Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the presentations made here in the previous hour, and there were a couple of visuals that I want to look at and commit some of that to memory.

I heard from Ms. Kaptur that this is not a partisan issue, it is an economic issue and an American issue, and I agree. I have been troubled for some time not just the influence that comes out of Goldman Sachs, but the influence that comes out of Wall Street. Here is my concern and here how it was internalized.

I lived much of my life watching from a distance what was going on on Wall Street, and I believed that as those investors and those bankers sat down there and began to trade on the

streets of Wall Street and began to build the edifices that exist there today so very close to Ground Zero, that they were keepers of the free enterprise flame in America.

I had great trust that they were the ones that understood from the top down, from the multiple billions of dollars in investments down, how to hold together free enterprise, how to plan for the long term, how to put provisions in place so that each generation could have that opportunity to do free enterprise capitalism and free market capitalism.

I got my first wide open eyes when I first went to Wall Street when I was elected to Congress; it would be fairly early in 2003 for me. It's a long story, but the short version of it was after I went around Wall Street and met with a lot of the CEOs and the players that were there, on the way back I turned to my wife and I said, Marilyn, they don't have a vision for the long term. They don't have a plan in place to protect our investments and see to it that this doesn't collapse. They're looking at the short term. They're looking at taking their margins out and they're looking at their quarterly reports, but they're not looking at where we are in 10 years or a generation or 50 years or 100. That was well before we saw anything except a dot-com bubble that was, at the time, being filled by an unnatural housing market that was partially fueled by unnaturally low interest rates. But that was my vision then.

As I watch this unfold, I reflect upon an individual we brought in as an expert, and since I'm going to quote him on the floor, I don't want to attribute it to the name, but it's 30 years in investment banking. This was in the beginning of the subprime mortgage crisis as the dialogue was beginning in the country before we actually saw this starting to tail off. He explained it this way: when you're in this investment banking business, what you do is--and these would be the experts--what you do is pretty much what everybody does. That way if they're making money, you're making money, and if things fall apart and they get bailed out, you'll be bailed out with them.

That was more than 3 years ago. That's another incident that was branded into my memory because it was a seminal moment in my understanding that the economy that most of us deal with as individuals, balancing our checkbook, paying our credit card bills, looking at the income that comes in weekly or monthly and budgeting our expenses and knowing that there are checks and balances in everything that we do, if we fail to make our house payment, somebody comes and sells our house. If we fail to make our car payment, somebody repossesses our car. They don't come along and say, oh, sorry, you didn't buy a nice enough car, we're going to tax somebody and fund that. We have to be responsible for our finances.

If we start a business, we have to guarantee those payments. We have to get a line of credit at the bank so we can make our monthly bills and we can meet the payroll and the utilities and all of the things that come along with the free enterprise side of this.

I looked at Wall Street and I found out that they had a different set of rules, a different way of looking at this, that their checks and balances were not built in so that there was an assurance that--the built-in component that is a check and balance that would require that the people who would make the over-investments and take the excessive risks would pay the price for that.

So as we get to this point now where we have seen the downward spiral in our economy, this ``Great Recession'' as some will call it and the massive government bailouts that we have had and the tremendous burden on the taxpayers, born and unborn, that we will have this obligation to try to service the interest and the principal on this debt, still the guarantee is there, more than implicit, it's now nearly explicit with this legislation. And we may or may not agree on how we go forward, but I think we can agree that the things that we've done in the past haven't had enough checks and balances internally.

As I listened to this dialogue--I didn't come to the floor to speak about this subject, but I wanted to express this right in the aftermath of this previous Special Order, Mr. Speaker, to let you know and everyone know that we do have a common cause to put responsibility and government responsibility in the market system. I just watched the gentlelady pay attention here. I would yield to whatever remarks she might choose to make.

Reclaiming my time and, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that it is unusual for Democrats and Republicans to share time spontaneously on the floor, but it's because there is a bond of common interest and a bond of a serious legislator that I recognize that's here on the floor for a serious reason.

I thank the gentlelady from Ohio for the presentation.

I'm going to shift off now into the subject matters that I had on the front of my mind, but I was compelled to address this and I appreciate the response.

Mr. Speaker, I come here to the floor tonight to talk about a range of issues. Perhaps if I would pick up on the financial side of this and go through a list of some of the things that have happened that I think contributed to the ``Great Recession'' that some refer to it as. And I would take us back a long ways. I would take us far back to the time that there became implicit guarantees that the Federal Government would do bailouts.

I remember those years of the eighties that the gentlelady mentioned. I went through 28 years of business, and I was highly leveraged going into the farm crisis of the eighties. I know the pain of that. I lived for 3\1/2\ years with a knot in my stomach that didn't go away unless there was something incredibly distracting that would cause it to disappear, and then I remember it would form again.

I am always happy to yield when the Rules Committee is conducting business here on the floor.

So I will go back to the beginning, Mr. Speaker, and that is this: that if we would go to 1978--and I want to illustrate the chronology of how we got to where we are today financially. Excuse me, Mr. Speaker, I will take it back even further than that. Let's go back to October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and it launched the Great Depression rather than the Great Recession. We saw a downward spiral in the value of that Dow Jones Stock Exchange and the other shares that were not registered on the Dow at the time, or as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Americans lost equity. Some jumped out of windows--actually, not nearly as many as history would have us believe--but that crash in the stock market precipitously dropped. Of course it came up and went down, and it's always been a sawtooth.

But we went through the thirties. We saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt being elected in 1932. And actually, prior to that, but certainly accelerated from that point, he borrowed money and spent money and created make-work projects, and he put the United States in debt like never before and never envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Even his own people, including John Maynard Keynes, got nervous with the amount of money that was spent. His Treasurer, Morgenthau, expressed his concern that we spent all this money and what do we have to show for it. Unemployment is still high; the economy still hasn't recovered. And they lumbered all the way through the thirties with marginal improvement in the economy.

And one has to question if it ever would have recovered if it hadn't been for World War II. In fact, the President of the United States, the current President, has made the remark that World War II was the largest stimulus plan ever. He can make that statement and challenge it or not, I don't take issue with the concept that he is illustrating in that point, Mr. Speaker.

But I would continue and make this point, that from October of 1929 we saw all of this spending in the New Deal era of the Great Depression throughout the thirties. We saw all the borrowed money that went into winning World War II, and it's a good thing that we did. I believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an outstanding war leader for the better part of the Second World War, not so much of an economic leader, in my view, nor a social and cultural one; but he did hold us together as a Nation and he provided that clear voice and that leadership that was so important during that period of time, and he stood on the ground of unconditional surrender. So I tip my hat to that contribution to history to that man.

