's been served to them by Nancy Pelosi and President Obama and Harry Reid, they're saying, Madam Speaker, to the American people, here's some more.

Well, here's some more that came at us yesterday: the Pigford Farms issue tied together with the Cobell issue that has to do with how resources were managed for certain Native American tribes. And I'm not an expert on the Cobell issue. I have been drawn into the Pigford issue.

But, Madam Speaker, Pigford Farms is this: it is the largest class action suit in the history of the United States. And the single largest recipient of that, her name is Shirley Sherrod. You remember Shirley Sherrod. She's the lady that announced on July 22 of 2009 that she would be the largest recipient in the largest civil rights case in history, which turns out now to be $2.3 billion to compensate for discrimination--an amount that--I agree there was discrimination and I agree we should compensate people who were discriminated against. It's a very difficult task to quantify, however.

But Shirley Sherrod received the news of the award of $13 million to her and whoever the people she might decide to distribute it to. We don't have access to those records. These cases are apparently sealed.

On 22 July, 2009, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, hired her 25 July 2009. Because she's the largest civil rights recipient in the largest case in the history of America, and the case is Pigford versus Vilsack--the Secretary of Agriculture.

Timothy Pigford filed the suit and the class action lawsuit and so his name, the first plaintiff's name, is listed as the name of the suit versus the Secretary of Agriculture, which was Glickman, and it became then the successor Secretaries until it became Tom Vilsack. But it was Tom Vilsack that was named then in the suit as successor, Pigford v. Vilsack, and the largest recipient was Shirley Sherrod. And what does he do 3 days after the $13 million was announced that she would receive? Hires her.

I can't fathom hiring somebody who had sued me, who had pushed for a settlement that turns out to be $13 million. The next piece is, what do they need the job for, and why would I reward them with a job? What else was going on in the mind of the Secretary and Shirley Sherrod that he would put her on the payroll and make her the director of USDA rural development in the State of Georgia?

This all came to light because there was a YouTube clip of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP that in its edited version appeared to make some racist statements. And I saw the speech in the totality enough that I accept the overall message on what she learned from that. And so I am not taking issue with the totality of her speech. But she was fired apparently for the clip that was out. And the clip I think is a clip that was available to the Web site that posted it, what was available at the time.

But in any case, $13 million recipient in the largest civil rights case in the history hired by the people she sued 3 days after the settlement announcement came down. And that's just a piece of Pigford Farms. Pigford Farms has been dragging on for years. And what happened was Dan Glickman, then Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton as President, stepped up and announced that they had discovered that there was discrimination taking place by U.S. Department of Agriculture employees against black farmers primarily in the South, because that's where they lived. And when that happened, it opened up the class action. The lawyers went to work and they produced what's now Pigford I, the first settlement consent decree.

It was approved by Judge Paul Friedman. I brought his opinion, Madam Speaker, with me to the floor tonight. And if those might think when I say this is a modern day version of slavery reparations, I would point out that in the case the first words in the opinion of Judge Paul Friedman are this: ``Forty acres and a mule.'' Forty acres and a mule.

Madam Speaker, he goes on to lament that he can't fix all of the wrongs that come out of slavery and the segregation in one civil rights suit. One can read between the lines that he is sorry that he can't fix it all. One can read between the lines that he may well be glad to hear a Pigford II proposal come before him so that he could ratify it once Congress has appropriated an additional $1.15 billion.

Here is what Judge Friedman wrote about the Pigford settlements, these $50,000 settlements that were paid out to black farmers for--they had to meet four criteria: had to be African American. They had to have farmed or wanted to farm. They had to have believed they were discriminated against. And they had to attest that they filed a complaint, that could have been verbal, to a USDA employee, a Member of Congress, a couple other categories. That's four criteria. Actually, the fifth one was then that someone, not a close family member, had to sign an affidavit that attested that they had not only believed they were discriminated against, but they had complained about it, not necessarily in writing, but it could have been verbally to any USDA employee under any circumstances. It didn't have to be a public meeting with witnesses.

It could have simply been walking down the street and you meet someone who might be the director of your county FSA, and you say, I don't think your people treated me right. I should have had a loan. That would be all it would take. If you didn't get the loan, you wouldn't even have had to apply. You just maybe had to think you weren't going to be treated right and failed to apply for the loan. That's enough. You don't have to prove discrimination. You just have to allege it

and get a friend to sign the affidavit. That's all that's required under Pigford I.

And then according to Judge Paul Friedman, he writes this: ``The consent decree accomplishes its purpose primarily through a two-track dispute resolution mechanism that provides those class members with little or no documentary evidence with,'' and I am quoting from this opinion, Madam Speaker, ``a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000 and forgiveness of debt owed to the USDA.'' And anybody who believes that that's not enough, they can actually sue on their own and prove it by the preponderance of the evidence.

But there is no proof required to receive the $50,000 virtually automatic cash payment except to get a friend to sign the affidavit that says that you complained about it and you believed you were discriminated against. And then all it had to be was to allege that you were turned down for a loan or a farm program of some type or another.

Madam Speaker, $1.05 billion was distributed under no basis beyond that, no requirement or proof for discrimination. And a very, very low level of even asking them if they actually ever complained or filed a complaint. And no verification required that they ever farmed or ever applied for a USDA loan or program. You didn't have to farm. You just had to say I am black, I wanted to farm, and I believe they discriminated against me, and I complained about it, and I have got a friend that will sign the document. That's it, Madam Speaker.

And $1.05 billion was distributed on that basis. And virtually automatic payments, much of it debt forgiveness included. And if anyone actually was a farmer and actually did have debt with the USDA, all of their debt was forgiven also. And Judge Paul Friedman said a virtually automatic payment if you didn't want to go through track two and get a bigger check than the $50,000 and the debt forgiveness, which Judge Friedman calculates that the average settlement would be $187,500.

