Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up the issues that are on my mind and the issues that I hope are on the minds of the American people, the minds of the people who are the elected leaders here in the United States Congress, and hopefully on the minds of those of us who see this American taxpayer dollar as a pretty sacred dollar that should be invested wisely and responsibly.

And there are any number of issues that can be brought up under that particular parameter. But I choose to come to the floor tonight, Madam Speaker, to talk to you about the situation of Pigford Farms.

Pigford Farms is an issue that emerged here in the United States government around about and exactly on, began I'd say in 1983, in 1983 when the United States Department of Agricultural civil rights office was closed. At that period of time, there wasn't an oversight department within the USDA that might have looked over the shoulders of our USDA employees to see if they were actually treating people equally with equal opportunity under the law, as I think everyone in this Congress will agree every American citizen deserves equal opportunity under the law. That's part of the 14th Amendment. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution that includes the 14th Amendment and equal protection under the law and provide for equal opportunity, not necessarily equality of result, but equality of opportunity.

And so I suspect that that focus under the USDA diminished somewhat or at least didn't have a check on it from 1983 on. But with the Pigford Farms issue--and this is the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in the history of America, Pigford Farms.

It looms over the heads of the Members of Congress here to be not what it was just a few years ago, $1.05 billion, not what it was when the Farm Bill passed here on the floor of the House under the direction of the chairman of the Ag Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, at an additional $100 million, which was designed to be the sum total that would ever be required to sweep up any of the remnants of Pigford Farms, this civil rights case, and package it all up and make sure that people were compensated and put it behind us. No, it has reared its ugly head again, Madam Speaker. It's reared its ugly head with an issue called Pigford II.

It wasn't enough to have Pigford I. Pigford I, which emerged because I believe there was discrimination taking place within some of our USDA offices, particularly around the South, where the culture of segregation had prevailed beyond the end of the legal segregation that we had, and was still, I believe, in some of the offices manifested in the form of discrimination between the Farm Service Administration personnel. But that discrimination that then perhaps, and I think likely, and I believe did carry on through some of those years of the eighties, perhaps as far back as the seventies, but this case deals with the eighties, the eighties and the nineties.

So Pigford Farms, the chronology of it goes this way, Madam Speaker. In 1983, the United States Department of Agriculture Civil Rights Office was closed. In 1994, and this would be under Bill Clinton's administration with Dan Glickman as the Secretary of Agriculture, commissioned an accounting firm or an analysis firm to analyze the treatment of minorities and women in the Farm Service agencies throughout the United States.

The study examined the conditions from 1990 until 1995 and looked primarily at crop payments and disaster payment programs in Commodity Credit Corporations, that's CCC, loans. A final report found from 1990 until 1995, minority participation in Farm Service Administration programs was very low, and that minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans.

Now, Madam Speaker, I am always suspicious of the ``their fair share.'' I know that the word ``fair'' comes up in law over and over again. It comes up in many, many pieces of case law, precedent cases out there. If one would read through that case law, you will see the word ``fair'' over and over again. You will hear the word ``fair'' debated here on the House of Representatives over and over again. And whenever I hear this word ``fair,'' didn't receive their fair share, I always cringe, because you know, we are a body that should be dealing with facts and empirical data. And the judgment should be on the facts, not the judgment of the facts.

But the word ``fair'' is always in the mind and the eyes of the person who utters that word ``fair.'' And none of us can agree on what the meaning of the word is of the word ``fair.'' Didn't receive their fair share. Perhaps that's true. I actually believe it is true.

But Marilyn and I have raised three sons. And anybody that's raised two or more kids knows there is no such thing as fair unless it's the State Fair or the World Fair or the County Fair or a fair ball or a foul ball versus fair. But this word ``fair'' that's a judgment call is an amorphous word. It could be anything. It could be within the context of what was fair in 1776 doesn't fit with what was fair in 1865, doesn't fit with what was fair in 1942, and not with what's fair in 2010. It's subjective, not objective, the term ``fair.'' And I would like to get away from using the word ``fair.''

But nonetheless, the data didn't support that African American farmers were engaged in the programs to a similar extent as non-African American farmers, what primarily would be white farmers. So that was the report from 1994. Two years later, actually the end of that year, 1996, December of 1996, the Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ordered a suspension of government foreclosures all the way across the country pending the outcome of an investigation into racial discrimination in the United States Department of Agriculture's agency loan program. And he later announced the appointment of a USDA Civil Rights Task Force.

So under the Reagan administration the USDA Civil Rights Office was closed, 1983. Dan Glickman in 1996 reestablished a similar agency called the USDA Civil Rights Task Force. And in February of '97 that task force recommended 92 changes to address the racial bias that existed, I believe, and to the extent is negotiable or debatable as part of the USDA Civil Rights Action Plan. And while the action plan acknowledged past problems and offered solutions for the future improvements, it did not satisfy those seeking redress of past wrongs and compensation for losses suffered.

So there was a move that was made to try to alleviate the allegations of racial discrimination within the USDA. Dan Glickman stepped forward in 1996 and announced the formation of the Civil Rights Task Force. That press conference in December of 1996, Madam Speaker, was essentially the confession by the Department of Agriculture that they had engaged in racial discrimination with farm programs, crop payments, disaster payments, and loans. And this started then the litigation that was at least anticipated at the time. And this litigation began in 1997.

So in February, February 28 of '97, the Civil Rights Task Force of the USDA recommended 92 changes. And those changes were not implemented. And so in 1997, same year, the litigation against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for discrimination against African American farmers began in August of '97. Two cases. One was brought

by Timothy Pigford, Pigford v. Glickman. The other one was Brewington v. Glickman. And it dealt with the farmers from 1983 until 1997, when they applied for Federal financial help, and again by failing to investigate allegations of discrimination, the allegations of discrimination were not aggressively investigated, and those who applied for financial help often didn't get it.

But Madam Speaker, I remember those years. I remember what they were like for white farmers in my neighborhood. I remember what they were like for me. And I did business with the Farm Service Administration in some of those years that are included in these that I have noted. And I would remind the body, and yourself included, Madam Speaker, that we had a farm crisis throughout the eighties. I remember what that was like.

I can remember a booming economy in 1979, where we had more work than we could do. I was doing custom work on farms, terraces, dams, waterways, cleaning out cattle yards, shaping up, trying to improve upon what Mother Nature gave us. And in 1979, we were already watching the consolidation of farms. We were watching family farms that people were being pushed off their land, they were losing their farms, they were selling their farms. The bid was so high sometimes that they couldn't afford not to sell. Other times they didn't have the equity to be able to stand and refuse an offer. And I lived right on the line between that good land that runs out flat all the way up to Canada versus from where I live it starts running hilly all the way down through Missouri into Arkansas until you get down to the rice country in Louisiana before it flattens out. Right there on that line.

Good land, good producers to the north, they had more money and more equity in their land. It appreciated more because it produced more. And they could afford to buy that land from where I lived south in the hills and pay a pretty good price for it and fix it up. While that was going on was the beginning of the downward spiral of the farm crisis. And there was farm family after farm family.

And I remember the people, I remember the families, I remember their kids, I remember them walking the long lane to get out and get on the bus. And I remember the days that they moved to town or moved off to a city or to another State and the neighbors bought the farm and hired me or others to come in and burn the buildings and bury them and put it back to farmland. Family after family after family.

In 1979, very, very busy. In 1980, we were now down really into the meat of the farm crisis. And that went on, '79, 1980, '81, '82, '83, '84, '85. I, Madam Speaker, lived for 3\1/2\ years with a knot in my gut, not knowing if we were going to be able to make it, not knowing if I was going to be able to feed the kids. And on April 26, on Friday afternoon, at 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Iowa Highway Patrol pulled into my bank.

They locked the doors on the bank and stood a guard in front of that door with a red sticker on the door and it said, Banks closed by order of the FDIC.

There I was. I actually had two pennies in my pocket to rub together, two pennies only, a payroll to meet with my crew. My accounts were frozen and so were the accounts of most of my customers. We had a lot of farmers go out of business throughout the whole decade of the 1980s, Madam Speaker. A lot of them were white farmers. A lot of them didn't have a recourse. A lot of them would have liked to have had a loan from the USDA. A lot of them would have had liked to have had some program benefits. A lot of them would have liked to have made what they would have considered to be a more fair shake from the board of the Farm Service Administration.

There were very tough decisions made throughout that entire decade. I remember how difficult it was to be holding some assets, equipment, a little bit of land, and watching as my customers couldn't pay me. And when they couldn't pay me, it was awfully hard for me to pay the people that had provided credit for me.

The downward spiral of that, as you see land values going down, equipment values going down, the assets even of accounts receivable going down, looking for a way out, you can't get out of a downward spiral. I watched it crush good men. I watched people whose entire identity was wrapped up in the farm that had been homesteaded by their ancestors. Some of them could hold it, but it ruined them. Others couldn't hold it, and they forever carried the guilt of that.

And this farm crisis era of the 1980s is part of the Pigford Farms issue. It's not something that can be divorced from it. And so I am convinced that there were many black farmers that lost their farms during the 1980s when the farm crisis was in a downward spiral. There were many black farmers that believed that they should have had a loan program or a commodity program, a disaster payment that they didn't get, that they believed they were discriminated against by the board of the Farm Service Administration, which, by the way, is elected by all the people that are participating in the farm programs in the county. I don't have any doubt they believe they were discriminated against. In fact, I don't doubt some of them were discriminated against. And probably in one way or another all of them that didn't get the program they asked for were discriminated against in one way or another. I don't believe they were all discriminated against on if basis of their race, although some, I believe, were.

That's the scenario of the farm crisis in the 1980s. That's the scenario by which the issue was raised and the civil rights class action lawsuit was brought forward against the USDA, that 1997 litigation that brought about the Pigford v. Glickman case and the Brewington v. Glickman case that covered those years of 1983 until 1997.

Then in mid-November of 1997 the government agreed to mediation and to explore a settlement in Pigford. In the next month in December the parties agreed to stay the course for 6 months while mediation was pursued and settlement discussions took place. But the USDA had acknowledged past discrimination, and the Justice Department opposed blanket mediation, so they argued that the case had to be investigated separately. I would agree with that from a legal standpoint.

But a year later, a little less, October of 1998, the Court issued a ruling that certified as a class black farmers who filed discrimination complaints against the USDA for the period of time between 1983 and February 21 of 1997. And then, in April of 1999, the Court approved this consent decree.

This is Pigford I, and they set forth a revised settlement agreement of all claims raised by the class members that reviewed the claims. And that began almost immediately and the initial disbursement of checks to qualifying farmers began on November 9, 1999.

Now, this is where some of the rest of the USDA employees came in. To summarize this, Madam Speaker, it works like this. Ronald Reagan's administration shut down their USDA Civil Rights Office and, under Bill Clinton, they started a similar entity back up again. In 1994, 2 years later, Dan Glickman, the Secretary of Agriculture, essentially confessed that the USDA had been discriminating against black farmers. So he appointed a company to do an analysis of it and, over time, it devolved into the courts declaring that the black farmers that had filed the complaints were a class, a class that could be dealt with by the courts to try to get them some compensation.

And so Pigford I was born and it resulted in $1.05 billion being distributed--now there was a couple hundred million of administrative costs that I believe are in addition to that and not part of that accounting--but roughly $1.05 billion was distributed to farmers who, well, let me say this, African Americans who filed claims. And, in order to administer all of these claims, this massive number, over 22,000 claims, it was required of the USDA to expedite this to call from across the country their FSA county directors, Farm Service Administration county directors, to come to Washington D.C. to administer these claims, to plow through these piles of paperwork.

And so they did. And they came from many of the States and certainly they come from Iowa, we are a farm State after all. And as the FSA directors and other personnel arrived here in Washington, D.C. and began to dig down

through this paperwork, working with a lot of it by certifying it as a paperwork application and others face-to-face or over the telephone with the claimants.

Here is what came back to me. One of those individuals, and I have had anecdotes from several, but one of those individuals felt the burden of the corruption and the fraudulent claims that were coming forward in front of him, that he copied a box of applications, and a literal box of applications, which I am really sure that would not have been very constructive to him maintaining his job with the USDA.

But it bothered his conscience so much, and when he came back to Iowa, he wanted to make it a point to make sure that I knew that these applications that he was dealing with were, he believed were a minimum of 75 percent fraudulent, 75 percent fraudulent. Now if you just apply that to the $1.05 billion in claims that were paid out, if he is right in that number, $750 million were wasted paying people that didn't have it coming, 250 or so million dollars perhaps went to those that did have a claim that had it coming.

And these applications are quite interesting to read through them one after another, take the stack and read through them. And you will see that there also were copies of complaints that were filed about fraudulent claims. And the fraudulent claims might be, well, Johnny, yeah, he was raised on a farm but he wouldn't help his daddy. He went off to the city and became a drug addict. And when his daddy needed the help, Johnny wouldn't come and help his daddy. But now his daddy has died and Johnny wants the $50,000 that comes from the USDA under this claim.

Pigford I was set up to do this, to pay out claims to people who met--I believe it's four criteria, and I will see, Madam Speaker, if I can remember them--people that were black, people that farmed or people that wanted to farm, those who believed they were discriminated against by the people within the FSA office, Farm Service Administration office within the counties, and those who also issued a complaint, filed a complaint in one of the criteria that's allowed under Pigford I.

This would mean that if there is an individual that, if you were back, and you wanted to farm, and you wanted to apply for a farm program, and you believed that they would not treat you fairly because of your skin color, and you complained about it to the proper authorities, that's all that's required. You didn't have to be a farmer. There actually wasn't a verification that you would be black either, but let's just presume that's the case.

So if you are an African American, and you didn't have to farm or ever farm or even know what a farm looked like, you just had to want to farm. You didn't have to know where the Farm Service Administration was, you just had to have complained that they weren't going to treat you right and get somebody to sign an affidavit that says that, yep, Joe complained about it to the Farm Service Administration employee at a public meeting somewhere, or a Member of Congress or there are a couple of other criteria there.

And if Joe and Tom can agree to sign each other's affidavit, that's all the proof that's required. It's not proof of discrimination. It's an allegation that you believe you were discriminated against.

What comes out of the USDA? In Pigford I is this, and I read through form after form of these, if you are black and farmed or wanted to farm and you believed you were discriminated against and you were willing to say so on the application and you allege that you complained, even verbally, to an FSA employee, a Member of Congress, a couple other criteria, and if somebody else will attest in an affidavit that you have actually filed that complaint, that's it. There is no check on whether they have been discriminated against. The consent decree doesn't allow for verification of discrimination. It just simply pays out what they consider to be a legitimate allegation of discrimination this way, an allegation of discrimination that meets those four criteria with someone who signed the affidavit, $50,000 essentially automatic, $50,000 and because of the tax liability that comes with it, there's another $12,500, Madam Speaker, that check gets cut to the IRS so that that there's not a tax liability. And if you actually happen to be a farmer and you had engaged in programs with the USDA Farm Service Administration and you say you had farm loans, program loans, a 100 percent debt forgiveness was automatic that went along with the $50,000 payment, and another 25 percent of that, an additional 25 percent of the debt forgiveness was a check that was also written to the IRS so that the tax liability would be gone.

And Judge Paul Friedman, who approved this consent decree, wrote in his opinion that the average settlement would not be $50,000, it would be $187,500 because a $50,000 check for the discrimination, or alleged discrimination, $12,500, or an additional 25 percent to the IRS, plus Judge Friedman concluded in his calculation that the average debt to the USDA was $100,000, that's forgiven along with another $25,000 check for 25 percent of the debt forgiveness to the IRS. So you add those numbers up--50, 1,250, 100,000, $187,000 was supposedly to be the average settlement in Pigford I. This all out of the pockets of the taxpayers, all without a shred of proof, just--well, I guess you could say a shred of proof because the signature on the affidavit from Joe's buddy Tom is the proof, that affidavit, and, yes, the application is filled out by the staff of a lawyer.

Well, this door was opened up in a huge yawning way. And the lawyers went to work to begin to promote this across the South, black churches, town hall meetings, fish fries, they promoted it as your 40 acres and a mule. That seems a little bit appalling, and it sounds perhaps like it's a stretch, Madam Speaker, but in reading Judge Paul Friedman's decision, it starts out with these words, and I quote, the very first words in Judge Paul Friedman's decision, and I quote, ``40 acres and a mule.'' Forty acres and a mule.

And he goes on to lament that all of the wrongs of slavery and segregation cannot be corrected in the largest civil rights class action suit and settlement in the history of America. But he sets about to try. And that's how he comes with the $50,000 plus the tax component of it and the $100,000 average debt waiver plus the $25,000 in IRS tax liability.

He also addresses the issue of some of the groups in the black farmers wanted to have an exemption from the inheritance tax, the estate tax, because they believed that the money that would come from Pigford would be a large enough sum that they wouldn't want to pay estate tax on that when they died and passed it along to the next generation. Judge Friedman, I guess that would be one part of the good judgment, concluded that that was a bridge too far. It was too much to ask for. And so, Pigford I was supposedly settled and resolved.

And before the House Judiciary Committee there was a new bill introduced for Pigford II by Bobby Scott of Virginia and others, and this would be the companion, although it may not be exactly verbatim, but essentially at least the de facto companion to the bill that was introduced by then United States Senator Barack Obama.

Now figure this out, Madam Speaker. We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he is going to run for President. And what does he do? He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim. Pigford I should have been settled. That's what the courts decided to do. Why would there be an action of a court? Why would there be a consent decree that essentially was a handshake signed off on by Dan Glickman and, well, true it was Dan Glickman and the black farmers organization, the Clinton administration, why would they sign off on all of that if it didn't end the Pigford issue? Yes, it was designed to end the Pigford claim. It was designed to package it up and put it behind us and move on.

But it didn't work that way because Barack Obama introduced--there was a statute of limitations by the way. And the statute of limitations from the opening up of Pigford I until it closed, the consent decree was approved in April 14 of 1999, and they had 6 months to file all of their claims, which would have settled that in October, I've got October 12 of 1999, and there were over 22,000 that claimed they had been discriminated against and that they had

complained about it, and they got in line for the $50,000, plus the debt forgiveness, plus the tax liability being paid up front along with the rest, to over 22,000 almost 22,500 claims. And there must have been some paperwork glitches along the way, because over 14,000 of those were paid out, and that's the $1.05 billion, Madam Speaker.

To pass this statute of limitations, the effort on the part of Barack Obama and Bobby Scott from Virginia here in this House whom I serve with, and they introduced legislation to open up Pigford again, to disregard the statute of limitations and allow for a new sign-up period because they had accumulated some 74,000, maybe only 72, but 74,000 new names of black farmers who believed they were discriminated against who were shut out of that process on Columbus Day in 1999.

So we had hearings. They had a hearing on the bill in the House Judiciary Committee. And the hearing went along about like this, John Boyd, the president of the black farmers organization, which was formed to move forward and collect on Pigford, testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee that there are 18,000 black farmers.

Now, if you are listening, Madam Speaker, you will have already added up that there are 94,000 claims, if you are listening, Madam Speaker, 94,000 claims. That would be 22,000 plus 72,000, 94,000 claims. John Boyd, the head of this, who has driven a tractor around Washington, D.C. and filed his claims and made this a high priority public issue, testified there were 18,000 black farmers. So how is it even if one would concede the point--and I do not for an instant, Madam Speaker, even when we concede the point that every black farmer was discriminated against, that would be 18,000 claims, not 94,000 claims. One could go back through the records and try to find the time we had the highest population of black farmers in modern record history, and we were able to go back into the 1970s and through some convoluted rationale put together some numbers that might justify twice that many, as high as 36,000. But John Boyd's under oath testimony was 18,000 black farmers, 94,000 claims.

How does that work? When I asked him the question under oath, he said, we have brothers, we have family who maybe they never saw the farm, maybe they moved off to the city, but they have a share. They have been discriminated against, too. Well, it seems to me to be a great big stretch, Madam Speaker, that we could have 18,000 black farmers and 94,000 claims.

And nobody that is advocating for the funding for Pigford can get around this, they can't get their brain around this concept that how would it be that 100 percent of the black farmers were discriminated against?

The data that I have seen that shows the percentage of the populations in each of the counties where there were Pigford claims, the percentage of African Americans in those counties, the percentage of claims is directly proportional to the black population in those counties. Now, Madam Speaker, think about that. If the percentage of claims reflected the discrimination, then wouldn't it be that there would be a variance in that relationship between the black population and the black farmers, for one thing? You are not always going to have an equal between the black population and the black farmers. That is not going to be the same county to county. Some counties there is a higher percentage of farmers to black population, and some there would be less, but also, an equal distribution of claims for discrimination. Madam Speaker, I can't seem to reconcile this idea that if you look at the data, the data would show that the discrimination was equal county by county by county in nearly every county all the way across the land in proportion to the black population. How could that possibly be? And I will say it can't possibly be because I know something about the culture within the FSA offices, Farm Service Administration offices. I dealt with them on a regular basis for nearly 30 years. Here is what I know:

Each office, a county office, has its own culture. The culture of that office is sometimes shaped by the career employees that work behind the counter. A lot of times they are farmers' wives. They know nearly every farmer in the county. They know their land. They know what kind of crops they raise. They know their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, and they know how to take care of them and how to process them. And the director, the county director, is hired by the county board. The county board is elected by the people who participate in the farm programs in the county. So it is very much a reflection of the county.

Now, it could well be, and I wouldn't take issue with a statement that there likely were counties that discriminated against black farmers as a matter of practice. I actually think that happened. But I don't believe that it happened in equal proportion in every county where there were black farmers, which is what the data, what the data would indicate.

I believe that there could have been counties that discriminated against every black farmer in that county. And we know there are counties that had all black staff. It is hard to believe that they would have discriminated against every black farmer. And I am convinced there were counties that had county directors and staff people behind the counter where the culture there would not tolerate discrimination in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I believe, of all of these hundreds of counties that were involved, probably there is a full spectrum of culture within each of those counties. But there is no way I can accept the idea that they all discriminated equally county to county across the board. There is no way I can accept that because the cultures of these counties changed.

But I will and I can get my mind around the idea that if you get enough lawyers that understand that there is a nice contingency fee for doing a little bit of work, that they can go out and promote the idea of every African American that they can convince that will fill out the forms that may have some form of a complaint or willing to file one without actually having a complaint, that they could gin this thing up, and we have the data that supports the idea that they did.

So what we have is Pigford II, a Pigford II set up, Madam Speaker, at least by the words of our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, by the 2008 farm bill. So when he told me that I had voted for legislation that directed him to sit down with Eric Holder and John Boyd and negotiate a settlement for opening up Pigford a second time in a settlement, it was a pretty shocking thing for me to hear. I wasn't aware that I had been complicit in facilitating what I consider to be a high percentage of billions of dollars worth of fraud here in the United States.

So I went back and I read the bill. I remember the discussion we had on the way in here with the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, when they slipped in at the last minute a hundred million dollar provision in the 2008 farm bill that was designed, it was designed to fund Pigford II. Now, remember, Pigford I was done. It was packaged up. It had a limitation equivalent to a statute of limitation, a closing date, which was October 12, 1999. There were those who said that they missed their chance to sign up. They thought there was 70,000-some out there who would do that. Bobby Scott and others introduced legislation in the House; it didn't go anywhere. Barack Obama, down this hallway, introduced legislation in the United States Senate; it didn't go anywhere. Congress never acted on a willful means to open up Pigford II. It didn't happen. Congress didn't act. Congress didn't appropriate. Congress didn't authorize. Congress accepted the consent decree that closed the filing October 12 of 1999. Even though Congress didn't act, not the House, not the Senate, it still was not enough to say no to some of the people who wanted to see this happen.

The chairman of the House Ag Committee, Collin Peterson, said $100 million will close up Pigford. We need to have that provision in the farm bill. I argued that was a placeholder for $1.3 billion. He argued back that I was completely wrong; $100 million would settle the account and be done with it. Now, $100 million is not loose change, Madam Speaker. It is a lot of money, but it is a whole lot less than $1.3 billion, which I alleged would be the cost of him providing this placeholder in

the 2008 farm bill. We sharply disagreed on that.

And now I will read from the 2008 farm bill, Madam Speaker, what went into that bill, and this is the language that the Secretary of Agriculture says authorizes him to sit down with Eric Holder, the Attorney General, John Boyd, the head of the black farmers, and open up Pigford II for another $1.15 billion.

The limitation under Pigford--and this is the 2008 farm bill, H.R. 2419 for those who are paying attention, limitation--in general and subject to paragraph 2, all payments of debt relief shall be made exclusively from funds made available under this subsection. This subsection right here, Madam Speaker, item number 2, maximum amount. The total amount of payments and debt relief pursuant to actions commenced under section B shall not exceed $100 million.

That is consistent with what the chairman of the Ag Committee told me: $100 million will cap the United States Government's liability to black farmers for discrimination by adding an additional $100 million to the previous $1.15 billion that had already been distributed, to clean up anything left out there, and here is the language that says so. This is intent language. It says it is the intent of Congress as to remedial nature of 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 of each Pigford claim previously denied that determination.

That means if anybody was denied a determination, even by a statute of limitation that closed this on October 12, 1999, that this $100 million was to be the sum total that would be used to settle this issue.

The Secretary of Agriculture says this language gives him license to sit down with Eric Holder and John Boyd and put the American people in debt, because this is debt for another $1.15 billion, without having any proof of discrimination.

Madam Speaker, I read this language and I point this out because that is why this chart is here. Subject paragraph 2: All payment or debt relief shall be made exclusively from funds made available under subsection (i). Maximum amount, $100 million. That is what was in the farm bill of 2008. That is what was represented to me by the chairman of the Ag Committee, by Chairman Peterson from Minnesota, who argued with me vociferously that I was wrong, that it wouldn't be $1.3 billion; it would be $100 million.

Now, Madam Speaker, I point out that we are looking tomorrow or the next day at $1.15 billion coming at us down the pipe through the Rules Committee, no amendments allowed, although I have got one up there in a request, but it is not going to be allowed. They have already told me, You're wasting paper and staff time. $100 million plus $1.15 billion is $1.25 billion.

My number was $1.3 billion, a lot closer than this $100 million here--a placeholder that opened the door. We have bureaucrats, Cabinet members, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Attorney General of the United States that take it upon themselves to read license in this language to put the American people in further debt to a tune of $1.15 billion and open this door up so that people that allege they believe they were discriminated against and allege that they filed a claim and have some friend that will sign an affidavit, will get a $50,000 check, and the IRS gets the tax liability of $12,500 on top of that. And by the way, if they have any USDA FSA debt, that is all forgiven, and the taxes are paid on it, and they are unhappy because they don't get a State tax waiver on these particular assets. This is what's happening.

We've got to stand up at some point and say we're not going to pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress. That war has been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood-- it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees especially--and there are no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one is filing that claim. They're just filing claims because they think they can get away with it and because they believe they understand, probably appropriately, that not a lot of Members of Congress want to stand and fight that battle. Well, it's a matter of justice and equity. It's a matter of needing to look into this and of needing to bring the facts out.

Madam Speaker, I want to make sure that the Members of this Congress know what they will be voting on tomorrow. I will be voting ``no.'' I will be voting ``no'' because there is no justice in this decision. This is something of which there is no court decision that enables it. There is no legal authorization that provides for it. There is no directive from Congress that directs the Secretary of Agriculture or the Attorney General to enter into any kind of an agreement. There is no court agreement. The court hasn't approved this. They sat around a table, wrote up a document and apparently shook hands. I don't even know if they shook hands.

This document said that if Congress authorized or appropriated the money by March 31 of 2010, then they would have an agreement that would bind the black farmers and, if that day went by, then they wouldn't be bound. That's what has happened. If government can sit down and decide to pay reparations with money borrowed from the Chinese, this government is still in free fall. We've got to fix it, and we've got to arrest it.

One of the people who is here to arrest the free fall in the United States Congress is my good friend, the gentlelady from Minnesota, who can withstand anything they throw at her, Michele Bachmann, to whom I would yield as much time as she may consume.

Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentlelady from Minnesota for coming to the floor to add to this discussion, I happened to have clicked on YouTube on the Internet, I did a little search today because I wanted to see what I could find on Timothy Pigford, who is the lead plaintiff in Pigford Farms v. the USDA. It is a video of Timothy Pigford sitting there telling his story, but then he goes on to say that he's hopeful that, first, that they all get paid; second, that it lays the foundation so that the Hispanics, the Native Americans and the women farmers all get paid, too.

So when I listen to that I think, what is the motive for this? Do you really believe that there isn't any place in America where people who are listed in his list of minorities get a fair shake? Not one place, not one county, not one FSA director, not one staff that sits behind the counter and says this is the right thing to do, we're going to treat everybody as if they're equal in our eyes just like we're all equal under the eyes of God? Doesn't that happen in one single county in America somewhere? They would deny it, Madam Speaker. They would deny that Americans can be nondiscriminating and understand this equal opportunity and equal justice under the law concept. And to have this kind of pressing that comes on from Timothy Pigford and a number of the other personalities involved here, this system--and there are a good number of African American farmers that filed their complaints, they complain that it has distorted their reputation. They may have a legitimate claim that wasn't settled adequately, and because this has been a full court press at all on, pushed by lawyers in bow ties from the Northeast and sold in the South and marketed as your 40 acres and a mule, this has damaged the legitimate black farmers.

I can't think of a more honorable profession than raising food out of this soil. I can't think of a more honorable profession than sometimes bending over and getting dirty and being out in the weather--in all kinds of weather, the summer and winter, rain and storm, out there having your roots go into the soil. Nothing makes you more rooted to America than being rooted in the soil. And I applaud every farmer, black or white or Native American or women or Hispanics, whatever they might be. It's a hard way to make a living, but there is a certain honor and glory to it that can't be replicated anyplace else. It builds character and it builds honor, and they are being besmirched by this broader effort here.

We need to say ``no'' tomorrow to the Pigford Farms funding that's coming, ``no'' because it wasn't authorized by the United States Congress. There wasn't even a head fake--to use something that might be the President's language--from Congress that said Secretary of Agriculture and the Attorney General, why don't you see if you can sit down with the head of the black farmers who formed the organization for the purposes of pressing the taxpayers for money--I don't think in the beginning he really thought we were going to borrow it all from the Chinese, but there is no directive on the part of Congress. Congress said, even though I disagreed with it, that $100 million would cap this, it puts an end to it, and

anybody that didn't have their case resolved in Pigford I would be resolved here under the 2008 farm bill. But Tom Vilsack took license and sat down with Eric Holder, and they're poised tomorrow to stick the taxpayers for another $1.15 billion, Madam Speaker. And it's time the American people said enough. This election was about debt and deficit and jobs and the economy, and we have to have the will to say ``no'' and draw a bright line. And there isn't guilt on the part of this country that should cause us--it can't be assuaged anyway by borrowing money and paying out people that don't have it coming. We want to make sure we make those people whole who were discriminated against.

I want to look into this deeply. I want to follow the money. I want to track and sort the applications, put them all on a big spreadsheet and see what the data indicates. And I think we will find that there is a massive amount of fraud. And we may lose this vote tomorrow, Madam Speaker, we may lose it. And if we lose this vote tomorrow, it still calls upon us to shed sunlight on this issue so the American people know what happened so that we don't do it again, so that we don't queue this up to go down the list of the other minorities--the Hispanics, the women, the Native Americans, and so on.

So I come to speak of the Pigford Farms issue, which I am completely convinced has far more fraud in it than it has legitimate claims, and that the American people deserve equal justice under the law, and if they have a legitimate claim it should be able to withstand the scrutiny.

I stand in opposition to the funding of Pigford II and the people that perpetrated it, Madam Speaker.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 8 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, November 30, 2010, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I have long appreciated the honor to serve the people of western Iowa here in the United States Congress. Each one of us carries this duty with us in a heavy way and also sometimes in a jubilant way depending on the cycles of the day and the cycles of the elections.

I sat here on the floor tonight, and I listened to the presentation of the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton). He talked about the situation on the border between Texas and Mexico, Arizona and Mexico, and perhaps also New Mexico versus Mexico, California, and Mexico. There are a whole lot of data points that he rolled out here. And I believe that there is a misunderstanding on the part of the American people of the magnitude of the border problem that we have.

I make a number of trips down to that border. I think it's my obligation to do that. I have served on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee now for 8 years. And if all goes well, I will be able to serve on the committee for another cycle. In that period of time, you pick up a significant amount of knowledge about the circumstances that have to do with immigration. And the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) talked about how illegal Mexican drug smuggler gangs are controlling vast areas of the border, some might argue a majority of the border or perhaps even all of the border, with the exception of some ports of entry, and controlling vast parts of the United States itself.

I have been down to visit Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument. It is a national park right on the border. And a large percentage of Oregon Pipe Cactus has been set aside, and Americans have been locked out and kept out because the illegal border-crossers and the drug smugglers command some of that park. A large share of it, mile after mile of it, is under control of the Mexican drug smugglers and people smugglers.