However, by the end of World War II, we had not recovered economically from where we were in 1929. And by the beginning of the Korean War--let me say by the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, as it was illustrated by Winston Churchill--we had not recovered from the Great Depression. By the beginning of the Korean War, we had not yet recovered from the Great Depression. And by the end of the Korean War, we had still not yet recovered from the Great Depression. If you measure it as the Dow Jones Industrial Average recovering back to the place where it was in October of 1929, that happened, Mr. Speaker, 9 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had passed away. It was 1954 when the stock market got back to where it was in October of 1929. All of those years.

And I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that overspending by government, the interest and the principal overspending by government delays the recovery. It may diminish the depths to which we might have otherwise fallen, but it delays the recovery.

It's the same as in a business. Let's say, for example, you're a small business and you're grossing $500,000 a year and meeting a payroll and all the bills that I talked about earlier and you have a flood that wipes out your asset base. Then along comes FEMA, and if you're in business, they're not going to give you a grant; they might help you get an SBA loan. So if there's a disaster loan, it might even be a preferable interest rate, but let's say your debt was $100,000 and you're grossing $500,000 and meeting a payroll of $250,000 a year. Now, it takes another $400,000 to put all the pieces back in your business, and you're able to borrow that money at 4 percent or 5 or 6 percent.

Now you have the interest rate on the $400,000, plus the requirement to pay the principal off on that $400,000. All of that money that you're spending now that is the result of the over-leveraging that may be necessary to keep you in business is money that's earned, it's money that you had to earn, you would have earned it anyway, but now that money goes off for interest and principal rather than capital investment, which is what creates jobs.

At a certain point, you can't service the debt any longer. At a certain point, a business can't pay the interest; it can't pay the principal, and it becomes insolvent if the debt and the leverage is too high. That is true for a family that runs their credit card bills up too much to where they can't service even the interest or the minimum payments on their credit cards. It's true also for a small business. It's true for a large business--and, Mr. Speaker, it's true for a government. It's true for a small government like Greece. It's true for a large government like the United States of America. At some point, this

debt that we have taken on here in this time, in this era, becomes too great for even the most robust economy in the world to overcome--to service, to pay the interest, and to pay the principal on that debt.

That's where I think we are headed. We may already be there.

That was the fear that they had during the thirties, and that was something that may have restrained Roosevelt in his spending to where we were able to recover from it; although, it took a long, long time-- from 1929 until 1954, until 9 years after the Second World War was over and 9 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away. We carried this burden throughout this whole period of time.

Through the fifties, during those idyllic years of Fun with Dick and Jane, which is the life that I grew up in, we were responsible for our budgets. The people who were coming into adulthood at that period of time had now cut their economic teeth on fiscal responsibility because they had pinched pennies and had made it through the Great Depression. Then they fought and won a world war. Then they were engaged in a Cold War. Of course, we had the war in Korea that was a negotiated settlement in the end. These were a frugal, hardened people who were the sons and daughters, in my part of the country, of pioneers who came across the prairie in a covered wagon--generally walking beside the team of oxen, not riding in the wagon--to live free or die on the prairie. These were independent, hardworking, industrious, entrepreneurial spirited, strong faith family people who took advantage of the opportunity to be legally here in America, to build lives for themselves and to lay the foundation for their children and their grandchildren. These were the people in the fifties.

Now we watch the next generation, the baby boomer generation, blossom with the component of the generation which was referred to as the ``flower children,'' who didn't take that responsibility, who weren't hardened by those experiences, which were only the secondhand experiences of what had been transferred from their parents to them, and they began to push this irresponsibility.

By 1978, the class envy component got high enough, and there were some things that were inappropriate in what was going on, but the lending institutions were redlining neighborhoods. They would look at the inner cities in America that were losing asset value. Now think of this: If you owned an apartment--a ``condominium'' is how we refer to it today--or a house or a piece of industrial or commercial property in an inner city that was being run down, the value of the real estate was diminished sometimes by the crime rates that were there, by the abusive drugs, by the businesses that weren't sustaining their value and their cash flows. So you might have a nice home in a neighborhood that's not as nice as it used to be. Even though you keep your home up, people don't want to buy that home because they don't want to move into that neighborhood, so the value is going down.

The bankers and the lenders were doing what they call ``redlining.'' I have a red pen in my hand. They would draw, Mr. Speaker, a line around this neighborhood or this area in the city, and they would make a determination that they were no longer going to lend money on real estate in those neighborhoods or in those commercial industrial property areas that were being run down.

It may well have been a prudent business decision. It was defined as a racist decision, and in some cases, I think it probably was. This Congress passed legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act. It compelled lenders to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. That was in 1978. ACORN was formed and shaped around that same period of time.

As this moved forward into the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, there was a refreshment of the Community Reinvestment Act that set yet higher standards for making more bad loans into bad neighborhoods. They had found that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had become quasi-government entities for formerly private entities who were not making, according to the opinion of this Democrat majority in this Congress, enough bad loans into bad neighborhoods. So they changed the standards in the Community Reinvestment Act. They were lobbied by ACORN to lower the standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They lowered the standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the secondary loan market so that more lenders could make more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods and could peddle them off into the secondary loan market of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Now we are into the mid-1990s, and still it wasn't such a crisis until such time as the dot-com bubble burst. The dot-com bubble burst, I think, was initiated by the lawsuits against Microsoft that were joined by several State attorneys general, including by my State attorney general, Tom Miller. I think that he and others wielded the lance that pierced the dot-com bubble when they filed the class-action lawsuit against Bill Gates' operation and Microsoft. Even though I believe that that bubble was swelling and that it would have burst at some point, I think the lance that was wielded was by those State attorneys general. That brought about the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

In the aftermath of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we had, I'll say, a mini recession. Alan Greenspan saw that mini recession. Mr. Speaker, this is my interpretation of his actions. Certainly, this is subject to rebuttal by Alan Greenspan or by somebody else who may have some knowledge that I'm not privy to. He set about a policy here in the United States to unnaturally lower the interest rates so that more people could buy homes in order to drive the housing market. This was to partially compensate for the bursting of the dot-com bubble. We had more homes built than before, a higher demand because of the unnaturally low interest rates and favorable terms, and we had the lower underwriting standards that had been provided to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as far as their secondary mortgages were concerned.