Now, we don't have an accounting from the USDA on how large the average settlements are. We don't have the spreadsheet of the 22,500 applicants that poured in after the direction of this opinion by Judge Friedman and the consent decree that accompanies it directed that there be town hall meetings across the South, that the attorneys on this case, in order to earn their contingency fees, needed to go out and promote this. And they needed to put newspaper ads in and radio ads in. I believe there was also television. I can't verify that for sure. And hold meetings and call people to them.

And we have reports from throughout the South that there were meetings that were held in churches, in town hall meetings, and they were told this is your 40 acres and a mule. You need to come and sign up for this. And this is what you have to attest to in order to get the $50,000 check. And if you have any debt, it will be forgiven.

Now, if you present that, if you have attorneys working on contingency fees, you have the perfect mechanism for fraud. And so as we look across the South, I can't believe that all of the counties discriminated against their African American population equally. I would have to believe that if discrimination took place--and I believe it did--that it took place sometimes in a county there would be none, because the culture of that office in that county would be such that everybody gets treated equally, with respect and promptly, with all the help that they can give with the staff that they have. I believe that takes place in at least some of the counties in the South. And I believe it has for a generation or more.

I suspect--and I don't have reason to believe, but I suspect--there were counties on the other side of that spectrum where they as a matter of practice discriminated against African Americans. And these are the cases that I believe needed to be compensated. But I can't believe that it was the same level of discrimination across all of these counties.

And when I see applications, and I have a stack of these applications, most of which were paid out, and they name the same USDA employee as the one they complained to, and they give the location and the date, and that USDA employee was not at that location, could not have been at locations as far apart as they were claimed, as many dates as were claimed. And why would it be that one USDA employee had all of these complaints and yet nothing was done about the discrimination? It's this, that they offered the name over and over again.

It's kind of like if you see an individual's name, and when you look through all these applications, and I have looked through stacks of them, when I look through them and I see often the same name of the USDA employee, I see the same handwriting on application after application, I can see the narrative has been changed just slightly from application to application. If they were numbered chronologically, I can just about tell you what's going on. There is an attorney's staff that is sitting there filling out these applications. They may actually be interviewing the individuals. The individuals had to sign because they were going to get the check. And the attorney's going to get a contingency fee out of that. And we don't know how much that is. And that's not in this opinion. It's not in the consent decree. But what is in there is that the IRS gets paid also as a matter of settlement.

So if it's a $50,000 virtually automatic payment, as Judge Friedman says, there is also a $12,500 check that accompanies that that gets mailed off to the IRS.

And so now it becomes $62,500. Judge Friedman estimated the average debt would be $100,000. And so the debt forgiveness at $100,000 would automatically send the check to the IRS for $25,000 to pay the tax liability that comes from the debt forgiveness that would become a tax liability for those individuals.

Those things went on. His estimate, $187,500 per settlement, believing that the applicants, or at least presuming to believe that the applicants for the Pigford settlement were applicants that actually were engaged in programs within the USDA. Now I can tell you whether we can get a decent insight into whether there are actual farming participants that are predominantly part of these Pigford settlements, the 14,500 that have received their first payments under the first version of Pigford I.

If we can go back and look at all the data, check their name, address, contact information, the amount of the check that they got, how much got sent to the IRS, how much debt forgiveness there was, how much got sent to the IRS. And we can look down through there, and we can see what percentage of them had debt with the USDA that was written off.

And then we can take a look at the addresses and see--some of those who have analyzed this more deeply than I would tell me that if you take out a map of the United States and start down through these applications and start sticking pins in the map at the addresses of the applications, you will find that many of these pins go directly into the inner cities and into the urban areas of America.

It's true that people can move from the farm to the city. They have been doing that for a long time. But the preponderance of the pins tell a story that doesn't appear to be consistent with the allegations of the depth and the level of fraud that they say are there.

I sat down with USDA employees. I have had these applications handed to me. I have had them come back sick at heart that they had to administer these settlements in Pigford farms and tell me that they believe that the minimum fraud level in the applications that they were required to provide a virtually automatic payment for, a minimum fraud being at 75 percent. I hear numbers from USDA employees that dealt with more application of this that go into the upper 90th percentile.

I want to look at these numbers and see. It's amazing to me that we can have 22,000 applicants, 14,500 settlements, payments that are made, and throughout all that time not have a single USDA employee that has been fired or disciplined or even identified as a perpetrator of discrimination. If we really care about ending discrimination in America--and we may have actually cleaned up the USDA, I don't allege that's the case today. In fact, I would argue that it wasn't nearly as

bad as they would like to have us believe.

And so if a discrimination took place, we should have been able to identify the perpetrators, and they should have been punished. And I think that it's irresponsible on the part of the secretaries of Agriculture, who have supported this Pigford settlement, to also say I can find not just 22,000 people that will apply; now we have applications and an additional 70,000 or so.

Now we are looking at applications in Pigford II of as many as 94,000 altogether, an additional 70,000 or so, 72,000 added to the 22,000 original claimants. And we end up with a total number of claimants of 94,000 who say that they were discriminated against. That's a really effective and efficient marketing result on the part of the attorneys that have been set up on these contingency fees and who are charged by the consent decree, the original consent decree, of holding these town hall meetings and getting the word out to African American farmers so they know if they have been discriminated against they can apply.

Again, no proof required that they were discriminated against. Early on they were required to prove that they were denied benefits compared to a similarly situated white farmer, and they complained that that was too hard. So they waived that similarly situated, and it turned out then there is no proof required that they ever farmed or applied for a program; they just have to say they wanted to farm, and that they believe they were or would have been discriminated against, and that they complained about it, and have their friends sign their affidavit.

That's what up: 94,000 applications all together. Perhaps a few less, but these are the estimates I am working with: 94,000 applications. John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Organization that has pushed on this and actually was formed for the purpose of bringing forth the Pigford Farms issue, testified before the Judiciary Committee that there are 18,000 black farmers in America, 18,000.