And we think that a sovereign nation should have no border incursion. If we have a border incursion, and if it's someone who is lined up next to someone else lined up next to someone else and they are carrying weapons and in uniforms, it is called an invasion. Whether they are wearing uniforms and carrying weapons or whether they are coming across in orderly ranks or whether they are coming across at a rate of perhaps as many as 11,000 a night--and that's some data that came before the House Immigration Subcommittee under sworn testimony--you take the annual illegal border crossings and you divide it by 365, and some of that data under oath calculates out to be 11,000 illegal border crossings in a 24-hour period. A lot of that takes place at night. Think of that: 11,000 a night.

And so I ask the question, what was the size of Santa Anna's army? About half that. That, Mr. Speaker, is the magnitude of the illegal border crossings that we are seeing.

And the price that we have to pay in the form of social services, law enforcement, education, and health services is in the billions of dollars in costs to the American taxpayer. And the price and loss because of the result of crimes that could otherwise have been prevented is awesome beyond our comprehension.

I do have some numbers on that. I'm hopeful that I will be able to produce a fresh report very soon that would better illustrate the numbers of Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of those who came into the United States illegally.

That is a real measure to American society. Every life is precious, every life is sacred, and every one that we can save should be saved. And you do so with an orderly society and the rule of law. You don't do so by allowing for vast areas of the 2,000-mile southern border to become lawless.

I recall approaching a port of entry, and it was in Sasabe, Arizona. As I approached the port of entry and introduced myself to the agents that were there, and leaving aside much of that narrative, I was informed that, yes, there's a legal crossing at Sasabe at that port of entry in a fairly remote location in Arizona. But on other side of the legal port of entry are the illegal crossing areas that are controlled by the drug-smuggling gangs, the cartels. And that means that there's lawlessness on both sides of the border. If there's an entity that controls an illegal border crossing then that means that our side of that border is not under control. Immediately, if they decide who crosses and who doesn't, they're also deciding to allow illegals to come into the United States and illegal contraband to come into the United States.

And I was in fact there on location when there was an illegal drug smuggler that was picked up. He had a white pickup with a false bed in the box. Nice piece of body work. You had to have a practiced eye to see it. But a false floor underneath there that was 7, perhaps 8 inches, and underneath that false floor it was packed full of marijuana. Some would call it bales. They were wrapped up in packages about the size of a cement package, although it's not as heavy, some placed over 200 pounds, some placed 250 pounds of marijuana, underneath the false bed in that pickup. And we took the jaws of life and cut it open and I personally unloaded over 200 pounds of marijuana out from underneath the false bed in that pickup.

Now, the circumstances at that time--and I suspect this individual was prosecuted, partly because I was there--but he appeared to be an MS-13 gang member. He had a 13 tattooed on his arm right here. Full of tattoos. Had all of the look that you would have of an MS-13 drug- smuggling gang member. And the practice down there has been--unwritten, but in practice--that if someone is caught with less than 250 pounds of marijuana, that they're not prosecuted by the Federal Government. And when the loads got higher and more frequent, then the number went up to 500 pounds as the threshold for prosecution.

Now, where I come from, if you have any illegal drugs in your possession, generally you're going to be prosecuted. There are law enforcement officers that may not, but it's not a practice. We think that the law is the law. Well, if the law is not enforced on the southern border for those that come across the border illegally with illegal drugs in their possession to the tune of hundreds of pounds and in fact thousands of pounds, then what do we have left of the law enforcement fabric on our southern border whatsoever? And how can this be a practice, let alone a policy?

I saw it with my own eyes on that day and handled with my own hands. And as I talked to Border Patrol officers and the other law enforcement officers along the border, they confirmed that in some sectors that's the practice. They set the threshold because they didn't have enough prosecutors, they didn't have enough judges, and they didn't have enough prison beds to prosecute all the drug smugglers that they're picking up across the border, let alone 11,000 a night on average, a lot of them some might say just illegal aliens, just people coming into the United States committing the crime of unlawful entry into the United States.

But among them are drug smugglers. And among the drug smugglers are violent criminals of other stripes. Part of that goes with the package. But to think that they could come into the United States illegally with a load of 235 pounds of marijuana and weigh it up and put it underneath the bed of the pickup and think, Well, fine, I'm not going to go to prison for this. If they catch me, they will just impound the pickup, which likely is stolen anyway, and impound the marijuana, which I saw warehouses full. And I say ``warehouses.'' More than the size of garages,

not the size of something you would see down at Boeing, to put it correct. So, vast amounts. More than a semi load of marijuana that had been confiscated altogether in one particular warehousing location. There are others.

But to think that we're not prosecuting with the full vigor of the law with someone who's coming through with a load of marijuana that is 200, 300, 499 pounds of marijuana. That's the America that we have on the southern border. And the people that don't live there and go like I do down to visit and get informed just accept the idea that their America is the same America in, let's say, South Dakota or northern Iowa as it happens to be on the southern border. And it's not true. It is a war zone there.

We have seen the numbers of the casualties and the drug wars in Mexico mount. And I remember sitting in Mexico City with some of the members of the cabinet and some of the members of the Mexican Congress who would tell me kind of off on the side that they had 2,000 federal officers, agents, troops that were killed in the drug wars trying to bring order and trying to bring the drug cartels underneath the enforcement of law, to break them up. This would be 3 to 4 years ago. They would say, we have lost 2,000 Federal officers. Now what numbers do we hear? Twenty-eight thousand. Twenty-eight thousand, mostly civilian, but not all civilian casualties, in the drug wars in Mexico. Twenty-eight thousand. Can you imagine the carnage? That's the size of one of the larger cities in my State, the number of like 28,000.

So here we are with Border Patrol officers, sending the National Guard down there. Thankfully, there are some Guard troops that are showing up. It does help. Every pair of boots on the ground helps and every bit of equipment we can put down there helps, and every bit of barrier that we build on the border helps. And I do want to build a fence, a wall and a fence. And I don't suggest that we build 2,000 miles right away next week, finish it by the end of next year. We could do that. We're a great Nation. We could do that without breaking a sweat if we had the will.

But I do suggest that we build a fence, a wall and a fence where they are crossing it, where they have a path beat down, and just keep extending the fence, the wall and the fence, until such time as they stop going around the end. If it takes 2,000 miles of fence, wall and fence, then so be it. If we can do it with a hundred miles or 200 miles, so be that.

But let's have enforcement of our border. Let's take our Nation back. Let's take our national parks and our national monuments back like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Put that back in the hands of the American people.

The America that I envision is the America that I grew up in that said you can walk anywhere in America, pick up a newspaper and read it in English, and you don't have to carry a gun. You can't do that everywhere in America today. The law enforcement is not such--the rule of law is not so established that you can go anywhere in America in that way and safely think that you can travel. You can't go to Organ Pipe Cactus down along the border, you can't take the jet ski on the lake in Texas. The Mexicans are controlling too much of that. And the retribution/restitution is almost nonexistent.

And so I would add also that there's another factor that I didn't hear the gentleman from Indiana mention and that's the factor called the spotters' locations on top of the mountains, primarily in Arizona. And as I traveled down there, I began to learn about these spotters' location from some of our law enforcement officers. And that would include the Shadow Wolves down at the Tihono O'odham Reservation. Shadow Wolves are one of the unique aspects of our border enforcement. They are the Native Americans that serve together and train down there and enforce the law on the reservation and on that area that spans the border. Actually, Tihono O'odham is on both sides, in Mexico to some degree. Most of it is in the United States.

And as I reviewed the border with them, they began to tell me, There's a spotter up on that mountain. He's watching us now. And I would look up there and of course I couldn't see him. I didn't know where to look, and he was too far away and I didn't have the glasses. And then we'd travel on down another few miles and they'd say, There's a spotter on that mountaintop and he's watching us. And as I began to put this together and traveled along the border and went to the Cabeza Prieta and some of the other locations along the border and talked to our officers, they began to tell me, Well, yes, we know where a lot of these locations are. I had a map there. Well, why don't you just put an X where you know where they are. So he'd put an X here, X there. I had him fill that in.

Along the way, we came up with a map that showed the location of at least 100 mountaintops that are controlled by Mexican drug smugglers who sit up on top of the mountain. They will take the stones that are up there and stack them up like sandbags around a gun emplacement. Well, it is a gun emplacement. It's a high-quality optics observatory location where they spot the travel of our law enforcement officers, primarily Border Patrol, all along the highways. If you go down in any area from Phoenix, going south towards the Mexican border, especially where you see an intersection where there is a highway going north and south and another one east and west, look up on one of those corners, and you will see a small mountain there in a perfect location to be able to watch the traffic coming from all four directions. You can presume that that mountaintop is manned--it's a lookout mountaintop. It's a spotter mountaintop, and they're using that so they can tell the people who are moving their illegal loads across from Mexico into the United States when our law enforcement is coming up, when they're approaching. It will cause them to divert, to go the other way, to perhaps take a side road--and there aren't many, but it will give them that sense of warning.

Now, for those who might think that I'm catching this secondhand, Mr. Speaker, and for those who might think that this is anecdotal, I can tell you that it's not anecdotal. It's real. I went down and I climbed to the tops of a number of these mountains. I sat in those locations and I observed the traffic. In those locations, with the stones stacked like sandbags on top of one of the smaller mountains, I found a broken piece of some fairly high-quality binoculars, and you could see clothes that had been left there. You can see from those locations that they've been spotting and tipping off as to the law enforcement that's moving along. It's an essential component for them. If they're going to smuggle drugs and if they don't know where law enforcement is, they can't just drive blindly up into Arizona with a truckload of marijuana. They have to know when the coast is clear. Well, these are the ``coast is clear'' spotter locations. They're on top of the mountains in Arizona. I climbed to several of them, observed it from there, took pictures up there, and saw the pieces of litter that were laying around. You can see the patterns and the habits, and you can get a pretty good idea of what their diet is and what they're doing up there.

Then we got in a Blackhawk and flew to the top of other locations-- spotter lookout mountains--and we settled down close to that. We brought in law enforcement officers from the ground. With the headphones on and listening to the scanner, you can hear the scrambler of the frequency that they're using when they communicate with each other. It's high-quality optics and high-quality communications equipment with scramblers and descramblers. You could hear, flying from mountaintop to mountaintop, the intensity of the chatter go up and up and up in the earphones when we were tuned in to the frequency that they were using. It's that chipmunk language that has been scrambled into something that's completely unintelligible even though it was coming in, and, you know, it was Spanish that was scrambled, and it got descrambled at the other end.

What I could hear was the intensity of that chatter going up and up and up. About a minute from the time we arrived at the next lookout mountaintop, the spotter mountaintop, that frequency and that transmission would immediately stop and be hushed. We

would get to the mountaintop in about a minute, and the location that had been manned just moments before, just minutes before, was empty. It was empty every time because they came down off the mountain and went out into the desert and hid. So, when they get out into the desert and get away from that location and hide, they don't have to get very far away, a half a mile or so, and you can't identify them as being the people who were sitting on top of the mountain. Plus, we don't have a law against sitting on top of a mountain in Arizona, so it's hard to prosecute. It's hard to bring them to justice, but they exist.

These are paramilitary locations. These are strategic locations. These are people who are armed with high-quality optics and with their high-quality communications devices, and they're set up to smuggle drugs into the United States. So far, we have not been very successful in snapping those spotters off of those mountaintops and taking that tool away from the drug smugglers. That's another piece that, I think, Mr. Burton is well aware of, and I add to the dialogue that he delivered here.

What do we see instead?

Instead of the administration using the resources that are at its disposal to go down and enforce the law in places like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California, it's using resources to sue the State of Arizona. I've read through that complaint, and it's a bit astonishing to me to think that the Department of Justice could contrive such an argument, and even though it didn't mirror the ACLU's lawsuit and MALDEF's lawsuit and--let me see--the American Muslim Society's lawsuit, I thought it would. Instead, they wrote up a whole new legal theory. This is the Holder Justice Department.

Eric Holder essentially admitted that the President had ordered him to sue Arizona over their immigration law, and 5 minutes later, under oath, he admitted that he had not read the bill. So here we have the Attorney General bringing a lawsuit against the State of Arizona-- determined to give the lawsuit--who came before the Judiciary Committee. Under oath, he testified that he hadn't read the bill. He conceded under oath that the President had ordered him to sue Arizona.

It was clear from listening to the President that the President hadn't read Arizona's law, S.B. 1070. So it's clear, as was concluded under oath and not denied, obviously, by the Attorney General of the United States, that the President ordered Eric Holder to sue Arizona. The President hadn't read the bill. Eric Holder hadn't read the bill, and they were determined to go forward anyway, so we made the commitment. I think that was actually announced by the Secretary of State when she was in South America--perhaps in Ecuador, if I remember right, maybe in Colombia.

It's interesting to read the complaint and think, What did they have to sue about? You know, it's like throwing a tantrum, and then somebody asks, What are you mad about? Well, let me see. I'll have to come up with something. I'm sure I'm mad about something. What could it be? Well, let me think. I guess I can't be mad about this whole list--that is obvious--but I'll make up a new reason to be mad. This is a new reason to sue, and here is what it is:

They argued in their complaint, the Department of Justice's complaint in their file against Arizona, that Congress had entrusted the various agencies in the executive branch of government with establishing and maintaining a ``careful balance,'' a careful balance between the various immigration laws that this country has. A careful balance. Huh.

Well, Congress did no such thing. There is no record of Congress passing legislation and saying, Keep a careful balance, Mr. President, between the various immigration laws so that the Department of Justice thinks this is all right and so that the Department of Homeland Security thinks this is all right, as well as the State Department. Surely, don't enforce an immigration law that might cause the diplomatic arm of the State Department any heartburn with President Calderon.

That's their argument, that they may not enforce obvious immigration laws because it might upset our neighbors in one direction or another. This is an astonishing legal position to argue, that they have been entrusted with establishing a ``careful balance,'' then maintaining that careful balance and, therefore, because Arizona is compelled to defend themselves, that somehow that careful balance has been upset by Arizona helping to enforce the laws that have been passed by the United States of America here in this Congress, on this floor, where we gave no direction--no direction--to the executive branch to have the discretion to enforce some laws and not others. There is no discussion. There is no history. There is no Congressional Record in here, let alone in the statutes, themselves, that declares a ``careful balance'' standard. That standard never existed. It was created by the imaginations of the lawyers in the Department of Justice, and now we've got to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fix a problem created and motivated by a political decision to sue Arizona, a decision which came directly out of the White House to order, exactly, Eric Holder to file that lawsuit.

That, Mr. Speaker, is what I think of what's going on here with the immigration situation, and it's just a bit of a sequel to the gentleman from Indiana's statements on immigration, Mr. Burton. I want to make sure that I support that initiative that he took here tonight.

From my standpoint, we've got to stop the bleeding at the border. We've got to reestablish the rule of law. We've got to raise the expectation that the law will be enforced in all of its aspects. We need to do a careful inventory of all of the resources that we're deploying, especially on the southern border, and make sure, when a Border Patrol officer puts his life on the line and pulls over a stray truck that has got more than a ton of marijuana in it, that that Border Patrol officer never has to get on the phone and plead with a county prosecutor to pick up the open-and-shut case and prosecute it. If not, we don't have the Federal prosecutors enough to prosecute and incarcerate someone who is smuggling a ton or so of marijuana into the United States of America.

We must take a look at the deployment of our resources. If our border patrol officers are an adequate number, that means we also have to have an adequate number of prosecutors, judges, and prison beds so that we can enforce the law so that there's an expectation that this Nation has as one of its essential pillars of American exceptionalism the rule of law, and we must stand for it. We cannot and I will not stand for its erosion any longer, Mr. Speaker.

But I came here tonight to talk about a number of other things as well, aside from the immigration issue. It was Mr. Burton that got me wound up as I listened to him talk. So I want to go back, and without a very smooth segue, I would like to just take us back, Mr. Speaker, to the election results of a couple of weeks ago and the message that was sent by the American people and reflect a little bit about my experience here and what I've seen happen politically and that works out this way.

As I came here, I came here in the majority and we had the votes to pass legislation that was reasonable that the American people could accept, and we did so. As I engaged in the debate here and I watched as the level of intensity of that debate diminished from our side and the level of rebuttal increased from over on this side of the aisle, on the Democrat side of the aisle, I don't know that I realized that at the time--I could feel it here internally but I don't know that I realized it clearly enough at the time but there was a shift going on in the minds of the American people. I thought we were doing the right thing for the most part in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, but we weren't articulating this to the American people in a way that was as useful and accurate as it should have been.

The best example of that, and I say this example because of my great respect for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States and put their lives on the line on a regular basis, that selfless and noble commitment. What I saw happening in the State of Iowa in 2003 was when we had Democrat Presidential candidates coming into Iowa on a regular basis, moving through the State stopping over and over again.

And as I listened to this dialogue and I remember the date, it was October 5, 2003, and I'm watching the news and listening to the debate of the Presidential candidates, and I opened up The Des Moines Register newspaper. Inside page 3, headline at the top of the page, Candidate Howard Dean Repeatedly calls President Bush a Liar. And I was appalled. I thought, how can anyone call the President of the United States a liar? How can this be in this article? What must the President have said?

So I read that article, October 5, 2003, and looking for the statement that would be identified that would make our Commander in Chief a liar, and I read the article and I missed it apparently and I went back and read it a second time for the language that would be in this article that would confirm the truth of the headline that our President, our Commander in Chief, was a liar.

It wasn't there, Mr. Speaker. There wasn't an allegation in the article about what the President had said. It was just a story about Howard Dean calling George Bush a liar, repeatedly calling George Bush a liar. Well, it turned out it was about 16 words in the State of the Union address that had taken place just a few months, 6 months or so before that when the President of the United States said, We recently learned from the British that the Iraqis were seeking uranium in the continent of Africa. That's the 16 words, roughly speaking, in general delivery here that was the objection that was delivered by Howard Dean.

Well, it turns out the statement was unequivocally true, and I actually have the evidence of that in the brief case that I carry with me wherever I go. But it wasn't so much the point of that because I remember when Charlton Heston ran commercials during the Presidential elections of 1996, when he looked into the camera and he said, Mr. President--and he was speaking of President Clinton--Mr. President, when what you say is wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's called a mistake. But when what you say is wrong and you know that it is wrong, that's a lie.

Well, I think that's an accurate definition of the difference between a lie and a mistake. I don't think President Bush made a mistake. What he said in that State of the Union address was spot on accurate, absolutely provable. They disagreed with it because of one Ambassador Joe Wilson, who--I will give him a pass tonight, Mr. Speaker, because the clock is ticking.

However, I turned to my wife, appalled that a Presidential candidate could declare our Commander in Chief to be a liar, and I said, Marilyn, I'm going to Iraq. So a few days later by the 17th of October, 15th to the 17th, I was in Iraq, and I took a look at what was going on there. I traveled through there, did a lot of stops, met with a lot of our officers that were there and enlisted men and women and came back with a different story on what was going on in that country.

But the assault on President Bush and the undermining of his position and our men and women under arms, when I heard people on this side of the aisle say, well, I support the troops but not their mission, Mr. Speaker, that cannot be allowed to stand, to concede a point such as that. My point is, if you support the troops, you support their mission. You cannot ask them to put their lives on the line for Americans if you don't believe in their mission, too. We can't ask them to go on that kind of a mission.

So what we saw happen was the assault, the verbal assault on the operations in a time of war in Iraq, being constantly pounded by the Presidential candidates and by many of the people over on this other side of the aisle in an effort to erode public opinion for the war in Iraq because doing so, in my estimation--and I understand that their motives may well have been pure--in my estimation in their desire to win the Presidency and their desire to win back the majority, their zeal to recharacterize our war in Iraq undermined public support for a mission that's turned out to be, on the balance of it, a pretty good ending considering what we were in the middle of during that period of time.

My point is the President of the United States and the executive branch of government did not bring out a full-throated defense nor did they articulate a reason for being in Iraq in an adequate way. That left the door open so that the criticism that came against the war in Iraq nearly cost what's now considered by many to be a victory in Iraq. Public opinion's got to hold together. It should hold together on facts, and Republicans need to stand together and stand up for truth in principle when we're right. We cannot allow a debate to go the other way just because we think we have the votes. We must stand and win the debate and hold the votes together. That, Mr. Speaker, is an essential principle.

As we go forward and we see these election results, we also need to understand that there will be a time coming into the 112th Congress, gaveled in, sworn in January 5 of 2011, that we'll sit here and we'll think we have the votes, so we just have to wait Democrats out while they have their say.

I want Democrats to have their say. I agree with the incoming Speaker of the House, Mr. Boehner, that we need to have sunlight on this place and run this place with the kind of function that allows for--he says open rules. I'd shorten it up a little bit and say a lot more open rules. I don't know that we can do all open rules but more open rules so there's a legitimate debate here. And if Democrats have an idea, bring that amendment, let's debate that amendment, we'll vote them up or down. If Republicans have an idea, also bring your amendment. We'll debate it up or down.

Think of how this process is supposed to work. You get busy and you go to work in the subcommittee and you hold hearings and you gather facts and the staff does the research work, crunches it in a way so that the under oath testimony and the information that's submitted is meaningful and that it can be cataloged and rationalized in a way that we can move forward with a good piece of policy. Once that hearing's need is satisfied, then you can go to a subcommittee and mark the bill up, and there of course you have to accept amendments from each side. Whatever the product is of the subcommittee needs to go to the full committee, and when it goes to the full committee, there needs to be a full committee markup. And there we need to allow for an open and legitimate debate because the process is taking an idea, present it to the hearing. If it can sustain itself in open, public dialogue, then it can actually become the bill that moves through the process, subjected to amendments that are designed to perfect the legislation, on through the full committee and to the floor for the same kind of process.

That's what's envisioned by our Founding Fathers. It was never envisioned that there would be a Speaker of the House that would run this Congress, the House of Representatives, out of her office with her staff and disallow amendments, disallow debate, disallow an opportunity to even vote with a level of clarity so the American people can see what's going on.

So their level of disgust rose up, and 58 Democrats were voted out of office, and there were a number of open seats that increased that number substantially from there.

So I think the message should have been clear. It doesn't seem to be clear. It is clear to me. The American people are filled up with a process that does not reach out to draw the wisdom from the American people through this republican form of government, which is guaranteed to us in the Constitution of the United States. They're filled up. They've had it with the nationalization, the takeover of the banks; AIG, the insurance company; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all the liabilities that go with that. They are fed up with the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler. Now it looks like, though, the White House is going to concede and sell some General Motors shares off into the marketplace. They will take a little loss, maybe even a big loss. I think that's a good step, and I encourage a lot more of it.

In fact, I'm hopeful that by the time the 112th Congress gavels out roughly 2 years from now that the Federal Government will have divested itself of all of those private sector entities that have been taken over. And I am hopeful that the first act of the 113th Congress, a little more than 2 years from now, will be to finally pass the final version

of the repeal of ObamaCare so that that can then go to the desk of the next President of the United States for his signature to finally repeal ObamaCare.

As we sit here in this Congress and we're watching the importance of jobs, the American people said they've had it up to here with debt and deficit. It's about jobs and the economy, and it's about freedom and liberty and being able to order our own lives instead of being ordered within our lives by a nanny state.

And ObamaCare is the flagship of socialism that has been delivered to us over the objections of the American people by the tens of thousands who poured into this city multiple times to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. Tens of thousands of people, for the first time that I know of in history, put a ring around this Capitol Building. They held hands and said, Keep your hands off of my health care. It wasn't just one set of people with long arms holding hands, ringing the entire Capitol. They were six or eight deep all the way around the Capitol and clustered in the corners by the thousands who just didn't bother to get in the line. They said, Keep your hands off of our health care; and Speaker Pelosi marched through the middle of all of that with her oversized gavel to come do what she believed needed to be done for the American people who couldn't apparently think for themselves and said, We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.

Well, ObamaCare that passed could not have passed here in the House even with the strong Democrat majority if it were not for legislative maneuvering in an unparalleled way, including a promise that there would be a reconciliation bill that would circumvent the filibuster in the Senate that would be passed over there and come over here to amend the ObamaCare bill that had yet to be passed.

So if you are going to do that, why can't you amend the bill and make it say what you want it to say, and send it back to the Senate? The reason for that is, Mr. Speaker, the Senate wouldn't pass the bill either because they elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts. They were so appalled at socialized medicine coming to America that the people in the Bay State sent Scott Brown to the Senate to put the brakes on ObamaCare. He put the message out pretty strong and pretty loud, and the people of Massachusetts clearly did.

But the Senate could not have passed the legislation that passed in the House on that day, or any day since. The House could not have passed it either if it weren't for the promise that reconciliation would come from the Senate. And even then, it couldn't pass the House unless there was a fig leaf that was brought up which was by the President to give the pro-life group of Democrats--the Stupak Dozen, it's called--their fig leaf protection, as if an executive order could amend a statute of the United States of America.

So, Mr. Speaker, here is the situation: we have the 2001 and the 2003 tax brackets that need to be extended or we will be seeing a huge tax increase, perhaps the largest tax increase of our lifetimes poised to hit us at midnight December 31 if this lame-duck Congress doesn't act. The negotiations on that are taking place. I do believe that there is more leverage in the Senate on this issue than in the House. If we don't get that resolved, Mr. Speaker, then our job is going to be--the first job, H.R. 1, bill number one--to make those tax brackets permanent so that no one faces anything but a temporary tax increase. And I mean that I would love to see this done in the lame-duck. If it's not done, it must be the first order of business in the new Congress in January. The estate tax, it is a painful thing to think about that kicking in in a diabolical way.

The second thing, let's just presume we get it negotiated, and this Congress in lame duck resolves the issue of the '01 and '03 tax brackets, so we are not faced with a tax increase.

Then, Mr. Speaker, if that's resolved, my sense of this is--and I think I have a vast amount of support, including 173 signatures on a discharge petition--that we must then use as the first order of business the repeal of ObamaCare. H.R. 1, repeal of ObamaCare. The new Congress will pass that in a heartbeat, to pull ObamaCare out by the roots, lock, stock, and barrel, so there is not one vestige of it left behind.

And then we start down the path of shutting off the funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the constitutional conservatives that rose up all across this land and rallied together to fight ObamaCare. That's the biggest reason why you have this vast change. The biggest change in majorities here in 72 years has taken place because ObamaCare was the crown jewel of the agenda that was driven that the American people have rejected. So I'm encouraging that we move forward with that.

I have no appetite for tying together repeal and replace. Those are two separate subjects. We didn't have ObamaCare as a law of the land until late March of this year. We got along fine without it. Having it is worse than having nothing, but we need to win the debate on repeal of ObamaCare, win that debate, and then move down the line with the pieces that we would pass that would improve the health care for the American people that hold together, that hold together the doctor- patient relationship and the free market component and let people have their choices. That's the only way America works.

We are not a dependent Nation. We are not a Nation that can submit to a nanny state or an onerous Federal regulation. We are a proud, free, independent people, totally unsuitable for the European style of socialized democracy. We have freedom. We have vigor. We have rights that come from good God. We are a unique race of people. And the vigor of America's history attests to that, and the destiny of America's future attests to that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

I thank the gentleman from Texas for his presentation here and setting the tone right for Thanksgiving as we are departing this city and going back to spend time with our families again. We are a grateful Nation, and I know that we will have a lot to be thankful for in the King household, as does America have a lot to be thankful for.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, being recognized, and all of our service here to the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives and be one of the first speakers here on the floor in the aftermath of the election that took place a little over a week ago.

I have a number of things that I hope to discuss this evening; however, I would like to start this presentation this evening, Mr. Speaker, with a recognition of valor of an Iowan who tomorrow will be receiving the Medal of Honor that will be hung around his neck and presented to him by our Commander in Chief, President Obama, at a ceremony at the White House.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor an American hero, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. He is of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team from Hiawatha, Iowa. He will be presented with the Medal on November 16, tomorrow, at the White House by the President for distinguishing himself by acts of gallantry at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.

In October 2007, while moving along a wooded area with an eight-man squad in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, the squad was ambushed on three sides by at least a dozen Taliban fighters.

Even though Staff Sergeant Giunta received several gunshot wounds, he continued the fight, running straight into the path of gunfire to rescue one wounded soldier and saving his life as he drug him back to safety, then running again directly into the path of oncoming gunfire to overtake and kill two fighters while rescuing his brother in arms, Sergeant Josh Brennan. Even though Sergeant Brennan would later die in surgery, the family still had the comfort of knowing that his brothers were with him and had rescued him from being taken captive by the enemy.

That is a small segment of that engagement that day in October of 2007, and, Mr. Speaker, it is our privilege to express our great gratitude and to honor Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta.

To commemorate this gallantry and this Medal of Honor, which will be the first Medal of Honor that will be awarded to a surviving American servicemember for either of the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, probably the greatest supporter and cheerleader and respecter of our military, our veterans, our combat veterans, and especially our combat wounded, works in this Capitol every day reaching out to them--Albert Caswell. Albert has written a number of poems that he has presented to the wounded and to the families. He has provided a tremendous amount of comfort for those who have suffered so much for our liberty and for our freedom.

This poem is something that he sat up last night and penned. Mr. Speaker, I read this into the record out of great respect for his contribution, and also great respect for the Medal of Honor winner that tomorrow will receive that medal from the President, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. This poem is called ``At Honor's Height.'' It reads, this:

At . . .

All, At Honor's Height!

All in the darkness of war . . . this fight!

All in those most sacred moments, that which ignite!

When, who lives or dies . . . and but lives to see another

sunrise . . .

So Sal, so all depended upon you . . .

While, against all odds . . . as you stood so tall, almost

like a God!

As into the face of death you ran . . .

As did all your brothers in arms, so too, who on this day

began . . .

Such Brilliance, Such Light, So True This Sight . . . your

hue!

All At Honor's Height, as were you!

Hooah . . . Airborne! With but your badge of courage worn!

As all in that moment, as when your faith so chose to crest!

All in your actions, and deeds . . . to answer freedom's

quest!

As your heart so sailed, up to new heights . . . so now!

All in your most selfless light!

Its Highest Point, At Honor's Height!

Turning The Darkness, Into The Light!

To win that day! To win that night!

All At Honor's Height!

For there can be no greater gift!

Nor then there, no more blessed thing as this!

Then, but the will to give up one's life!

All for, your Brothers in Arms . . . this most sacred

sacrifice!

While, all in that moment of truth . . . by bringing your

light . . .

Which, so brings such tears . . . even to the Angels' eyes,

this night!

Ah yes you, Sal, so stand this day, all at Honor's Height!

All in what you so gave . . . so brilliant and bright!

For what child shall so be born, all from your gift in

future's worn?

Who might so save the world, or in harm's way so too . . .

climb to such heights!

For on this day, you and your Brother In Arms have so shown

us all the way . . .

To Honor's Height!

Mr. Speaker, I don't have the words to embellish the actions of Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, nor do I have the words to embellish the poem that has been so brilliantly written by Albert Caswell, ``At Honor's Height,'' to commemorate the gallantry, the bravery, the nobility of this Iowan who tomorrow will be so profoundly honored at the ceremony in the White House and the presentation of the Medal of Honor.

I have had the privilege to get to know one of our top Medal of Honor recipients in the Nation. In fact, the most decorated living American is Colonel Bud Day, also from Iowa. We happen to have three living recipients of the Medal of Honor that I claim as Iowans, and Colonel Day heads up that list as the dean of them. He was the top officer in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He is a World War II, Korean, and Vietnam veteran. He also has been an honorable and noble leader here in America that has stepped forward and worn the Medal of Honor with courage and dignity, and he has been a noble American in every day of his civilian life as well as his invested life.

He has made the advice for Medal of Honor winners that: You wear that medal every day of your life; that when you receive the medal, everyone looks at you and wherever you go they know that you have received the Medal of Honor, so all of your behavior is observed more closely than it might be if you were perhaps significantly more anonymous. So you can cast disgrace on America or you can cast honor on America.

The Medal of Honor recipients have by and large, and in all cases that I know of, cast honor on America by their deeds, by their bravery, by their nobility, and by their actions as they proceed through the course of perhaps post-military service and being Americans in a most honorable fashion of seeking to make America a better place to live in.

We look forward to the future that Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta has and the message that he will deliver to this country as he proudly wears the Medal of Honor. I ask that this Congress stop and pause and reflect upon the sacrifice that he has made.

I think also that there are circumstances where we have lost Americans who have conducted themselves in as noble a fashion who are unrecognized. I pray that Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta does grow old here in America and leaves the legacy of his nobility and bravery wherever he goes as an inspiration to the young, as an inspiration to all of us. He is certainly an inspiration to me, and he should be an inspiration to us here in this Congress.

As someone says, I don't really want to have that debate. It is a brutal debate. We have never had such a thing here in this Congress. There are brutal battles in war. Lives are lost, blood is spilled, hearts are broken, destinies are changed. The destiny of America has turned for the better when the destinies of individuals are occasionally sacrificed in that noble cause. And Staff Sergeant Giunta was willing to make that sacrifice. He stepped into the gunfire over and over again. Tomorrow he steps up to receive the Medal of Honor from the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States.

I salute Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, and I ask that especially the young people in America look up to him as an example. There are many others. Tomorrow we honor Staff Sergeant Giunta.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence on this subject matter, and I appreciate the privilege to deliver this summary of Staff Sergeant Giunta's sacrifice here on the floor.