There was pressure that was put on the lenders. They had been pushed by ACORN, which found itself in the inner-city neighborhoods brokering home loans and approving the conduct of the lenders as to whether they were complying with the Community Reinvestment Act.

So we have a political organization that has turned out to be a corrupt criminal enterprise, promoting bad loans in bad neighborhoods at unnaturally low interest rates, driving up a false economy in the housing market to, presumably to some degree, compensate for the bursting of the dot-com bubble that was brought about by the suits of the States' attorneys general, including by my attorney general, Tom Miller.

While all of that was going on, we got hit by the September 11 attack on our financial centers. There were the ensuing extra costs involved, and there was a tremendous loss in life and in treasure that took place due to that. Then what do we see happening here?

We have seen now an economic crisis that has been, perhaps, averted, but maybe it would have been better if we would have simply allowed some of those businesses that were too big to fail to just simply fail. We'd have reorganized them, and we would have put them through the process to get them back into the system again. We would have recovered more quickly. It may have hurt more, but in the end, we would have reestablished the principle that you simply cannot have ``too big to fail'' unless you are going to have a government guarantee. Now the government guarantee on Fannie and Freddie is $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities. All of this has taken place, and it has moved us away from those standards of free enterprise and accountability.

I would be very happy to yield so much time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Minnesota, who is on the Financial Services Committee and who is extremely knowledgeable about this and about any subject that she might choose to change it to.

Will the gentlelady yield?

I thank the gentlelady.

In reclaiming my time, I wanted to explore this ``secured creditor'' so that the Speaker and those who are observing will understand clearly what this means. A ``secured creditor'' would be someone who holds collateral, which is a guaranty that's behind the bond.

I'm going to ask you to flesh this out a little bit, but I'm going to say that it includes, perhaps, real property, which could be the actual factory, itself. It could be the equipment inside the factory. It could be cash collateral, security. It could be the cars sitting as ready for shipment to the dealers but not the cars in the dealers' lots, because they own those cars.

Is that a reasonable picture of what ``secured collateral'' is when you talk about bondholders and the secured creditors?

I would yield to the gentlelady.

Reclaiming my time, I would add onto that that I hadn't thought of that in terms of, and this is a presumption that iPods will stay the price they are, which we know that competition and mass production will probably reduce the cost. But under current value and current dollars, a child born today, for being a natural-born American citizen, their share of the national debt is $44,000. That's like here's your mortgage, sign here with your little ink footprint when you're born, we'll wheel you right out of the delivery room and you've got a $44,000 debt that you have to pay the interest and the principal on. That same child born today, by the time they start fifth grade in school, their share of the national debt will be $88,000. That's the difference between the Obama budget and the budget that we had coming into the Obama administration. That's that kind of a burden that I'm going to presume cross-references to the $300 a month that the gentlelady from Minnesota has talked about.

One of the important studies was done not that long ago by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. He's done a couple of very important studies in the last 2 years. One of them was the level of welfare that's here in the country. I believe he counted 72 different programs that distribute the wealth from taxpayers in America to people who are sometimes taxpayers but more often a greater share of them are tax users. Of those programs, even though we brought down some of the welfare in the mid nineties, it didn't really reduce it so much as it produced a temporary plateau; and then it was built up again with a whole series of programs that we can't track.

Well, he has done so. And it's a chilling thing to see what happens to a society that was a meritocracy, that rewarded people for their work, that now has become a welfare state.

One of his definitive studies, Mr. Speaker, was this. He went in and looked at households that are headed by high school dropouts, without regard to their immigration status; whether they were legal, illegal, foreign or natural-born Americans, whatever their category might have been with their immigration status, if they headed households, and the average household, a family of four, and they were a high school dropout, they would draw down an average of $32,000 a year in taxes in the whole collection of the benefits that are there and they would pay about $9,000 a year in taxes. They would draw down 32, they would pay about $9,000 a year in taxes. The net cost to the taxpayer was $22,449 a year, and that's an average, and the average sustained life of that household, Mr. Rector calculated, was 50 years.

So the math comes out to about $1.5 million to subsidize that household. And we've got people here in this country that are arguing that we need to open up our borders and bring in any number of people because our economy needs this labor and we need someone to pay for the Social Security of the baby boomers. Well, if they can't sustain themselves here, if they're undereducated, even though we have entrepreneurs that fit that category, that are going to make millions of dollars and create millions of jobs, on average it is a net cost to the taxpayer of $22,449 a year, $1.5 million for the duration of that household, that's a burden on the taxpayers that is not a stimulation to the economy, it's a drag and a drain on the economy. And the argument that they are paying Social Security with the payroll tax and, therefore, that's good for those of us that are looking at retirement, members of the baby boom generation, which I am and Mrs. Bachmann is not. That's my little pandering piece here, Mr. Speaker.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentlelady refreshing that point. I had actually forgotten that number. I remember it now when you say it. $44,000. And now I think in terms of, if you have all the free time in the world to do whatever it is you want to do and you have rent subsidy and heat subsidy and food stamps and the refundable child care credit and the earned income tax credit.

Reclaiming my time, I think it might be useful for the gentlelady and I to go through this list

of things that have happened about the nationalization. Because if I look at the dialogue in the country, we've carried this dialogue, I think, back and forth together and teamed up on it.

The gentlelady has talked about $700 billion in TARP. We haven't brought it up so much, but it is part of this, that three large investment banks were nationalized, either by action of or the support and approval of President Obama; along with AIG, the large insurance company, for some amount around $180 billion. We might have used $185 billion at one time. It's in that area. Then we've seen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I did mention earlier. The President by his executive order has swallowed up the balance of the risk, put it on the taxpayers, to the tune of $5.5 trillion in the contingent liability should Fannie and Freddie, either combination of them, collapse.

While that's going on, we watched the nationalization, the takeover, of two of our proud American car companies: General Motors and Chrysler. We saw the CEO of General Motors fired and replaced by a CEO that was essentially de facto hired by the President of the United States. We've seen all but two of the board of directors of General Motors put in place by the President of the United States who doesn't even deny it. He takes a little bow and a smile as if that's what we should be doing with government.

We have them looking in at CEOs' pay. We look at the student loan program that's been taken over by the Federal Government. We've watched the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it with ObamaCare taken over by the Federal Government. Now we're watching the financial institutions all the way down to the smallest credit transaction will be looked over by the Federal Government. This is a chilling display of the continuum of history of the last 18 months.