Now, granted there were more a generation earlier. There were more farmers a generation earlier. A lot of my neighbors went broke. I burned and buried a lot of farm sites across western Iowa in those years as the farm crisis went into its downward spiral, and there were people there that carried debt. There were people that were out of debt that took on debt in order to stay in business.

And as the downward spiral came, the value of their land went down, their machinery went down. The commodities prices weren't there for their crops, and bank after bank closed. And, in fact, my bank closed April 26, Friday afternoon, 3 o'clock, 1985. I will never forget that day.

I had a company to run, I had customers, most of whom were also customers of the bank that was closed--two branches shut down--a payroll to meet. I had 2 pennies in my pocket, literally 2 pennies to rub together, just almost a symbol of how hard it was. Rub those two pennies together and hope and wish and work and pray to figure out how I could meet payroll with my employees, keep the business running, find some customers that could pay because I had my customers, all their accounts were frozen like mine was frozen.

We found a way to get through. It was difficult. But I watched that crisis hit, not just the bank closing in my neighborhood, all across the Midwest, especially. I watched it crush people. I watched family farms move off and load their things and move to the city.

So some of those pins that get stuck in the city are pins of people that were on the land that had to move off in the farm crisis here. But my point is this: That thousands of farmers went broke during the farm crisis years of the 1980s. The entire decade of the 1980s--actually starting in 1979 and flowing through, were farm crisis years.

These are the primary years where they alleged discrimination against black farmers. And where it took place, it's hard to quantify because its laid over the top of the disaster of the farm crisis years of the entire decade of the 1980s. Many people went broke. Many people were denied farm program benefits and loan programs. There were many that were not viable, and the USDA concluded that they couldn't work with them because they were going to go under.

They were already upside down. And to put good money after bad was not a good decision, not when things were spiraling downwards.

I saw banks close, new owners come in. I saw them interview the people that would come in with their loan application form, their financial statements. And I saw them go down through the financial statements. I mean I was a part of this, and I engaged with my neighbors that were going through this as I was.

As they would look at the assets and they would say, let's see. You have got this nice new combine here. Well, you are going to sell it. And you have a pretty nice pickup that's 2 years old, we are going to sell it. And by the way all the livestock that's here, you know, it could die or get sick, but it's very liquid. It can go to the sale barn this week. We will sell all of that.

And you won't need that feed so you can auction off all that hay you have got there for the cattle that are in the feedlot, you can sell them. And you don't need the horse, and you don't need your best tractor. We can get you down to a small tractor, and you can hire somebody to come in and custom combine, and you can borrow your neighbor's planter, and we will keep you on some of this land. We will take the mortgage on it. We will take a first and a second mortgage on it, and we will keep you operating for a little while, but you are going to work for the bank.

Now I am not picking on the bank; that's what they had to do to keep some of these people alive and keep them functioning. That's part of the farm program, or that is part of the crisis. The farm program did come in, and it was helpful in 1983. It gave us another boost in 1985. It got us through that decade, and now we are relatively prosperous compared to those years.

But whatever color you were, if you were farming in the 1980s, you were having trouble. And a lot of people went under, there was farm sale after farm sale. I remember the bills hanging up, the sale bills hanging up in the gas stations around, in the sale barn, where there would be farm auctions.

You could go to farm auctions, several of them a weekend every weekend, and we did that for a long time, and it hurt a lot. And I saw tears run down people's cheeks because they were standing on the land that had been homesteaded by their ancestors, and they were losing it. And it was their identity. It's who they were.

So I know, I know from personal experience how painful this is to go through those years. And to completely discount that component of the economy and argue that a lot of African American farmers that went under in the 1980s would still be farming today if it hadn't been for the discrimination in the USDA offices, it denies the starkest facts of the economy altogether. But they can't be untangled; they are tangled together. It's impossible to quantify.

And so the leftists in the country have decided they're just going to pay everybody that applies. That's what Pigford I was. And there was a deadline. It was filed on April 14, 1999. So you get 6 months for everybody to sign up and go out and have all these meetings, do your fish fries, meet in the churches, advertise on the radio, in the newspaper, wherever you can, and hold all these town hall meetings. And they held them--42 of them in Alabama alone, 42 meetings. And people signed up. When the deadline came 6 months after that April 14 date, then they found they had things so ginned up there were a lot of other applicants.

So even though $1.05 billion was paid out under this Pigford discrimination claim, there were Members of the House and the Senate that introduced legislation to open up a second one, Pigford II. And they tried to do it, but they didn't get it done. This Congress wouldn't buy it. We had already seen the level of fraud in Pigford I, and to open it up again and extend the closing deadline for the consent decree so that all of these other applicants could come pouring in, this roughly 70,000, at least 66,000 that had accumulated, wasn't bought by this House and Senate in the same form. It bounced back and forth. It passed in a couple of versions on one side or the other, but this Congress never got together on

that, never got together on the authorization to extend the date.

We did get together on one thing, Mr. Speaker. We got together on the 2008 farm bill to address Pigford in a way that the House and the Senate agreed, and the President signed it. It was brought forward here on the floor, right over there from that microphone, by the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, a late amendment of language that came into the bill, into the farm bill that we worked on for a long time. And it's a hard job to bring a farm bill through this Congress. And I'm sure that the weight of that weighed a little on the chairman and weighed on all of us, more on him than on anybody else. It had to have. But I argued with him at the time, the language in the farm bill authorizes $100 million to close the Pigford issue so that if there were any remaining claims that had not been resolved, they would be put underneath the $100 million amount, and they would all be resolved.

I argued, Mr. Chairman, you are opening up Pigford for an additional $1.3 billion in liabilities. And it's full of fraud. And I sat way into the night in a markup on the farm bill with a representative of the USDA who had lived this and went down through anecdote after anecdote, circumstance after circumstance, and convinced me completely that there's a very, very high level of fraud that was taking place. But yet the structure of this settlement was such that they couldn't look into the fraud because you didn't have to meet the standard of being discriminated against; you just had to say you believe you were discriminated against.