I ask that as we go forward into the 112th Congress, we keep in mind, we get into our parochial battles here, and I mean that, of course, figuratively, because they really aren't battles by comparison. And we wear the Republican jerseys, the people on the other side wear the Democrat jerseys, and we go at each other day after day here trying to gain some kind of advantage.

This Congress, Mr. Speaker, especially over the last 2 years, but I think over the last four, and those on this side of the aisle would say, no, further back than that, has gotten away from the principle of doing the right thing for the American people and instead gotten involved in the one-upmanship that takes place when you have partisan conflict here.

I do recall coming to this Congress when I was elected and sworn in here on this floor in 2003. And I recall those 4 years, and subsequent to that, if I had a policy issue, I had constituents that had a problem that needed to be dealt with, if I had something that made a good argument for where we could take America, I took that argument to the committee or I took it to the committee chairs. I took it to members of the committee. I testified before committees to move that policy forward, Mr. Speaker, and there was an ear for a policy discussion. That ear was there on the part of the committee chairs, the members of the committee, to a certain degree with the leadership, that would seek to accommodate those concerns that I would bring forward.

I am convinced that most of the Members were in the same condition I was in. There was an ear there and the system was set up so that the wisdom of the American people could be synthesized and poured into each of the 435 Members of Congress. We would sort those issues out and raise the priorities of them, and as we brought those issues here and the priorities came to the top, this Congress acted upon those priorities. At least the process and the system was wired to do that.

Sometime in 2007, perhaps, that began to devolve. In 2007, in the beginning of that session, we did have a legitimate appropriations process where we had an open rule and a Member could write an amendment to an appropriations bill, bring it down here to the floor and introduce that amendment, and if it met the rules of the Parliamentarian, it would be deemed in order and one could force a debate and a recorded vote on an issue that had to do with an appropriations bill.

Now, that had gone on for 200 years in this Congress. And it went on in the early part of 2007, which I remember is the last time we had a legitimate appropriations process with open rules. And along about 2008, that began to get shut down. And by 2009 and 2010, it was shut down and Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, were shut out of the process.

Our constituents can't understand about electing someone to the United

States Congress, it a powerful seat, 1/435th of the spending and the initiation of the taxation and the deliberative proceedings that take place as directed by our Constitution, electing someone to establish that franchise, and having that franchise cut out from underneath them because the Speaker of the House had deemed that there wouldn't be any amendments on appropriations bills, there wouldn't be any open rules on appropriations results.

I am pretty sensitive to this, Mr. Speaker, because in 2007, my staff analyzed this--I didn't pay attention to it--they analyzed it and concluded that I had introduced and successfully passed more amendments than anybody else in Congress in that appropriations process of 2007. And I look back on that time and I think, where have we gone?

We have gone from having an active open rule that was consistent with the first two centuries of American process here in this Congress to a kind of system that not only is there a closed rule on appropriations bills, it has been shut off now for 2 years, but no appropriations bills. No budget. Just a continuing resolution, a CR, that is written in the Speaker's office by the Speaker's staff. And if someone can knock on the door and slip a piece of paper underneath the door, and if somebody inside there decides they want to incorporate it, you might actually be able to have your voice heard.

But the voice of the American people has been shut out, and that intransigence is one of the biggest problems we have had in this Congress.

If we don't have enough faith in the positions that we take here that we can allow open public debate, and if we can't allow amendments to be offered, debated, and voted upon so that we can perfect legislation in subcommittee, in committee, and here on the floor, then the system is dysfunctional, and it shuts out the wisdom of the American people and it puts it into a monopoly of one office, the Speaker's office, the Speaker's staff, and to the extent that any of the committees can weigh in.

That is the piece that I am hopeful will change. That is the pledges that I am hearing, that we are going to see more open rules, the appropriations process comes down with open rules, and that any Member of Congress, whether they be Democrats or Republicans, can offer essentially an unlimited number of amendments in an appropriations process so that the American people can see it is a legitimate process, we can debate those issues, we can vote them up or down, and we can move on.

Mr. Speaker, I am looking forward to this reversion back to the fresh air we had, some might say a new breath of fresh air. I would say it is reverting back to the fresh air we had. And it is high time. And all of the issues that have been debated up and down in the media, a lot of them didn't see the light of day here in this Congress, and I am hopeful they will see the light of day.

The first issue that I am hopeful that is debated here in this upcoming 112th Congress with this incoming new freshman class, these 80-some arriving new freshmen, actually it might be in the nineties by the time we add those on the other side of the aisle too, I believe as God's gift to America, just in time. I think the cavalry has arrived.

I think we have been fighting the battle of the Alamo, and we actually held out before we got overrun. And this massive freshman class full of conviction and vigor and dreams and passion, the lifeblood of the vigor of America, is in this city now, going through orientation, getting prepared, putting their offices together, hiring their staff, finding out where everything is, positioning themselves for committee assignments, et cetera, so that they can hit the ground running here on the 4th of January, when they will swear in to the new 112th Congress in large numbers, 80-some Republican freshmen, who will bring their vigor and their legislative valor here to this floor. And they expect that their voice is going to be heard, and we need to make sure that their voice is heard and that the process is open.

It might mean long days, long nights, long debates. It might mean we get a little tired of coming back over here to vote time and time and time again. But the American people expect us to do our work, we should want to do our work, and in fact if we shrink from that, the work product that we have won't be the work product of the reflection of the wisdom of the American people, Mr. Speaker; it will be the work product then of folks that are sitting behind closed doors instead of out here in front of the C-SPAN cameras where we belong. We should be doing our business here.

But that first piece of business that I am hopeful comes out in the 112th Congress, and think it will have the full-throated support of that freshman class that is prepared to grab ahold of the levers here in the 112th Congress, I am hopeful, and I will seek to establish that H.R. 1, the first bill coming out of the chute, is the repeal of ObamaCare.

If there is any piece of legislation that symbolizes this dramatic change that has taken place here in the seats here in Congress, these 290-plus freshmen that will be seated here, most all of them Republicans, if there is any one single piece of policy that embodies that reason for the transformation, the passing of the gavel, it is the repeal of ObamaCare as the clearest example of what people have risen up against.

I remember 4 years ago--it will be 4 years in January--right behind me, Mr. Speaker, as the gavel was passed from Republican to Democrat; from John Boehner to Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives. I remember that day. It was a historic day, the first female Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in its history. Nearly 4 years have gone by. Some would say a lot of water under the Golden Gate Bridge since that period of time, Mr. Speaker. And we have seen unpopular policy after unpopular policy come unfolded. For example, the theory that spending billions of dollars extending unemployment benefits is the best bang for the taxpayer's buck when it comes to stimulating the economy. I was not prepared to rebut such an argument. I never conceived of such a thing. But that's one of the principles that the American people know better, and they went to the polls and said, Uh-huh. We're really uneasy with that path it is going down.

The idea of pushing ObamaCare down the throats of the American people when it was clear that they had rejected it; when you think of tens of thousands of people who poured into this city I will say a year and a week ago on November 5, a little more than that now, but it was November 5, 2009. Tens of thousands of people were stacked up out here on the West Lawn of the Capitol building, swarmed around the Capitol. They swarmed down through the hallways of the office buildings. They came out here to say, Keep your hands off of our health care. We don't want ObamaCare.

This Nation has never seen the kind of resistance that we saw come out of the streets of America in opposition to a policy this was proposed. We have never seen that. And it says in the Constitution freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the freedom to petition the government--peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. And they did, all within the confines of the Constitution, a lot of them with the Constitution in their pocket. It was in their head and in their hearts and tears running down their cheeks because they saw what was being done to America. They saw what was being done to the Constitution. And they saw what was being done to their personal liberty and their personal freedom. And they came here to this city and to most of the big cities--in fact, most of the towns and even county seat towns in Iowa, people filled up the meetings to resist the coming of ObamaCare.

That was the summer buildup in 2009 to the vote that took place here in the House on November 7, 2009. And then we saw a vote on Christmas Eve in the Senate when Harry Reid decided that he had enough leverage on people that if they wanted to go home for Christmas vacation and see their families, they had to catch a plane on Christmas Eve. If they'd have held out until 9 o'clock that night instead of 9 o'clock that morning, a lot of those Senators would have spent Christmas here in Washington, D.C., which is what they deserved. They deserve coal in their stocking for what they did that day.

But they passed through by using the leverage that they had and with no margins to spare a health care bill that didn't match the one here in the House. But they moved the ball down the field a little ways on Christmas Eve. So that would be December 24.

And now some of us said, What do we do? How do we stop this ObamaCare juggernaut that had passed the House on November 7, 2009, and a different version of it squeaked--and squeaked through the House, too, but squeaked through the Senate on Christmas Eve morning--How do we stop it now? And I asked one of the senior Senators over on that side, What do we do now? And his answer was, Pray. And pray for a victory in the special election in Massachusetts.

I don't think very many people believed that Scott Brown was going to be the next Senator from Massachusetts on Christmas Eve of 2009. And I went up to Massachusetts to participate, to the extent that I could contribute, and for 3 days up there I saw valiant constitutional conservative Americans making phone calls, one after another, lined up to make phone calls for the benefit of Scott Brown's candidacy. Constitutional conservatives, tea party activists, regular Baystaters from Massachusetts. And I met couples that say, Well, I'm a teachers' union member here and my husband is a member of the electrical workers--the United Electrical Workers--and we've always walked the streets and campaigned for Democrats. Not anymore. We're campaigning for Scott Brown. We've had it. We've had enough. We don't like that health care proposal that's coming, and we want to send somebody there that's going to stop it. And Scott Brown pledged that he would vote against ObamaCare and he would block it.

And we know what happened. January 19 of this year Scott Brown was elected to the United States Senate to fill--he always said it is the people of Massachusetts' seat. It is their seat, like any seat in the Senate or the House belongs to the people who elect their Representatives to that seat. He was humble enough in that regard. And he was precisely right. We see it as the seat that was occupied by Senator Teddy Kennedy for all of those years. A dramatic shift in the political dynamics of America took place on that day on January 19, and a lot of people thought, myself cautiously included, that that was the end of ObamaCare because they would not have the votes to move ObamaCare by a conference version back through the Senate because it had to sustain itself in a cloture vote.

And so we saw President Obama's mojo be diminished dramatically. We elected a Republican Governor in Virginia when they said it couldn't be done. And even more improbably, elected Chris Christie, a Republican Governor in New Jersey when it seemed completely improbable that could happen. And even though he had a lead in the polls going into the last few days, a lot of us thought that something would happen to trip up Chris Christie. Well, he's the Governor. Bob McDonnell is the Governor in Virginia. That message came out loud and clear and strong. And when Scott Brown was elected, it was clear that President Obama's mojo had been diminished dramatically and the prospects of America having to live under ObamaCare had also been diminished and perhaps crushed.

But the President came before the Republican conference and had a conversation that lasted about 90 minutes. And subsequent to that he called the meeting on February 25 at Blair House, which was a big square-table discussion about health care, challenging that Republicans didn't want to talk, we just wanted to disagree with the proposals that he had. Well, Republicans wanted to talk and it was the President that didn't seem to want them to talk. So I had a staff person that sat there and put it all into a spreadsheet and timed everybody's speeches. It was limited time. There was a strict rule involved. But of course the President said, I'm the President. I don't have to follow the rules that we have written for the meeting that he's hosting. He interrupted Republicans 72 times that day on February 25 at Blair House. That was the level of respect that he had for our input. But he gained some traction, and they found a way to leverage ObamaCare back at us.

From February 25 until March 23, they marched through this Congress. And finally on that day when ObamaCare passed here in the House, it didn't have the majority support of the House in order to be passed. To get enough votes to pass it they had to meet a couple of conditions. One is the President had to make the pledge or the oath that he would sign an executive order that was designed to amend the legislation that was about to pass Congress. Can you think of such a thing? Standing up to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, so help me God, and thinking that as a President you can write an executive order that eclipses or amends legislation that's passed by the Congress and tell them you're going to do it in advance? That's what the President did.

Now if that's not appalling enough, on top of that, another group of House Members here--Democrats--wouldn't vote for ObamaCare here on the House even with the fig leaf executive order that the President promised for the gentleman from Michigan. But they had to also have a locked-down pledge that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that would also effectively amend the package that was coming to the House.

So, for those who didn't live through this, Mr. Speaker, I'd put it this way: ObamaCare was the first big piece of legislation that made it to the President's desk and was signed into law and became the law of the land that on the day of its passage didn't have the majority's support in the House of Representatives and it could not have passed the United States Senate under their current rules, but they had to do this by legislative sleight of hand to package up the three components to ObamaCare--the bill itself that started out at 1,994 pages and ended up 2,500 pages--the bill itself; the fig leaf executive order that the President promised and did sign that was supposed to prohibit the funding of abortion through ObamaCare, which we know it did not; and the third thing was the reconciliation packaged that circumvented the requirement for a cloture vote under the rules of the Senate and send it over here to the House.

That's what it took to give America ObamaCare.

Americans rose up on that weekend, and for 3 days they would stay on these Capitol grounds. By the thousands, they would stay outside the windows of the Rules Committee and chant, ``Kill the bill. Kill the bill.'' When I'd say to them, ``We're going to have to break this up. We can't keep this up,'' they would say, ``We won't go until they all vote `no.' We won't go.''

These are courageous Americans who stayed here all night. If they slept at all, it was out here on the cement or maybe on the grass. They would not go until they killed the bill. There were enough Americans who poured out here--tens of thousands--and who kept that vigil around the Capitol. They surrounded the Capitol building. They joined hands and surrounded the Capitol building.

Mr. Speaker, I'm not talking about one human chain with long arms each. I'm talking about six or eight deep all the way around the Capitol building and clusters in the corners of thousands who were needed to fill the human chain around the Capitol. They came to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances, and still the Speaker marched through the crowd with her huge, oversized gavel in her ``let them eat cake'' moment.

So here we are, Mr. Speaker. The American people saw all of that.

They saw the takeover of three large investment banks. They saw $700 billion in TARP spending. They saw $180 billion go out to AIG, the insurance company. They watched the formerly private sector, then quasi-government, now completely government-owned, -operated, - functioned, -guaranteed, and -backed up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has saddled the American taxpayers with a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion.

They saw all of that, Mr. Speaker.

They saw as the Federal Government took over General Motors and Chrysler to operate those formerly private sector businesses for the benefit of the people affected by them. That's when

they handed the secured assets of the investors over to the unions.

The American people saw all of that, and their sense of justice was offended: the affront to the free enterprise system, the nationalization of three large banks, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors, and Chrysler, and the Federal Government takeover of 100 percent of the student loan program.

How? With a debate here on the floor of the House or the Senate? With hearings before committees and markups before subcommittees and committees in a process as envisioned? No. Written into the reconciliation package as a sleight of hand that came out of a circumvention of the cloture vote in the Senate and slipped over here to the House of Representatives to be stuck in as ObamaCare. That is how they took over the student loan program.

Then we saw the Federal Government, under the direction of President Obama with the magnum gavel that Nancy Pelosi regally walked through the crowds who simply wanted to maintain their freedom and liberty, nationalize our skin and everything inside it. That's ObamaCare.

The second-most sovereign thing we have is our body and our health, and the Federal Government took it over to manage it and to make it the law of the land. They nationalized our skin and everything inside it, and they put a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. There was no square inch of skin left not nationalized by this government, and the American people rose up in a peaceful way.

I have to give the American people credit, a tremendous amount of credit. In any other country in the world, if they watched their liberty go like that, they would be demonstrating in the streets like they did in Athens not that long ago or as we watched take place in France or in Great Britain, for that matter. I mean the French may have to work until age 62, and they think that's worth burning tires and cars and demonstrating over.

What do we do in America when we disagree with our government? We come to Washington, DC. We fill up the parks in America. We do rallies all over. We fly the American flag. We run the yellow Gadsden flag up alongside it, down just an inch or so from height, the yellow Gadsden ``Don't tread on me'' flag, and we petition the government for redress of grievances--peacefully--and they were peaceful.

When these rallies were done, when these press conferences were done, I sent staff people out with cameras to look so they could take pictures of the litter. Could they find at least a cigarette butt out there to take a picture of to show me how disrespectful it might have been? These crowds were the most respectful crowds that the park service had ever seen. They cleaned up behind them. They didn't drop anything in the first place. They looked out for each other when they were done. They might have walked the grass down a little bit, but there wasn't any litter to pick up. They love this country. They love this beautiful Capitol. They respect the history of this Nation, of the Constitution, and of the system that we have.

They were maybe not successful in rolling back ObamaCare in November of 2009, in December of 2009, or in March of 2010, but they understood what happened. They understood that our freedom and our liberty had been marginalized by an arrogant attitude--that the people up in the Speaker's office knew best and that the American people didn't know. When the statement came that we had to pass the bill so that the American people could find out what was in it, I met a lot of people outside this Capitol, outside the beltway, who read every word of that health care bill.

Now, I wouldn't say that I've ever met anybody in or outside of the beltway who could read and understand all of its implications--that's impossible given the depth and the magnitude of it--but they understood that this was an affront to our liberty and to our freedom, that it would forever transform the way health care would be delivered in America and that it was a component of this vast overreach, this taking of our liberty and our freedom that had been initiated, oh, several generations ago. It was brought to a head several times, but never had it seen the configuration of an intense liberal President with a determination to use the majority that a happenstance of history had given him in the House and a supermajority that was filibuster-proof in the Senate.

They used it and they abused it, and the American people rose up and went to the polls and said, Enough. Enough. We're going to send people here to this Congress who understand that the Constitution is our default position, that whenever there is a question, we look back to the Constitution for guidance; and if the Constitution constrains us, we don't disregard the Constitution. What we must do is either comply with the original intent of the Constitution or take the trouble to amend it, and it takes a lot of trouble to amend the Constitution.

The Constitution needs to be our default mechanism. We have a lot of new freshmen coming in here who understand that. One of them is Bobby Schilling, from Quincy, Illinois, who understands it. The opponent whom he ran against was Phil Hare, who famously said, Oh, the Constitution? We don't care about that.

His constituents do.

They sent their message, and they sent a new Representative here to Congress who does care about the Constitution. His colleagues in this class are 80-some strong, and all of them, I know, do care about the Constitution. When they take their oath of office, they will take it seriously. It will be something branded on their hearts, as it should be of any Member who comes in here and who has the privilege to serve Americans. We all have to brand down our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

I am looking forward to this class coming in, Mr. Speaker. I understand the message that has been sent by this country, and it has been sent with those new Representatives who are arriving here in Washington, D.C. They are here now, those who will be sworn in on January 4. That message is: Adhere to the Constitution. Hold on to the Constitution. Believe in it, and defend it as there have been so many who have died in its defense. We can at least stand and defend it and adhere to it. Understand also that debt and deficit, jobs and the economy are the central theme that have been flowed out here.

But the takings of our liberty in the form of the nationalization of all of these companies and entities has been an affront to the American free enterprise system. It diminishes the vigor of America to have the government running Fortune 500 companies in America with no plan to divest themselves of it and to think that the Federal Government would make decisions with a ``one size fits all'' formula for our health care and do that to us when we completely have the ability to manage that health care for ourselves.

I think there's something also that was missing on the part of the liberals here in Congress, Mr. Speaker. And that's this: That as much as the progressive movement draws its instruction from Western Europe, when the progressive movement was generated by intellectuals that visited Germany in the latter part of the 19th century and came back here and began to inject the progressive thought process with social democracy. Western European social democracy values, to keep it simple, Mr. Speaker, came to us out of Western Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. It's been debated in this country over and over again. These are the people that decided they would undermine our Constitution not by amending it but by trying to redefine its meaning and its intent. And they made the argument that it's a living and breathing document, and therefore, it has to adapt itself to the mores of the day, otherwise we couldn't possibly be burdened with something that was so rigid and structured that we would have to amend it as society evolved.

Well, I would make the statement that human nature does not change, and that if we ever get the fundamental structure of our Constitution and law correct--and for the most part, we have the fundamental structure of our Constitution correct--if we ever get it correct, then the only reasons to meet in the legislature is to make appropriations for the upcoming year or two and to make adjustments to new technology, if that's required.

But the progressives from a century and a generation ago have polluted the thought process of Americans. And the people who are progressives--and there are some 77 in this Congress, at least today, and they're listed on their Web site, and they're linked with the Democratic socialists of America. Socialists and progressives are one and the same by essentially their own admission. They miss this thing about America: We're not a dependency people. Even if the socialism was right, social democracy is right for Western Europe, it's not right for Americans. And there are a good number of reasons why it's not right. A lot of them are in the Bill of Rights.

We have guaranteed freedom, rights that come from God. They don't believe that in--well, some believe it, but it's not in anybody else's Constitution that I know of. It's in our Declaration actually here, and it's in the Iowa Constitution as a matter of clarification. But our rights come from God. They don't come from a sovereign, from a king. They don't come from government. If rights come from government and government takes your rights away, then who are we to complain? Who do we complain to? If the government takes our rights away, they're the ones that are sovereign.

But what we have here in America are God-given rights that are vested in the people. The people are sovereign, and the people then entrust the power of their sovereignty through the representative form of government, the republican form of government, and they elect those representatives to represent them here in Washington and around the country. They must guarantee a republican form of government. That is a constitutional requirement. But it's the people who are sovereign. The vigor that Americans have that come from these rights is this vigor--a lot of it's in the Bill of Rights. The freedom of speech in a full- throated way to step out on the courthouse steps and let fly with your deepest convictions without fear of a punishment that might come from the government.

I recall standing on the courthouse lawn in Sioux County, Iowa, in Orange City during the Tulip Festival. Myself and another candidate had lined up a couple of big speakers and a microphone. It's always a good crowd during the Tulip Festival. So we just started to holler up a crowd and give speeches. As we did that, more and more people started to gather. And after a little while, a fellow came out of the courthouse, and he came over and approached Representative Dwayne Alons, who represents that area and is from there. And he said, You've got to shut this down. These men can't stand here and give these speeches on the courthouse lawn because this is a polling place. Now this is the first weekend in May. There are no elections going on, no elections near. So the fact that it was a polling place during elections was really irrelevant. But the man said, They can't be speaking here like this. This is a polling place. This is electioneering, and it's a violation of State law.

Now we're speaking away in our full-throated positions on the things that we advocated and believed in. And Representative Dwayne Alons looked at that courthouse employee, and he said, Well, if you can't exercise your right to freedom of speech here on the courthouse lawn, could you tell me just where in the world you can exercise your right to freedom of speech? That gentleman turned around and went back in the courthouse, and that's the last we heard of him.

But the vigor that comes from this freedom of speech and the confidence that we can write a letter, send out an e-mail, put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, get on the radio, go out on the street corner and the curb, or stand at the pulpit and express our deepest, most firmly held convictions without fear of retribution or recourse that would come from government--at least in an official fashion--that is one of the essential principles of being an American that adds to our vigor. It allows us to be the people that can use our reason, our ability to rationalize, our ability to continually self-examine our culture and civilization to make these adjustments, like the American people made adjustments when that gavel was passed to Speaker Pelosi in January of 2007. They made more adjustments in 2008, and more Republicans went home, and more Democrats came. And then they watched the results of their decision, and they weren't particularly alarmed when it was Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid until President Obama came in. Their decision, all right?

I sat out there on the west portico of the Capitol, and I had a great seat. And I saw the momentous time in history when the first black President of the United States was sworn in. And I felt that uplifting feeling. We had reached a milestone as a nation, and perhaps we had put race behind us. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would find a way to blend the two sides together and get us to a postpartisanship era in America. Well, the American people gave him 2 years, and they could see the pattern over and over again. It wasn't going to be postpartisanship. It was going to be more and more partisanship, and an economic theory that had been discredited since the New Deal in the 1930s by FDR. This Keynesian economist on steroids had decided he was going to spend money hand over fist in a desperate effort to try to stimulate the economy, dug us a hole deeper than the hole the Chilean miners were in, and he was still down there with that shovel digging on Election Day November 2, 2010.

The American people looked at that. They were appalled. They thought that good judgment would take over sooner, or at least some time. So they decided the quickest and most effective way that they could take the shovel out of the President's hands was to take the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi's. And that's what happened. Debt and deficit, jobs and the economy became the order of the day. And the American people were appalled that their ability to manage their own health care had also been taken away from them and company after company had been taken over by the Federal Government. And another principle that is a pillar of American exceptionalism, the pillar of free enterprise, also was being diminished on a regular basis by--I don't know that I can say clearly that it's an anti-capitalist administration. But certainly the President surrounded himself with many anti-capitalists.

Free enterprise, another foundation of American greatness. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And by the way, this freedom of religion has been diminished by the IRS by the intimidation that the churches might lose their 501(c)(3) status. So pastor after pastor steps up to the pulpit. And about the time their convictions and their conscience open up the volume in their throat, they think, ooh, but what if I lose a not-for-profit status? I will be standing on the street corner preaching from the curb? Some let fly, and I am proud of them, all of them. Some pull it back and decide they're going to be more careful. And they're afraid of the tax penalties that might come if they lose their not-for-profit status. But freedom of speech is part of American vigor.

Freedom of religion is part of America's core culture. It is the moral foundation that holds our civilization together. You cannot hire enough police officers to do that job for you. It has to be part of our moral character. If you think otherwise, take a look at what happened to the police force in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. More police officers, more problems in that scenario. But the core of our values is tied to our Judeo-Christian faith which is the center core of American civilization. That's part of American vigor. And speech, religion, and the press, the freedom to freely assemble, and the rights to property under the Fifth Amendment, freedom from double jeopardy, the list goes on and on. That's just in the Bill of Rights.

That's just in the Bill of Rights.

And then we have this other vigor, this American vigor. And it's unique to us.

This situation where, I'm going to make this argument, Mr. Speaker, that Americans are a distinct race of people, a race of people. And I don't know anybody else that takes this position; but if they listen, then I think everybody that listens will take this position.

We have a distinction that characterizes us. We may look different, we may have different skin tones and different

shapes to our facial features. We may come from every--we do come from every continent on the planet. We come from hundreds of countries on the planet.

But what we have in common is we either, people that came to America bring with them the distinct vigor of their culture and their civilization. It isn't that somebody that comes from France or Italy or Argentina or Russia, wherever it might be, Sweden, that comes to the United States, it isn't that those nationalities have these unique vigorous characteristics of hardworking industrious entrepreneurs that love freedom and want to build something and put a mark on life and leave this world a better place for the next generation.

We got the dreamers from every civilization. We got the can-do spirit from every civilization. The American culture, the American Dream is built because we are the recipients of the cream of the crop of every donor civilization on the planet that sent legal immigrants here to America. And they rose up. They had to sacrifice to get here. They had to plan. They had to sometimes sell out their future to get here. But when they came here, they were determined to build something that had value. And when they saw the Statue of Liberty it meant something to them. It's a dream. It throbbed in their heart when they looked at that and they saw themselves sailing into Ellis Island. Here was this promised land. Yes, some of them thought the streets were paved with gold. But also, many of them believed that they had an opportunity to go out there and mine for that gold and pave their own streets in this country, and nobody could take away their freedom, their liberty, their property rights, and no one could put them in double jeopardy of a crime. That vigor that is from each donor civilization is part and parcel of the character of America.

I come from a number of different sources, but some of my ancestors came across the prairie in a covered wagon. They walked beside that wagon or behind the oxen, and on a good day they traveled 10 miles across the prairie where the prairie grass was high in a sea of grass. On a good day they traveled 10 miles. Why they ever decided to drive that stake in the ground where they did and declare a homestead, I don't know how that process goes through one's mind.

I've never read nor have I heard how they were thinking. But I know this: they came to the Midwest to live free or die on the prairie. They took the State motto of New Hampshire. They transposed it to the Midwest and on to the points to the West as well, where you had freedom-loving people that wanted spaces and opportunity, and they put their stake in the ground for that homesteaded 160. However they got started and they built, they built a house out of sod, and they started raising kids and putting them to work. And they took the axe and chopped the tree stumps out and turned them into farms, and they ran cattle and they found ways to make a living. They came out to live free or die on the prairie.

And those of us who are descended from that kind of stock, we understand why. Why are my neighbors proud, independent? They don't want to be dependent upon government. They just want to have an opportunity to work and succeed and support their church and their family and their neighborhoods and their schools. That's all they ask for. The proudness, the independence, the industriousness, that's what's built America. And we took the cream of the crop off all those donors civilizations, and we gave them an opportunity here under the banner of freedom and liberty. And American vigor rose up. This giant Petri dish of this experiment of freedom and liberty rose up, and here we are.

We're not a people that's suitable to be put under the yoke of socialism, or have a Federal Government dictate to us where we can or can't get our health care, or take away our shares in General Motors or Chrysler and hand them over to the Union, or have the Federal Government say that we want a guarantee that people can buy houses whether they can afford it or not, and we're going to guarantee that we're going to charge the taxpayers to pick up the difference when they can't meet those mortgages.

These people want to be free. They want to be left alone. We want to allow for the vigor of Americans to shine and to glow and project itself across this continent and across this globe.

As I've said, Mr. Speaker, with the opening remarks about Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, the risk that he took running into enemy gunfire over and over again to save his fellow troops, miraculously lived through that, will be receiving the Medal of Honor tomorrow in the ceremony at the White House. He put his life on the line. Some of his people lost theirs.

And we owe to him, and we owe to all of those who have put their lives on the line, who have put on the uniform throughout the centuries, we owe them the fight for freedom and liberty here on the floor of the United States Congress. We owe them that fight. We owe them that liberty.

We owe them that we're going to shut off this accumulation of debt, we're going to reduce and eventually eliminate the deficit. And in doing so, it will bring the economy back around, and it will produce jobs, and it will enhance our freedom and liberty, and those entrepreneurs that came to this country for that freedom, for a chance to build, and the descendents of those entrepreneurs that came here in earlier generations so that their children would have an opportunity for a better life, to earn, not to receive as if America is some giant

ATM, but to earn a better life here. We owe it to Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta and everyone like him our best effort here on this floor to honor his effort, to uphold the Constitution, to uphold the oath to the Constitution that we will again take on January 4, here on the floor of this House of Representatives, to raise America up to the next level of our destiny, do honor to those who've gone before us, and to leave a legacy for those that come behind us.

And this is the beginning, Mr. Speaker. This class, this new freshman class, for the 112th Congress is God's gift to America, and the American people will appreciate it. And we need to empower them to the maximum amount because I believe that they will lead us forward to that next level of our destiny.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 17 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, November 16, 2010, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding.

I came down here to the floor out of support for Guam, half a day, where America's day begins. And the first cup of coffee in America is there on Guam. So I have a special place in my heart for Guam, and I support the educational components of this legislation. I also come here, Mr. Speaker, and I think it is a bit unusual, but I support the balance of this underlying legislation that was amended to the gentlelady from Guam's bill in the Senate. I do that, but I also support the words of Mr. Hastings of Washington, who says that Democrats have admitted they were wrong.

We have to look at this legislation and see that the minimum wage was imposed upon the Northern Marianas and American Samoa in 2007. Two tuna canning factories; now one has closed as a direct result of the imposition of a minimum wage. And the sole garment factory in the Northern Marianas has also closed because of a direct result, at least in significant part, because of the imposition of minimum wage. It is a microcosm economy that anybody that understands free enterprise should know that when the government artificially raises the cost of wages, businesses that have to stay, therefore a profit, can't stay open unless they can operate from a profit.

Labor is, Mr. Speaker, a commodity. It is a commodity like gold or oil or corn or beans. Labor: it is a precious commodity. And the value of it needs to be determined by supply and demand in the marketplace, not by the United States Government.

And so here we are with a damaged economy out in the Pacific in America's territories and an example for all this Congress that if we continue to increase government-imposed regulations, government-imposed minimum wage, for example, and all of the burden that's been put upon the free enterprise system over here with this over-management and this Keynesian economist on steroids, which is our President's economic policy, we're going to pay the price in the United States of America the same way they're paying the price in American Samoa and the Northern Marianas.

I support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this formally most deliberative body that has such a long and deep tradition that goes back two centuries and a generation or more.

And here in these Chambers and the Chambers that have preceded these across the capital throughout the years have come the discussions and deliberations that have helped direct the destiny of America. Times of wars have been declared here. And there have been many State of the Union addresses delivered and heads of state that have come here to stand here at the rostrum and tell America, to the United States House of Representatives--accompanied often by the United States Senate and the Cabinet members and the Supreme Court, representatives from the Pentagon and others--to address the destiny of America and help direct our destiny.

And it has been true that the voices of America have been heard in these Chambers over and over again throughout the generations. And it's what it was designed to do by the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Our Founding Fathers understood--and I believe that God put them to work on our behalf--our rights come from Him. We know. And it is a matter of fact that's clearly delineated in our Declaration of Independence. It's been carried out by many of the words of the leaders that we have had that have emerged over the years, over the centuries, and over the generations.

Our rights that come from God, debated here in the United States House of Representatives, in this American destiny which is the product of His Providence and the product of the collective judgment of the American people and the vision and the wisdom of this Republic. The Constitution guarantees us not a democracy but a republican form of government. That means a government that's established by representatives of the people. And those of us here that are the products of the elections that have the privilege to represent the 435 congressional districts in America, we aren't the products of a democracy. We're the products of the votes by the citizens of America that direct us to carry out our duty as representatives in a republic.