And reclaiming my time, I do wish to join in that pledge and putting my marker here. We have joined together in the introduction of legislation to repeal ObamaCare, to pull it out root and branch, lock, stock, and barrel, to eliminate ObamaCare so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare DNA left behind that could reproduce itself and further poison our legislation and our laws in America and further diminish the vitality of the American people.

I recall that President Obama as a candidate consistently was critical of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq. He pounded on President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq. However, that exit strategy actually is being implemented, ironically by the very individual who was so critical.

My point is that Barack Obama has been involved in the nationalization of these huge sections of our private sector, as the gentlelady has described, more than 51 percent of our private sector activity. And when we add the financial sector to it, it becomes a number that approaches that three-quarters, as she has said.

I sent a letter to Secretary Geithner, a formal letter. The response needed to be under oath because it was within a hearing of Financial Services and Ag hearing that we did jointly. The question was if the President was elected at least in part because he was critical of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq, what's President Obama's exit strategy to divest the taxpayers of their invested interest in this whole list of private entities that we have talked about from the banks to AIG to Fannie and Freddie to the car companies? I didn't get to the point of the student loan or ObamaCare because that hadn't been nationalized yet at that point.

Two months later I did get an answer. And it took a couple of days for the smartest lawyers I had to analyze all the language, which boils down to this: The response from Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, well, we will divest ourselves of these assets when the time is right. And only he would know when that was. But there was no criteria for the Federal Government getting out of this business.

It appears that there is a powerful incentive that is driven within the White House and within the progressives, the very liberals in this Congress, of which there are at least 77, to continue the nationalization, the management now that they are seeking to do of managing all of our financial industry, taking over student loans, and now every credit account in America. And additionally to that, I would give a new example that was exposed to me the other day.

We have an example of how the Federal Government takes over the insurance industry. They did so in about 1963 or 1964 with the Federal flood insurance program. They argued that the private sector didn't produce enough competition so that you couldn't buy flood insurance in flood plains. Maybe there was a reason for that, because you would be flooded and the risks were too high. So they set up the Federal flood insurance program to provide competition to the private sector that was property and casualty at the time.

In a few years, it came to pass that--and it is true today--that the only

flood insurance that you can buy in America is under the Federal flood insurance program. It's also true today that that program is $19.2 billion in the red because their premiums don't reflect the risk because they offer this insurance--and by the way, it's compulsory to buy that insurance if you borrow the money through a mortgage loan under a national bank. So it looks to me as though FEMA has been assigned by Congress and is carrying out an action that has now expanded the flood plains dramatically so that the people in these flood plains have to buy more and more flood insurance.

And I looked at one area within one county in my district where there are 2,200 more properties and 1,100 more property owners that will be compelled to pay for the national flood insurance premium. Presumably, if you expand the areas that people are compelled to buy insurance and do business with the Federal Government, then you will be able to bring this Federal flood insurance out of their $19.2 billion in the red.

Think of what happens when the Federal Government sticks their regulatory nose in every transaction in America, every credit transaction, every private flood insurance transaction, every health insurance transaction, operates and manufactures probably two-thirds of the American cars, probably not quite that many actually, and has already taken over the secondary loan market to where they are in more than 50 percent of the real estate.

Well, and they decided who would get the credit on home loan mortgages based upon the cash flow of the welfare check. And it didn't work out so well. That's one of the examples. I am standing here thinking about this. Where would they stop? A party whose policy is change, who don't have any timeless values, there is not even a definition of truth over on that side that they can agree on, it is about change.

And I have often said that if you would give me the magic wand and I could grant to the progressives, the liberals, the people that fit that definition of folks on that side of the aisle their wish, which would be the entire wish list of all the things that they could compile on that list between now and New Year's, and say to them you get all of this, you get all of this, every policy that you can possibly dream of, and we are going to give it to you when the ball drops at Times Square for New Year's, but the deal is then you have to clam up and not be clamoring for change any more, you have to live under all of the rules and all of the changes that you advocate for, here is what I can guarantee you. They would work night and day to make this list as complete as possible.

They would work right up to the last minute. They would have an amendment they were trying to slip in as the ball was dropping at Times Square to bring New Year's about and grant them their wish. And then when they were granted everything they wished, they would stay up the rest of the night trying to figure out how they got cheated and what they forgot. And they would never keep their word about having to live under the rules and the regulations that were part of their wish list.

We, on the other hand, believe in timeless values. We believe in the integrity of the human being. We believe that our rights come from God. We believe in free enterprise capitalism. We believe in property rights. We think that people that work should live better than those that don't. We believe the wealth of this Nation is not a zero sum game, but it's something that's built upon the entrepreneurial spirit and the foundations of free enterprise, property rights, individual rights, not group rights. And the destiny of America is going to be determined by the amount of liberty that we can grant to people out of this Congress instead of diminish from them.

And my mission is to go forth and to give back out of this Congress the rights that rightfully come from God to the people that have worked so hard to build this country, and not to destroy it incrementally by these huge bites out of our freedom and our liberty. And the question that comes to me is what would a socialist do, what would a progressive do, what would a liberal do that a communist would not? Where do they draw the line? This has been a breathtaking sweep into a takeover of huge chunks of our economy. And they have designs on big chunks of the economy yet. When there is no restraint except the American people and the constitutional conservatives that are filling the streets of America.

They come out with their American flags, their yellow Gadsden ``Don't Tread on Me'' flags, their constitutions in their pocket, and patriotism in their hearts, and tears running down their cheeks because of what they see is happening to America under this ruling troika of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. And it's going to turn around, Mr. Speaker. It's going to turn around this November. It's coming back into the hands of the people. And we will have a lot of work to do to clean up the mess.

One of the things is on the immigration cards, the flash cards that train people to study their naturalization and pass the test. On one side it will say, ``Who is the father of our country?'' You snap it around and it says, ``George Washington.'' You pick up I

think it's card 11, and it says, ``What is the economic system of the United States?'' You flap that card around and it says, ``Free enterprise capitalism.'' It probably isn't the case today given what's happened.

I don't want to have to pull that card out of the deck. I want the freedom, the liberty card in the deck. And I want to be able to see my children and grandchildren and every succeeding generation not live the American dream, but live the American dream in addition with a higher standard of living and greater aspirations and more liberty than we had, which is tremendous.

This is what is pulling at the heart of America. This is why the constitutional conservatives, which are comprised of the Obamaites with buyers' remorse, the independents that really don't want a label but they understand the Constitution and free enterprise, the 9-12 Project people that have been so activated here on September 12, all of the Tea Party groups that are there, the conservative Republicans, in fact, almost every Republican constitutional conservative, people that understand that our default position needs to be the Constitution itself and not some activist judge's idea of what they would want that Constitution to say, but what it actually says, what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 14 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 29, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence this evening and the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House.