So we had our debate, Chairman Peterson and I, outside the record of this Congress actually. I said it's $1.3 billion; this is a placeholder and a marker that opens up the door for $1.3 billion. He said, no, $100 million puts an end to it. And that's what we're doing. We're cleaning it up, and we're putting an end to Pigford. And I said, I don't think so. We went around on that dialogue which ended with him walking away. I don't know if I blame him for that.

But here is what's in the bill. He says the maximum amount, farm bill 2008, H.R. 2419, the total amount of payments and debt relief pursuant to actions commenced under subsection B shall not exceed $100 million. That's what the chairman said. And here is the intent, intent of Congress as to the remedial nature of the section. It is the intent of Congress that this section be liberally construed so as to effectuate its remedial purpose of giving a full determination on the merits for each Pigford claim previously denied that determination.

In other words, if there are 66 or 70,000 applicants out there that didn't get in before Pigford closed in October of 1999, if those Johnny-come-latelies wanted to pour their applications into this, this Congress said, here is $100 million, that's it, it's going to take care of all the claims and no more; this is the end by law. This is the section that's cited by the current Secretary of Agriculture that he says gave him the authority at the direction of Congress, actually, acting at the direction of Congress to open up and create a Pigford II settlement where he, Secretary Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder sat down with John Boyd, the head of the black farmers organization, and they cooked up Pigford II, not authorized by the House and the Senate and the President as would be required if he's going to act in the fashion that he told me, in fact, not authorized at all, $100 million cap put on this Pigford I to put an end to it. By the way, I disagreed with $100 million. I thought we went too far with the first $1.05 billion.

But in any case, there exists no authorization that came from Congress and no legislation that was passed by the Congress and signed by the President that gave the authority to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Attorney General to sit down with the head of the black farmers organization and arrive at an agreement early last year in February that would tap the taxpayers for an additional $1.15 billion. But that's what they agreed to. They went on their own and had these negotiations.

Now, where would this inspiration have come from? If Congress said it's capped at $100 million, how would Cabinet members, full Cabinet members, come to a conclusion that they needed to go sit down with John Boyd and tap the taxpayers for an additional $1.15 billion? Where would this come from?

Well, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you where I think it may come from, and that would be from the President of the United States who, as a United States Senator, introduced the Pigford II language that opened up the filings for a second round of Pigford claims as the United States Senator, led by Barack Obama, and over on this side led by Artur Davis of Alabama and Bobby Scott of Virginia.

They pushed that. They tried to push it through the Judiciary Committee. It didn't go. They slipped it into the farm bill at $100 million. They got their placeholder. Now I ask you, Mr. Speaker, who was right? Who was right? Was it Steve King or Tom Vilsack or was it Collin Peterson? Because we are here today lamenting what happened on the House floor yesterday, which was a vote to send $1.15 billion additional into this Pigford II settlement that I will tell you even though they have put some provisions in here still result in--still result in a virtually automatic payment to those claimants that will come. That's what will happen, Mr. Speaker.

And so the chairman of the Agriculture Committee that said this is the end of it at $100 million, who would he disagree with? Tom Vilsack or Steve King? I'm sure he remembers the conversation. I'm sure he remembers that I said it's 1.13 billion, and this is just a placeholder that opens it up, this $100 million is a placeholder that opens it up. We disagreed we had that conversation. One of us is going to be right.

Did he know when he brought the language to this floor that $100 million was going to turn out to be a placeholder for $1.25 billion? That's $100 million plus the $1.15 billion. Did he know that? Or was the chairman of the Agriculture Committee apparently was he misinformed by someone else? Did the President of the United States direct his Cabinet members to go negotiate and reach an agreement for an additional payout under Pigford II of $1.15 billion? Where would it come from? Would the Secretary of Agriculture take it upon himself if he could have ended this to open it up again? I don't think so. Would the Attorney General take it upon himself to open this up if it was ended by the farm bill of 2008? I don't think so.

I think the American people, Mr. Speaker, will suspect, as I do, that since the President was the initiator of this Pigford II legislation as a United States Senator, it was the President of the United States more likely to order his Cabinet members to go sit down and negotiate with the president of the black farmers organization and then try to figure out how to get Congress to fund it. Because the deal, the settlement proposal, and it's not a consent decree, a judge hasn't ruled upon it, a settlement proposal was something that was agreed to be contingent upon, conditional to Congress appropriating the funds to pay.

Well, last night Congress did that by a vote of 256-152. Now, if I were completely wrong on this--remember, this is a repudiated Congress. This is the lame duck Congress. This is the Congress that the American people have said enough already, shut it off. Take the shovel out of the President's hand; he's dug a deep enough hole. Stop your spending. We're going to send people to the Congress that will do the battle for fiscal responsibility and stop spending.

Those folks have not arrived yet, those 87 new freshmen Republicans who will be here taking the oath of office on this floor on January 4, 2011. They are not here yet, so we have the old troika ruling. We have the old troika ruling, and still, still we produced 152 ``no'' votes on this Pigford funding of $1.15 billion that came through here yesterday.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that I believe that all 152 who voted ``no'' on that either deeply suspect or are convinced that there was a significant amount of fraud in Pigford I, and that the fraud in Pigford II will be substantially greater than it was in Pigford I because those, at least in theory, who were most discriminated against are the ones most likely to have filed the

application in Pigford I in a timely fashion. Those who got the news late, once the inertia of the recruitment went on across the South, they are the ones who lined up a little later. It is kind of a chain letter effect.

There were 152 who voted ``no.'' It was a bipartisan objection to the funding of Pigford. It wasn't all Republicans this time. By Speaker Pelosi's definition, it would be clearly bipartisan. There were three Democrats who voted ``no.'' Those Democrats, I presume, were making a statement that they believed either that those who had been discriminated against had been compensated or were making a statement against the fraud that they must believe exists. I have not talked to them so I can't take a position as to what they believed and why they voted ``no.''