That means that we owe our constituents our best efforts and our best judgment.

And part of that best judgment is to spend a lot of time back in our districts listening to our constituents, carrying out our arguments, using them as a sounding board because they're busy in real lives. They're busy going to work every day, raising their families, living the American dream in many cases. And they have asked us, directed us, hired us, and we've asked for the privilege to represent them here with our best judgment, here in the center of the capital of the greatest Nation on Earth, the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, the United States of America.

You hear this magnet of Washington, D.C., which is the center for information that comes in the world, and it's available to us. Each of our offices is a magnet for information. And through our office comes the wisdom of our constituents and the wisdom of America. It's our job to hear the pleas of the people and understand the arguments that they make, and evaluate them, the empirical data, evaluate the urgency that they deliver it to us with, and sort out the highest priorities and bring those priorities into this body.

And we're also here gathering data from around the world and from around the country that comes directly into our office, and we're to evaluate all of that and bring out of it a rational, prioritized solution for the destiny and the direction of America. That's the vision and the wisdom of this constitutional Republic known as the United States of America. The vision and the wisdom.

And I note that in Texas when they went through the effort to establish the textbooks that would be delivered and often go all the way across America, they made sure that they changed the language in the books so that it is clear that the students in Texas know, and soon it will be clear that the students all across America know, that this is a constitutional republic.

So here we are, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, a place where we're to gather and bring to this floor the wisdom of America, coming out of the mouths of 435 Members of the United States House of Representatives. And that, brought up to and compared to the wisdom that's collected out of the 50 States from the 100 Senators, from that's to come the policy of the United States of America over to the desk of the President, where he has the opportunity to sign and ratify or veto the legislation that we send to him.

And here we are today with a Congress that's dysfunctional, Mr. Speaker, a Congress that over 200 years of tradition and history and practice has provided for open rules that allowed for any Member of Congress to bring an amendment to an appropriations bill. Maybe even at the last minute. Maybe an amendment that was written not on a piece of parchment--that was a little bit before my time anyway, but possibly it could have been. Could have been written on a napkin. Could have been written on a place mat. It could have been produced on a computer in an office or typed out now on a BlackBerry and sent down here. But introduced to the Clerk of the House as an amendment even at the last minute. And any Member could, under those circumstances of an appropriations bill, bring that amendment up, require a debate and force a vote on the subject matter that was before this Chamber.

That practice had taken place for over 200 years, Mr. Speaker, and now it's gone. It's been taken away by Speaker Pelosi. The first year that she held the gavel of the Speakership we still had the semblance of an open rule that went on for about half of that appropriations cycle, and then it was shut down. No more open rules to appropriations bills. Shut down. During that period of time, my staff advises me that I was successful in passing more amendments than anybody else in the United States Congress. It wasn't my goal to rack up more amendments, but it was my goal to make sure that my constituents were heard.

And we brought those amendments to the floor in 2007, many of them successfully. But in the aftermath of that abbreviated appropriations season, what we saw happen was a change in the rules that restricted Members from bringing amendments and eventually became the de facto closed rule system that shut down and shut off the input that came from all of these Members of Congress, who had been out reaching out and gathering information and becoming the repository for the collective wisdom of their congressional districts. Added to that their judgment, their research, their analysis, all of that shut down and shut off by order of the Speaker of the House.

No more amendments on appropriations bills unless the Rules Committee up there in the hole in the wall committee where very seldom does any press go and very rarely is there a television camera in there. And they meet often in the middle of the night. And they write a rule such as a rule that deems a bill to have passed. It's pretty infamous that the chair of the Rules Committee, Louise Slaughter, advocated that they not bring ObamaCare to the floor of the House for a debate and a vote, just simply deem it as passed. Deem a bill as passed.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, how the Founding Fathers would shudder at the thought that they could create this great deliberative body and this constitutional Republic that could be reduced down into the chair of the Rules

Committee advocating that they simply deem that a bill is passed rather than debate it, put it up for amendments, and allow the collective wisdom of the United States of America, as processed through the voices of the Representatives, to work their will so that we can produce a policy that's good for this country?

They set up the right debate structure, they set up the right process, and it's been usurped by this Speaker to the point where even it's a closed rule on appropriations now. Where one can't even begin to offer an amendment. Where I went up to the Rules Committee to--you are supposed to go up there and beg them to allow you to make an argument or a debate. I have never done that. I can't bring myself to beg the Rules Committee.

But, nonetheless, at 1:30 in the morning on ObamaCare, I had 13 amendments up before the ObamaCare bill was to come to the floor the next day, and I waited a long time in line for an opportunity to make my case for those 13 amendments. And the Rules Committee, one of the senior members had the audacity to lecture me for wasting staff time to write the amendments and apparently for wasting trees to print them up in paper. Because whatever ideas might come from a Member of the House of Representatives, I should have known--and he told me I should have known--that the Speaker has decided that none of my amendments will be considered, therefore why did I waste the time. Why did I waste the paper to introduce them into the Record? That's the kind of thing they can get away with when they are up there in the hole in the wall, the Rules Committee up there in the corner, unaccountable to the press, not on television, no one reviewing them outside of this body.

And I can come down here and tell you that, Mr. Speaker, and a few people will hear it, and a lot less will be outraged; but even that intolerable circumstance is even worse than that because of the no open rules on appropriations has now been reduced to for this year no appropriations bills and no budget.

So when the President proposes his spending plan, I guess you could call it a budget--we don't accept the President's budget. This is the House of Representatives. The Constitution requires that all spending bills start here. They don't start in the White House. The White House makes a recommendation, and it's our job to process it through the Budget Committee and produce the document that is the collective wisdom for supposedly the entire United States House of Representatives that sets the spending limits for the appropriations process. A budget that says don't outspend your budget, and you can spend it in these categories that are laid out by the Budget Committee. And that's the fiscal restraint.

No budget bill in this Congress; no appropriations bills in this Congress. So we no longer need the rule that says you don't get to offer an amendment on them because there are no bills to amend.

Mr. Speaker, we're at the point where this United States Government is being run by the iron fist of the Speaker hanging onto the gavel, dictating to 435 Members what she will do. And we're no longer accessing the collective wisdom of 306 million Americans. We're just accessing the collective wisdom of the Speaker's staff and whoever else can penetrate through that circle as part of that staff.

And how can we believe that the equivalent of a dictatorship can run this country as well as the collective wisdom of the American people? Our Founding Fathers saw the wisdom. They set up the constitutional Republic so we could gather all the wisdom of the American people and sort the good ideas from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, and bring the highest priorities to the top throughout the system of representing each district and coming in here to introduce legislation, bring it through the hearing process, the subcommittee and the committee process, and to the floor of the House.

Where, then, when a product is produced by the wisdom of the entire House, it can go down to the Senate, where they can work their will. And if they have some better, some sage, ideas, go ahead and fix it a little bit and send it back to us. And if they are good ideas, we'll ratify it, and we'll send it to the President. That's how it's supposed to work, Mr. Speaker. It is not working that way.

The system, the process has been shut down. Democrats and Republicans should be outraged at what's happening to America because the wisdom of America is being locked out of the process here in the United States Congress.

And we watched, and a number of us vigorously opposed what some declared to be the passage of ObamaCare. ObamaCare, the President's signature piece of legislation, rejected by the American people, who under the constitutional guidelines came here to the Capitol building on at least two occasions, and I would argue several more, by the tens of thousands to petition the government for redress of grievances and to argue don't take our liberty away.

The people in the United States want to be able to buy the health insurance policy of their choice. They want to be able to take care of their own personal responsibility. They don't want to have the Federal Government cancel every health insurance policy in America, which they will do under ObamaCare. And they don't want the terms of their health care dictated by the Federal Government. They want to be able to buy a catastrophic health insurance policy with low premiums and high deductible. They want to be able to couple that with an HSA and grow that into a retirement fund once they've done a good job of managing their life's health. They want to be able to shop for a policy of insurance across State lines so they can look for cheaper premiums and fewer mandates.

They don't want Federal mandates on their health insurance. None. And they surely don't want an expansion of Federal mandates on health insurance, whether it's brought to them by Democrats or Republicans. No Federal mandates on insurance. Let people vote with their feet. Let them buy across State lines. Repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which is the Federal statute that allows the States to establish monopolies for health insurance companies within those States. Let people break out of those chains.

But ObamaCare came at us and was passed here off the floor of the House of Representatives when it did not have the majority support of the 435 Members that were here. And, Mr. Speaker, you might ask how did it pass then? How did it pass here barely, by a small little margin of votes if it didn't have the support of the majority of the House?

And the answer to that is, well, there had to be a couple of backroom deals made that had to be announced to the press so that they could at least make the excuses that they made, but they didn't have the votes to pass ObamaCare as it was. That bill that turned into almost 2,500 pages of legislation could not have passed the House if it weren't for two promises. One of them was that there would be a reconciliation package that would come out of the Senate that would come here to be voted on within so many days of the passage of ObamaCare, and another one was the President promising to Bart Stupak and others, the ``Stupak dozen,'' that he would issue an Executive order that would fix the problems in the legislation that were created by the language of Ben Nelson, the Senator from Nebraska.

So in that day, under that scenario--think of this--they could not produce 218 votes to pass ObamaCare unless there was a solemn oath that convinced the people that were going to vote for ObamaCare, that were elected to vote for ObamaCare, that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that made a number of other changes and that the President would sign an Executive order that would amend the Ben Nelson Federal funding for abortion language.

Think of this: How naive would you have to be? How far would you have to stick your head into the sand, Mr. Speaker, to believe, first, the language that came out of the Senate in the reconciliation did happen, but to believe that the President of the United States could sign an Executive order that would amend the law that was passed by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate? That is an unconstitutional concept to its very core.

Congress has the legislative authority, not the President. The President's responsibility is to faithfully ensure and take care that the laws are enforced and the policy that the Congress directs is carried out. That's what needs to happen. That's the constitutional framework. The President doesn't have the authority to sign an Executive order that amends the language that has been approved by a majority vote in the House and a majority vote in the Senate. But a number of people over on this side of the aisle cast their vote for ObamaCare--about a dozen--on the promise that President Obama would sign an Executive order that would alter the legislative language and its effect when it came to Federal funding for abortion. That is what I and many others would call the tiniest little fig leaf for people who wanted to vote for the bill in the first place but said they took a stand on principle and they wanted to find a way out from underneath that. So they hid behind this tiny little fig leaf called the President's Executive order. But the votes weren't there to pass ObamaCare on that day without it and without the promise that the Senate would pass legislation that would change the language that was being voted on in the House.

Think of it; the chair of the Rules Committee just simply wanted to deem that ObamaCare passed and not have a vote, deem it passed. And the promise, though, was that the Senate will pass some legislation to fix a mistake that you are about to make; and, by the way, if you think that taxpayers shouldn't be compelled to fund abortions in the United States of America, the President will fix that with an Executive order. And we are here to believe that this is still the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world and that it's the collective wisdom of America? I say not. I think not, Mr. Speaker.

This system, this process has so devolved downward that it no longer functions as the Congress was envisioned to function. We now must alter, abolish, and change the direction that this Congress is going and put new people in place, people with gavels in their hands chairing committees, people that adhere to the Constitution; put in place the requirement that we introduce legislation that identifies the specific sections of the Constitution that grant the authority of this Congress to introduce and pass such legislation, that there's a constitutional foundation for all the legislation that we pass. And I believe there is a reasonable chance that that will happen and that the changes will take place in November and that there will be a major sea change in the seats in this Congress. A breath of new constitutionally and fiscally responsible vigor will come a-washing in over this Chamber.

But in the meantime, we need to lay down the parameters and reestablish this covenant with the American public that we will function in a constitutional fashion, that we will balance the budget and start to pay down the national debt and be straight with the American people on how difficult that is. I want to see a balanced budget come to this floor that balances this budget in 1 year--not in 20 years or 50 years or 10 or 9--1 year. And, yes, I expect that that first balanced budget offered that balances the budget in 1 year will be so painful that it's not going to pass. But we need to tell the American people what we have to do to balance this budget. Right now this Congress doesn't have the will to even tell America what it takes to balance the budget.

And we must, as an early--and I will argue first--order of business, bring the repeal of ObamaCare to the floor, to pull ObamaCare out by the roots, lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare left behind, Mr. Speaker, because ObamaCare is not the product of the American people. It's the product of legislative strong-armed activity that used the maneuvers of ``deemed to pass,'' the Senate promise of reconciliation, the President's Executive order, and the willful neglect on the part of Members of the House of Representatives.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas so much time as he might consume.

Reclaiming my time just to pose a question to the gentleman from Texas, if you are suggesting that the people who are in the majority in this Congress know that there will be a punishment that will hurt businesses, and that would be why some of them would want to extend these Bush tax cuts or make them permanent, as I do and as you do, is that really it? Is it their conscience, or is it the political pressure that is coming to bear now before the election, and what will be the results and the aftermath? Is it in their heads and their hearts to keep the taxes up because they think government can spend the money better? And is it in their political survival instincts to try to posture themselves in straddling the fence until such time as there is an election so that they can continue to allow the tax cuts to expire at the end of the year?

In reclaiming my time here, Mr. Gohmert, I'm just thinking about how this works.

The expiration of these Bush tax cuts has been marching towards us for a long time. We know, when we get into the silly season of politics, any decisions that are made in Congress are made to send a message to the voters and not necessarily to provide the best policy to the American people. Call me a cynic, but I think your pundits and your historians will recognize that Congress does things just prior to an election that aren't particularly rational unless you put them within the context of the lens of sending a message to the voters that you're really not as bad as they think you are, for example.

So any of this decision could have been made with responsibility and foresight. It could have been made in any of the preceding months. It could have been something that was concluded in June or July, for example. We could have extended these tax cuts for 10 years, or we could have made them permanent, which is as I would have preferred; but it didn't happen.

I take this back to 4 years ago, in 2006, when Democrats won the majority in this House of Representatives. Charlie Rangel, the esteemed former chair of the Ways and Means Committee, was the apparent person who would become the new chair, formally, on the third day of January of 2007. Charlie Rangel went on the talk shows all over America, and they began asking him: Which of the Bush tax cuts would you like to keep? Which of the Bush tax cuts would you be willing to see or like to see expire?

I listened to a lot of that. I never heard a definitive answer from Charlie Rangel. In fact, it has been a long time since we've heard a definitive answer from Charlie Rangel. Yet, throughout that period of time, from November until February, the pundits were asking questions, and smart money investors were making decisions and were drawing a calculus on what they thought might happen to the potential extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Smart money concluded almost 4 years ago that there would not be extensions of these Bush tax cuts. Then you saw, beginning in late January and early February of 2007, a dramatic drop-off in industrial investment because smart money knew that the cost of capital was going to go up and that the profit margin would go down. That, I believe, was one of the early indicators that started to drive our economy down. Where we sit today is watching these cuts that could have been extended and could have been made permanent in any month prior to now. Now we're down to the last week before the election, and we're pretty confident it is not going to happen.

As bad as it is to see this large, huge, looming tax increase, the most immoral and diabolical of all is the death tax--the death tax that doesn't exist today. People who pass away in 2010 can pass the entire amounts of their estates on to the next generations without a tax penalty. George Steinbrenner, one of those examples, avoided the taxman. However poor the happenstance was of his being called home this year, the billionaire George Steinbrenner's family didn't have to pay an estate tax. However, at midnight on December 31, at the instant the ball drops in Times Square in New York, someone who passes away a second after that ball hits bottom will be looking at a new death tax that has a $1 million exemption, that starts at a 55 percent tax and goes up from there. That means that the family farm that might own two sections of land in Iowa will have to give up half of that land just to pay the taxman, and there is no relief in sight.

It is the class envy component of this which concludes that, no matter how much you pay, no matter how many taxes you pay on the equity that you have, if you have paid the tax on it and have accrued the capital and the net asset value, we are going to tax you again after you're dead.

I've taken calls in the past, and I think many Members of Congress have taken calls in the past from family members who have had someone of whom they were having to ask the question of whether they should put them on life support or whether they should take them off of life support. The question was predicated upon: Will there be a tax liability or won't there be associated with the life of a loved one?

This Congress must resolve this issue because, if we march forward to December 31 at midnight, there will be thousands of Americans lying on death beds, with their families gathered around. Sometimes that terminally ill family member will be coherent and rational and will say, Do not pay this tax. Don't put me on life support. Unplug me from life support. I want to pass away in 2010 so you don't have to pay the taxes on everything that I've earned all my life and that I've already paid the taxes on.

Those are the circumstances. This diabolical and cruel policy will put families in the position of having to ask the question of whether they should try to keep their family members alive longer, with the chance that they might have some weeks or months of fulfilling lives, or whether they should take them off of that life support. Worse yet, it will happen. The time will come. If we don't fix the death tax, it will happen that there will be family members who make decisions to unplug or to not plug in loved family members, even at their requests, because those family members are not expected to live past midnight on December 31. Then, at the stroke of midnight, if that person draws another breath, there is immediately a 55 percent tax levied against all but $1 million of his life's work and his life's savings. It is cruel, it is diabolical, and it should not ever happen in the United States of America.

That was set up because that was the best deal that could be gotten, and there was a belief back in those years of 2001 and 2003 that this Congress would have a conscience, a conscience that would prohibit them from allowing us to go forward to December 31, which would put people in a position like that. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that, of all of these taxes, the death tax is the most cruel. It is the most egregious. It is the most diabolical. It is a sin to put people in this position, and this Congress is determined to go down that path because their class envy trumps their compassion for people who have to make decisions like that.

The gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

A couple of things I would add to that. I want to go back and cap off the estate tax argument and one of the other ways it applies.

You said land rich and cash poor, and that happens all across this country. And some of that land is poor. When people say they are land rich, they're land rich with poor land even, but that's the expression. And there is a tradition that goes out; there are roots that go into the land. Those of us that have lived on the land and made a living out of it and look around at our neighborhoods and know that the generations that grow off and on of that land are committed to making a living out of it and seeking to establish a way that they can pass that land along to the next generation. It's a matter of tradition. It's a matter of pride. It's family lore. It's a distinction of having that chance. People came out across the prairie in a covered wagon and walked behind the oxen to live free or die. They put their stakes out there in the four corners of their 160 quarter section and homesteaded it.

We have a lot of family farms in Iowa that go back 100 years, even 150 years, and some of those are broken up by the estate tax that looms over the horizon. One of those that is at risk of being broken up right now is one that I actually came across last week, and I want to make a statement here for the Record tonight, Mr. Speaker. The representative of that farm is Landi McFarland, a mid-twenties young lady that is a sixth generation that has been raised on that land.

That land that's known as Hoover Angus Farm. And they run a pure Red Angus operation and the other things that go along to make that balance within that land that's down there in southern Iowa and those beautiful rolling, grass-covered green hills in that part of the State and that part of the country and the world. And as a sixth generation who lives and breathes to live on that land and carry out the dreams of her ancestors and her father and her grandfather and the people that went before her, wants nothing more than that chance for the next generation to live there and do the same thing and build on Hoover Angus Farm.

And yet, they're looking at an estate tax that would wipe out half of that land that's been put together.

And the cruel, cold heart of people that don't understand that, that never lived that life, that don't know about being land rich, even with poor land, and cash poor, and knowing that half of that land could be taken away just to satisfy Uncle Sam, do not begin to understand that when you put together an operation, sometimes it takes generations to pick a piece of ground here, a 40 here, an 80 there, a 160 here. And after a while you've got a unit, a land-based unit that's symbiotic, it's balanced. It produces the feed and the productivity and has the grain storage and the transportation links and the building network that allows for the whole unit at all to function as a unit.

And if Uncle Sam steps in there and half of that has to go, a lot of times it will destroy more than half of the value. You can't just cut it in half. You can't just say, Well, here's your half acre, and here's Uncle Sam's half acre, and turn it into a checkerboard and think it functions again. It does not. It becomes dysfunctional. And the value of the unit diminishes. You can't split it.

So you have to decide whether you can sell something off and maintain that unit or whether that unit becomes of less value and no longer functional and competitive, in which case it gets split up to other interests--perhaps sold at a discount because it's no longer a unit-- and the legacy of six generations of Hoover Angus and then Landi McFarland could end overnight if we don't fix this estate tax problem that we have.

And another component that the American people need to think about is the chilling development in

ObamaCare. And it is this--and I have said, Mr. Speaker, a number of times right here from this same podium, that ObamaCare is the nationalization, and when I say ``nationalization,'' I mean coming under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government, ObamaCare is the nationalization of your skin, Americans, and everything inside of it. It's the Federal takeover of your skin and everything inside it. The second most sovereign thing that you have is your health. The first most sovereign thing you have is your soul.

The Federal Government takeover, nationalization of your skin and everything inside it, and a 10 percent tax on the outside if you choose to walk into the tanning salon. A tax on the outside of your skin to fund ObamaCare. How outrageous can that be?

And here's the milestone, Mr. Speaker, it's the first component of a national sales tax with all of the elements of the Federal income tax and all of the things that Mr. Gohmert has talked about and identified here that are expanding and poised to grow and increase dramatically.

One of our fears has been that we would have a sales tax coupled with an income tax and all of these other series of taxes. The tanning tax is the very first Federal sales tax that's imposed on anybody that goes into a tanning salon.

Now, I don't suggest that it's a tax on a lack of melanin in the skin--although some have suggested such a thing--but I will tell you flat out specifically that it is the first national sales tax on a product.

And if the Federal Government can impose a national sales tax on a service, they can impose it on any sales or service whatsoever in the United States of America.

And if we're to do that, we need to abolish the IRS, eliminate the Federal Tax Code, wipe it all out, and convert it all over into a consumption tax. Free us up from the burden of the IRS. That's what needs to happen, Mr. Speaker.

But these are two points that I think are essential to make. When you watch family businesses where the tax has been paid on the equity in that business and watch when it passes to the next generation, if the Federal Government's got to step in and impose a tax on an estate that's already paid its taxes on its equity, it takes that family business, that family factory, that family farm, and it separates it in half, and like a lot of things, even the baby that Solomon spoke of, it's worth a lot less in two halves than in one whole.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention and your indulgence tonight, and I'm absolutely convinced that I have convinced you.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, it is a privilege and honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to do so on such a significant day. This is a day of events, I believe, that will be marked for a long time in at least political history, and hopefully it will be marked in the hearts and minds of the American people as well.

And I can think of a couple of events today, one that is unfolding as we speak, and another that unfolded earlier when the United States Senate had a cloture vote and didn't have the votes to force Harry Reid's version of the Department of Defense authorization bill to actually come up for a vote before the United States Senate.

The cloture vote failed because he attached two unrelated issues, unessential issues, to that bill. The politics of it are such, pick your side of the argument. My side of the argument, Madam Speaker, is that they were unnecessary pieces of legislation that were attached to experiment socially with the military, not essential legislation. And the objection on the part of even the Republicans that supported each piece of that legislation was that procedurally, the majority leader in the United States Senate had crossed the line.

So the Department of Defense authorization bill is now frozen in place. I think it must come forward at some time. The indications that we are getting is that will not happen until a lame duck session. That means after the election and after a new United States Senate is elected and after a new United States House of Representatives is elected. Then the people who no longer represent the will of the American people come back to do the essential business of the United States of America, but they don't have the support any longer of the voters who have chosen some different people.

But the two pieces of legislation I am talking about that were attached to the DOD authorization bill are the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which is something that was implemented under President Bill Clinton back in the era when he wanted to put gays in the military, found that he ran into a political buzz saw, and settled for a compromise. And I didn't support it at the time, to be straight about that, Madam Speaker, but in retrospect it was a pretty good policy. Essentially it was we have people with different inclinations, and those who come to serve America can do so without announcing their sexual preferences. And as long as they keep that to themselves, they can serve in the United States military. That policy has served our military well for these last 15 or so years that it has been in place. I suspect it has actually been longer than that. Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Bill Clinton's policy.

Now, because of the activism of the homosexual community, they have pushed an effort, and the President has made a campaign promise that he will repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and recruit into the military openly gay people. That is a social experiment with our military, Madam Speaker. The military is not a place to conduct social experiments. One would think that our military personnel should have a say on this. One should do a study. There has been a request for that study through the Department of Defense to get the results of what our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines think of this, and then make a determination on whether to go forward with a different policy.

I am hearing continually Don't Ask Don't Tell worked. Opening it up undermines the effectiveness of our military and it breaks down their readiness, and it is bad for America's national security. That seems to be the tone that comes from the enlisted personnel. It comes from some of the officer personnel. But we know that when you are, let's see, one of the joint chiefs, for example, or if you are the Secretary of Defense, and the President of the United States is your commander in chief, and if he should tell you in a Cabinet meeting, for example, that you are going to support the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or you are going to be mum on your opinion and keep it to yourself, so this repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that opens up access to the military for gays, so that comes about and that happens. That is what takes place.

Our officers in uniform take their orders from, on up through the ranks, the commander in chief at the top. They get the message from the top. So you don't hear the straight answer from them that we like to think that we are getting from our military personnel. I believe if you could hear that straight answer, you would hear a far different tone coming out of our Joint Chiefs, for example. But the study should be done. It should not be an experiment to play with. What has happened over in the Senate is that they refused to invoke cloture because it is inappropriate and improper to stick the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the DOD authorization bill. If Harry Reid and others believe it should be repealed and we should open up the military to openly gay people, then they should put it up as a stand-alone piece of legislation. They should allow for amendments on it. They should debate it, and they should allow for a recorded vote. And why not do it right now, Harry Reid? Why not bring that up right now as a stand-alone piece of legislation? Why not roll it out on the floor of the United States Senate right now? And if you can pass it over there, send it over here to the House, and I hope that Nancy Pelosi picks that up. I hope Speaker Pelosi picks that up and runs it out here for a debate and a stand-alone vote so the American people can see where these Members of Congress stand.

When you roll it into and you hide it in a DOD authorization bill, then you are trying to push a social activist policy without the accountability of a recorded vote. And that is what the Senators objected to, and that is why they voted no on cloture. That is why Don't Ask, Don't Tell will not be repealed, at least in this period of time between now and the November elections. If there is a pledge over there to bring it up in a lame duck session, we know how those pledges work. If they do so, a policy of that magnitude in a lame duck session, after watching the dynamics in the United States Senate change because of the elections that will take place election night in November, and after watching a change that will take place here in the House of Representatives, to come forward with a bunch of lame ducks and try to pass legislation that is rejected by the American people would be another insult. It would be another affront to the American voters, the American taxpayers, to American citizens.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell needs to stand. That is what the American people want. That is what the military wants. And there is a study out there that needs to be completed. I want to look at the results of that, and I want to look at the methodology of it. I am not necessarily endorsing the results. I have not seen them, nor have I seen the methodology.

But I believe, Madam Speaker, that our military personnel that put their

lives on the line every day, that strap on that vest and that helmet and that uniform and face the heat and the cold and the bullets and the shrapnel and the IEDs, and all of the things that put them at peril, deserve better than a social experiment taking place here in the halls of Congress, just to pay off a political constituency group before an election. That is what offended the Senators over there today who voted no on cloture.

The other component in that legislation was brought up for the same reason. It is called the DREAM Act. It is one of those things that happens. We come up with bad ideas for legislation here in this Congress, and we try to put nice-sounding titles on them so somehow or another if it has a good name, it has a better chance of becoming law. Well, if we had named it the Selective Amnesty For a Certain Class of Illegals Act, I don't think it would have had much chance to get to where it has. But it is called the DREAM Act. I would like to be able to say that you are dreaming if you think you can impose amnesty on 2 or more million people that came here illegally and set it up as a reward just because the compassion of your heart says that is what you should do. The people that support the DREAM Act are the people that are looking at this thing in the same way they are supporting the broader overall amnesty policy. What is the bottom line motivation? We would like to think that we are all looking at this policy from a constitutional perspective and a rule of law perspective, and setting up statutes so there is a framework that strengthens America and that respects the rule of law. But instead, we have seen the immigration law in America has simply been pushed off the edge and hijacked towards the line of opening up our border for the cynical political purposes of wanting to provide for people to come here and vote that will vote for a certain party.

Madam Speaker, I heard this about 3 years ago, and I heard it right outside this House of Representatives out here on the West Lawn when there were about 150,000 people that came to protest they wanted their amnesty. Many of them presumably were illegal. But Senator Ted Kennedy, alive and relatively well at the time, went out to speak to that group of roughly 150,000 people. He said to them: Some say report to be deported. Then he waited for the interpreter.

Then he said: I say report to become an American citizen. And then he waited for it to be interpreted. And then there was a cheer and applause that went up from the 150,000, the multitudes that came to the Capitol to demand that they receive amnesty and exemption from America's immigration laws.

But I report this to you, Madam Speaker, because I heard clearly that day the clarion call that came from Senator Teddy Kennedy that said: We are going to give you all amnesty, and we are going to give you all citizenship, and we are going to let you all vote to redirect the direction of America, and just know that I represent the Democrats, and remember that we are the ones that gave you amnesty and the path to citizenship. So report to become an American citizen, remember who said so, Teddy Kennedy, vote for his party.

Now there are some people on my side who got this wrong. I have said for a long time that the driving force on immigration here in the United States is this.

On the one side, it's kind of like a set of barbells. Over here on one side, we have business that thinks that they've somehow got a right to cheap labor. Among these businesses, there are Democrats and Republicans, increasingly numbers of Democrats on the Big Business side of this who want the cheap labor. Yet there is a business interest. It's all the way over on this side of the barbell. Then you've got the bar through the middle, and on the other side of the barbell are those who want open borders and amnesty for the sake of all the political power that it brings them.

Now, Madam Speaker, that might be something that doesn't exactly resonate when I say that, that illegal immigration gives people political power in America, and I know I have to explain that. It's this:

We've already completed the census. We've counted everybody in the United States. I hope we have. Now redistricting is beginning all the way across America. According to a CIS report of a couple, three years ago, there are between nine and 11 congressional seats in America that would shift from the States they are in because we count people rather than citizens for the purposes of reapportionment in America.

If you go across the South to States like Florida, Texas, California--and perhaps Arizona--Florida, Texas and California, by my recollection, would be States that would lose a seat if you were to count citizens rather than just people. Those seats, those nine to 11 in the aggregate altogether--and there would be other States that would lose seats--would be scattered back around America and reapportioned to the States that are a little bit short right now. Utah, for example, is on the cusp of picking up a seat. Well, if we counted citizens instead of people--``people'' is a class that includes illegals, the people who shouldn't be here--then there would be States like Utah and Indiana that would pick up a seat. A State like Iowa is more likely to keep the number of seats that it has, but the seats would be scattered across the United States in such a way that there would be a nine to 11 shift. There would be nine to 11 congressional seats that would shift, and they would shift from the hands, according to that analysis, from Democrats into the hands of Republicans.

So what do we know about this?

Each congressional district has, roughly, 700,000 people. Let's just say, if you had 600,000 illegals in your 700,000-person congressional district, you would only have a universe of 100,000 people who you could draw from to get votes. So, when you look around America and you see that some of us get elected with 30,000 or 40,000 votes and others like me require about 120,000 votes to win an election, you begin to understand that the high populations of illegals within some of these congressional districts have a voice. They have a voice here in this Congress. Even though they supposedly can't vote, they have a voice in Congress. They have leverage because they create congressional seats in places where there is sympathy for illegal immigrants. That is how the political power comes. That is one of the ways that it comes.

Then you also have the businesses that depend on the illegal labor, and that's just those who use the labor. There are the businesses then that market to the illegal labor, and they begin to see that they are dependent upon that flow of cash that goes through in that fashion, and now you've got a constituency group that advocates for open borders. It is for their self-interests, but they advocate for open borders for their self-interest purposes whether it is for the political power that Teddy Kennedy so clearly laid out the clarion call for--that's this side of the barbell--or whether it's the weights over on this side, the business interests, that believe they have a right to cheap labor.

By the way, that labor is subsidized by the taxpayer because cheap labor can't sustain itself in this society any longer. This society has become a welfare state. I mentioned the barbells--cheap labor's interest on this side, advocating for amnesty, and the people over on this side, advocating for amnesty because they get a massive amount of political power.

Here in the middle is this barbell, the bar for the barbell, and it gets squeezed. That is the middle class. That bar that holds up either end is the middle class in America. The blue collar people, the middle- income people, the people who just want to buy modest homes and raise their families and give them a chance to go off to college, to go to work every day, to church on Sunday, and to live life as the American Dream are being squeezed. The middle class is being crushed in the middle of this.

There are the people who, let's say, emerge from high school, whether they be Americans who drop out or those who finish and don't go on to higher education. There was a time--oh, there was a happier time--when a person who decided that he just didn't want to stay in the educational system any longer, but who was a hard and smart worker, could walk from that school and go over and get a job in a factory or in a

processing plant and punch that time clock and go to work for 8 hours a day and do that for 40 or more hours a week and make a respectable living and take care of his family. Maybe he pinched his pennies and paid for his house eventually, drove a respectable car and lived life.