Not having had the opportunity to listen to the dialogue of the previous people, I will take this up where the front of my mind and my conscience happens to be, and that is what is happening with and to America, what are our priorities, where are we going to go from here, presuming that we could actually reverse many of the things that have taken place over the last 1\1/2\ years or longer.

Madam Speaker, I would ask your indulgence to just cast your mind back into the last 1\1/2\ years or so, this being April 2010. In fact, I would take us back into August and September of 2008, perhaps a little more than 18 months by now. And what we have seen happen is that we saw a concern about the potential economic collapse of the free world, the fear that global currency and the confidence that allows us to trade in that currency could collapse and that we would see the free market economy and the markets within the world, including the Dow Jones and a number of the other market indexs, the Nikkei market, European market, and that list goes on, those lose the confidence of the investors if that happened, if the investors pulled their money out, if, in fact, there was any money to be pulled out, we could have seen a downward spiral that could have been a crash of our economic system that could have potentially eclipsed that of the Stock Market Crash that precipitated the Great Depression in October 1929.

We saw the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson come to this Capitol on September 19, 2008, and make a request, a very serious request, and some might characterize it as a demand, for 700 billion taxpayer dollars, 700 billion taxpayer dollars to inject into this economy in a fashion that he saw fit, in a fashion that wasn't necessarily laid out for us. We didn't understand particularly his presentation. We heard the words he said but it wasn't definitive. It wasn't clear. And as we found out after the $700 billion worth of TARP passed, even those words didn't hold so very accurately when we looked at the actual practice of how the $700 billion was spent.

So, Madam Speaker, that was the start of this long saga of what America's free enterprise economy, what is left of it, might look like and how we might manage these finances.

It's interesting to me that since that time, I have done some traveling around the world and I recall listening to Angela Merkel and the leaders in Germany the following February, if my memory serves me correctly, so it would be February of 2009, say to us, America, you're spending too much money. You should not dump the $700 billion in TARP in. It is a waste of money. It is irresponsible. You need to pull back. Their proposal in Germany, even though that is a social democracy, a nation that wants to have as much of it, apparently, within the hands of the government to manage as they can and a minimal amount within the free enterprise system, they have a different belief in it than we have.

They had a $450 billion plan; ours was a $700 billion plan followed by a $787 billion plan, coupled with $1 or $2 trillion disbursed by the U.S. Treasury that wasn't within the province or the guidance of this Congress, and I think it's awfully hard to track what that might have meant.

Theirs was $450 billion. I believe the number was $80 billion in targeted expenditures and the rest were loan guarantees. So one might argue the German approach to this--the people that originated socialized medicine, by the way--was they would spend $80 billion in an economic stimulus plan. Now, granted, their economy is not as large as ours, but $80 billion versus $700 billion, and another $787 billion, Madam Speaker, and we have the Germans admonishing us because we're spending too much money in trying to stimulate the economy in this robust Keynesian approach. And then since that time we've heard the President of France lecture us on the dangers of appeasement.

Oh, what a world we have today. How so much it has changed in the last 2 or 3 years, Madam Speaker. How so much the philosophy that has made America great has been pushed to the sidelines, hasn't emerged very much in the thought process, the decisionmaking component of this, at least, even though it remains in the hearts and minds of the American people.

So, Madam Speaker, here we are today, $700 billion in TARP spending, gone, spent, blown. This, yes, was initiated under the Bush administration, as was the nationalization of several financial institutions and the beginnings of the nationalization of AIG. However, the balance of all these things that I'm about to talk about came about under the Obama administration. And everything that I'm talking about, from the $700 billion TARP funding all the way through to today, was supported by either then-Senator Barack Obama, candidate for the Presidency Barack Obama, or the President of the United States, Barack Obama. That policy is indistinguishable whether he supported it as a Senator, whether he supported it because he was a candidate for the President or because he supported it as the President-elect or the President of the United States.

And George Bush gave some deference to Barack Obama on how he would approach this economy. One day

I hope to have that conversation with President Bush. But, in any case, there's no component of this voracious appetite for overspending and pushing government into every corner of our private sector lives, there's no aspect of this that wasn't supported by the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

The American people know that and they understand it, Madam Speaker. And so what we have seen, we have seen the support for the $700 billion in TARP. In fact, this Congress limited the first half of that to $350 billion. And that went, essentially, without strings attached. And the balance of that, the other $350 billion, had to be approved. This was in October of 2008, so it had to be approved by a Congress to be elected later and by a President to be elected later. We know what happened. The second $350 billion was approved by the Congress elected in November of 2008 and approved by the President who was elected in 2008, Barack Obama.

So this entire lexicon of things that happened economically, good or bad, are not the fault of George Bush. They are not laid at the feet of the previous President. These are the responsibilities of this Congress, the House, the Senate, under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, the leadership of Harry Reid down that aisle, and the leadership of Barack Obama, whom I have sometimes described as a ruling troika, Madam Speaker. That would be, as I warned America about during that same period of time, if you elect Barack Obama as the President of the United States and re-renew the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi--in other words, reelect the Democrat majority here in the House--and you continue to expand the majority of the Democrats in the United States Senate, we will have created, and this is something that I believe is part of the Congressional Record, a ruling troika in America--that ruling troika being the President, Speaker Pelosi, Harry Reid, who could, by my words then, upheld to be true since then, go into a phone booth, the three of them--haven't done so literally, but figuratively they have--and decided what they would do to America.

Their accountability isn't to the American people. It isn't to the will of the American people. Their accountability is only to the members of their own caucus as to whether they would not just reelect them as leaders but decline to un-elect them as the leaders of their caucus. That is the only restraint that is on them and then the restraint of pushing policies that they couldn't pull the votes to get past.

It came very close here in the House a couple of times. And I have respect for political operators that have an ability to get those tough votes through and get them passed. In fact, if it's the right thing to do, it's a hard thing to run a good country--in fact, a great country-- if you can't get those tough votes accomplished. But I will suggest, Madam Speaker, that many of the things that have happened in this Congress, the 111th Congress and the 110th Congress that preceded it, are anathema to the American vision and anathema to the American Dream, that they run contrary to the principles that made America great.