But it is curious to me that two of the three Democrats who voted ``no'' on Pigford were two that were defeated in the last election. So one can presume that they are votes of conscience that they put up on their way home from this Congress. I thank them for their service to this country. We have one that won his election who is seated from the South who also voted ``no.'' I would like to hear from him. He happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, a man with a brain and a conscience that voted ``no.''

So now it is up to us here in this upcoming Congress to take a look at these records, to go down and compile the spreadsheet and analyze the data and interview the people that were involved in administering this to get a real picture of what was going on. I am very well aware there are good, solid people who are responsible constitutional conservatives who don't want to touch this. I am very well aware of that, Mr. Speaker, but we have an obligation to the American people to shine a light on this. And I intend to move forward to do that within the limitation of the time and the resources and the cooperation I am able to get in the 112th Congress.

There has been a massive amount of fraud defined to me in the interviews I have done with USDA employees. To the extent, as I said, that African American employees of the Farm Service Administration who worked within the offices, presumably if they worked there, they would not allow themselves to be discriminated against. And if they never farmed and never filed an application but received a check anyway, it is pretty clear that there is levels of fraud that need to be exposed.

And so, Mr. Speaker, there is much to be said about Pigford II. It is not a consent decree. There is only an agreement that has been negotiated between Tom Vilsack and Eric Holder and John Boyd. They have negotiated that agreement. They have negotiated the amount. They have succeeded in getting it past the Senate after the Senate reached a point of exhaustion in fighting it. That is my reports from some of the Senators over there. They did pass it through the House after vociferous objections, 256 to 152, but with bipartisan objection; southern Democrats voting ``no,'' not urban but southern Democrats voting ``no.''

It is on its way and we are pretty sure the President will sign it because, after all, it has been his baby since he was in the United States Senate. It is really odd that a man from Chicago would take such an interest in an issue that he can't have personal experience with, not having personal experience that we know of in the rural areas.

And here we are, Mr. Speaker, anticipating the President will sign it. When he does, if and when he does, then I believe they will take it before the same judge that started out the Pigford I opinion with these words, ``40 acres and a mule,'' and laments that he can't fix all of the problems of slavery and segregation in one class action suit. Well, he has got a second one now. It is likely to come to him. I am pretty sure Judge Friedman will approve this. And I am really confident that the Secretary of Agriculture, and if you can get the Attorney General to speak, will say that they put all kinds of safeguards in here, safeguards like lawyers have to sign off. Yeah, well, they had to sign off on the first one, too, and that didn't really resolve this issue. It is just to the best of their knowledge they think it is true. That is not a very strong statement. There is no requirement for evidence. They did put some language in there that allows the administrators, if they think there is fraud, to ask more questions and require more documentation. Okay. But if they are instructed not to think there is fraud, they will not find fraud.

This administration does not think there is fraud or they would be looking for it. It is amazing to me--18,000 black farmers, 94,000 claims. Even if you presume that 100 percent of the black farmers were discriminated against, we still have four and a half claims for every black farmer. How does this work? It should be fraud. It can't be described any other way.

And the percentages of these claims, there is no question that comes out of this administration, out of the White House or the Department of Agriculture or the Attorney General's office. They are not saying we are looking into the fraud. They are saying, if it exists, it is so low it is really not an issue. But we are going to satisfy your concerns by having an IG report come out in 6 months. The money is gone. You won't be able to get it back.

If you want to learn something about how to protect against fraud in Pigford II, let's look at Pigford I. We already have the data. Let's dig into it. So what I think we have to do is dig into both. And we owe it to the American people not to be paying out 40 acres and a mule. You cannot right wrongs from a century and a half ago. But if they were righted, Abraham Lincoln told us how: For every drop of blood that was drawn by the lash be paid by a drop drawn by the sword. That's done. That is behind us. We have an American future. We can't be paying modern-day slavery reparations thinking we compensate what took place in the past. We have the future to worry about. Let's make sure everybody has equal opportunity and let's build for the future.

I see my friend, the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert has arrived. And when Judge Gohmert comes to the floor, I know that there is some real important input that the American people need to know, and so I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, also my friend, I appreciate the subject matter that you brought here to the floor tonight.

I would add to this: not only do we need to continue the tax rates that we have today, but I would make them permanent so there is certainty, so that people can do the investments that Mr. Gohmert talked about and will be able to plan their businesses and create the jobs and plan for the future.

But there is another one that hangs over the head of many families in America today, and that is the estate tax. That one is the most ominous of them all. If we aren't able to reach an agreement on these tax brackets by the end of this lame duck session and if we are just in the condition that we are in today in that there is no certainty and where the $1 trillion or $2 trillion of capital that is sitting on the sidelines doesn't get released and invested into our economy, that's bad. We've already seen a lot of months of it, so another month of it doesn't devastate us completely, although it would be a great Christmas present.

I know people would be sitting around the family shop, figuring out, We can add onto this production line. Let's hire this person here. Let's make this part of our operation go. Let's open up a new business over here.

These things would be going on. That would all happen if we could get these tax brackets made permanent between now and the end of this wounded, crippled lame duck session that we have of this repudiated Congress that has been renounced by the American people.

Another month of it isn't as bad as what happens if we go another month with the estate tax hanging over our heads the way it is, because I will tell you that what will happen is there will be thousands of Americans who are lying on their death beds--some in hospices around the country, some in hospital beds, some of them lying at home--and there will be decisions made by them and their families.

Somebody who is lying there, who has got some years on him and a lot of life behind him, knowing he doesn't have much ahead of him, will say, Don't put me on life support. Don't give me any life-saving treatment. Let me pass away in 2010 because, if that happens, then you'll get the full inheritance of my life's work.

That's what he will say. He'll make that decision.

He'll tell his loved ones, Don't extend my life. Don't give me extra ways to feed me. Don't give me IVs. Let me lie here. Put me in hospice now, and let me slowly die.

That's what will be said over and over again.

There will be those who will go further. There will be those who will decide they want to end their lives so that their children don't have to pay an onerous estate tax that will have, as of midnight on December 31, a $1 million exemption. After that, there will be an up to 55 percent tax on the balance.