Those times aren't entirely gone, but they are diminished dramatically because, first, we have expanded the professional class in America, the professional class that believes that now they have a right to live in a gated community and to hire cheap labor to take care of their lawns. We have that class of people that has expanded. Then over on the other side we've got the illegals and the low-skilled people who are more mobile than the American population. They can travel to the jobs more quickly because they're not tied to any hard assets like real estate, for example. So they can get in their vans or minibuses and go to Washington and pick apples if they decide to do that, and their wage scale is about half of what it would be if we had a tighter labor supply. Illegals are undercutting the lower-skilled labor in America, and they're taking away the opportunities for those Americans who don't want to go on to a higher education and take on more professional jobs.

There used to be--and in my mind there always will be--great pride in those working men and women. They put their hands to the task. A little dirt under your fingernails and some calluses on your hands is an honorable thing. All work is honorable--all productive work is honorable--but this society has now morphed into a welfare state.

I want to go back to the welfare state part; but when I crossed over to this side, I mentioned the gated communities. Think of what has happened to the elitist attitude, the elitist attitude that says, Well, I don't have to worry about the security for America. I don't have to worry about walking down the streets anywhere in America and being mugged or having illegal drugs pushed on my children because I will live in this protected environment, in a gated community, with a fence around the house and with, maybe, steel iron bars with spikes on them on top of the fence. That's out there. Then they raise their children to go off to Ivy League schools so they can come back and live in other gated communities. They live in an isolated America--upper class people, professional class people, living in isolated America.

But you know what?

They open the gates for somebody who is illegal to come in and fix their roofs or to trim their lawns or to work in their gardens or to clean their mansions, to take care of their laundry and to run errands. I mean, we heard Colin Powell just the other day say that, first of all, he supports the DREAM Act. He also said that he needs the illegals to take care of his place. What's he thinking? This is a man who I thought could have been, and perhaps at one time should have been, President of the United States. Now he is advocating that we grant amnesty to the people who are here illegally, and he is openly stating that he needs illegals to take care of his home.

Madam Speaker, if you get to the point of desperation where your house is so big and your home is such an expansive mansion that you can't go out and cut your own grass or trim around your own flowers or paint the trim around the windows or do the things that you do and if you must have servants to take care of that place and if you can't afford to hire legal workers to take care of that place, I would suggest you put it up for sale and go get an apartment somewhere where you can manage the maintenance of it yourself if you have to cross the line and break the law to do the maintenance on your home.

I'm shocked that a man of that stature would make a statement like that. Furthermore, I'd put a little reminder out there for the General Powells and others in the world to think about the DREAM Act and about what the DREAM Act really means. It means this:

If you are under the age of 35 and if you were brought illegally into this country before you were 16, then you are not at fault and are no longer accountable as long as you would agree to go into the military for 2 years or would agree to go off to college for a couple of years. If you will do that, then we'll give you that path to citizenship because, after all, you really were nurtured in this country, legal or illegal, and we'll give you that path to citizenship. You just have to agree to go on to an education a little higher than high school or go off to the military for a couple of years. Now, I don't know how you would sign up for a couple of years to do that, but I'm trustful that there is a special program that way.

And we will chase you down with your citizenship papers and get you to become a complete citizen. And if you're a resident of a State, then you get to enjoy the in-State tuition discounts. We know that this has happened around the country in a number of places. California is one of those places.

Iowa tried to pass the DREAM Act. I heard about what was going on there. The DREAM Act started. The foundation of it was--and, I believe, still remains--in-State tuition discounts for kids who are in the United States illegally and then suspends the enforcement of the law against them so that they can't be deported as long as they are going to college--or now we expand it to the military.

Now, think about this. An in-State tuition discount for someone who is in the United States illegally, that's the equivalent of a scholarship. They're not a lawful resident of this respective State, so you can't give them in-State tuition discounts without a statutory change, without changing the law. So they want to change the law.

So, let's just say the tuition to go to--who shall I pick on? I'm reluctant to pick on anybody, actually, but let's say tuition to go to the University of Iowa as out-of-State tuition, $20,000 a year; in- State tuition, $10,000 a year. And we have someone who is in the country illegally, who was brought here the day before their 16th birthday, and they had been in America for 3 years. I think that's another one of the qualifiers. So we'll say to them, Well, you wanted to be a good citizen, so we're going to give you this in-State tuition discount to go to the University of Iowa, and it's going to save you $10,000 a year. That's the equivalent of a $10,000-a-year scholarship fund for someone who is not in the United States legally.

Now, think--to the General Powells of the world and others who think that the DREAM Act is anything other than some form of class amnesty, think what that is like then to have--what if we had ICE come up and deliver that de facto scholarship for $10,000 a year. We just put them on the road in their Humvee and they can drive out there and we are going to hand these out to those people that came here the day before their 16th birthday--it was their parents' decision, not theirs--and we will give them a de facto scholarship of $10,000 a year. Well, that's a great deal; right? And then they go off to college and sit down in a classroom and we feel so good about ourselves.

But we should keep in mind that somebody wanted to go across the river, across the State border and go to the University of Iowa and take classes at that university but they were not a resident of Iowa any more than the illegal that's the beneficiary of the DREAM Act is a resident of Iowa. And so they have to pay the out-of-State tuition at $20,000 a year, paying twice the tuition. They're paying, over the course of a 4-year education, a $40,000 premium to go to a school out of State--like, let's just say, Illinois to Iowa--a $40,000 premium, while at the same time this other student that sits in the desk next to them has been delivered a scholarship that's a $40,000 discount, a $40,000 difference between the two. And if ICE would have driven up with their Humvee to deliver the de facto scholarship, they would have had to deport that student because they would have been in violation of America's immigration law, unlawfully present in the United States.

Now, that should be enough to bring a pause to someone who has worn as many stars as General Powell has and deserves to wear. But let me take it another step for those General Powells and others in the world, Madam Speaker.

Let's set that illegal student down in a classroom with their de facto scholarship of $10,000 a year sitting in a

classroom. Now, let's just say it's not a regular student that came across the river from Illinois. Let's, instead, think about what will inevitably happen. Inevitably, it will be the widow or widower of someone who has given their life in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan to protect our freedom and liberty. And this widow or widower wants to go off to college to sit in this classroom to upgrade their education so they can take care of their family, take care of those children that perhaps lost a father or a mother, and they're paying the premium of out-of-State tuition, $40,000 more for a 4-year education. And they're sitting at a desk next to an illegal student that, if the law were applied, would have been deported but, instead, gets a tuition discount.

Now, how do you reconcile that scenario with the warrior's widow sitting at a desk paying a premium of $40,000 and the illegal--that's eligible for deportation by every standard except the DREAM Act-- getting a $40,000 discount on that tuition, Madam Speaker? That's an outrage. That's an outrage to do that to those Americans who want to go to school out of State. It's an outrage to do that to the families of our veterans. It's an outrage to do that to the rule of law.

I will submit that the people that are for the DREAM Act haven't thought about this on a rational basis. They've simply thought about it from whatever their particular sympathy basis is.

This class of people that are here illegally are here because most of them, the class that is part of the DREAM Act target--because most of them, their parents brought them here against their will. Yes, I concede that point. But where do you enforce the law if you don't enforce it against someone who is 35 years old and was brought here to the United States the day before their 16th birthday? Do you enforce it the day after? Or you can take it back the other way and you can say, if somebody was brought to the United States the day after they were born, should they be deported? Yes. Because that's the line. We drew that line and that's the law, and we can't grant amnesty. We set the standards. And because we haven't enforced the law, we set up, instead, the effect of a magnet that brings illegal people into the United States of America, and it is essentially a magnet that turns out to be a reward for breaking the law.

So, if the DREAM Act passes and you're pregnant and outside the United States of America and you can't quite get here in time to have the baby, don't you know that you can just sneak in and keep that child and raise them here and nurture them here--maybe you only get them in when they are 14 years old and they go to a school in America for 3 years. They qualify for the DREAM Act, presto. They can get an in-State tuition discount, a college education. They can go into the military. They can get their citizenship. And then what? Then they can start under the family reunification plan, going back and pulling their whole extended family into the United States under the family reunification. And that's out of our control.

Madam Speaker, when you look at the numbers, America's legal immigration standards only have between 7 and 11 percent of the people that come into the United States legally. Only 7 to 11 percent of them are based on merit. The balance of that is based on some other connection, either the visa lottery or the family reunification plan or some other category, but not based on skill sets and merit.

Now, if we look at some of the other countries and the policies that they have--you can look at Canada, United Kingdom--Australia, for example, they set up a scoring points system that rewards people for being able to contribute to the host country.

Now, I have long said that the immigration policy in the United States of America should be designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States. That should be, actually, the policy of--any sovereign nation of the world should establish an immigration policy for the purposes of enhancing the economic, social, and cultural well-being of that particular sovereign state. In this case, it's the United States of America.

We should also understand that one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. And if we have contempt for the rule of law, if we have some of the highest profile people in America openly speak about hiring illegals to take care of their home and at the same time advocate for the DREAM Act, which is amnesty for a specific class of people, reward for illegal behavior, a magnet for bringing more children into the United States that would be here illegally, and getting them to qualify under the DREAM Act so they can go off and be funded partly by the taxpayers and go off to college, or the argument that comes from the Department of Defense, which is that it's good for our military readiness to have the DREAM Act. That's another Colin Powell argument, And it does come out of the Pentagon to some degree. Now, how can it be that a Nation of 306 million people can't field an army without granting citizenship to people that are here illegally?

I mean, I could not have pitched such an idea, Madam Speaker. I can't with a straight face make such a proposal.

This military is working with a social experimentation agenda. And who is to think that the military, the Pentagon, and the United States is for the DREAM Act when they have a Commander in Chief that tells them what they think. They're for the DREAM Act because it's important for military readiness. I don't take them that seriously any more. I don't think they are able to deliver their own objective opinions into the media without having to pay a consequence to the Commander in Chief, or whatever kind of retribution that would come out of the White House.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Again, experiment in the military. Can you get a straight answer out of the Pentagon any more with the Chicago-style politics of the Commander in Chief? I say not.

And now maybe this looks like it's just a coincidence that we come across the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell--both of those social experiments wrapped up under the Department of Defense Authorization bill and rejected by the majority--I believe it was the majority, at least. No. It was rejected at least on a cloture vote in the United States Senate. And you think that those two, Madam Speaker, might be anomalies.

I will make another point to tell you. It's a pattern. Here's the thing that supports my conclusion. There's been an effort to take calories out of the diets of our young people, an effort to reduce the calories accessible to our young people by 1.5 trillion calories. I think that's a year, but I don't know. Take a couple of Doritos out of the Dorito bag, thinking those kids are only going to go for one bag and not two. Reduce the calories in a Power Bar from 150 calories down to 90, thinking that overweight, voracious feeder that you have that's 16 years old isn't going to go for a second Power Bar. If the kids want the calories, they're going to eat them. Reducing the size of the servings just means they'll open up more packages.

But the military stepped in in support of this effort, this healthy youth effort. Data that has been reported, at least, says that Americans kids are--30 percent of them are overweight. And the Pentagon has said it affects our national readiness, that we can't recruit young people to come into the military, can't recruit enough of them because too many of them are overweight and can't meet the physical standards.

Madam Speaker, I'll submit that you can take an overweight 16-, 17-, 18-, or 20-year-old, and they're still a pretty good physical specimen even though they've got a little bit of weight hanging over their belt. And it's not a security risk for the United States of America. We can solve that problem. If it came down to not having enough people to put on the uniform because some of them were too fat, let's just get some basic training uniforms for some that are a little bigger and put them on those young people and put them out there in basic training a little while longer. Once they're on the military diet and the military exercise plan, we've seen millions of them come back home squared away, upright, gut gone, toned up, in shape, proud, with a look in their eye that they're another noble soldier and patriot.

This is not a national security risk because 30 percent of our kids are overweight. This is an indication of what

goes on when the White House starts to pour down in a cascade through the executive branch of government an ideology that's inconsistent with the military.

It's inconsistent to force openly gay policy on our Department of Defense. And there isn't any pattern out there that could show us that that would be a successful result.

It's inconsistent with the rule of law to propose the idea that for national security purposes, we should pass the DREAM Act and put these people that came here illegally into the military and give them citizenship along the way. That undermines the American dream.

It's inconsistent to think that a general that has worn four stars honorably would think that the rule of law doesn't apply when it's time to hire somebody to cut your grass. It's got to apply every time. Equal justice under the law. Lady justice is blindfolded. She stands there with the scale. She's blindfolded. It must be that way or America is undermined. And this broader philosophy of illegal immigration and how to deal with it is something that I'm invested in pretty deeply.

I want to roll over if I can, Madam Speaker, as to what's going on downstairs right now in the basement of this Capitol. There is a pledge to America that's being rolled out. It's being discussed by the Republicans here in the United States Congress. It is something that brings back memories of the Contract with America that was rolled out here in 1994 about this same time in September.

And this is, I understand after doing a quick Web search, named Pledge to America. And now, I don't know all that's in that that's being unfolded right now. I just know what I wanted to have in that, what I hope is in it.

I'm hopeful that the document is a clear document, a document that says we have made these promises, we're going to keep these promises.

And I expect that there's going to be language in there that says that we are going to support a 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, all of it. Pull it out root and branch, lock, stock, and barrel, so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare DNA left behind, because this toxic stew of ObamaCare has become a malignant tumor in our land. And it threatens to metastasize.

It's affecting us already. It's driving up our premiums for health insurance, especially for young people that most can't afford it. It's got to go. It's got to be pulled out by the roots. It's got to be eradicated. And that's got to be step one, plank one. It's got to be our promise, our pledge to America that we will repeal ObamaCare in its entirely. Not the most egregious aspects of it, not a component here and a component there, not chipping away at it and leaving other pieces there--because if that should happen, that foundation of ObamaCare then, as I said, it's a malignant tumor. It's a cancer. Then it metastasizes. It goes into this robust growth and it swallows up and consumes and chokes off our liberty and our freedom and takes away our personal choices, and already under the statute that exists today, shrinks down our health savings accounts and cuts our ability to contribute to them by more than half and almost eliminates catastrophic insurance and takes away personal choices one after another after another.

I'm hopeful that repeal of ObamaCare as a stand-alone--rip it out by the roots, follow through on discharge position number 11, which is here, Madam Speaker, at the desk, and any Member of Congress that wants to establish that they're opposed to ObamaCare and they want to see it repealed can come down here to the well and ask the Clerk of the House for Discharge Petition Number 11--that's legislation that I introduced to repeal ObamaCare--and sign that discharge position. There are at least 173 signatures on Discharge Position Number 11, which repeals ObamaCare.

And the last language of the bill--it's only 40 words--it says, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That's the quote.

So it pulls it all out by the roots, and it's what Americans want. Pick your number, but well over 60 percent of Americans want to see repeal of ObamaCare. I see numbers that go up to 73 percent that want to see repeal of ObamaCare. So those who want to keep it, they're not the balance of the difference. If it's 73 percent that want to repeal, it doesn't mean that 27 percent want to keep it. It means that some of those 27 percent want to keep it and some of them are undecided.

But if a Member voted for the Speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, and the San Francisco agenda, ObamaCare, cap-and-tax, and others, put that vote up--the most important vote that any Member of Congress ever makes is for their leader, their Speaker. And if that vote went up for Speaker Pelosi, it enabled the San Francisco-Obama agenda to be forced to the floor of this House against the will of the American people, who let everyone here know their objections in a constitutional and peaceful and litter-free way.

But still their hearts were hardened and they imposed ObamaCare on us, even though the bill itself could not have passed that night except that the President promised that he would write an Executive order that would amend the language that was coming to the floor. That was part of the deal. And part of the deal was that there would be a reconciliation package that would be passed in the Senate that would circumvent the filibuster that would come to the House to seek to fix some more of the problems.

Oh, no, a bill didn't come here to the floor of the House that had the support of the majority of the Members. A bill came to the floor that was conditioned upon an executive order by the President and another bill coming from the United States Senate that then satisfied just barely enough. Didn't satisfy any Republicans, and it dissatisfied 34 Democrats. Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare.

All of those 34 Democrats voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. Many of them told their constituents in the 2008 election that they wouldn't commit to voting for Speaker Pelosi, that they were an independent voice. We even have one at least that's running television ads that says he's an independent voice that's willing to stand up to President Obama, and stand up to Nancy Pelosi, and vote against ObamaCare, but at the same time vote for Nancy Pelosi.

Now, when you do something like enable Speaker Pelosi's agenda by voting her into that position, and then when you see cap-and-tax come down on top of us that penalizes coal country in a big way, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, some of those States come to mind, Wyoming, you see that agenda being driven out of the Speaker of the House, when you put up the vote, stood up here and audio out of your voice said the name, Pelosi for Speaker, that's the most important vote that gets cast in any individual Congress in any 2-year period. And it enables the agenda of the leader, Speaker Pelosi.

And then when that same individual votes ``no'' on ObamaCare and postures himself to say he's independent, willing to stand up to the President and the Speaker of the House because here's the signal, voted against ObamaCare, that's no sign of independence. That's a sign of being let off the hook by the Speaker. That's the sign of a permission slip to vote ``no'' so you can go back and tell your constituents that you are an independent voice.

The distinction here is we have a discharge petition. And a signature on the discharge petition says you mean it. It says that you want to see the bill come to the floor unamended, with an up or down vote to repeal ObamaCare. One hundred seventy-two Republicans signed the discharge petition number 11. One Democrat has signed discharge petition number 11 so far. There are others out there that are going to need to say to their constituents, listen, I really do stand up to Speaker Pelosi. Watch me. I will go down and ask the Clerk of the House for discharge petition number 11 and get my pen out, and I will sign my name on that. That means that if it comes to the floor that I'll vote to repeal ObamaCare. That's what sits out there right now, Madam Speaker, and that's the distinction.

But I believe that we will move forward with a pledge to America that repeals ObamaCare, rips it out by the roots in its entirety without equivocation. And I trust that's what's being discussed downstairs as we have this discussion up here. I hope and expect. That's one of my requests.

Another one would be that we pass English as the official language of the United States of America. That's an issue that has somewhere between 83 and 87 percent support all across this country. We haven't discussed it very much in this Congress because we know who holds the gavel. But Americans want to have an official language. An official language of the United States needs to be English. And there are at least 28 States that have established English as the official language. And it's no longer possible to drive from Mexico to Canada without driving through a State that has English as the official language. That's how the map looks when you happen to look at the map.

English is the official language of the State of Iowa. It's the official language of Nebraska. It's the official language of 26 other States. That's because of the simplicity that every other country in the world understands you have to do business in a language, and that if you encourage a multitude of languages and require the interpretation in those languages that costs a lot of money and causes a lot of confusion.

And for a long time people that watch and study humanity understand that a common language is the most powerful unifying force known to man. I mean when they were working on the Tower of Babel, God understood it. He looked down at the Tower of Babel as they were trying to build that tower into the heavens to try to achieve heaven without going through God. And it was a blasphemy towards him. And God looked down at the Tower of Babel and he said, behold, they are one people. They speak all one language. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. That's how powerful one language was. And so to break up the Tower of Babel, God gave them, caused them to babble, and scattered them to the four winds. And there is at least a Biblical belief that that's where the different languages came from that have been located around the world.

But we know that if we come together as Americans and we speak all one language we can communicate quickly, we can understand each other, we don't need to go through expensive interpretations. And we also are listening to the advertisements for different means of learning foreign languages under the immersion process. It's the best way, the immersion process.

Now, I encourage the studying and the learning of languages. I think it's great that Americans take that upon themselves to do that. It's important for our foreign trade and our international travel. It's important for our military and our State Department. It's important for international relations. But a Nation should have a language where you can go from corner to corner in that Nation and expect that you can communicate in one language.

If it had been Swahili, then so be it, Swahili should be our official language. But it's not. It's English. But speaking of Swahili, it happens that in some places like Kenya, for example, they do speak some Swahili, but the official language of Kenya is English. And they are grateful for it. It's brought so much along the way.

So I am hopeful that this very simple, common sense, powerful, unifying force of language, official English, which has a massive numbers of cosponsors on it and a vast support of the American people, even though we haven't debated it during the time that Nancy Pelosi's been the Speaker of the House in a real legitimate way anyway--there is a lot of things we haven't debated, won't be allowed to come to the floor--I am hopeful that that pledge to America has official English in it.

I believe that we should have a House rule that gives a priority that we actually first pass a budget resolution. But I also believe that we should have a House rule that gives priority to the balanced budget that's offered so that it can be offered and it can be debated here on the floor and brought to a recorded vote so the American people can see how hard it is to balance this budget. It's hard, Madam Speaker. And it's going to be really painful to bring the thing to a balanced budget. And if we do it all at once there will be some serious whiplash in this country.

Now, I voted for a balanced budget here. I have asked for one to come to the floor. We brought one under the Republican Study Committee. It first started out balancing in 10 years and then 9 years. It wasn't aggressive enough to suit me. But at least it was a vote on a balanced budget. And we started to debate what it takes to balance the budget. And if you don't do that you never get there. If you don't define your goal and your target, you never get there.

So I would want to see a rule come here to the floor that we could support in a bipartisan way that would give precedence towards a balanced budget to be offered first. And if the majority or the other party, be they majority or minority, offers a balanced budget, then that budget would take precedence over the budget that's offered that is let's say the chosen budget from the majority of the Budget Committee. So that we have a record on what it takes to balance the budget and who's willing to vote for a balanced budget. And I would think that we could get together on that in a bipartisan way.

And then we need to work to pay down the national debt. And I want to see the day that we have a balanced budget and we start to pay down this national debt. That's the third thing I would like to see in the pledge to America.

The fourth thing is I want to put an end to Federal funding of abortions. And I would phrase it this way. I want to statutorily prohibit all Federal funds from going to any entity that provides abortion services or counseling. That simple. And that should have, I think, strong bipartisan support. And that's been demonstrated in some votes here in this Congress. So then it would enshrine the Hyde amendment and the Mexico City policy. And we are going to repeal ObamaCare so we wouldn't have to go after that specific component of ObamaCare that ends up funding abortions. I will call that the Ben Nelson language.

Fifth thing I would like to see in the pledge to America that's being unfolded right now as we speak, Madam Speaker, I would like to pass legislation that modernizes E-Verify. E-Verify right now is you are limited. You can only use E-Verify with a new hire. So when you look at someone's application and you can't verify whether they can work in the United States legally, then you have to give them the job. And then once you give them the job, they are on your payroll. They qualified for your insurance and all of the burden that comes along with bringing somebody into your employment.

Then and only then can you run their data through E-Verify and it might come back and it can't confirm. And if it does that, you have probably got someone on your hands that can't legally work in the United States. And so you give them their time to cure their data and if they can't get it cured, then you have to fire them.

I just simply, with the legislation that I am hopeful that we are able to bring, probably not this year, next year, to fix E-Verify so that you can use it on current employees, legacy employees, so someone can decide I want to clean up all my workforce. I have had some people that have been here for a year or two or 5 or 10. Some may have been here illegally. I just want to have a legal workforce. I want to run all their names through E-Verify. Why not? Why not give the employer the tool.

The second thing is why not let them use E-Verify with a prospective employee with a legitimate job offer? We have that under a drug testing law in Iowa, and it's completely without any litigation or complaint. If you show up and you want a job, you can go through all of the hoops and they can say to you, I have done the interview, you have passed all the tests but this one. You have got to go off and take a drug test before I can put you to work. That's what we do in Iowa, and no complaints, no lawsuits. It's the employer's prerogative, and I encourage them to do that. They should be able to provide a drug-free workplace. We should also be able to provide, as employers, an illegal- free workplace, modernizing E-Verify so it can be used on current legacy employees and with a legitimate job offer is a legitimate thing to do.

The third component that we need to do, Madam Speaker, out of this is we

need to clarify that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not deductible for Federal income tax purposes. Doing that allows the IRS, during a normal audit, to run the Social Security numbers and the information data of the employees of the audited company through E- Verify. And if they come back, they can't lawfully work in the United States--and we will give the employer safe harbor if they use E-Verify. Then the IRS can deny the business expense.

This is a piece of legislation that I have drafted called the New IDEA Act. So the net result is this, if you paid out a million dollars in wages, and the IRS--well, let's just say multiple millions--but the IRS has determined that a million dollars of those wages have gone to illegals, then they can deny that as a business expense. And we know when that happens it goes over on the profit side of the ledger, and it becomes taxable as income.

So now you have got income tax to pay on a million dollars instead of having a million-dollar deduction that avoids that income tax. The corporate income tax on that is a profit, plus the interest, plus the penalty, calculates out to be, if you are a $10 an hour illegal, you become about a $16 an hour illegal.

When you get to that point, now you have lots of employers that have decided that they want to make a decision to clean up their workforce and hire only legals and that shuts off the magnet here in the United States in an effective way.

The last thing I want to do, right before I yield, is I want to sell off all of this property that the United States has taken over and nationalized, including the shares of General Motors and Chrysler.

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to the balance of my time?

I yield to the gentleman from California.

I want to thank the gentleman from California for hustling here to the floor to weigh in.

I yield to my other friend in life, Dr. Paul Broun.

I thank the gentlemen from Georgia and from California for coming in to weigh in on this. We are here at a time when we have got to reestablish the rule of law, and we have got to shut off the bleeding at the border, and we have got to shut off the jobs magnet.

This bill, the New IDEA Act, does shut down, if not completely off, the jobs magnet. And New IDEA stands for the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act.

Madam Speaker, we often say here there are no new ideas here in Congress, that it's just recycled old ideas. Well, this was kind of an audacious move to declare it to be the New IDEA Act, but it defines what goes on.

The New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, right now, we have not eliminated illegal deductions.

Instead, we have the IRS that's not calling the shots on this. It's letting the deductions come, so people can hire illegals with impunity. It really is against the law to deduct wages to illegals, but they are not enforcing it.

Another piece that this law does is it requires the IRS and the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to set up a cooperative arrangement. So they have to sit down at the table and decide, well, here are these no-match Social Security numbers. We will roll these over here in the Department of Homeland Security so they can go check them out when they go look at the employers, and the IRS can take those numbers as well when they bring it into their audit and bring the focus on so that we are coordinating the agencies in America to get at the goal.

The goal is to enforce the law. The goal should not be to advance amnesty by the DREAM Act or any other way. And we cannot be the great Nation that we are yet to become if we don't take our path up that way by supporting and strengthening the rule of law, one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism. That's the argument, amnesty or the rule of law. It's two choices.

And it looks now like the DREAM Act is not coming at us until perhaps in a lame duck session. If it does, out of that Senate in a lame duck session, that is an offense to the American people to bring a bill like that with impunity against the American people when you no longer represent them because of the election that will take place in November.

So, Madam Speaker, again, I thank my colleagues for coming to the floor. I appreciate your attention on this matter. I appreciate the American people's attention on this matter, and I believe they will stand with the rule of law and against amnesty.

Mr. Speaker, we all agree that those who heroically responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks should get the treatment, compensation, and liability protection they need. The American people are grateful to those the ground zero workers and the emergency responders that worked heroically, day and night, for months in rescue, recovery and cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center site. Unfortunately, the approach this bill takes to accomplish these goals is unreasonable and irresponsible.

During committee hearings on reenacting the 9/11 Fund, I expressed the view that if the fund is reenacted, it must be done in a manner that properly compensates the victims while at the same time protecting the taxpayers.

First, I asserted that if the Fund is reenacted it must provide adequate compensation to the victims without handing the keys to the U.S. Treasury to trial lawyers. Unfortunately, this bill does not contain these protections. Rather, the bill allows trial lawyers to request compensation from the fund for work that is not directly related to their clients' recovery from the fund.

Second, I stated that if the Fund is reenacted it must include provisions that will protect the U.S. taxpayers. However, instead of protecting the taxpayers, this bill abdicates Congress' legislative authority to the unreviewable and virtually unbounded discretion of the Special Master.

Third, I counseled that if the Fund is reenacted it should be for a reasonable, but limited, period of time. Once again the authors of this legislation did not listen to my advice; rather, they propose to keep the fund open for 21 years despite congressional testimony by Special Master Ken Feinberg that ``no latent claims need such an extended date.''

Finally, I suggested that if the fund is reenacted it should be paid for. Apparently, the bill's authors listened to me on this count, but unfortunately, rather than choosing a pay-for that protects U.S. taxpayers, they have chosen one that will actually cost American jobs.

We could be considering a reasonable consensus proposal to reenact the 9/11 Fund today. Instead, I have to urge my colleagues to oppose this legislation because not only does it fail to protect the taxpayers, but it also fails to ensure that those REAL victims that answered the call of duty on September 11, 2001, will actually get the care that they deserve. Unfortunately, we have brought a bill to the floor today that will cost American jobs and creates gimmicks to hide the bill's true cost.

The taxpayers and those who responded to the 9/11 attacks deserve better.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 473, had I voted I would have voted ``no'' on the bill that opposes the mission of our troops and our foreign policy.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. It is always an honor and one of the reasons I try to come down here often and convey the values that emanate from the Midwest; and hopefully some of the people across the rest of the country that don't adhere to those values can index with the things that we believe in.

But what I have found out, Mr. Speaker, as I have traveled around the country is that we have a tremendous amount of common values, from corner to corner of America and up through the Midwest as well. When I think of the States that I have been to in helping other candidates in trying to convey a message, from the Northeast to the Southeast to the South, up through the Midwest, down to the Southwest and off to the West, what I have found is that the people that show up, that care about our Constitution, the constitutional conservatives, the newly energized Tea Party groups that are out there, the 912 Project people that

are there, the independents that aren't affiliated that care a lot about America and fiscal responsibility, when they show up, they show up with their American flags, they show up with their yellow Gadsden flags, the Don't Tread on Me flags; they carry a Constitution in their pocket or on their heart; and they know that if this country is going to be refurbished and put back together again, that we need to go back to the Constitution and this Congress needs to adhere to our oath to the Constitution. We have to ensure that our road map, and a road map is not someplace out there in Never-Never Land of progressivism that has always failed. We have a century and a half of progressivism that we can look at that goes clear back to the shaping of those kind of ideals in the utopian segments of non-English speaking western Europe.

We've watched what's happened. They have been at each other's throats in wars. They've killed tens of millions of each other. Their economy and their industry has collapsed over and over again. They've propped it back up. Their growth has been slower than ours. We've provided them the global defense from the enemies to enemies that are still lined up against each other. The Soviet Union imploded because Ronald Reagan was right. He was right because he decided that we could press the Soviet Union to the point where their economy would collapse before they could keep up with us economically and build themselves up militarily. All of that has taken place.

When we saw the Soviet Union go down, I thought, now it will be obvious even to the most leftist American that you can't grow and prosper and move on into the 21st century and lead the world economically, culturally, politically, militarily, every measure that there is, unless you have a free enterprise system.

Free enterprise. Free enterprise. A simple thing. It's so simple that on the flash cards that are produced by USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the services that provide the path for legal immigrants to become citizens of the United States. When you're training and you're studying to become an American citizen, there are a lot of things there. You have to learn a little about our history; you have to be able to have a command of the English language in both the spoken and written English language; and there are a number of questions in the test. And the flash cards that are proposed, that stack of flash cards produced by USCIS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, glossy flash cards, red cards, about like that, they will ask questions. They would be questions such as, Who's the father of our country? You snap that card over and the other side says--you know the answer, I trust, Mr. Speaker--George Washington. Another one will be, who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln. What is the economic system of the United States of America? You flip that flash card over, if you study and you want to be a citizen of the United States, and it says free enterprise capitalism. How about that? Now that's one of the questions we would consider to be basic, rudimentary, something that any third grader--well, they may not know that, but a sixth grader will; an eighth grader will for sure, or should. It should be taught in all of our schools: The vigor and the vitality that comes from free enterprise capitalism. It is a basic question. If you want to become an American, you have to understand our economic system; free enterprise capitalism.

I wouldn't say that the President doesn't understand the system, but I am not convinced that he adheres to the free enterprise capitalism system that we have. I have yet to see a single move on the part of the President of the United States or this administration or the progressive leftists in this Congress, House or Senate, that supports the underpinnings of free enterprise capitalism as the engine of our economy. And I've seen move after move after move that undermines free enterprise, over and over again.

Nobody over here is going to stand up and say, ``You're wrong, Steve King. You're wrong. I'm a free enterprise capitalist.'' You can't say that. If you're going to raise taxes, if you're going to raise taxes to the tune of something in the area of $1.5 trillion? If you're going to be part of a $1.5 trillion deficit on top of it? A deficit that we have never seen in this country. And be part of punishing--they say punishing the rich. What about the job makers? What about the job givers? What about the employers in America? What happens when you punish the people that produce the jobs? What about big employers, big job givers? Do we punish them?

Yes, you guys want to do that. You're doing it every day. You're advancing regulations. You're advancing taxes. You think that the goose that lays the golden egg which is free enterprise capitalism, that somehow if you slaughter the goose, you find all of those golden eggs inside. Well, it doesn't work that way. It's one egg at a time by the economic engine that is out there struggling to make some profit. And the people over on this side of the aisle, I wish somebody would stand up and tell me that they created a job, that they signed somebody else's paycheck on the front, not the back; somebody that had invested capital to establish a business, that had a chance to make some profit. And out of that, you're only as good as the employees that you have and you're not going to make money in business if you don't have good employees. So you want to hire the best employees you can hire and get the most production out of them that you can. And in today's world it's not good enough, Mr. Speaker, to work hard. Hard workers are respected, certainly. But this is a technological era. You've got to work hard and work smart; do both of those things together. If you work hard and don't work smart, you're going to be down there in the lowest income levels in America, the under-skilled jobs. And then those folks are the ones that are receiving public benefits in greater percentages and numbers than anybody else.