I can take us down this path. TARP is one of them. The Federal Government's business isn't to come in and decide which businesses are too big to be allowed to fail and then put a huge bill against the taxpayers, their children and their grandchildren; borrow the money from the Chinese and the Saudis; and then make decisions on which businesses should be allowed to succeed, with government help, and which businesses should be allowed to fail.

This country has got to be run by free enterprise, by the free markets; and if businesses fail, they have to be allowed to fail. And investors need to be able to come in and pick up the pieces at the discount that is available when they go through chapter 11 or 7. Their assets are still there. They can be managed by other corporate entities or noncorporate entities, for that matter.

It isn't that if a bank went under or if AIG the insurance company went under that all of a sudden all of the assets that they have are dispersed or sunk into the ocean somewhere. The hard assets are still there. The accounts are still there. They can still be managed by some entity that comes in and picks up the pieces. I have seen this happen a number of times far too close to make me comfortable within the banks that were closed back during those years in the farm crisis years of the eighties.

It happened over and over again, hundreds and hundreds of banks went under. And when they went under, they were recapitalized. New board of directors. New investors came in and picked up those shares of stock. They looked at the loan portfolios, they looked at the deposits, and they made management decisions to put that bank back on a profitable track. Many of those banks, most of those banks, and I don't know that I could say all of those banks actually got turned back into profit. Yes, there were banks that were closed. There were those whose doors were shut and didn't open again. But many banks came under new ownership because they were sold back into the private sector. Even though the FDIC found themselves brokering assets of banks no longer solvent, they did not hold on to the assets of those banks and operate those banks as if they were players in the private sector.

But what we have seen happen with this Obama White House is entirely different than what we saw during the farm crisis years of the eighties. First, this idea of too big to fail. Too big to fail, Madam Speaker. No one in America's britches should be too big to fail. Too big for their britches, but they can't fail.

I'd point out a presentation that was made to us about 3 years ago at an 8 a.m. Wednesday morning meeting which I host, a breakfast which I host and have done so for 5\1/2\ years, the Conservative Opportunities Society. One of the very smart financial presenters there--since that is off the record in that meeting, I can address what he said, but not his name--we were talking about the subprime mortgage crisis. And he said, When you're in the business, the investment banking business, where he'd been for 30 years, what you do in this business is--and he paused for effect and said, Pretty much whatever everybody else does. That way, if they're making money, you're making money. But if things melt down and there is a bailout, then you will be bailed out with everybody else.

Madam Speaker, it's not hard for me to imagine what that does to the investment minds of people that are operating investment banks if they know implicitly, not explicitly, that they can take a lot of risks and they are never really going to go under because the Federal Government will come in and bail them out. That was the implicit guarantee in banks that were too big to be allowed to fail. And it was followed through upon by this government, by this President, in this administration, in this time, and approved by him as a United States Senator and approved by him as a candidate for the Presidency.

Too big too fail became too big to be allowed to fail. Too big to be allowed to fail. The Federal Government would come in, and if we didn't have the money to bail out these businesses, then we would tap into the United States Treasury, who would borrow it and borrow it from the Chinese and the Saudis and anybody else that could invest in U.S. bonds and pick up these businesses.

So the Federal Government nationalized three large investment banks in the aftermath of this September 19 visit to the Capitol by Henry Paulsen, then the Secretary of the Treasury. Three large investment banks, ownership taken over. Ownership or control taken over by the Federal Government. AIG, the insurance company, $180 billion invested in an insurance company, was guaranteeing securities.

And then we back this up to the late seventies when the Community Reinvestment Act was passed because there were lenders that were not willing to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. They had drawn red lines and concluded the asset value was diminishing, not appreciating, and the return on that investment, let's say the collateral value was shrinking. Therefore, if they loaned against that collateral value, they would find themselves upside down in those mortgage loans. So they drew lines around the neighborhoods where the value of assets was going down.

Now, some argued that it was a racist decision. I don't know that. I wasn't in those rooms and I don't know those people. For all I know, I never met the people that were making those decisions. If it was for the racist reason, it's kind of like racial profiling. If that is your only reason, then it's wrong. But if it's an indicator that makes you look at the totality of the record, okay, then it may not be wrong. But lenders were drawing a red line around these neighborhoods, and they refused to make those loans into those neighborhoods.

And there was a political decision made in this Congress that they were going to force lenders to make loans into those neighborhoods that had red lines drawn around them. That was the Community Reinvestment Act. But the problem was that they couldn't get the banks to make enough loans into those neighborhoods because the collateral value was going down and the underwriting requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prohibited them from picking up on the secondary market some of those bad loans.

So in 1978 I believe was the year when the Community Reinvestment Act was passed. They expected that there would be a lot more loans made into these neighborhoods that were redlined. There were more lines made but not enough to satisfy the organizations out there in the inner city. The community organizers--we can ask the President about community organizers. What do they do? They advocate for taxpayer dollars and redistribute those taxpayer dollars into the neighborhoods. They don't contribute to the free enterprise economy. They just tap into the taxpayers, distribute those taxpayer dollars, and in exchange trade off for political power. That is what community organizers do.

So these community organizers concluded that they weren't going to get enough loans into those neighborhoods so they came back to this Congress and lobbied this Congress in the nineties to make changes in the Community Reinvestment Act and, by the way, because of the Community Reinvestment Act, they also found out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had strict enough underwriting requirements, that because of those capital requirements and the underwriting requirements, Fannie and Freddie, the secondary loan market, the GSEs in the United States, could not pick up those loans off of those lending institutions.

And so they have refreshed the Community Reinvestment Act and made it a little more strict, but also into the bargain they lowered the underwriting requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now we have created a scenario for real bad loans in bad neighborhoods, real net loss to the lenders. But the lenders weren't on the hook so much because as soon as they could make a loan into a neighborhood that was approved by organizations like ACORN, they could peddle that loan off into the secondary market and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would pick up the entire tab on that and the original lender would be off the hook.

So there's plenty of incentive for the original lenders to be retail marketing bad loans in bad neighborhoods as long as they could package them up, sell them into the secondary market under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then got to this point where they could see that they need to divest themselves of some of those loans, and they sliced them and diced them, and turned around and spun them back into the tertiary market and beyond.