I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, how that works in the neighborhood where I live. Let's just say there is somebody there who is 90 years old, and he went out and bought some land early on in life, and he leveraged it and bought another piece of land. He slowly paid for that, and ended up with a couple sections of land paid for. That's 2 square miles. That's 640 acres times two. That's 1,280 acres paid for. That's the nest egg that he worked all his life for. Maybe he worked 70 or more years to put that together. He paid the tax on the income, and retired the principal and paid the interest, and there it sits for his children. Maybe he has got five children there around that death bed.

If he passes away in the first second of 2011--by the way, there will be death certificates that are backdated, too. They'll be back-timed, probably not backdated. They'll be back-timed past midnight so the estate tax won't apply. But let's just say there are two sections of land, five kids. He passes away in the first second of 2011, and the death certificate says so. Here is what happens to those two sections of land:

The $1 million exemption doesn't really touch the value of those two good valuable sections of land, so you can take one section out of there. There's the 55 percent tax to pay the taxman, to pay the death tax. It takes one whole section of land, 1 square mile, to pay the Federal Government. The second component of that is the section of land that is split up five ways because of the five kids.

So what they have is actually two sections of land--one that is essentially debt free because the other one has gone to pay the taxes, and it gets split five ways. Everyone has got 20 percent equity. They can't buy that land back and keep it in tact. It takes a long time to put a unit together, to put the building site together, to get the storage that's there for the grain and the livestock and all the pieces to work. It doesn't just work to go out there and say, Well, here's another piece of land that's the same or you can operate an operation that's half the size with only 20 percent equity. So it wipes out both sections of land. They sell out the whole legacy. A century of work or more goes out the window because we have a death tax that comes. The bell tolls on the death tax at midnight, December 31.

It is cruel, unconscionable and, I think, a sin for this Congress not to address that before that time.

So, Mr. Speaker, being very well aware of the clock and the duties that we all have here, I want to thank my friend from Texas for coming to the

floor and for volunteering that valuable input that we have.

I appreciate your indulgence here this evening and the privilege to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 39 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 2, 2010, at 10 a.m.

I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding.

I come to the floor troubled, considerably troubled by--and in opposition to the rule--by this Pigford settlement proposal that we've heard about just now.

It was brought to my attention sometime after I was elected to Congress. I had a number of Iowa USDA employees that were deployed to Washington, D.C., and other locations to assist in administering the Pigford I settlement. They distributed $1.05 billion to African American farmers, some of whom were discriminated against. All of those that were discriminated against I would agree, I think with all of my colleagues, that they should be compensated to the degree that is practicable by law. However, as I sat down with the individuals that were administering the Pigford I settlement, and one of them came back with a box of file forms and applications sick to his stomach and told me that he had been compelled to engage in a practice that he believed was 75 percent fraudulent at a minimum, I thought that was a high and shocking number and put the information away until it emerged again and again in this Congress. It emerged before the Judiciary Committee in hearings before the committee on Pigford II to open it up again. There, the president of the Black Farmers Organization, John Boyd, testified under oath that there are 18,000 black farmers. As I go back through the USDA records, I can find a peak of perhaps as many as 36,000, but his number of 18,000 sticks in my mind. We are up to 94,000 claims, Madam Speaker, and 18,000 black farmers. And if you presume that everyone was discriminated against--which I reject on its face--we are looking at something here that is a multiplier beyond what this Congress ever intended. And as the gentlelady from North Carolina said, an anticipated couple of thousand applicants turns into now 90,000-plus applicants, of which perhaps two-thirds of them may be successful in their $50,000 stipend.

There was a statute of limitations. That consent decree was closed April 14, 1999, and since that time it has been opened up a second time. The Ag Committee is the other component of this. Myself and Congressman Goodlatte of Virginia are the only two that serve on Judiciary and on Ag. There, in the 2008 farm bill, the chairman of the Ag Committee, Mr. Peterson, put in $100 million to be the end, the settlement of Pigford. That was going to be the end of it for all time. We had an intense conversation on that. I said it will be an additional $1.3 billion; he insisted that $100 million would end it. I have the language here, Madam Speaker, that puts the cap on this at $100 million. Here we are, 2 short years later, with $1.3 billion, and the people that I'm talking to that have administered this at higher levels yet than those that first brought it to my attention tell me that the levels of fraud are higher yet. And it is not just $50,000, it's $50,000 plus 25 percent of that check that goes to the IRS to pay the tax liability, so there's another $12,500. Judge Paul Friedman estimated the debt that would be forgiven would be an average of $100,000 per black farmer and another 25 percent IRS checks. So we're at $187,500, and still this Congress has no access to the records other than

those that have been spirited out of the USDA.

So it isn't just that we should not fund this; there is no deal. There was no Congress directive that sent Eric Holder and Tom Vilsack to sit down with John Boyd of the Black Farmers and make a new deal and come to this Congress and say appropriate $1.5 billion additional dollars to fund the Pigford II. That was their elective. In fact, that was their elective in the face of Congress' direction that it would be capped at $100 million in the 2008 farm bill. There is no deal unless Congress authorizes this today. And if we do so, we are asking Members that haven't had access to the information to ratify an agreement that was put together by Eric Holder and Tom Vilsack at their own volition, not by the direction of Congress.

The next Congress has an obligation to look into these records and check the data and follow through the threads of fraud and be honest with the American taxpayers and make sure that those that have been discriminated against are compensated. But the central point here is this, Madam Speaker: For the altogether $2.3 billion that the taxpayers have accepted this liability, there hasn't been one USDA employee that has been fired or disciplined, not one. And the Secretary of Agriculture tells me he's not willing to relitigate Pigford I, he's not willing to open up the records to allow us to look at it, and he's not willing to allow us to look over his shoulder to assure that Pigford II is less fraudulent than Pigford I.

For all of these reasons, I ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule and ``no'' on the bill.