Here's how this works out. And tomorrow morning, Mr. Speaker, I will have a guest at the Conservative Opportunity Society, an organization that was founded in 1984 by Vin Weber, Newt Gingrich and others for the purposes of identifying the roots of our prosperity; the Conservative Opportunity Society. I happen to be the chairman of the Conservative Opportunity Society. Over the course of the last 6 years or 5\1/2\ that I have had the honor of that task, we've had a whole variety of excellent educators and speakers that have come forward. Tomorrow morning it's Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.

Robert Rector is one of those guys who goes back in the back room and does that deep due diligence research to try to come up with the numbers to quantify and identify what is actually happening in America, economically, socially, culturally. Robert Rector is one of the people that I think if you take him out of the equation in 2006 or 2007, that grand coalition of the President and Teddy Kennedy--President Bush and Teddy Kennedy and others--would have passed a comprehensive amnesty piece of legislation on us. But Robert Rector gave us the facts that showed us the cost to illegal immigration in America. And now he's done a new study. This is a new study that identifies what's happening with welfare reform in America. This study goes back and looks at that time in the mid nineties when this Congress went into showdown mode on welfare reform. And for a time the government was shut down because the Republican majority in the Congress refused to knuckle under to the demands of President Bill Clinton at the time and he demanded that they spend more money and he demanded that they not reform welfare, that we let people continue to be paid not to work in the same numbers as before, because of his sense of compassion. But Republicans persisted, and we got a welfare reform bill. In the end, though, they blinked when it came down to who was going to give in. It's kind of like a street brawl when whoever's standing there when it's over is the one that won. Well, in that case Bill Clinton won the final showdown on who would give in to put the government back at work instead of leaving them shut down.

But we got some welfare reform. America thinks that there was a real model of welfare reform that was accomplished, and some of that was a

model that came out of Wisconsin from Governor Tommy Thompson, who's done an outstanding job in Wisconsin and set a pace here for Washington. A lot of that actually was done in the neighboring next- door Iowa without that level of fanfare, but that came here to the Capitol. That's where our federalist system that leaves the decisions as much as possible to the State had manifested itself. And the model of Wisconsin and Iowa--as some will say, it's a better program even than Wisconsin--was reflected here in Washington with welfare reform.

Well, we thought we reformed welfare in the mid-1990s. But when you track the dollars that are handed out in welfare benefits, you look and you find out it's not just that handful of welfare components that we might think of such as food stamps and rent subsidy and heat subsidy and aid to dependent children and some others, but it's 72 different programs. And these programs are so myriad in their number and disparate in their varieties that it's impossible for a citizen that's sitting at home reading the newspaper or tracking--maybe they're tracking the Internet now. If you're a student now, you could figure this out. Seventy-two different programs, many of them, most of them, maybe even all of them, growing.

And so what we've seen, if you chart the graph, is welfare spending was going up. You hit the mid-1990s, the reform came and it leveled off, dipped down just a little bit. And then it went up again at a pace that accelerated at a level greater to or equal to what it was in the mid-1990s, because they added so many programs in, blended so many in that it crept in on us before we knew what was going on. Robert Rector's nailed that down.

Now I'm looking forward to hearing him at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, and I hope there will be a good number of Members that will arrive down at the Capitol Hill Club at that 8 o'clock breakfast, and we will get into this subject matter. This is one of the things, Mr. Speaker, that goes on in this Congress that doesn't get any press, that we're back behind those doors constantly sticking our nose, our eyes, and our ears into programs trying to find ways that we can better configure this government, ways we can save money, ways we can get more productivity out of the people in this country. And our job, our job, Mr. Speaker, is to increase the average annual productivity of our people.

Average annual productivity. That doesn't mean everybody is going to be producing. Some people are going to be in a hospital bed, some are going to be in a nursing home, some are going to be shut-ins at home. Some will be retired because of their age or maybe they've earned it. Maybe they're retired because they have earned the kind of wealth that let's them retire. Their capital is still working.

But we need to have the able-bodied people and the able-minded people in this technological era--doesn't always have to be able-bodied; able- minded--that are contributing to this economy, that are producing something on a daily basis, that are proud of what they do, that are creative. And when you add that all up, 306 million Americans. And just think, if every single one got up every day and did something that's constructive and productive in the private sector, how much difference that would make.

Think of this. If we're all on a great ship sailing out across the ocean back in the era where you had to grab ahold of the oar and pull on the oar to go anywhere, you're in the calms. Sails aren't helping you. You can man the sails when the wind is blowing. So if everybody goes down there and grabs ahold of an oar and pulls on that oar, you sail through the water without a lot of effort. But every time somebody let's go of the oar and goes up and sits in the steerage passage, in the steerage compartment and watches as the ocean goes by and watches everybody else work and pull on the oar, do you know what that does? Every time somebody lets go of an oar, it's harder to keep that ship going at the same speed. In fact, it must slow down because you've got fewer people pulling on this economic engine.

And the more people that quit and give up or are provided an incentive--let's just say it pays the same to pull on the oar as it does to sit up there in steerage. Let's just say the food is the same. The service is the same. You get a bunk that's just as good. Why would you pull on the oar? If you're living as good a life without having to go down in the hold and do your share of the work and carry your share of the load, why would you do it? Just out of good conscience because you like to row the boat?

Mr. Speaker, that's not the way it works in the real world. Some people do like to row the boat. Some people work just out of conscience. Some of them give from an altruism from within their heart. But that's not what keeps the economy going. What keeps the economy going is--it contributes. But what ensures that the economy goes is people are rewarded for their labor. People are rewarded for their creativeness, for their entrepreneurial spirit, for inventing, for producing, and for marketing.

People that add to this economy need to be rewarded for what they do in proportion to their contribution. And only the markets can determine that; not some government bureaucrat, not some pay czar, not somebody that decides this CEO should get paid X and this CEO should get paid Y. Or like the President who can decide this CEO needs to be fired.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I'm not making that up. That is a fact of history, undenied by the President of the United States or any of his spokesmen in the White House. The President fired the CEO of General Motors a year ago, a little more, fired him. Came out in the press. President eliminates the CEO. There was no denial out of the White House. He essentially took a bow.

Remember how many times he said Barack Obama or President Obama or just put ``Obama'' in there and then put in quotes in your Google search ``I'm the President.'' How many times has he said ``I'm the President'' in the last year and a half or a little more? A number that I can think of. He constantly reminds us that he's the President. But no President in America should ever have the authority to fire the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or anything else. Let him fire his own staff. Let him fire his own Cabinet. Let him fire his own executive branch right on down to the lowest person on the totem pole. That's fine with me. That's his shop.

General Motors and Chrysler were private companies taken over by the Federal Government, and the President of the United States fired the CEO of General Motors and approved the replacement hire, and he fired and replaced all but two of the board members on General Motors. And he ordered, his people ordered, the elimination of 3,400 car dealerships. Why? Because his car czar and his people in the White House had some off-balance idea that, if you eliminate dealerships, you can sell more cars.

Now, I come to this office with, I think, maybe a gift of the common sense that comes from the Midwest, and I'm sure that it exists in all of the rest of the country, too. But here's what I know from where I come from. If you want to manufacture widgets, especially if you invent a widget, but if you want to manufacture them--let's just say you go in your little shop and you go and create and you manufacture a widget, and you decide, ``I can make these things pretty good and I can mass produce them, even, so now I want to sell them.'' What would you do? Simple. You'd go to the county fairs. You'd go to all of the county fairs and you would show these widgets to all of the people walking by. And when they stopped and showed a little interest, you'd say, ``Hey, I'll tell you what. You should be a franchisee. I want to let you be my dealer, and you can take this widget home with you--pay for it, of course--stock it in your inventory. I'll give you the material and you can sell widgets out of the window of your shop or out of the implement lot'' or whatever the widget might happen to be.

And you would know that if you want to sell a million widgets, you can't stand there and sell every one of them. There's not enough time. But if you can get enough dealers out there, if you can get 3,400 dealers out there with enough widgets on the lot, you can sell a whole lot more widgets than if you don't have any dealers.

So do 3,400 less car dealers sell more cars than 3,400 car dealers? The answer

is obviously no. It is a stupid decision to believe that you can eliminate car dealers and sell more cars. And what's happened? The company that was not dictated to by the White House is the one that's selling the cars and growing and turning a profit--Ford Motor Company. And I've not been one that went out and bought a Ford as the first vehicle. In fact, it's been hard for me to buy a Ford in the past. But it's looking a little more attractive to me now because they're American cars, American made, that are not propped up by the taxpayers. And they're proving what free enterprise does. When you get out there and compete, you can build a good product.

Now, I'm not saying necessarily that I'd go out there and change the brand that I currently drive. I'm happy with that. But, Mr. Speaker, my point is the White House has been dictating to the private sector. They have nationalized and taken over General Motors and Chrysler and three banks, three large banks; AIG, the insurance company, to the tune of $180 billion; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--this just popped up a couple of days ago--in addition to that, the $145 billion that has been poured into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop them up.

We also have the other agencies--FHA, Federal Housing Administration--and some other loans that are rolled down through other Federal agencies. The loans that have been issued throughout those other agencies, now the no down payment and the very low down payment loans, and that means the low down payment of 3\1/2\ percent.

From 3\1/2\ percent down to zero, that's $1 trillion in loans that the Federal Government is the guarantor of, $1 trillion. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac give the taxpayers a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion.

So what happens if these loans all blow up? That means the taxpayers are stuck at 5\1/2\ plus one, and I know the math on that: $6.5 trillion in contingent liability for the American taxpayers because the people that don't understand free enterprise think somehow the only reason that somebody that doesn't have an income, doesn't own their home, is because nobody's offered them a no down payment loan, and somehow they're going to figure out if they don't have any money how they're still going to pay mortgage payments on a house.

Now, that means here's your house, you have no skin in the game, and it takes at least 6 months to foreclosure in most of the States on a loan like that. Well, who wouldn't take a home? I wouldn't actually, but there are many people that would take a home for no down payment, you get to live here for 6 months without making payments before we figure out how to evict you.

We had a bankruptcy clawback bill that was brought through the Judiciary Committee and here to the floor of the House that exempted some people and gave them breaks in whose homes are being foreclosed on. And I offered just a simple amendment in the Judiciary Committee, and it was this. If someone had defrauded their lender or attempted to defraud their lender, they wouldn't be able to take advantage of the special provisions in this special bankruptcy clawback law. That amendment passed the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, by a vote of 23- 3.

But guess what happened? The will of the committee was reflected in the vote, the recorded vote, but by the time the bill got to the floor the language was changed miraculously. By whom? Well, maybe the staff of the Judiciary Committee, with the consent of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, with the complicity of the Rules Committee chaired by Louise Slaughter, and I think that at least in the silence of it all, within the arrangement of the Speaker of the House's method of running this place, Speaker Pelosi.

So this franchise that as every Member of Congress, each of us that represents about 700,000 people in this Congress, we come here to carry the values of our constituents, and out among our districts we have all the solutions for America. We have all the answers that man and woman can devise out there among our constituents, 700,000, I have the privilege to represent, added to the other 305.3 million or so that are represented by the other 435 Members of Congress.

We have an information network. We gather input, we gather data, and we have those voices coming into my office constantly. That's what we do, and it's part of my job to weigh those ideas, place them in the right place, get them to the subcommittees, get information before the hearings, get them to the subcommittees for the markups, and get them to the full committee for the secondary markup, get them to the floor with amendments, before the Rules Committee, if it's just that they go there, and get this into the debate. If we don't get it solved, we want to go down the hallway to the Senate and weigh in over there and use whatever kind of influence we have because it's so important that we collect the wisdom of the 300-plus million Americans. That's what a constitutional republic does. That's what it's designed to do, Mr. Speaker.

But we have a draconian House of Representatives that has shut off the input from the citizens of the United States, has shut down the process to the point where an amendment can be offered and passed in a markup of a bill before a full committee like the Judiciary Committee, or the Energy and Commerce Committee would be another example, Mr. Speaker, where this has happened on ObamaCare, on cap-and-tax as well, where the will of the committee is just ignored and they go rewrite the bill and bring it to the floor. They don't say anything to anybody. They don't ask permission. They don't ask for a signoff or a consent from the people that recorded their vote in support of those amendments. They just simply ignore the entire will of the committee or defy it and rewrite the bill after the fact and send it to the floor without notice.

And when caught red-handed, their answer is, well, it was so obvious we knew you'd catch us. That really gives me a feeling of comfort. How many were not obvious, how many didn't we catch when they changed a little word like a ``may'' to a ``shall'' or vice versa, something that can completely transform the meaning of an entire piece of legislation. If you're looking at every word, I suppose you would catch it, it's obvious a ``may'' to a ``shall'' or a ``shall'' to a ``may'' or a ``notwithstanding'' slipped in somewhere or was taken out.

But it should have the integrity that the will of the group as brought out by the chairman of the committee and that decision of the committee must be sacrosanct and honored, and it should not ever be changed unless it's changed by a vote, not of the Rules Committee, to change the language of a bill that goes up there. If there's something that's been a mistake or there's a change of opinion, then whoever wants to change that conclusion of a committee should have to bring an amendment to the floor of the House of Representatives and debate it here. That's how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. That's how it was designed to work, and in fact, it's dysfunctional if it's not run that way. This is a dysfunctional Congress, Mr. Speaker. The will of the people is not being reflected in this Congress in many, many ways. So this takes me to a couple of issues.

Cap-and-tax passed this House almost very close to a year ago today. Looks like it's balled up in the Senate, and I hope that it stays buried there. They will keep trying. That didn't reflect the will of the people. That was a high-handed leverage operation, and I won't go so deeply into that because I actually don't expect we will see that at least before the election.

And after the election, if there's a lame duck session--and there likely will be--it better be just pro forma activity of this Congress to get the business done that must be done so this country can function, because the people in November will have spoken, Mr. Speaker, and their will needs to be reflected after the election. A lame duck session that brings transformative pieces of legislation breaks with the trust of the American people. It would be a defiant action, and it should be met with the defiance of the American people, and anything they should try to do in that kind of environment should be repealed, and the President of the United States ought to say so. He ought to say no transformative legislation should be brought before this

Congress in a lame duck session. A President that honored the Constitution and the will of the people would reinforce that position right now and do it today, Mr. Speaker.

But another one of those pieces of legislation that was brought before this Congress that defied the will of the people is ObamaCare, and I will just tell you what ObamaCare is. It is what the President has identified it. He's referred to it as ObamaCare. I happen to remember February 25 at the Blair House this year when President Obama talked about this health care plan as ObamaCare. That's the moniker he would like to have on it, and that's what he would like to have for his legacy. The American people can't have ObamaCare and have freedom too. It has to be one or the other. It cannot be both. They are not compatible with each other. Freedom and liberty cannot coexist side by side with ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker.

This ObamaCare that was contrived and recontrived and manipulated and remanipulated and sent up to the Congressional Budget Office for another CBO scoring after another CBO scoring turned logical contortionism inside out to get to a conclusion that ObamaCare wasn't going to be expensive, and the assumptions that were made defied rational thought.

One of them was, well, we'll save $532 billion by cutting Medicare $532 billion. Think of it. Here we are, the senior citizens are now the baby boomers arriving at retirement age, and in my district--I have Iowa--Iowa has the highest percentage of its population over age 85 of all the States, and there are 99 counties in Iowa. Ten of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa are in my district, western Iowa, the Fifth District of Iowa, which is 32 counties. Draw a line from Minnesota and Missouri and put a third of the State on the west side of that, that's the Fifth District.

In those 32 counties, we have 10 of the 12 most senior counties in the most senior State in America. So I will submit by that standard that I represent the most senior congressional district in America, a district that would have most likely the highest percentage of its people on Medicare and Social Security.

This President and his administration proposed and force fed legislation on the American people that would slash the already tight undercompensated budget of Medicare by $532 billion because of a couple of things. One is they allege that there is fraud and corruption and waste, fraud and abuse in ObamaCare. We don't know whether that's true everywhere in America, but we know or I am confident that it's not true in the small towns in the rural areas, especially in the Midwest where I happen to have the privilege to serve. And so the idea is slash the budget of Medicare and then if you do that it will magically find the corruption and the waste and chop it out.

Well, the people that are involved in gaming the system are the best at gaming the system. So those that are simply working on a stable budget providing services that aren't waste, fraud and abuse, they are likely the ones that get their budget cut because they are not going to be gaming the system. They are just honest people that are trying to provide services to senior citizens that need the help.

A $532 billion cut, now here is where we find out also that ObamaCare, if you look at the real numbers, the numbers that are emerging, it's a trillion-dollar deficit, a trillion dollars over the budget projections. We are also seeing that they are putting things in place to ration our care; they are putting a CEO in place who is convinced that the United Kingdom, their socialized medicine is the best plan, worships at the altar of socialized medicine.

It looks like the British are starting to repeal their socialized medicine plan, and we have just adopted one in the form of ObamaCare. The American people don't yet know what all of this means.

The Speaker tells the Americans we have to pass ObamaCare, we have to pass the bill, she said, in order for you to learn what's in it. As if we can't read 2,300 or 2,400 pages and figure it out. Well, it's true, it isn't possible to read the bill and figure it out because you have to be able to understand and predict what the bureaucrats will do to write the rules in the aftermath, and that is just beginning.

But here are some things that I have seen and things that I know, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the President said he wanted to provide some competition into the health insurance industry and the problem was there wasn't enough competition for health insurance. So he wants to set up a public option. Do you remember that public option?

His public option would be Federal Government setting up an insurance company that would compete with the private sector health insurance companies. All right, so if there isn't enough competition, the first question the President should have asked and the first question that the pundits should have asked would be, Mr. President, do you have any idea how many insurance companies, health insurance companies there are in the United States?

If you want one more company to provide more competition, wouldn't you at least, before you came to such a conclusion, as the President has, wouldn't you ask the simple question, this is like the dumb question, how many insurance companies are there in America selling health insurance? I know it sounds a little dumb, Mr. Speaker, but there are a whole lot of people out there that made decisions on this that don't know the answer to this question.

So I checked it out: 1,300 health insurance companies in America, 1,300; 1,300 health insurance companies selling insurance in America and the President says we need more competition, so let's have a government company to compete against--I don't know what's in his head, one or three or five or so health insurance companies--1,300, Mr. President. That's a far cry from not having enough companies, I would say. And if you add one more and it's a government company, it's 1,301 companies. Is that really the bright, perfect balance number?

His motive isn't to provide more competition. His motive is to replace the private sector. He campaigned early on for the public option and also for a single-payer. The President is on record being for a single-payer. Single-payer is the government takes care of everything. They take care of providing all of the health insurance and all of the health care that there is.

By the way, where they get to the point where they would have a monopoly, it would wipe out the insurance component of this by arguing that we are wasting money administratively by helping people's health insurance policies. Why don't we just give them the health care? Why would we tell them you have to own your own policy, carry your own insurance card, pay your premium and we will back-fill your account. We will subsidize your premium if you aren't making enough money. We will tax you if you are making too much money.

This is a share-the-wealth Robin Hood strategy. The only thing is the President's idea that we are not going to increase taxes on anybody that is making less than $250,000 a year turns out not to be true. It turns out to be false.

The question that needs to be asked there with the President is, Was it a mistake, Mr. President, or was it a willful misinformation to the American people? That's the question.

I remember during the campaign in 1996, when Charlton Heston at the time was the president of the National Rifle Association, ran commercials against Bill Clinton, the President. Charlton Heston said, you know, the question was did President Clinton tell the truth or did he lie, Mr. Speaker?

Charlton Heston's comment was this. He said, Mr. President, if you say something that's wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's called a mistake. If you say something that's wrong and you know that it's wrong, that's a lie.

The question becomes what did the President believe when he repeated to the American people that he would not raise taxes on the American people if you made less than $250,000 a year?

ObamaCare raises taxes on many people that make less than $250,000 a year. It imposes an individual mandate that requires everybody to buy insurance or be fined and punished and penalized for doing the same. That's never been a requirement by the Federal Government

in the history of this country that the Federal Government would produce a product or approve a product and compel the American people to buy it.

So if they are going to approve the health insurance policies that are produced by, let's say, Wellmark or some other company, we say, we like your policy and your policy and your policy and our health choices health administration czar, I call him the commaczarishioner, will pick some of these 1,300 companies that exist when ObamaCare was passed and say, I anoint these policies but you have got to adjust them all to match the demand of the rules to be written by the Health Choices Administration commaczarishioner.

Once we approve all this, then it will be a decision of how many companies will be left to do business and the Federal Government injecting themselves to compete directly against that, and then every health insurance policy in America under those standards-- well, actually, every health insurance policy that is effective today will be effectively canceled by the Federal Government under the law and under the rule.

They will have to requalify. Actually, they will have to qualify under Federal standards yet to be written.

There is not a single policy in America that the President of the United States himself, even if it was at a beer summit back in the South Lawn of the White House, of all 100,000 policies in America, Mr. Speaker, there is not one that the President of the United States himself could pull out of that stack of 100,000 policies. That's a pretty deep stack, maybe that high, and point to it and say this policy, Mr. or Mrs. American, is your policy and you get to keep it, and the substance of the benefits on it will not be changed, and your premiums will not increase or be altered dramatically different than the markets would normally move it. Not one policy out of any one of the millions of Americans that are insured and not one policy out of the 100,000 varieties that are out there to be sold can be guaranteed, even by the President of the United States.

The man who fired the CEO of General Motors, replaced the board of directors, all but two, reminded us that he is the President and he gets to do these things. Maybe he is also the one that has brought about the firing or the elimination, the replacement of the CEO of BP. I think he would be pretty proud of that if he could get right down to the inner soul of who he is.

But there is not one policy in America that he can point to and say this is yours, you get to keep it; the premium is not going to be altered substantively and neither will the terms of the benefits that are in it, not one. They will all get canceled. All of them that will be viable on the other side of the implementation of ObamaCare after 2014, all have to qualify.

You know, that's like, that's like going to the racetrack and having the fastest car and you have been around and around the racetrack, and you set your standards. And when you pull on there with that nice, fastest car, and you have got to go back and you have got to run the laps and go again and qualify again and again and again, that's what it is.

That's what it is. Everybody's got to qualify. Many won't. Many companies will be broke. They will be driven down. A lot of these policies will have to be rewritten, premiums will go up, but that's also part of the equation. There's more to that. Employers will look at the penalty, the 8 percent penalty on payroll, those that employ 50 or more, and they will decide, many of them, I can pay the 8 percent penalty for not insuring my employees cheaper than I can pay their premiums, so why would I knuckle under and comply with a Federal mandate when it's cheaper to do something else?

And then you will have individuals that will be self-employed, those who will be working for companies that don't have 50 or more employees. Those companies are going to be providing health insurance less and less, and those employees that don't have health insurance are going to be more likely to just pay the penalty because they know this: They've got guarantee issue. They've got preexisting condition language that's there. So why would you buy insurance if you could just simply buy the insurance when you get sick, on your way to the hospital, in the hospital, from intensive care? Sign the application, pay the premium like somebody that's completely robustly healthy and pay the same premium.

This is the myopic thinking that comes from the White House and from the other side of the aisle. They don't understand how business works. They don't understand how insurance works. They understand how socialism works, and they're seeking to drag us there.

Now, I used to refrain from saying such things, Mr. Speaker, but the evidence is so replete, and it's a constant out there among the American people. They understand this. Some of this actually began at the end of the Bush administration--all of this, though, with the blessing of now President Obama. But we had a $700 billion TARP program that was a mistake; $350 billion of that was passed in the lame duck of the Bush administration. And then there was the nationalization of three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, General Motors/Chrysler, a takeover of the student loan program in the United States that not that many years ago was all private. Now it's all run by the Department of Education, every bit of it. And if you're wondering about this pattern, this isn't something that they don't understand. They know what they're doing.

Back in 1960, 1960, 1961 and 1962, in that era, the only flood insurance that you could buy in America was sold at the private sector, property and casualty flood insurance. So if you lived in a floodplain, you could pay the premium to a private sector company and you could protect yourself from floods. But the Federal Government decided they would get involved in the Federal flood insurance program and they passed that. Just a few years later, there was no longer any private sector property and casualty flood insurance in America. There hasn't been any for almost 50 years. Almost 50 years since we've had private sector property and casualty insurance, because the Federal Government got in the business and they couldn't compete well enough in the beginning, but then they passed legislation that required that anybody that had a loan through a national bank had to buy flood insurance. So the flood insurance premiums were compelled as a condition of the loan, and so they imposed a requirement to pay those premiums. And over time, they pushed out the property and casualty people, the private property and casualty people, and the flood insurance program became 100 percent Federal Government.

Now, you can't go out in the market--and for years you have not been able to go out in the market--and buy flood insurance. You have to buy that through the Federal flood insurance program. And curiously, that program is $19.2 billion in the red, Mr. Speaker, and they're looking for ways to compel more people to pay premiums because the value of those premiums hasn't reflected the risk or else they paid out the benefits in such a way. I think it's a combination of the two, but mostly the premiums haven't reflected the value of the risk. They haven't run their insurance company very well. They're the government, after all. And if they fail to meet a casualty, they don't go broke. They just run deficit spending or come back to this Congress and ask us to borrow money from the Chinese to backfill their business inefficiencies, and that's the model.

So we've got a Federal flood insurance program that is a bust--$19.2 billion. We've got the student loan program now taken over by the Department of Education and done so in the dark of the night as part of a reconciliation package that circumvented the filibuster rules in the Senate and was attached to the last-minute deals that were made in place on ObamaCare. And now we've got ObamaCare, and it will move itself towards the nationalization of our health care. In fact, I'd say it is the nationalization of our health care, because there isn't anybody in America that will be able to manage their health care anymore at their own choice.

The markets will not establish the demand. You will not be able to go to an insurance company and, say, if you and a million other people in America want to be able to buy low-premium catastrophic insurance-- let's just say

you're 22 or 23 years old, in robust health and you've got an income where you're making $25,000 a year and your employer is not providing your health insurance, but you want to be responsible and you want to pay for catastrophic insurance and you say, I want to have a $2,500 deductible premium that only pays catastrophic.

You should be able to buy that really cheaply in the marketplace. And what's going to happen? I guarantee you, it will not exist. It will not exist because the community ratings at 3-1 already eliminate catastrophic, low-premium health insurance for young people, which means they have to pay a disproportionate share of the premium.

And when they look at that, they wonder, What am I getting back for my money? Well, they're getting the privilege of paying somebody else's health insurance premium that levels this out a little bit, as if the generations has an equal shot at it.

But here's what happens. Young people that are healthy don't have very many health insurance and health care claims. Their premiums generally have reflected the risk in the States where the States allow them to do that, and it's many--in fact, it's most. But under ObamaCare, with the 3-1 community rating, now that premium can't be anything less than one-third of the highest premium that's charged out there.

So if you have somebody with, let's say, a bad health record that you would charge a high premium to, your low-income guy has got to subsidize the high-claims guy. And the world doesn't sit there just so that a younger person with low health care claims can't afford to pay a lot more premium than that. Well, they're not a lot more risk than that either. But somebody that gets on upwards to their income peak earning level--I don't know what that number is but I'm just going to say 55 just to pick a number. Your income earning capacity increases throughout your lifetime to a certain point and then it tends to level off as people start to retire. So let's just say mid-fifties. That's the time also that health tends to cost more, in the aftermath of the mid-fifties. So the premiums go up, and that's a higher income time of life.

Why would we go down to the younger people and discourage them from buying insurance, people that will drop off and pay the penalty instead of the premium because we've rigged the game in favor of the people at the upper age group and the upper claims group of this? Again, it defies logic.

We could go on and on about how bad ObamaCare is, Mr. Speaker, but I just want to make this point. I brought legislation to repeal ObamaCare. I could not sleep the night this passed. I typed up a request for the bill draft and I sent it to leg. counsel at the opening of business that morning. It was a Monday morning. That draft came back to me completed in legislative form within 3 minutes of the time that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's repeal bill also came down. Within 3 minutes. Each of them were 40 words. They were verbatim to each other, pieces of legislation that were pure in their simplicity, 2,000-plus pages of ObamaCare ripped out by the roots, lock, stock and barrel if we pass this legislation that is so simple that repeals all of ObamaCare, 100 percent of ObamaCare, lock, stock and barrel, not one vestige of it left behind, not one particle of ObamaCare DNA left behind.

It has become a malignant tumor in our society. It is metastasizing as we speak, and it has got to be repealed. Every single word of it, every component of ObamaCare has got to be repealed. Michele Bachmann's legislation does that. Mine does that. Connie Mack's of Florida repeals it. Also, Parker Griffith's of Alabama, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, all--those are the ones I can think of. I think Jerry Moran will be another one--have introduced legislation that repeals ObamaCare, all of it, lock, stock and barrel. That needs to happen, Mr. Speaker, if we're to have our liberty back, if we're to have our freedom back. If we're to have our American vitality back, it's got to go, all of it.

Now, what I have done is worked that legislation pretty hard. I ended up with 89 signatures, and I'm still taking more if they will sign them on, to the repeal legislation.

Most of those people who signed onto my bill I asked to sign onto the bills of the others, especially onto Michele Bachmann's, because she had worked it so hard, but it ended up there were a few more signatures on my bill than on the others, so I introduced a discharge petition some 5 or 6 weeks ago.

A discharge petition, Mr. Speaker, is the one single tool that the disenfranchised majority opinion in this Congress can use to bring legislation to the floor over the will of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Any other method that we might have to move legislation here in the House is blocked by the iron fist of the Speaker. Any legislation we try to move through committee will go nowhere. No matter what the support is for a bill, if the Speaker doesn't want it to move, it doesn't move. If you want a hearing for a piece of legislation before a committee, you will not get that hearing. If you want a markup before a subcommittee or a full committee, you will not get that markup. The Speaker will decide whether it moves or whether it doesn't. It is an iron fist, a draconian hand, that shuts down the opportunity for the will of the people to be manifested in a recorded vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There is only one tool--only one tool, Mr. Speaker--and that is a discharge petition. It is there to give relief for the will of the people in America reflected in this republican form of government that is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution.

It is a discharge petition.

When a bill has been introduced here into the House and has been allowed to cure for a minimum of 30 legislative days, then it can be converted into a discharge petition on file right over here with the Clerk of the House, and that requires a signature on that document and an initial of the Members of Congress who support it. Now, those signatures are accumulated here on this discharge petition, Mr. Speaker, and it is discharge petition No. 11 that repeals 100 percent of ObamaCare. That discharge petition that is on file has my signature at the top. It has Michele Bachmann's right there with mine and with Connie Mack's at the top, and it goes right on down the line.

When I first filed it, some of the critics out there in America said, Well, there's an act of frustration. He won't be able to get anything done on this. They aren't going to sign onto that discharge petition.

Well, we can take a look and see what has happened today, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we can check it currently, and I might be able to do that, actually, on the fly. We are at least at 159--I think at 160--on the discharge petition. When we get to 218, then we will be able to bring that bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote. No amendments. It cannot be blocked by the Speaker of the House. That is what a discharge petition does.

Let me see. There we go. I'll get this going and try to give you a report, Mr. Speaker.

This discharge petition No. 11 is here in the well. Republicans have lined up to sign that petition, and they have done so repeatedly and consistently. It is a logistical difficulty to get that many people to go to the well and sign a discharge petition, but we are up to 159 or 160 on this petition, and there are others who have agreed to sign.

Of the Republicans, Mr. Speaker, there are only 14, by current count, who haven't either signed this discharge petition or haven't agreed to sign the discharge petition. All of the elected leadership has signed. In fact, I am seeing a notice here that all of the appointed leadership has signed. The entire leadership team has agreed to sign the discharge petition. Actually, the entire leadership team on the Republican side has signed the discharge petition. That's 100 percent support by the leadership team and by the Republican Conference. That is Leader Boehner. That is Whip Eric Cantor. That is Republican Conference Chair and master communicator Mike Pence. That is everybody along the line who you will see who line up at the microphones to lay out our Republican policy.

One hundred sixty of us altogether have signed. There is at least another four who have agreed to who haven't quite made it down here to put their John Henrys on the discharge petition. That is very, very close to a full court effort here in the House, and I think

that the Republican numbers have an opportunity, by the end of this week, to be signatories on the discharge petition, totaling perhaps all but maybe four who have a little difficulty getting there. I'm expecting that we'll have a chance to get to that point, and maybe, just maybe, on the best day, every Republican will have signed the discharge petition. I hope we get there because here is what it is about, Mr. Speaker.

Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. Every single Republican voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. It was universal. Every Republican opposed it and 34 Democrats opposed it. Why did they vote ``no''? That question is out there. The American people are wondering this, Mr. Speaker. Why? Did they oppose ObamaCare? Did they do so on a philosophical basis? Was it a policy question?