So as this mortgage market was moving along, it was still moving slowly through the nineties. And we got towards the end of the nineties, and actually to the year 2000, when George Bush was elected, we had at the end of the nineties the bursting of the dot-com bubble. When the dot-com bubble was burst--and I suspect it was pierced by the class action lawsuits that were brought against Microsoft by the State attorneys generals, my State Attorney General Tom Miller included--in fact, one of the ringleaders in the lawsuit against Microsoft. I actually think that the dot-com bubble would have burst anyway. Because what it was, it was a speculator's bubble. Yes, there was value in our ability to store and transfer information more effectively than ever before. The speculators invested in that. They bet that would return on their investment and these technology companies would blossom and make huge profits and they would cash in on them.

But this bubble was created out of that speculation, and the thing that wasn't corrected for some time until the bursting or the piercing of the dot-com bubble was the inability for the market to consider that having that technological ability to store and transfer information more effectively than ever before didn't necessarily translate into profits for companies. You have to produce something more efficiently in order for the value of that company to be there.

So, with the Internet, for example, whatever the Internet does to improve the productivity of all of our companies--and anybody that is engaged in business will know that it does improve your productivity as a company--you have the value of that productivity as to what it's worth, not what you speculate you can store or transfer for information.

The only other things that you got to add to that dot-com bubble value was the increase in productivity and the value that you have for recreation. So if people surf the Internet, and they were willing to pay for that, that was a component of our economy.

But the dot-com bubble burst. And as it collapsed, we were seeing the end of the Clinton administration. That was the recession that they talked about during that period of time. And as George Bush was elected, we saw Alan Greenspan make an evaluation--and I suspect this is accurate, and he would have a different opinion of it perhaps--but that we needed to make some adjustments in this economy in order to compensate for our declining economy because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Remember, the bubble burst, and it left a depression within our economy. And I don't use that in economic terms. I use that in, let's say, literal terms.

So Alan Greenspan looked at that and decided that we need to recover this economy. How do we do this? Well, unnaturally low interest rates. We're going to promote more mortgage loans. We are going to create a housing market and a housing boom, and we are going to use that to fill the hole in the dot-com bubble. That's the scenario that was playing out.

So unnaturally low interest rates with an encouragement for people to borrow money on terms that they hadn't seen in their adult lifetimes, you couple that with the Community Reinvestment Act, passed in the seventies, refreshed in the nineties, coupled with the lowering of the capital and the underwriter requirements of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and an aggressive lobbying part on the part of ACORN, who came to this Congress and lobbied to lower the underwriting standards for Fannie and Freddie and to push the Community Reinvestment Act, and ACORN finding themselves and putting themselves in a position in the communities whereby they got to approve or disapprove of the effort of the lending institutions to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods.

Now we have cooked up the perfect economic witch's brew, Madam Speaker, that resulted in the toxic mortgages that nearly brought down the global economy. That's a component of the scenario which nearly brought down the global economy. And as these investment banks, lending institutions picked up the mortgage loans on the secondary market, Fannie and Freddie tranched them, sliced and diced them, packaged them, shuffled them, cut the deck, sorted them out and began to sell them on up the market.

AIG, the insurance company, was looking at these bundles of mortgage- backed securities, setting a premium risk rate on these bundles and charging that premium. And whenever they were packaged and bundled and marketed for a profit, the people that were doing that were taking their profit out and passing the risk on, and AIG was passing judgment on that risk with no check and no balance and no one looking over their shoulder, and no one knew the market. They just trusted that AIG would know the answer because, after all, they were the premiere insurance company. They had been growing by leaps and bounds. But their agents were skimming--I don't know if

I would say ``skimming'' is a fair enough word. But their agents were taking a profit out for the marketing of the policies and the premiums, but there was no continued responsibility and liability.

So I'll suggest that when people make investments and they pass those investments up the line and they can take profit out of them at every step along the way, it's kind of like the reverse of the value-added tax, isn't it, Madam Speaker, where every time you can bundle up some mortgage-backed securities, package them up, get AIG to set a premium on that and get a guaranteed return rate because AIG's premium is there, pass that on up the line, you take your margin out of that, it's kind of like selling the wheat and paying the tax to the Federal Government and sending the invoice along with it while the guy at the mill grinds the wheat into flour. He takes the invoice from the value- added tax and uses that for his credit, and it goes on up the line. He pays his 10 percent tax and goes to the baker, and the baker then uses the two invoice credits of the 10 percent on the wheat and the value added that is another 10 percent on the increased amount on the flour that's milled from the wheat that goes to the baker who pays the tax of what's left on the value added before it goes to become the bread.

The same was going on during the era of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the tranche mortgage-backed securities and AIG guaranteeing, passing that thing all of the way up the line. It became, yes, there was foundational value underneath these mortgages. That is the market value of the real estate, but it also was a huge chain letter that was marketed all of the way up through. And when the investors in the world lost confidence that they no longer knew the value of these bundles of mortgage-backed securities, then that happened, then we were threatened with an economic meltdown, Madam Speaker.

That is kind of how we got here. And now, as the economy spirals downward, or more or less the threat of the economy spiraling downward, we look to a President who is a Keynesian economist on steroids. He believes, and I have certainly heard it directly from his lips in very short range that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve on spending and that he just didn't spend enough money. If he would have spent a lot of more money, it is the view of the President, whom I take at his word, that the Great Depression would have been over in the 1930s and we wouldn't have had to wait until World War II that brought about the most effective economic stimulus plan ever. That would also be the President's view.

But I will submit when the stock market crashed in October of 1929 and we saw my Iowa President do some things that FDR may well have approved of, and FDR went in with the New Deal, which, in my view, was a really bad deal, and in President Obama's view was a pretty good deal and could have been a better deal if he spent a lot more money, it didn't bring about a recovery from the Depression that started in October of 1929, but what it did when the Federal Government borrowed a lot of money, and they borrowed it from the American people in the form of bonds, they created a lot of make-work projects, had to pay the interest, had to pay the principal, we had all of this debt going on at the beginning of World War II. And then we had to take on a lot more debt. But at least during that period of time, had we not borrowed all of that money, not spent all of that money, then the United States economy would not have had to service all of the interest and service all of the debt.

Interest and principal. Could it be that the people in this country have forgotten what interest and principal is and what it takes in cash flow to service the debt. And will they ever figure out what it is like to be on the other side of this?

I recall a very good neighbor and a wise mentor friend of mine, Dennis Lindberg, who has since passed away, told me a story about when he was a young man and how he had the experience of paying interest at a very young age. He said to me, I decided early on that if I was going to have anything to do with interest, I was going to be the one collecting it.

But this government looks like they will have a lot to do with interest, and they will forever be the ones paying the interest rather than collecting the interest.