I thank the gentleman from California for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill. It is, I think, something that even though it's been vetted fairly well, on those that are paying attention it hasn't been vetted very well by this Congress. And, from my standpoint, I am one of the people that's actually read the consent decree from Pigford I. I brought a copy of it to the floor. It starts out with these words, ``40 acres and a mule.''

Now, we know what that started out to be in the aftermath of the Civil War, a promise from the Federal Government that there would be 40 acres for African Americans, newly freed slaves, provided by the Federal Government, by either federally owned land or southern land that had been confiscated by the Union, and there would be a rented mule to go along with that, or a loaned mule.

That has been the promise of slavery reparations. Of course, it didn't come to pass. In a few cases it did, but not many. But in truth we have here the modern-day version of reparations that are going on. Pigford I allowed for those who had a legitimate claim of discrimination to file that claim. Many who didn't have legitimate claims also filed claims.

What I am seeing, information that comes to me, boxes, stacks of data, and people have been deployed to administer the first $1.05 billion, and they say to me they are sick to their stomach, they are heartsick because of all the fraud that they see. And the level, 75 percent, it's a low number. I am hearing numbers into the high nineties, and still we don't see the data. We don't see the applications. We don't see how it matches up with Judge Friedman's opinion here, this decision on the first consent decree, where he says that it's not $50,000, it's $187,500.

Mr. Speaker, this has become a modern-day reparations component, and it's wrong. The $50,000 was essentially automatic to whoever applied. They didn't have to approve discrimination, they just needed a friend that would sign an affidavit that said that they knew at one time that they were or wanted to be a farmer and that they may or may not have spoken to anyone at the USDA, but that they had complained either verbally or in writing with someone who was either an employee of the USDA or perhaps they were a Member of Congress or a couple of other categories.

This issue needs to be examined far more thoroughly. The Shirley Sherrod case comes into this. Now it's curious that Shirley Sherrod is the number one recipient in the largest civil rights class action case in the history of America, Pigford Farms. Shirley Sherrod is the individual who became so well-known in the media a few months ago when the Secretary of Agriculture summarily fired her for a little clip of a speech that she gave before the NAACP.

I don't take issue with the totality of the statement that she made, Mr. Speaker, but it's curious to me that Shirley Sherrod got the notice that she, and whoever her partners might have been, were going to receive $13 million from Pigford Farms, 22nd of July, 2009. The 25th of July, 2009, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack hired her to be the head of USDA Rural Development in the State of Georgia.

What does this mean, Mr. Speaker? Well, I don't know the answer to that yet, but I know this. The tremendous amount of data, 94,000 claims, 18,000 black farmers, 4\1/2\ claimants for every black farmer, it's got to be fraud. I urge a ``no'' vote.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding and for managing this Special Order here tonight and for bringing this issue, Mr. Speaker, before the American people.

This is a critical national security issue. And I'm so grateful that we have individuals here in this Congress, as intended by our Founding Fathers, that focus on a variety of issues that could clearly see and be focused on the intelligence that can bring this before the American people in such a way that they can understand, Mr. Speaker, that you will turn your focus hopefully on this subject matter.

There has been a lot of discussion across the country now and in the news media about the WikiLeaks issue. And I look at this, and I think Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, a person who made his living as a hacker, a person who is proud of being able to crack anybody's security code and get in there and pull that information out and then dump it into the public arena, into the public media sphere. For what purpose? What possible constructive purpose could be achieved by an individual who is a product of Western civilization pouring forth state secrets from Western civilization itself? It has to be for either self- aggrandizement, for that or the combination of undermining Western civilization. An enemy, an enemy of the things that we believe in.

And I don't stand here with the intent to indict the Aussies. I love the Australians. They are a free spirited, strong free market, free will group of people. They had to also take a continent and settle a continent about the size of the United States itself and make a living down there in an environment that's sometimes beautiful and sometimes harsh. They have a spirit of their own. They remind me that in every conflict that the United States has been in they got there first, and some of them they've been in all of them. It's a pretty good thing to say about the relationship between the United States and Australia.

There's not much to say about their citizen--whom I wish today were an American citizen, and at that point I think he might be subject to charges of treason against the United States.

So as I listened to the speakers here, I reached into my dog-eared Constitution and took up this definition, the constitutional definition of treason, and it says--and I know that some have called for charges of treason to be brought against Mr. Assange. I know they apply to an American citizen. But this says, Article III, section 3: Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies--which certainly al Qaeda and the Taliban and the enemies of the terrorists who are lining up against us are our enemies--and giving them aid and comfort, giving aid and comfort to the enemies.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I think it's a subject that we wouldn't have much debate on here in this Congress that Mr. Assange has given aid and comfort to the enemy. He's empowered the enemy. He's put Americans at risk. He's put the allies of Americans at risk. And in this precarious situation around the globe, in this geopolitical-military-economic chess game that goes on constantly on the entire planet, he's taken away some of our advantage and he's given it to our enemies.

And I wish and I hope that there's a way that we can find a way to prosecute a man like that, that we can protect ourselves. And if we fail to do that, or even if we're successful in that and it exposes some other vulnerabilities, I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that this Congress take a look at some new legislation, a new structure of law, that's really not brought about because of the actions of Mr. Assange but brought about because of the actions of our enemies, our terrorist enemies.

And I have come to realize, and I think that there will be a significant number of Members of Congress that have come to realize, that we don't have the tools to fight these enemies; that the idea that we could catch terrorists like, for example, Osama bin Ladin's chauffeur, and we can't find a way to try that chauffeur and put him on trial with legitimate expectations of an effective prosecution and a conviction and a penalty.

We have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sitting down in Guantanamo Bay yet. Two years into the Obama Presidency, when President Obama said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay and try these terrorists in civilian courts, and now we found out what happens when you try these terrorists in civilian courts--a whole bunch of evidence that's essential to the conviction has been left out of the prosecution, and they were not successful in an effective prosecution and conviction of the last terrorist that was tried in civilian court.