Every one of them would like to tell you it's a policy question. Well, is it ever a policy question in some of their cases? I think we're going to find out. Were they voting ``no'' on ObamaCare because the Speaker of the House said, ``I don't have to have your vote. Go ahead and vote `no,' and then you can posture yourself back in your district as someone who is against ObamaCare and as someone who is not necessarily doing the bidding of the Speaker of the House from San Francisco''?

Well, this San Francisco agenda has been driven through this House because every single Democrat voted for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker--every one. All 34 of those Democrats who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare voted for Nancy Pelosi.

So, when you think about how this fits together, if they voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker, they enabled the San Francisco agenda to be driven through this House of Representatives. That includes cap-and- tax. It includes ObamaCare. It includes Barney Frank's financial reform legislation that sets the Federal Government up to be in a position to take over our lending institutions, or at least the larger ones if they decide to do so. All of that agenda and more has been driven by the Speaker of the House--Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, a San Francisco agenda imposed upon America--because every Democrat voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker.

Now they'll be going back home at the end of this week, and they're going to say, I voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. It was a tough vote on cap- and-tax. I was doing something because I had a little nuance here.

I know one Member of Congress, who is part of the Iowa delegation, who said, Well, I think the bill has gotten better here in the House, and I'm going to vote for cap-and-tax because I think they're going to fix it down the hall in the Senate.

You'd sell out your franchise like that? If you had any leverage to fix anything, you just lost it when you voted for it and sent the bill down to the Senate. You stand here, and you hold your vote ``no.'' You don't hold your nose and vote ``yes'' and say you've done something responsible.

Where we are, Mr. Speaker, is this: ObamaCare has got to be repealed. There are 34 Democrats who said they were opposed to it who will have an opportunity to prove it right here at the well by signing discharge petition No. 11. Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. If they are sincere, they will sign the discharge petition. They will be added to the Republicans who have signed it and to those who will. There will be more tomorrow, and there will be more the next day. I can guarantee that, Mr. Speaker. When we get to this point, we will find out the separation between the women and the girls and the men and the boys.

Were they for the repeal of ObamaCare? If they opposed it in their votes, they shouldn't be for it in policy today. If they are going to duck and cover and try to have it both ways, a discharge petition will help separate that. In fact, it will separate it, and the American people will know the difference. We will gavel out of here perhaps on Thursday night, and most every Republican will have signed the discharge petition. I am hopeful there will be a handful of Democrats who will step up to it, who will take a stand and say, I really meant it when I voted ``no'' on ObamaCare, and I'm going to put my signature down here on this discharge petition, which commits them to voting for the repeal of ObamaCare if we get 218 signatures and it comes to the floor.

That is being honest with America. That is sending a message out across America. It is giving the constituents in each of these congressional districts an opportunity to take a look at the real record, an opportunity to evaluate the real positions of the Members of Congress--not the smoke and mirrors version, not the duplicity, not the straddle-the-fence version, but the real version, which is, if you voted ``no'' on ObamaCare, you'd better be for the repeal of ObamaCare. If you voted ``yes'' on ObamaCare, you might want to reconsider and sign the discharge petition anyway because it is bad policy. It is lousy policy. It can't be afforded. In no way can it be calculated to fit within anything that we might be able to sustain. It is unsustainable.

It is unforgivable to do this to the American people and to take away our freedom to manage our health care--to go out in the market and buy the health insurance policy that we want.

There are many things we can do for reform. There are many things we have tried to do for reform. We sent some of them over to the Senate when the Republicans were in charge here in the majority, and they got locked up with the trial lawyers in the Senate. We are going to have to roll the trial lawyers. That has to happen in this next Congress and in the Congress after that, Mr. Speaker, but we cannot tolerate a Congress that drives up the spending in America, one that runs in a $1.4 trillion or $1.5 trillion deficit. That is 10 times the average deficit under George Bush.

And still they stand up and say, Bush's fault, Bush's fault. Bush's fault?

$140 billion deficit under Bush. Now, I'd like to have balanced the budget, and I voted for a number of balanced budgets and I'll keep doing that. And I'm an original cosponsor of the balanced budget amendment.

But, Mr. Speaker, to equate a $1.4 trillion deficit and $1.8 trillion deficit coming the year behind that, and to equate that to a $140 billion deficit, it defies any rational thought, Mr. Speaker.

And I hope that I have conveyed some rational thought for you tonight, and I'm glad that you paid attention.

Mr. Speaker, as always, I'm privileged and honored to address you here on the floor of the

House of Representatives, this great deliberative body. And having come here and sat down and listened to the presentation of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the previous hour, most of what you have heard here tonight has been the regular fare that is delivered from the DCCC. Not a lot of it's been original thinking.

And Mr. Speaker, I call upon the American people to use that great gift of reason and think this through. First I just go backwards. The gentleman from Florida alleges, Mr. Speaker, that Republicans have blocked the unemployment extension. Republicans have blocked the unemployment extension. The gentleman from Florida, if he knows anything, knows very well the Republicans don't have the votes to block an unemployment extension. We don't have the votes to block a declaration of war. We don't have the votes to block anything in this Congress. Anything that didn't get done that he laments should have been done lays at the feet of the Speaker of the House and the majority leader in the United States Senate and the Democrats, not Republicans.

I wish we had the authority and the votes to kill some of these crazy ideas that are coming out of the progressives on the left. We don't have those votes. We can't kill crazy ideas. And now I have to sit here and listen to a crazy allegation that Republicans are to blame for blocking unemployment benefit extensions. It's an outrageous thing to say. And then to follow it up with, May God have mercy on your souls, as if the gentleman had a deep core of faith and he really was worried about the souls of Republicans.

I am awfully glad he's not been appointed to be St. Peter. If he could make that call at the pearly gates, I am pretty convinced that every single Republican would be condemned to the fires of hell by his judgment. No, we've been fed a line of baloney here. Republicans do not have the votes to block an unemployment extension. If it didn't happen in the House of Representatives, it didn't happen by the will of the Speaker and the majority in this Congress, the Democrats. That is a fact, Mr. Speaker. It's not arguable. It's not even nuanced. It's clean as it can be. I wish it were not the case, but it is.

Speaker Pelosi could have forced an unemployment extension off of this floor had she chosen to do so. And if she chose to send it to the floor on suspension, where it takes two-thirds to pass an unemployment extension, then clearly it's a cynical attempt to try to tell the American people the same thing that we've heard from the gentleman from Florida, blame it on the Republicans. But if Democrats cared about extending unemployment benefits, they would have brought the legislation through.

This House doesn't have the votes to kill it. Remember, 34 Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. Every single Republican voted ``no'' on ObamaCare and still it's the law of the land. However temporarily, it's the law of the land. ObamaCare passed the House of Representatives with every single Republican standing in uniform saying no. And 34 Democrats joined with every single Republican and said no to ObamaCare. And still, and still their hearts were hardened, and still ObamaCare went to the White House and to the President's desk, where today it's the law of the land.

So for the gentleman from Florida to stand over at that microphone and try to convince you, Mr. Speaker, who probably should have gaveled him for the audacity of that statement, and let me say the lack of accuracy, but try to convince you and the American people that it's Republicans that are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits, I don't think there is a sixth-grader out there with a rational thought in their head that would believe that if they knew the facts.

Now, the gentleman from Florida, some of the members of the Democrat party, some of the people who are the spokesmen and -women for Speaker Pelosi might then deploy out and say, well, Steve King is wrong, we're really referring to the Republicans blocking unemployment benefits in the Senate. I mean I have established this, Mr. Speaker, there is no question, and if anyone challenges the veracity of my statement, stand up. I will recognize you. I will yield my time to hear, if you think you have a rebuttal to my statement. Of course you won't. You will sit there and sit on your hands because you know I am right. Your silence is a confession that what I have said is 100 percent true.

Democrats haven't moved an extension of unemployment benefits because they don't have the votes to get that done. It's not the Republican resistance that stood in the way. That's a fact. It's unrebutted, which makes it a fact. It's in this Congressional Record today and tonight, Mr. Speaker.

And so the deal with the House is all wrapped up. My argument stands. No one can rebut my argument. The House didn't have the votes to kill unemployment benefit extensions, and so the arguments on the part of the gentleman from Florida are specious and unfounded and false.

But down the other end of this Rotunda there might be an argument, Mr. Speaker. And so perhaps we should examine that argument about whether the Republicans in the Senate have the votes to kill the extension of unemployment benefits. And let's remember this is $33 billion or $34 billion with a B, billion dollars, to extend unemployment benefits for 99 weeks. For practical purposes let's just give that in round numbers. You only have to round that up about 3 weeks to get to 2 years. Two years of unemployment extended by the United States Congress, the tab picked up by the taxpayers of America, money coming from where? Well, let's just say the Chinese, for want of a better source. As long as they keep loaning us money, we'll borrow it, and we'll borrow money to pay people not to work to the tune of 99 weeks of unemployment.

Now, that's a separate argument, Mr. Speaker. But the argument made by the gentleman from Florida, the Republicans are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits and should God have mercy on our soul for doing that, it's not the Republicans. The Republicans don't have the power in the Senate either. We've established we don't have the power in the House. Republicans don't have the power in the Senate to block an extension of unemployment benefits. These Democrats know, by the way, it's coming. It's going to get done. It's going to pass the Senate. It's going to come to the House, unemployment benefits.

But should every Republican in the United States Senate stand against the extension of unemployment benefits--without a paid-for, by the way; without any fiscal responsibility, 100 percent borrowed money, 100 percent racking up the national debt--the national debt that this year rings in to 1.5, or excuse me, the deficit for this year rings in to $1.5 trillion. The national debt runs to 13.18. The GDP, gross domestic product, is $13.20 trillion. So if you round that to the nearest tenth of a trillion, our national debt is equal to our gross domestic product. I don't know that that's ever happened in the history of America.

But to explore the question in the United States Senate if Harry Reid, the majority leader, decides to bring an extension of unemployment benefits that cost the taxpayers $33 billion or $34 billion to the floor of the United States Senate and Republicans decide they want to block it--now, according to the filibuster rules, it might require those 60 votes, that 60-40 majority in the Senate, to break the filibuster. And they are a vote short of that. And they swore in a new Senator, I think it was today. So now they come closer and if a Republican will switch over and vote to break the filibuster, then they're ready to close the deal on $34 billion in unemployment benefits, unpaid for, fiscally irresponsible without trying to cut some government spending somewhere. Okay, we'll give you all of that, Mr. Speaker, under the filibuster rules.

But let's keep in mind, let's keep in mind that we had ObamaCare come before the House and before the Senate. And is our memory so short, is Mr. Grayson's memory so short that he doesn't remember the reconciliation package that came back from the Senate here to the floor of the House? Does the gentleman from Florida and the other people who put these specious allegations out, do they forget that ObamaCare didn't pass with a 60-40 vote to break the filibuster in the

United States Senate? It passed with a reconciliation package that required a simple majority in the United States Senate.

So, if Harry Reid is sincere and he really thinks he wants to give unemployment benefits to the people in this country, he can wrap this up in a reconciliation package, pass it off the floor of the United States Senate with a simple majority and send it over here to the House where the Speaker almost certainly would bring unemployment benefits to the floor of the House. And the gentleman from Florida, everybody in America knows, the votes are here in the House right now to pass those extensions.

But they can't do that right away. They've got to spend a day or two or three or more beating up on Republicans making false allegations to try to convince the American people that these demons that are knocking at the pearly gates--may God have mercy on your souls, according to Mr. Grayson--are somehow trying to keep those resources out of the hands of hardworking Americans.

And they wonder why America is cynical, and they wonder why their credibility has gone down the drain. They wonder why the popularity of Congress is at the lowest point ever, and the popularity of the Speaker may be, at least in modern record keeping, at the lowest point ever; and the lack of confidence in government officials is just as great as it's ever been. The greatest lack of confidence we've ever had in the United States Congress. Why? Because people come here to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and make outrageous statements like that, and the American people don't always hear such a cogent rebuttal as they're hearing right now.

But they have a brain, and they have the ability to think and reason, and they have a memory that let's them roll back and think well what happened here now. We weren't going to have ObamaCare unless we had 60 votes in the Senate to pass it. Remember this? Remember how because of ObamaCare, I think it was a big reason Massachusetts delivered to the United States Senate Scott Brown who said, I'm opposed to ObamaCare. I will oppose it. I will vote against it. I'll kill it if I can. And he came here to the United States Senate, was sworn in, was sworn to vote against and kill ObamaCare. That's what the people in Massachusetts wanted. That's what the people in America wanted.

But, no. President Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and a small cabal of people who were meeting in back rooms decided we are going to force feed this on the American people because it matched their ideology, not because it was good policy, not because the budget would be better off. It's worse off. Not because it provides better care. It's less care. Not because it would be less costly. No, it's more costly. Not because people would have more choices, as President Obama said. No, they have less choices. Not because people would get to keep their health insurance policy if they liked it. No, they don't get to keep that policy. We know that now.

We know that anybody in America that has a policy today that they think they get to keep, sorry. There isn't one, not one policy, not one American out of 306 million Americans that has a health insurance policy that the White House, President Obama, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel, name your spokesman for the White House, not one of them, including the President, can point to one single policy and say, Rest easy. It's yours. I guaranteed you you'd get to keep your policy, and no one can take it away, and no one can dramatically change the premium, and nobody can dramatically change the benefit package that you have.

That's not true. It never was true. They knew it couldn't be true. But they never could have cooked up ObamaCare in the first place. But they said it. They sold the American people a bill of goods. And now I'm hearing a bill of goods delivered from this podium over here.

But the bottom line is if it's unemployment benefit extensions that you seek, it can be delivered by the Democrat majority, and they should take the blame if it's not now. Not lay it off the Republicans. Republicans don't have the votes. Harry Reid can do a reconciliation package and deliver unemployment benefits just as surely as he sent us ObamaCare in a reconciliation package.

Remember how that was? Well, we'll pass the bill, ObamaCare, here in the House even though the majority of the House doesn't support ObamaCare. There is a deal that there will be a reconciliation package that will come down the line through the middle of the Capitol right down that hallway, and it will arrive here, a reconciliation package, and enough people on the Democrat side of the aisle, one of the components of that, in such a way that they said, I'll vote for ObamaCare on the promise that reconciliation comes and then we'll vote for that, and then we'll send them to the White House to the President's desk, and he can sign them in just the right sequential order.

So a simple majority in the House, a simple majority in the Senate can pass ObamaCare, a simple majority in the House and a simple majority in the Senate can pass reconciliation. And in the right timing and the right sequence signed in the right order by the President of the United States can impose ObamaCare on every single American even though on the day that ObamaCare passed the House, that bill standing alone did not enjoy the majority support of the Members here. No, Mr. Speaker, it enjoyed a bare majority on the promise that there would be a reconciliation package come here to the House floor.

And on it were some things that didn't have anything to do with health care, including the government takeover of the student loan program in the entire United States of America. So there was a deal made, and the American people know it was a back-room deal. And it was a promise, and some didn't trust the promise.

And here we stand today listening to drivel about the Republicans obstructing extension of employment benefits when every American that paid attention to the force feeding on all of us on ObamaCare understands that a simple majority in the House will pass and dominate any piece of policy if the Speaker decides it's going to go forward, if the majority leader doesn't stand in the way. The Speaker will determine what passes in the House, and the only check on the Speaker is the 218 votes over here. Well, they had 218 votes over here for ObamaCare plus a couple. And 34 votes to spare.

This is the problem, Mr. Speaker. When you have massive majorities in the House and in the Senate that align themselves with the President of the United States, then you have a situation where the President wants a policy--let's just call it ObamaCare--could be extension of unemployment benefits to the tune of $34 billion. So the President says, I want this. Give me ObamaCare. By the way, I had a radio announcer talk to me today about how I had used the term ObamaCare and maybe we should call it something else. I pointed out that ObamaCare was used by the President of the United States, February 25 of this year. At Blair House he called it ObamaCare. If the President calls it ObamaCare, I think it's pretty easy shorthand for the rest of us to call it ObamaCare. And it's not pejorative unless you happen to think about what it's doing to America's liberty. In which case it is mightily pejorative.

So the President can decide he wants ObamaCare, and he delivers it to the House of Representatives and says, Give me ObamaCare. So the Speaker, majority leader, the whip, and the rest of the leadership, they look around and they think, he's our leader.

We better give our leader what he wants. So they will set about reconciling any tiny little differences in the back rooms of the United States Congress, and they will come out with something that complements the President's request, and now you've got the sycophantic approach that comes from the House matching up with that of the President of the United States, and then they send it over to the Senate where Harry Reid sits over there and decides: Well, let's see, I don't want to cross the President; I don't want to cross the Speaker of the House; and I don't want to cross the Democrat majority in the United States Congress, so I want to complement all the things that they do and add the bells and whistles on that his people want.

So they stack that on, and now here we go. It's an upward spiral.

Thinking of this in terms of policy, a liberty stealing policy, which is ObamaCare, that's easy for me to see today because I've talked about this for some time. But when we get into the spending side of this, this massive $1.5 trillion deficit that we have created here by this President, this Congress, this House and the Senate, it also is an upward spiral of spending, because even though the President--the President did present a budget. The House didn't do a budget. This House didn't do a budget.

I don't know how many years it has been since the House hasn't had a budget. I think 1974 is the last time we had a rule that required a budget. We have had a House budget every year since 1974, and I may stand to be corrected on that, but I believe I'm exactly right on my year and on the functionality. The House has been required by a rule to produce a budget since 1974, and here we are, 2010, first time the House didn't produce a budget.

So the President kicks one out. The House doesn't produce one. If the House doesn't produce a budget, that means Republicans don't have the opportunity to offer one. So we don't get to put a budget into the record and have a debate on both these budgets up or down, in which case I will vote for the balanced one.

We produced a balanced budget within the Republican Study Committee, Mr. Speaker, and it's something that I have been engaged in, involved in, and very supportive of for a number of years. With Chairman Tom Price of the study committee and the budget chair, Jim Jordan, we produced a balanced budget, and I've, in the past, voted for a balanced budget. It took a while to get here, but this year we don't have the chance to do that because the Pelosi Congress doesn't produce a budget, even though the President does, so they don't get to plus up or plus down the spending by the White House.

But when that does happen, the House here stands to plus it up because they don't want to say ``no'' to the President of the United States. So they add on; they don't subtract. They don't have a sense of fiscal responsibility. No, they have a sense of pandering to constituencies who are tax eaters on their part. Mine are taxpayers and producers, the people that I represent, and you can tell by my thought process and my tone. They wouldn't elect me if they weren't producers.

So the House would normally plus up the President's budget if the House is run by Democrats, if the White House is run by Democrats, and then send that budget over there to the Senate where Harry Reid and company would plus up the budget again. They don't want to say ``no'' to the President or to the House. They just want to make sure they get their spending priorities. So they plus that up and spend that up, and we've got an upward spiral of the budgeting process going on.

The President makes a request. He sends it to the House. The House says, well, we don't want to say ``no'' to your things, but we've got our things that we want, and you can watch the spirals going upwards, and the House passes or promotes a spending increase and the circle goes on. Now to the Senate and Harry Reid and company, spending, spending, spending right on to the top, out through the roof.

The spending in the United States Congress goes and the deficit sails out into the stratosphere and we see numbers like this. We see a $1.5 trillion deficit. We see a national debt of $13.18 trillion compared to a gross domestic product of $13.2 trillion, Mr. Speaker. And if you hadn't done the calculation yourself, and I'm sure you're sitting there with your calculator taking a look at this, Mr. Speaker, our national debt is 99 percent of our gross domestic product, 99 percent. So all the money that gets produced, all the production in America in a year, we owe 99 percent of an equivalent amount.

2010 debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP, the debt, just the debt, not the deficit, is 63.2 percent. By 2020, given how this budget is, well, you have to project this because we don't really have a budget. Debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP will be 90 percent by 2020. By 2027, it will be 125 percent. That is the debt level at 2027. That surpasses Greece's current debt level.

And when we look at the President's effort, the total cost of job saving and job creating stimulus--have to think about that one. I had a good challenge on that the other day, and I said to an economist in a national radio dialogue, made a little fun of the idea we're going to create--this is what the President said--we're going to save or create 3.6 million jobs. Save or create, Mr. Speaker. What does that mean?

You save if you can point to creating a job, you can point to creating a job. You might be able to point to those jobs and say, listen, we invested this money in national defense and decided to build these tanks or these drones or these bulletproof vests or M-4s or whatever it might be, so because we've invested in this new equipment and hardware, this factory has lit up and hired people for the exclusive purpose of making tanks or drones or bulletproof vests or M- 4s. So all those jobs you might point to and say these jobs are created by government spending.

I won't argue so much with that accounting; although, I want to see them in the private sector. That is government spending, however, and that's a qualifier. 3.6 million jobs saved or created. But when you get to the saved jobs category, Mr. Speaker, from the instance that came out of the mouth of the President, saved or created, I asked the question: How do you ever determine that 3.6 million jobs have been saved? What jobs haven't been saved, Mr. Speaker? What jobs?

We sit here today with a workforce of around 153 million people in this country, 153 million, and I'm going to guess on the employment level. I am going to expect that it's lower than that, but the actual working workforce--actually, Mr. Speaker, I will not guess at that. I will say it is over 100 million and probably in the area of perhaps 20 million less than that. So somewhere around 132 or -3 million, but I qualify that because that's not a number that's come from the Department of Labor.

So let's just say that employment in America has probably not dropped below 125 million in a long time, and if you're going to dump $1.2 trillion into saving or creating jobs--and the lowest employed that we had in America is perhaps 125 million over the last generation or so-- then as long as you had 3.6 million jobs left, you could always point to that and say, I saved those 3.6 million. The very last 3.6 million jobs in America, I saved them with my $1.2 trillion economic stimulus plan.

So I asked the economist, is that a number that you use, when you are really looking at economics, do you evaluate a category called jobs saved versus jobs created? He said, yeah, we do, we talk about this in economics.

Now I didn't get it sorted out on this as to whether he commingles jobs saved with jobs created. I don't think so, doesn't make sense with me. I mean, how do you save jobs? Well, if you have a stable tax base, if you have a stable economy, if you have a competitive situation where employers can hire and fire and produce and produce and sell to a marketplace, then under those circumstances, if those circumstances are static, then chances are the jobs also are static. About the same number of jobs would be there from one day to the next to the next. So the jobs saved, jobs created, would be the jobs that are added to that number because of, as you say, a tax cut policy, a regulatory improvement policy, or, the President would argue, government spending.

We have had a lot of government spending all right, and there have been jobs that have been saved because of it, government jobs, mostly, not all of them. But we should understand that when the President of the United States steps up and says, I am going to spend 1.2 trillion of your dollars, your grandchildren are going to have to pay the interest and the principal.

In the meantime we are going to borrow the money from the Chinese and the Saudis, and what we are going to do is, we are going to save or create 3.6 million jobs. We should say wait a minute, Mr. President. Tell us the difference, how many jobs will be created versus how many jobs will be saved.

How will you define saved jobs? How will you define created jobs? What's the difference in your calculation between private-sector jobs and public-sector jobs? How many are government jobs, how many are private-sector jobs? And when we look at the jobs growth

and the job loss, it makes a difference what percentage of them, what part of them are private sector versus what part are public.

So, we know that the President and Democrats, Mr. Speaker, promised that if the stimulus passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8 percent. But we know we saw unemployment bump up against 10 percent, and it bumped there for quite a while and then it drifted down just a scosche, Mr. Speaker, it dropped to 9.5 percent.

Now we hear, well, 10 percent unemployment is the new norm. Really, that's not what these Democrats were saying in the House when we had 4.6 percent unemployment. They said that unemployment is too high. That's a failure of the Bush administration, 4.6 percent unemployment.

Now we are at 9.5. Well it's a lower rate than the new norm of roughly 10. That's what's going on, the redefinition of the benchmarks and the metrics to evaluate our economy.

But here are the facts, Mr. Speaker. There have been 3.42 million gross jobs lost since the stimulus plan was passed--that's that $787 billion rolled around, by the time you add in the loose change, of $1.2 trillion--3.42 million gross jobs lost, and 2.53 million net jobs lost. So some jobs have been created, some jobs have been lost, but there has been a net loss of 2.53 million jobs, jobs lost, and the gross domestic product growth has averaged 1.4 percent since the stimulus was passed, 1.4.

Hmm, how good is that? I mean, I listen to the talking heads that constantly are yammering about how bad it was and how many jobs were divested during the Bush administration. One would think that the Bush administration, Mr. Speaker, would be a distant memory. But it's not, because we are reminded of it every day, including today, by the President, President Obama, when he came forward to demand that the Republicans get out of the way and extend unemployment benefits.

Even the President, apparently, doesn't understand how he passed ObamaCare. He passed ObamaCare without any Republican votes anywhere, not in the House, not in the Senate. Republicans don't have the votes to block any of these ideas.

So if the President had enough temerity to try to figure out how to pass ObamaCare, how can he, with a straight face, have the temerity to say to the American people Republicans are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits? We don't have the votes to do that.

All it takes is Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, the ruling troika, to decide they want to pass unemployment benefits and they can do that, Mr. Speaker. There is no doubt about it. They have proven it.

They proved it in March of this year when they passed ObamaCare, so who could be befuddled by this? Who could be mesmerized by the false allegations that are made by people who want to demagog against Republicans when the facts are before us.

So, here is what we have, 1.4 percent growth, that's the growth that we have since the stimulus plan was passed. Now, we might be in an unusual situation. This is an unusual situation where we are in a economic situation that we could clearly call a recession, and it may or may not be more serious than the recession that we had when Ronald Reagan was launched into the White House because of the abysmal economic policies of Jimmy Carter.

But what we saw then, 1982, for example, Mr. Speaker, 9.3 percent growth for multiple quarters from 1982 on in the Reagan recovery. The Obama recovery is 1.4 percent growth, 9.3 percent is the Reagan recovery. So which policy worked the best? The tax cuts that Reagan brought forward?

Even though he was faced with Democrat majorities, he went to the American people and said, get the load off of the private sector in America. Let them produce, let them earn their keep. Let them keep what they earn, more of what they earn, 90 percent tax rates, can't have that. Otherwise, who would go to work if the House is going to take 90 percent out of every pot?

Well, that's what was going on back in 1980 when Reagan was elected President. So here is what happened. Today we have 1.4 percent growth, tiny little growth, it is growth. I grant the President that, it is growth.

The Reagan recovery was 9.3 percent growth. So I just did this tricky little math thing. I took 9.3 percent Reagan growth, divided it by 1.4 percent, Obama growth, and I came up with this number, 6.64. The Reagan recovery was 6.64 times greater than what we have seen so far in the Obama recovery.

So what would be the cause of that? Ronald Reagan believed the private sector was the growth engine. President Obama believes that government is the growth engine.

And so, Mr. Speaker, what's going on here is this: The President is a Keynesian economist on steroids. Whenever the economy doesn't grow the plan stimulus frequency, he believes we didn't borrow enough money. He believes we didn't spend enough money. He believes we didn't put our grandchildren far enough into debt, apparently.

We didn't borrow enough from the Chinese, not enough from the Saudis, not enough from the world market. Think of it. We funded our way through the Great Depression and through World War II almost exclusively with American money, and here we are financing our way through this economic situation with Saudi Arabian and Chinese money, Mr. Speaker.

So as I listen to the President, as he delivered his analysis of his economic theory, before the Republicans in the House conference on February 10, 2009, what he said was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, in the era of the New Deal, lost his nerve, that he got worried about spending too much money. He got worried about running America too deeply into debt.

And because he was worried about spending too much money, FDR pulled back. And as he pulled back, he didn't spend enough money, according to the President, in the second half of the 1930s, which brought about a recession within a depression.

Unemployment numbers went back up again, the growth in GDP went down again and along came World War II, which was the greatest stimulus plan ever. That's the composite of the presentation made by the President, February 10, 2009.

Well, Mr. Speaker, we have elected a President who looks back at the Keynesian economic theories of the 1930s and draws an entirely different lesson than I draw. He draws the lesson that government can borrow money, spend money, stimulate the economy, and somehow all of this rolls over and lifts us all up, and a rising tide floats all boats, but you can raise the tide with Federal spending on borrowed money.

I don't know if he has read into detail the history of what actually took place in the thirties, nor has he perhaps read the statements made by John Maynard Keynes himself who said, Mr. Speaker, I can solve for you the problem of all of the unemployment in America, I can solve all the unemployment in America by doing this: give me an abandoned coal mine, and I'll go in there and drill holes all over that abandoned coal mine, and I will fill those holes up with American cash. And then I will backfill the holes and fill that coal mine up with garbage. And now here will be all of this American currency buried in these holes in this abandoned coal mine, a coal mine filled up with garbage.

And then he says, I'll turn the entrepreneurs loose to dig up the money. If that happens, look what happens: that means that people go to work, they start digging through the garbage, they find the money, they dig the money out. And it takes all kinds of support mechanisms out there to keep them going just like it might if you find a gold mine. Somebody's going to have to move the garbage out of the way. They'll get paid to do that even though they don't get at the cash. Somebody's going to have to be a doctor there to take care of the people who get cut, injured, wounded, or sick. There's another profession that goes on.

Somebody's got to be the barber, somebody's got to run the saloon, somebody's got to run the restaurant, somebody's got to be the lawyer's office, and pretty soon you've got this stimulated economy that rolls out of the money that's dug out of the ground just as if they were mining gold. In

fact, Keynes said--John Maynard Keynes, the Keynesian economist, the original one, said--well, he believed, I should say, rather than I try to quote him precisely--that when government spends money, the more foolish the spending, the better because if it's foolish enough, it doesn't compete with the private sector.

So if government spends money and spends it foolishly, it stimulates the economy because it circulates it back into the economy. And if you spend it really dumb, it doesn't compete with the private sector. What kind of thinking is this? This is John Maynard Keynes, who lost his faith in that economic approach during FDR, but we have a President who missed that part of the lesson. We have a President who didn't read the ``bury the cash in the abandoned coal mine and fill the coal mine up with garbage'' scenario; or if he did, he took a different lesson from it than I did.

And we have a President who does not see the economic continuum from production through the expenditures that builds the way Adam Smith saw it. But here's this--and Adam Smith had a beautiful approach to this--I trust the President, if he read ``Wealth of Nations,'' he surely didn't adhere to it, but Adam Smith's book from 1776--what a glorious time that was in our history of Western Civilization. One of the foundational principles of free enterprise was articulated in such a clear way by Adam Smith in ``Wealth of Nations.''

But our economy is not based upon consumption because consumption eventually, if you have a consumption economy, it's just one, huge, big chain letter. And you know what happens if you get in a room and there are 10 of you in the room, the first one that sells the chain letter-- if you can't go outside of the room--is going to be the one that makes the money. The last one to buy the chain letter doesn't have anybody to sell it to. So you can go on up the line--it was, I believe, Sam Clemens that said a nation can't get rich doing each other's laundry, neither can we get rich if we are this giant chain letter, where we simply charge each other for doing things and echo that money up and down the economy.

What's the foundation and benefit of an economy, Mr. Speaker? It is this: any economy has to be rooted in the productivity of its people. And productivity comes in varying degrees. If it's a service economy, then it has to be a necessary service economy. If it's recreation, that's recreation that's spending for the disposal income. But here's what an economy has to have--what a people have to have--those components of our survival as a species. And so we need food, we need clothing, we need shelter, we need water, at a minimum, something to drink. What produces that? I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that it comes from the land. All new wealth comes from the land--new wealth--and we value add to that new wealth again and again and again.

Now, it's true that you can go out into the ocean and seine some fish, and that's kind of outside the land. So new wealth plus what you can seine out of the ocean represents all new wealth. And you can go cut some timber. You can mine it out of the Earth. It can be gold, it can be minerals, it can be coal, it can be limestone, it can be gravel. It can be a lot of different minerals that come out of the Earth. All new wealth comes from the land out of the Earth. But primarily it's that crop that grows every year that provides the food, clothing and shelter; and the water comes from the sky. That's necessary for the survival of humanity. They're the most precious commodities we have.

When the economy comes down into a crunch and we have to make our decisions on what our priorities are, first we want something to drink, then we want something to eat, then we want some shelter, a place to get out of the cold or out of the heat, and then we want to put some clothes on because that protects us from the cold, not necessarily from the heat.

Those are the things that are necessary. And where do they come from? Out of the soil every year. And it can be corn; it can be wheat. That's food. You feed it to livestock, and it comes back to you in a highly concentrated protein, value-added ag product that we see, concentrated and recycled and enhanced vegetables in the form of meat.

Clothing, cotton, for example, all kinds of fiber, flax, those things that we use to make--and of course the wool that comes from sheep that are grazing off of the grass that comes out of the soil. So there's your food and there's your clothing.

And we build shelter out of the same thing, wood to build a home with, for example, mine some rocks out and line them all up and put them together with some water and build a building. So that's all new wealth. The things we need for survival come out of the Earth itself, and most of them are regenerated every year out of the soil.

And as this economy moves forward, then we value add to those products. A bushel of corn becomes all kinds of things, becomes ethanol--300 and some other products--and it gets woven into--well, let's just say corn sweetener that goes into our soda pop, all the way to the plastic forks that we use in the cafeteria. That comes out of corn.