So I look at this and I make the charge that I think our military tribunals are a useful way to do this and Guantanamo Bay is the best place on the planet to keep them. But we don't quite have the legislative tools. We don't have the judicial tools.

I'm hopeful that this Congress will consider a proposal that's rooted in this thought; that we will set up a special court like a FISA court, or perhaps even the FISA court, and ask them to immediately adjudicate when we catch somebody that's working against the United States, that's perpetrating terrorism against the United States, and be able to process them immediately through a special court, and have that court be able to rule that this was an attack against Americans or whether it was an attack against America's civilization that was designed to spread terror and fear here rather than a crime that was committed against individual Americans, and be able to rule that that individual then fit within the category of an enemy of the United States, an enemy in this war on terror that we have, and then instantly move them off of the shores of the United States and down to Guantanamo Bay or another jurisdiction that's even further removed from these courts, and under Article III, section 2, strip these Federal courts from the jurisdiction of ruling upon these decisions of terrorists that are attacking America.

If we do that--and it's a pretty sticky constitutional question on how we would deal with American citizens in that category, but it's not when we deal with someone like Julian Assange. An Australian citizen could be put into that category, moved over to a place offshore of the United States outside of the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, the civilian Federal courts in the

United States, and adjudicated under a military tribunal in a fashion that was designed by this Congress and directed by this Congress. That's what I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona. And I reflect upon a trip that I made down to Guantanamo Bay I believe it was a year ago last Easter. And the trip was designed to fill me and a handful of other members on the Judiciary Committee in on the practices and the facilities that they had at Guantanamo Bay. And I think this is something that the American people have not had an opportunity to witness or actually hear about within the news, that there is a facility that's perfectly structured for the job that we have, which is to bring these terrorists to a location and legitimately try them and give some resolution to their circumstances.

And I don't remember the exact number of inmates that they had down there at the time, but it was down to the hard core of the hard core. They had already released those that could be released. And the rest of them were a danger to Americans, a danger to free people everywhere, and a danger if they were released to come back, and as Mr. Lamborn said, to attack Americans again, but also NATO troops and other people that represent the free world.

And as we are looking at that facility, oh, it's a pretty wonderful facility if you want to be in a jail and be a Muslim, for example. And you walk into these cells, first of all the temperature is set at 75 degrees. Seventy-five. My house is a lot warmer than that in Iowa in the summertime. Because 75 degrees, they argued, was their cultural temperature. And I don't know that that's true. I would think 140 degrees is more likely some of their cultural temperature. But in any case it's set at 75.

And you open the door on any of the cells, and they have their own personalized cells, there is an arrow there that points towards Mecca. So they never have to guess which direction that they are praying. Every one of them gets a nice fancy prayer rug that's all embroidered. It takes a lot of hand work. It's a beautiful piece of work. And they get a little skullcap that's also hand-worked and done. And the Korans that they get are carried in a ziplock bag so they are nice and protected and never touched by the hands of an infidel, because that might anger the inmates at Gitmo. And they had their nice television and a little break room that they got together. And here is this flat screen TV. And that went on pretty fine for a while.

Oh, by the way, their meals, they get a choice out of nine selections a day of Islamicly approved meals. And they can pick three squares out of the nine every day that fit within their cultural heritage in their way. It isn't like Americans are serving them ham and beans like they would give me or you or anybody else that was in there. They get to select from this special menu, a special menu for special people that get a special rug and a special skullcap and a special ziplock bag- delivered Koran that is never touched by an infidel.

And they have as many as 20 attacks on Americans a day at Guantanamo Bay. About half of them are physical attacks, where they try to get one of our guards down, usually Navy personnel, and get their handcuffed chains around their throat and try to strangle them, attack them with the metal that's part of their restraints. And the other half are throwing human feces in the face of our troops. What is the punishment for that? If it happened to be a domestic prisoner in a domestic prison, if you continued with that you would find yourself in solitary confinement. And eventually, the punishment would go to the point where you would be locked up in prison for life. Eventually.

But what we do is nothing. There is no penalty. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed attacks the guards every day, several times a day, the worst thing we can do to him is cut his outdoor exercise down to 2 hours a day. Two hours a day outdoors. The rest of the time

you are in 75-degree air conditioning with your own selected meals, three out of the nine that are the choice of the menu there, on your own specialized prayer rug with your own Koran. And there was one inmate that wanted a Bible in Gitmo. He converted to Christianity. But it was verboten to bring a Bible into Guantanamo Bay because it would set the inmates off, the other inmates off who thought that a Bible was an insult and affront to them.

And they were watching their flat screen TV in their little break room, and a lady came on to do a commercial, and she had a short- sleeved shirt on and showed her elbow. Showed her elbow. I don't get really all that worked up over an elbow. But they got all worked up over the elbow and trashed the room, tore up the furniture, broke the flat screen TV, scattered it all. It was like a little riot in their little break room. What's their punishment for that? New furniture, new flat screen TV. We coddle these prisoners. We don't even have a punishment for those that attack our American guards.

And we set up the trial room so that there are microphones, a sound system, places for witnesses to sit, places for family members to observe, a sound-proof glass that's there. And when it gets down to the critical component of the testimony, we have an officer that is assigned with the job to cut off the testimony until such time as the witnesses that don't have access to classified are marched out of the witness chamber, and they pick up the testimony.

This facility is laid out for the purposes of trying people where national security is an issue. And if we had been trying the individual you talked about, Mr. Lamborn, I believe he would have been convicted in Guantanamo Bay. Because the evidence that was necessary to convict him would have been used rather than held back for fear that it becomes a spillage of a national secret that becomes the subject here of the WikiLeaks.

So those are things that go across my mind. We have got to do a lot more. We have got to be a lot smarter about this. What would be very helpful is if we had a Commander in Chief who was making the ask of this Congress rather than us trying to push that chain uphill, having a President that would actually be pulling it in that right direction. I yield back.