So we keep adding value and adding value as it multiplies up through the economy. And the funds that come from that pay for the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, the nurse, the accountant, the mayor and the city council, the State legislatures. The list goes on and on and on, but it's value-added back down to the root of our economy.

And the foundation of this is free enterprise capitalism and the invisible hand that makes the decision. If you want to sell a loaf of bread, you have to figure out how to make a better loaf of bread for the price that's on the shelf today, or sell an equal loaf of bread--or maybe not quite so high a quality--for a lesser price. And as those decisions are made, you change your mix in your bread and you put it on the shelf, you might change the wrapper, you might change the quality, you might lower the price to compete against your competition, and that invisible hand will go in there and take that loaf of bread off the shelf. Well, here I've got one for $1.25, I'm going to take that one because this one that's for $1.40 I don't like it as good.

Decisions get made, supply and demand. The baker who is meeting that supply, the one who has the high quality for the best price, judging by the--if you trust the judgment of the consumer--will be the one that's baking more and more loaves of bread until somebody figures out how to do it better. It's an automatic adjustment of supply and demand, Mr. Speaker, not understood, I don't think, by the President of the United States, by the people that surround him in the White House.

I think they are pretty much befuddled at how this all works. They think this economy is a giant chain letter. They think that there is always another sucker out there that you can sell the idea that you can grow government. And if you grow government and increase borrowing and increase spending, somehow magically this economy will sprout and grow and there will be a wizard result of a President who is a Keynesian economist on steroids. Not to be, Mr. Speaker, because you cannot defeat the law of economic gravity, which is, if you give people an opportunity to produce and succeed, that's what they will do. If you take that opportunity away and you decide you're going to call all the shots at the government level, then people are going to do what they have to do that's ordered by the government.

How many economies and how many societies have we seen collapse because they believed that central command could run the show with a bunch of intellectual elitists better than the invisible hand of the housewife, the househusband who goes in to buy that loaf of bread that I spoke about earlier?

Now, there's a magic here. There's a magic in America. There's a magic that comes from our freedom, from our liberty, from having the freedom to make these decisions ourselves. And some of us have walked through the grocery store and looked and thought, I can bake that bread better than anybody there, and went home and started up a bakery, and they've competed.

And some of us have gone to the gas station and decided, I don't like the service here, and I don't like the price

and I think I can do a better job, and gone back and opened up a gas station.

And some of us have bought a product like, let's say, a disk or a golf cart and decided, I can make this a lot better. I think I'll start making them and selling them. And pretty soon, there's somebody selling golf carts out there that weren't on the market before.

This is free enterprise. This is the beauty of this system that Adam Smith so clearly articulated in Wealth of Nations that every American should understand deeply. It should be in our soul, Mr. Speaker. It should be in our soul.

It's so deeply a part of the American culture and experience, that if one would go to the USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and look at the flashcards that they offer, there, in those flashcards, they show that you can study to become an American citizen for a naturalization test.

And these flashcards, well, they're nice glossy things, about like that, and you can look at one side and it'll say, Who's the father of our country? Snap it over to the other side, George Washington. Another one, Who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln.

Number 11, question number 11 is, What is the economic system of America? Snap that flash card over, it says, Free enterprise capitalism.

Hah. How about that? The United States Citizenship Immigration Services understands this. I don't know that you can become a citizen of the United States, naturalized, and not know free enterprise capitalism is our basic economic system. We're not socialism. We're not communism. We're not Marxism. We're not managed economies. We're not the Federal Government takes over the private sector. We're not the President of the United States swallows up eight Fortune 500 companies and threatens to swallow up BP on top of it. We're not a country that swallows up--well, we are, we did, but we shouldn't--these student loans, all the students loans in America.

By the way, we had a vote last week about the Federal flood insurance program. Back in the early sixties, the only flood insurance available in America was flood insurance that was offered by the private sector. The Federal Government decided to get involved, and so they offered a competing model of flood insurance. Early sixties, '63, I think. In a few short years, there were no private sector flood companies providing flood insurance anymore. If you didn't want to do business with the Federal Government buying flood insurance, if you didn't like their premiums or their coverage, you were out of luck. And if you borrowed money from a national bank, you were compelled to buy flood insurance if that bank said you have to because that was the Federal standard.

And so the Federal Government took over, in the name of providing another piece of competition, another place to market, flood insurance. The Federal Government took over 100 percent of the flood insurance in America. And now they're $19.2 billion in the red, and we have to legislate here in the House of Representatives and impose flood insurance on more people and get more people to pay the premium so that flood insurance could eventually get back into the black, which there's nothing in the bill last week that gets us there.

And if that pattern wasn't good enough, Mr. Speaker, about what happens when the Federal Government gets involved in the insurance business, then I'd direct your attention to the student loan program.

Now, just not that many years ago, all the student loans were private, set up separate from government, and operating through the lending institutions. And we had a pretty good program, especially the Iowa student loan program, very, very good program. Their losses were minimal. They worked hard with people to make sure they got those payments coming in. They helped people get the funding to go on and get an education. They performed a service, and they minimized the losses, the student loan program, Iowa, and many other States for that matter.

But George Miller of California and a number of others decided we really can't trust the private sector to provide student loans, so we'll take it over. Well, a couple, 3 years ago they took a bite out of that apple and took ahold of part of the student loan program in America and passed it here in the House and in the Senate. And then, the coup de grace came in the reconciliation package that came from the Senate. It was the one that came that had to do with the last component of ObamaCare that I spoke about about 40 minutes ago, Mr. Speaker. The reconciliation plan has in it, had in it, has in it the elimination of private sector student loans. All of them now go through the United States Department of Education. The Federal Government has taken over all of the student loans in America.

Now, I don't know if anybody can give me an example of when the Federal Government got involved in a business to provide more competition and didn't end up swallowing it all up, but I can tell you two definitive answers here that I've seen in my lifetime.

Flood insurance, when I entered high school, zero percent of the flood insurance in America was government; 100 percent was private. Well, about the time I got out of high school or some years after that, 100 percent of the flood insurance in America is government. There is no private sector in it at all, zero. They've wiped out the private sector competition in flood insurance.

And then we see it happen with the student loan program. Again, under the same rules to provide some competition, we don't think there's a legitimate marketplace. We'll get some competition so that the government can compete against the private sector. We'll get the private sector honest. Well, no, they got the private sector to be gone. They legislated the private sector out of existence and gave over the entire student loan program to the Department of Education.

And here we are with ObamaCare. ObamaCare. The President of the United States said he just wants to provide one more competitor for insurance, for health insurance for the people in America. I don't know that he would have answered the question, but the White House press corps failed us time and time again.

A number of questions I would like to ask him are, Mr. President, how many insurance companies exist in the United States of America when you make the statement that we need more competition?

If he knew the answer and gave an honest one, it would have been 1,300, 1,300 health insurance companies in America providing health insurance for a large percentage of Americans. Eighty-five or more percent of us are satisfied with what we had. And of those 1,300 companies, they produce, in the aggregate, 100,000 policy varieties that the health insurance consumer could evaluate in order to buy the policy of their choice. And the President wanted more competition. 1,300 companies is not enough. 1,300 companies is not enough. 100,000 policies are not enough. Let's have 1,301 companies and 100,010 or 100,012 policies available. That would keep the rest of them honest; right?

Don't we know this? Haven't we seen enough of this? Haven't we seen the flood insurance program taken over by the Federal Government? Haven't we seen the Federal Government swallow up and nationalize three large investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, to the tune of $180 billion? $180 billion. Taking over the balance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and making you, the taxpayer--and you are a taxpayer, Mr. Speaker--liable for a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion. Three large investment banks: AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.

Now we're at General Motors and Chrysler, another couple of Fortune 500 companies swallowed up by the Federal Government. Shares ripped out of the hands of the secured creditors and handed over on a silver platter to the trade unions who had no investment, who had no risk, who made no concessions; 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors owned now by the unions. The secured creditors aced out.

And the White House dictated the terms into the bankruptcy court, at least for Chrysler, and very likely General Motors, but we have sworn testimony on Chrysler that the terms going in were dictated by the Federal Government. The terms going out were exactly the terms dictated by the Federal

Government. Yes, there were hearings. There were witnesses in the bankruptcy court, but not one component of the bankruptcy of Chrysler, not one piece of it, was changed as a result of the sworn testimony before the bankruptcy hearing.

The Federal Government going in evaluated and assessed the asset value of Chrysler. They were the only ones that were evaluating the asset value of Chrysler going in. They took the secured creditors and ripped their assets out of their hands, handed them over to the unions. And at the tail end of the bankruptcy who's the only buyer? The Federal Government.

The Federal Government appraises it going in, sets the terms of the bankruptcy, no amount of testimony changes anything, the bankruptcy court accepted the dictates of the President or his people, and on the other end the only buyer is the Federal Government, who in their magnanimity hands over shares again to the United Auto Workers.

This is free enterprise capitalism? This qualifies for the flash card of what drives the economy in America? I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. And I'm not done. Three large investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, the student loan program. That comes to more than a third of the private-sector activity according to Professor Boyes at Arizona State University. And along comes ObamaCare.

ObamaCare. The nationalization of all of these entities, all Fortune 500 companies, and now it comes to the nationalization, Mr. Speaker, of your skin. Your skin and everything inside it taken over by the Federal Government. And the very taxation of the outside started the first of July. If you walk into a tanning salon in America, 10 percent of that goes to Uncle Sam to help pay for ObamaCare, which is going to be some kind of revenue saving operation.

We need to, Mr. Speaker, repeal this ObamaCare. We need to pull it out by the roots. I have, in conjunction with Michele Bachmann, worked intensively to repeal ObamaCare. She introduced a repeal on the first day. I introduced a repeal on the first week. We have a discharge petition at the well. It's discharge petition number 11. We have at least 136 signatures on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that went over 140. We are on our way to 218 signatures to repeal ObamaCare.

A discharge petition can circumvent a block by the Speaker. If 218 signatures appear on discharge petition number 11, that means ObamaCare comes to the floor of the House, where it would certainly be repealed in the House, however difficult it is to get it through the Senate. We need it gone. We need to put an end to ObamaCare in America. We have to pull it out by the roots, lock, stock, and barrel, not one vestige, not one particle of DNA of ObamaCare left behind. ObamaCare has become a malignant tumor, and it threatens to metastasize on this free people, this formerly free people.

And if we are to have the vitality that comes from American liberty, we can't be living with the dependency that's created by ObamaCare. And Mr. Speaker, I pledge my strongest effort to repeal ObamaCare completely and entirely, to rip it out by the roots, to quote the last few words of the repeal bill that is the discharge petition, ``as if it had never been enacted.''

So Mr. Speaker, the American people demand the repeal of ObamaCare, I demand the repeal of ObamaCare. I ask my colleagues to join in the repeal of ObamaCare and to sign onto discharge petition number 11 so we can get there, give the American people back their liberty, let us become the vital people with the vitality that we have had in the past to take us to the next level of our economic destiny.

Mr. Speaker, that is our charge. That's our responsibility. And that will be the call and the cry of the American people come November.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 11 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, July 20, 2010, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House, and a lot of subjects come up here. About every imaginable thing has been debated here on the floor. I've listened to a lot of the dialogue that's unfolded in the previous hour, and I appreciate my colleagues' presentation or discussion of especially the economic and the spending situation, the dire straits that America is in.

And it seems ironic to me, Mr. Speaker, that about a year ago, in fact a little more than a year ago, I sat in the office in Berlin just outside Reichstag and had a conversation with the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who made the argument to us that the United States is spending too much money, that the financial crisis--this, I believe, was actually February or March of 2009, and she made the argument that the solution for our economic crisis was not the Federal Government spending more money, Mr. Speaker, but it was about some targeted tax cuts that they had provided for their socialized economy.

European socialized economy, government-managed business, public- private partnerships, that's been some of the problems as to why they haven't had the economic vitality that we've had in the United States, and still as this financial situation unfolded, brought to the American people's attention about September 19, 2008, before the Presidential election I might add, and these discussions were taking place in February and then again in May of 2009 with representatives of the European Union and the leadership over Western Europe, whom I've often been critical of because they didn't let free enterprise flourish, had too many government regulations, had too many taxes, and because of that their economy was bogged down. Entrepreneurs weren't allowed to have the prosperity that they would have in the United States. Our economy grew, their economy stagnated, and that's what we've seen unfold over the last generation or so in the economic comparison between Europe and the United States.

But I found myself in the improbable position of listening to the leadership of the European Union and Western Europe lecture Americans that we should spend less money, not more money. Their plan, I believe, was $480 billion altogether, $400 billion in loans and $80 billion in targeted spending. And the advice was America needs to hold down the spending and we need to adopt a more fiscally responsible budget, spend less money, provide less debt, and not this pass on to the next generations.

Well, that was a year and several months ago when this began, Mr. Speaker, and during the last couple of weeks, we've heard that lecture again from the same person, Angela Merkel of Germany. I'm glad she's making this case. It ought to hit home to our President of the United States. It ought to hit all of us here in this country that we in America, this Congress, over my vociferous objections and that of many of my colleagues voted ``no'' on a $700 billion TARP fund and voted ``no'' on a $787 billion economic stimulus plan, and in the middle of that, while it was framed, we watched the government takeover of the three large investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and General Motors and Chrysler and the student loan program. We watched the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it in the form of ObamaCare, and the government has now subsequently, within that list that I've just identified, swallowed up over 50 percent of the former private sector activity of our economy and more to come.

Financial services, reaching out to tap in and regulate every credit transaction in America and setting up boards and a whole new regulatory shield, another layer of regulation for our financial institutions, for our large banks, and to a lesser degree, for our independent banks and smaller banks, but not for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where a lot of this problem came from, where the taxpayers of the United States now assumed a $7.5 trillion contingent liability if Fannie and Freddie should go under. We've dumped billions into them, $40 billion to $50 billion comes to mind perhaps for each. And if they should become insolvent, the American taxpayers have to keep dumping money into Fannie and Freddie to prop them up because they're part of the takeover where they used to be private. At one time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were private. Then they were quasi-government. Now, they're completely under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government.

All of this has taken place in the last year and half or a little more. We watched it happen. I've argued against it every step of the way, so have some of my colleagues, and quite a number of my good, reliable colleagues have come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and made this case, made it over and over and over again.

But this situation that Europe has where they have loaned money to each other, the economy of Greece has gone down and been propped up by the European Union, and the economy of Spain has the highest unemployment--I think Greece might have eclipsed them, but for a long time Spain had the highest unemployment in the industrialized world. Their economy is wobbling. Ireland's economy is wobbling, and the European Union countries have loaned money to each other. It's almost like being in a poker game.

And let's just say that, because of all the overhead that's taken out by government, all the regulations taken out by government, if you all sit down in a poker game and the house takes, let's say, 45 percent of every pot, sooner or later the people sitting around the table that are trying to exchange those dollars are exchanging IOUs instead because the house has taken the money.

Government has swallowed up too much of the proceeds of the private sector, and then they have loaned money to each other, and the United States is borrowing money from around the world. In fact, the amount of money that is borrowed from the Chinese is now approaching $1 trillion. And, yes, Americans have invested into American debt. But this debt is too hard a burden for us to carry.

I put a polling question up on my Web site. The news is full every day of the environmental calamity in the gulf and it goes on every day, and it is sad, and it is tragic, and I think we should turn all our efforts to shutting off the leak and cleaning up the mess, Mr. Speaker. But I asked in the polling question, what is the greatest threat to America, the gulf oil leak or the debt and deficit that this country is carrying? And about 80 percent of the respondents in the poll will say the debt and deficit is a greater threat to America than the gulf oil leak.

That gives me encouragement. That tells me the American people are on target here; that they understand the priorities and they understand the long-term implications of the debt and the deficit that we are carrying now in this economy.

But, Mr. Speaker, those are some of the issues that pick up on the previous speakers within the previous hour, and some concerns come to mind also aside from the economics. And perhaps I will come back to the economic side of this, but I think we need to talk about the rule of law for a little while here tonight.

I often come here to this floor and talk about the pillars of American exceptionalism, those essential components that have made America great. And I have listed them: Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, which thankfully just this week the Supreme Court has reinforced.

First the Heller case established that it is an individual right to keep and bear arms, and in the case that was settled just this week, I think just yesterday is when the news came out, is that the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, affects not just the reach of the Federal Government to diminish the gun ownership rights of its citizens, but also the Second Amendment is guaranteed to protect the citizen's right to keep and bear arms from the reach of any political subdivision in America, whether it be States, municipalities, counties, whatever the political subdivisions are.

So the Second Amendment has been established and strengthened twice within this last half a decade or so, first the Heller case and now the case that came out this week. The Second Amendment is another pillar of American exceptionalism, because we know an armed population can defend itself against tyranny.

So the pillars of American exceptionalism being freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and we will go right on up the line within the Bill of Rights. Some of them, including the rights to property, which have been subverted by the Kelo decision, and I hope one day that decision is overturned by a Supreme Court that is more prudent and the past Supreme Court that made that decision; the protection against double jeopardy and the right to be tried by a jury of our peers--the list goes on. But most of those pillars of American exceptionalism are within the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

There are a couple of other components that are part of American exceptionalism that are not defined in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, and that is something where one of

them, one of them, Mr. Speaker, is enshrined in the flashcards that are produced by USCIS, the United States Citizenship Immigration Services. These flashcards rights are little training cards, like you would imagine or see in a classroom that you can learn off of. The flashcard that says 2 plus 2, you snap it over and it says 4; 4 plus 4 is 8; and the list goes on.

But the flashcards for learning to become a naturalized American citizen ask simple questions, questions that you would need to know the answer to if you were going to be a naturalized American citizen. And it would start with, who is the Father of our country? And you flip the card over, George Washington. Who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln.

Question Number 11, I believe, is, what is the economic system of the United States? Flip that card over, and on the other side it says free enterprise capitalism, Mr. Speaker. The economic system of the United States. That is a pillar of American exceptionalism.

If we didn't have free enterprise capitalism, we would not be a great nation. Our economy could not have competed with that of the rest of the world. We could not have built the industrial giant that supported our people and our troops and the military around the world to win World War II. We would not have emerged as victors in World War II without free enterprise being a driving force that let the industry in America fulfill and supply the demand that we had for 16 million mostly men and also women in uniform in World War II.

We went all over the world with our economy, with our people. We brought American products everywhere in the world. There was a chance for profit. Our factories were running at a fever pitch day and night. We were building bombers and tanks and ships and parachutes, and we were providing supplies for a lot of the rest of the world whose industry had been destroyed. And at the end of World War II, we were the only industrialized country in the world that had an intact industry.

And the dollar was golden. The greenback was strong. It was a silver certificate at the time. And we saw American culture, American values, and American products spread all throughout the world. We provided a large share of the world's manufacturing and industry, and a lot of that was driven because we maintained intact that pillar of American exceptionalism called free enterprise capitalism, that freedom to produce and earn, and, yes, get wealthy, if you can figure out how to do it, keep some of what you earn, keep a lot of what you earn.

And, by the way, the unemployment rate at the end of World War II in this country was 1.2 percent. And when people argue that we have been at historically low unemployment levels and argue that 4.6 percent is that, or that that is a normal unemployment level, I point them back to the lowest level that we have seen in history, 1.2 percent at the end of World War II. And then the number went up when a lot of our soldiers came home.

But free enterprise capitalism is what has driven the industrialized might of the United States. It has driven our military. It has taken our culture around the world. The desire to trade and market and profit from it has taken the American culture everywhere in the world. Free enterprise capitalism is an exceptional pillar of American exceptionalism.

And another one of those pillars of American exceptionalism is a legitimate, legal immigration system. The Constitution requires that Congress establish a uniform immigration system, so Congress is to do that. And I would say we have done that. It is uniform. It is consistent with the Constitution. We have an Immigration Reform Act that was passed here in this Congress in 1996 and signed into law. We need to have an executive branch that will follow the law.

But the beauty of America's immigration system has been that, up until the last generation or so, maybe the last generation-and-a-half, Mr. Speaker, it has been difficult to come to the United States of America. And the legal system that we had actually screened people out, those who came into Ellis Island, the millions that came into Ellis Island. And I can think of one day that set the record: 11,757 came through the great hall at Ellis Island on, I think I can remember the year and the date, April 15, 1907. A massive number, just like 11,757 people through there. But day by day by day they came through.

About 2 percent of those who had actually been screened before they got on the ship to come to the United States, to immigrate into the United States, even though they were screened, they were screened for good health, for sanity, so-to-speak, they were screened so they had an ability to take care of themselves, they arrived here in the United States of America.

America a century ago was a meritocracy. We didn't have a welfare system that had at this point evolved into a welfare state. It was a meritocracy. We wanted people that were physically healthy, mentally healthy, able to come here and get a job and go to work or start a business and sustain themselves and provide for themselves.

They were screened by conditions that we had then before they got on the ship, generally in Europe at that time, and they were screened again when they arrived at Ellis Island. They were checked physically. Sometimes, yes, they were rushed through. But even though they were screened before they came, about 2 percent were sent back to their home country because they didn't meet the standards here in America.

But almost all of them who came to the United States, almost all of them aspired to the American Dream. And many of them may have believed that the streets were paved in gold and gotten here and were disappointed to find out they were actually paved in dirt, dust, mud, sometimes cobblestones, sometimes horse manure. It wasn't quite the beautiful place that was advertised on the brochures in Europe, but they came. And some of them went back voluntarily because they didn't find the promise that they thought they had.

But all of them had a dream--almost all of them had a dream. And they shared the American Dream. And when they came here, they brought with them the dreamer's vitality, the dreamer's energy, the dreamer's stick- to-it-ive-ness, and the conviction that they could start up a life for themselves, make a life for themselves, and leave this world a better place for their children than it was for them. It's always been an embodiment and a component of the American Dream.

So the legal immigration that came to America did this, Mr. Speaker. And this is the verbal definition of one of the pillars of American exceptionalism--legal immigration skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization that sent people to the United States. When that happened, we got their vigor, we got their dreams, we got some of their capital, we got all of their work, and we've got their descendents that grew up here in America with that same dream.

And even though it might have been first generation immigrants that might have lived in a shantytown and worked in a boiler factory somewhere, they worked to make life better and they pushed their children to get an education and they taught them that America has embraced us and we have our freedom, we have our liberty here. And you need to defend our country and go out and make sure that you're going to grow up in a better opportunity than the first generation had, and make sure the third generation has more opportunities than the second and the fourth generation more opportunities than the third. And so on and so on.

And so it has been. It's been true with family after family, generation after generation. And it's embodied in a way in my family where I have a grandmother that came from Germany. She raised six sons and a daughter. Of those six sons, five of them put on the uniform to defend our country. Some of them went back to Germany in the Second World War. One was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. My father went to the South Pacific. They didn't hesitate. They didn't hesitate to go take on the country that their mother had come from. They knew and they believed that they owed this country a debt of gratitude, and they demonstrated it. And that's part of the greatness of America, too.

But that pillar of American exceptionalism, that vitality of the Americans that come here infused with the generational tradition of that vitality, and the multiple generations, has been a significant part of American exceptionalism. And I look at the roots of these causes for American exceptionalism, and I often take this back to the Age of Reason in Greece and Roman law and how the knowledge base that was established by rational thought in the Age of Reason in Greece and the Roman law found its way through the Dark Ages and emerged in the Age of Enlightenment, the English-speaking component of the Age of Enlightenment, to be specific, Mr. Speaker.

As those qualities arrived here in the New World, in America, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and a continent that had at that time conceived only unlimited natural resources, low taxation, no regulation, a concept of manifest destiny, of having been the beneficiary of the Age of Enlightenment at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and had the foundation of our Judeo-Christian values arrived here with those immigrants--most of them; that foundation of value system that comes from the birth of Christ and the redemption that comes with Christ and 1,500 years later also the Protestant reformation and Martin Luther that taught the Protestant work ethic that was picked up by the Catholics. And the Catholics did pretty good with the Protestant work ethic, is my point, Mr. Speaker.

So we've seen this vitality in this giant petri dish of America every component that we can imagine that has been positive has been here in this country, put here by providence--the natural resources, the understanding of the Adam Smithian component of economic theory, the supply and demand invisible hand component of economic theory, the Age of Reason from Greece and the Roman law that found their way through the Dark Ages and emerged as the Age of Enlightenment, all here in the United States of America. It was unlimited natural resources that go along with it.

Those components, driven by the vitality of the immigrants that have come here, have been essential to this Nation rising through the challenges of the ages and facing off against the world when we didn't see ourselves as a world power. We didn't see ourselves as a world power when we found ourselves in the Spanish-American War. And so we have the legacy of that that exists today. Puerto Rico is one of those components. The Philippines is another. That goes around the world pretty well.

We didn't view ourselves as a global power, but we had a global reach after having had the Maine sunk in Havana Harbor. America had a global reach. Even though we didn't, again, see ourselves as a global power, we got in at the tail end of World War I and made a difference and changed the balance. And now we were a player in the world that needed to be contended with. It's not to go out and find a war to do that. They came to us because we had to defend the liberty and the freedom in the world and align ourselves with people that believed in the same values.

And a generation after World War I, along came World War II. Now, that was a cataclysmic conflict where tens of millions died, and America emerged as the world power and the dominant force in the world until such time as the Cold War began. And even then, 45 years of the Cold War, a Cold War that started I think we can see it with the Berlin Airlift, which the anniversary of it just began a few days ago, but the United States stood strong and we faced off against the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and there was a game going on, a very high-stakes, life-or-death game; even a life-or-death for the planet game going on.

And at the end of it, in about 1984, Jean Kirkpatrick, as Ambassador to the United Nations appointed under Reagan, had stepped down from that post, and she said as she stepped down--and this will be a paraphrase of her quote, Mr. Speaker. She said, What's going on between the United States and the Soviet Union--speaking of the Cold War--is chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the only question is: Will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate us militarily?

That race was going on and the Soviet Union was seeking to build more and more missiles to try and gain an advantage that would cause us to have to concede to them or capitulate on foreign policy, at least, at a minimum; but Ronald Reagan came in and pushed the resurgence of our national defense, built the missiles back up again, and in the process of doing so, November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

That's the power of an economy and the power of an ideology over a managed economy, a communist economy, a central command economy. That's the power of it all, Mr. Speaker. This country has been a powerfully strong superpower in the world and the only unchallenged superpower in the world in the aftermath of the Wall coming down on November 9, 1989, and subsequently the implosion of the Soviet Union. It took it about another year and a half to finally get itself wound down.

But we are standing here as the unchallenged superpower in the world in significant and essential part because we have a free enterprise economy. Well, we had a free enterprise economy, and now we are getting a managed economy that's someplace over there. It looks like it's to the left of Europe.

They're lecturing us, Don't spend too much money. They didn't argue we shouldn't do so much nationalization. They're guilty of that, too. But there have been a lot more dollars' worth of private sector economy nationalized by this President than by Hugo Chavez. And that's not a stretch, Mr. Speaker. It's simply a fact that as Hugo Chavez is blown away by tens of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars.

And how do we get this economy back? I'll submit that it isn't going to happen under this President. President Obama is not going to let go of companies that have been taken over by this Federal Government. I asked the question of the Secretary of the Treasury, under oath, and actually I presented it in a written form because we ran out of time in the hearing. The question is, President Obama was elected at least in part because of his challenge to President Bush for President Bush allegedly not having an exit strategy in Iraq.

We've all heard that. That rhetoric is old and we've forgotten about it, but it's back there, and the Record is full of it, Mr. Speaker.

So my question to the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, was: If the President has been elected in part for his criticism of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq, what is the exit policy for the Obama administration to divest themselves from the takeover of the banks, insurance companies, Fannie and Freddie, the car companies that I have listed here earlier in this dialogue, Mr. Speaker. What is their strategy for divesting themselves and giving the private sector back to the private sector? The answer that I received-- and granted, they're buried, and they're probably short staffed. They took a couple of months. I will give the Secretary of the Treasury credit. At least he answered my letter. Often I don't get letters from the other Cabinet members that we have. And the answer essentially was this--a couple of months to get the letter back, a seven-page letter, and it boils down to: He would know when the time was right to divest the Federal Government from the ownership, management or control of these entities that have been nationalized. He would know when the time was right. There is no written criteria, and he could make the decision then at the right time. In other words, it's really not your business. I'm not going to write down a formula. We may or may not have an intent to divest the Federal Government from the banks and AIG and Fannie and Freddie. They don't intend to let go of Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie have an implicit guarantee--actually, it's now a specific guarantee. The taxpayers will bail them out. They are not covered in this financial regulatory reform bill, the Barney Frank/Chris Dodd bill that's designed to solve our economic woes.

I have looked down through some of these things that are not very well known about what's in the financial regulatory reform bill. Out of the House, we know it as H.R. 4173. We

know that there is a conference report. They found out that even though the best judgment of the conference committee produced a result, the votes aren't there. So they're going back to change the conference report and see if they can find the votes to get it passed. I am troubled a little by the procedure, Mr. Speaker.

But here are some things that are in it, and they're not likely to come out. I want to speak to the issue of the focus on special provisions for women and minorities that are in the bill. Now I point out, Mr. Speaker, that I've dealt with this for a long time, with set- asides and had to compete against provisions that are written into Federal contracts as set-asides. I have spent a lot of my life as a contractor doing site development work of all kinds, earthmoving, pipe, concrete work, underground work, demolition work. We would do some seeding, some fencing, those kinds of things, and some concrete work.

I bid a lot of contracts in my professional life, and I can think of one in particular that I will use as an example. The Federal Government has set aside special components. Sometimes a contract is set aside for women or minorities, and no one else can bid it. Now, I had a small company, and I had to start from scratch. I didn't have any capital to begin with. I actually had a negative net worth of $5,000. I convinced a banker to loan me enough money to buy me an old beaten-up bulldozer, and then I started to work. So I had to build capital with sweat equity and moxie and anything else that could be done that was legal and moral and ethical. I tried to outwork my competition and outsmart my competition and slowly build up an operation where I got a second machine, a little capital, another machine, hire another man, buy another machine, hire another man, and get some capital underneath me to get to the point where I could bond these projects. And there are a lot of sad stories along the way. It's a very difficult thing to build the capital to be able to bid some of these projects.

But all the way along the way, I knew that I was disadvantaged. Big money had a big advantage over on me. The people that were wired in and entrenched, they had a significant advantage over me. I was trying to crack into that without the capital, was short on equipment, short on manpower, strong on ambition, willing to work and work longer and harder hours than anybody else would. But the deck was stacked against me. That's why there aren't a lot of people in the business, because the system and the structure is set in such a way with capital requirements, it's capital intensive with equipment and meeting the regulations for employees, et cetera. So I know how hard that is.

But I would need a project that fit our equipment. It needed to be smaller projects. When it got into the millions of dollars, we didn't have the ability to bond that, especially in the beginning. And so I needed those projects that were down there--$100,000 project, $3,200,000 project, maybe a $300,000 project. And so I would look for the bid notifications to pick up those projects that fit the things that we could do, that were small enough that we could bid the project. And quite often, I would draw a set of plans and there would be a provision on there that would say ``minority set-aside.'' I couldn't bid the projects because it's a project set aside for a minority or maybe a woman-owned business or sometimes either/or. And I have gotten a little sensitive to this.

I recall a larger project. When I got to the point where I could bond the larger projects--and this is a lifetime of work to get to that point, by the way. And I drew a set of plans for a sewer lagoon project in a city, and I remember right where it is and a lot of the details of the specs. But I was familiar with the engineering firm, familiar with the specifications, so I sat down to put the project together. I spent 4 days getting quotes from suppliers and subcontractors, calculating the volume and the quantities that are there, putting the bid together as best I knew, looking at the project and negotiating to make sure that I drew all the best bids that I could from subcontractors, all the best bids that I could from suppliers. And when I put that together, a man has an honorable responsibility to honor the low bid. I'm bidding for a low bid. The people who bid to me as subcontractors and suppliers, I want their best bid. I want their low bid, and I will honor it, and I will keep it confidential until such time as the bids are opened. That's the standard that needs to exist in the industry.

So I spent 4 days doing that. I got my numbers all together. And right before it was time to submit my bid, I gave one last read through the specifications, and in there, it said that there was a percentage of set-asides for minority contractors. I looked--and I think I could guess at the percentage, but I probably better not guess. It is not a large percentage. I will say under 20. But to find a minority contractor that would do a small part of that project--even if I handed it to him--was an impossibility. I went to the list of contractors. I worked the phones. I called other people that I knew, suppliers and contractors, and said, Where is somebody out here that can do the seeding or the fencing or the riprap work or take on any component of this job, any part of it? Is there somebody that can, somebody that will? The answer was no. There was nobody that could be found. And I had to take that 4 days' work and just toss it in the trash and forget it because it was set aside for minority contractors, the component of it was that I couldn't meet.

Now, if somebody was a large construction company and they had an especially established minority contractor that they used to plug in to those circumstances, they had a bidding advantage, and those types of situations got set up. They got set up in part because the government created a false demand, and we couldn't find people that would do the job, and so there were sometimes contractors set up that didn't have a desire or a knowledge. They were just a straw man that was used to meet regulations.