So this economy has been diminished by the burden that has been put upon it, just like it was diminished in the 1930s by the burden put upon it. The stock market crashed in October of 1929, and it didn't recover during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. It didn't recover during World War II. The stock market was still struggling to get back to where it was at the end of World War II, at the beginning of the Korean War, at the end of the Korean war. It wasn't FDR who solved the problem. FDR delayed the recovery by borrowing all of that money and spending all of that money in the New Deal during the Great Depression. The stock market didn't come back to where it was in 1929 until Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years; 1954 is when the Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered to the place where it was when it crashed in October of 1929. All of those years, 9 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away.

And I want to give him a tip of the hat and a nod, and a significant measure of respect for the way he led this country in World War II. He was solid. He was an anchor, he was stalwart, and a commander in chief. He had a vision for full, all-out 100 percent war demanding total surrender from our enemies. I can take some issue with some of the decisions made along the way; but on balance, Roosevelt was a very good wartime President. I just don't think he was a very good depression-era President.

And this President, I have no idea what kind of wartime President he would be. We are not in a depression. Some will say we are in the Great Recession. That is the vernacular that has been adopted most. But this Great Recession that we appear to be in has spent a lot more money than was spent during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The result, I believe, will be similar.

If you take a business, we can think in terms of a small business, a small business that generates $100,000 a year in gross receipts, and perhaps has a $10,000 mortgage with a 10 percent loan on it. This is so I can do the math as I am talking. So your $100,000 in gross receipts needs to pay the proprietor, pay the utility bills, and all of the overhead, as well as the interest. So if you are grossing $100,000 with a $10,000 loan, then 10 percent of that loan would be $1,000. And if you are paying $1,000 in interest, and let's just say you are going to retire that debt on a 10 year loan, so you pay 10 percent of the principal each year.

The first year it would be $1,000 in interest and another $1,000 in principal; $2,000 out of your $100,000 goes to pay the debt, to service the debt you have. And then you have to take your margins, your expenses out of the remaining $98,000 and have enough to feed the proprietor and keep the proprietor engaged in the business

Let's just say that all of a sudden, we have this economic crisis and the business is having trouble. It gets flooded or burned out or whatever it might be, and along comes on the Small Business Administration or some other entity, and they say we can keep you in business, but you can't stay in business unless you borrow $100,000 and we will inject that $100,000 of capital into your business. Well, that is nice. You get to stay in business.

Now you have $109,000 worth of debt to service, but I will just go with the $100,000 because I am speaking off the cuff and I can do the math as we fly. Now your interest burden is not $1,000 on the $10,000 debt you had, it is $10,000 interest on the $100,000 debt you have, and the 10 percent you were paying on principal of the $10,000 debt, that $1,000, now becomes $10,000.

So your business that was servicing with $2,000 a $10,000 debt, now has to have two $20,000s to serve the $10,000 worth of interest and the $10,000 worth of principal on your $100,000 debt.

You have taken your ability, your gross receipts in the business are similar or the same. You can only service $2,000 on the old way of financing with the $1,000 of interest and $1,000 worth of principal, $2,000 out of your $100,000

gross, but when they give you this nice loan that you borrowed $100,000, now you have to figure out how to service $10,000 worth of interest and $10,000 worth of principal out of a $100,000 worth of gross receipts. Instead of it being 2 percent, now it is 20 percent.

I hope this example, Madam Speaker, is explanatory to the President of the United States, to Larry Summers, to the people that are looking at this economy and believing that John Maynard Keynes had some answers. He had answers all right, but they were the wrong ones, Madam Speaker.

We need to reduce the debt. We need to reduce spending, and only when we do that can we have a free market economy that will work its way out of this and let us be able to pay the interest and pay down the debt so that this economy can finally get around to the side where it is not constantly burdened servicing interest and debt as opposed to the legitimate functions of government.

We did had 2 or 3 years here where we had a balanced budget. There are some reasons for that. I will give Bill Clinton a little credit. And I will give the Republican Congress a lot of credit. They came in here revolutionaries and they decided that they were going to choke spending down, and they did that. I think also, though, the economy outgrew their predictions and so they were a bit surprised when they balanced the budget.

I think Bill Clinton was a bit surprised when the budget came balanced. Those are the fortunate happenstances of history. We need to be more prudent than that even.

We are going to have to go back. This debt commission that meets tomorrow, that starts out with Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson as co-chairs, they are going to examine all of this debt and figure out how to look at the debt and the income to bring America into something that is more responsible. I don't think that they think that they are going to balance the budget or make a proposal that will balance the budget, I think they believe that they are going to look at the spending and the income and make some kind of a recommendation that would help compensate the calamity that we are in.

But, Madam Speaker, I would submit that if you want a committee to produce a result, write up that result. Tell me the result you would like and present it to me, and I can appoint for you the committee that will produce the result that you want. That is how it has been done around this Hill since time immemorial, how it is done in the real world, how it is done in the city council meetings and the county supervisory meetings and within the outside committees of our State legislatures. And that is not a criticism of the people who sit on that debt commission.

They are good people by and large and by balance. But they do not represent, I don't believe, the creative ideas in the United States. First of all, I look through that list of people on the commission; I don't find a single person on that commission that supports a national sales tax. I don't find a single person that has advocated for the abolishment of the IRS and the Federal income tax. Not one. Smart people there, yes. Their decisions, though, and their positions, from what I have seen, are not economic positions exclusively. They are pragmatic economic decisions that are tempered by their judgment of political reality.

So couldn't we at the very least, if we wanted to provide solutions for America, couldn't we set all of our politics aside, take away all of this pragmatism that is political pragmatism, not economic realism, throw that off to the side, park it over there in the parking lot, can't we clean out all of the political jargon that's there and sit down and first ask the question: What would be the smartest thing we could do economically in this country? And in the process of doing that, how do we fund this government, the necessary components of the Federal Government?

Madam Speaker, those are the basic questions I have been asking about this country for 30 years. And I am making a recommendation to the debt commission. And I trust that they will overhear this discussion that you and I are having tonight, Madam Speaker. But it comes down to this: if we were going to devise a tax policy for the United States starting from scratch, that proverbial blank slate or a blank piece of paper, that tax policy, Madam Speaker, would not be the Internal Revenue tax or code. We would not generate the IRS. We would not look at this as a tax on income.

Because here is what Ronald Reagan once said. Ronald Reagan once said, ``What you tax you get less of.'' He also said, ``What you subsidize you get more of.'' But I will stick with the tax side of this. What you tax you get less of. The tax is a punishment. We here in America tax, and that is in quotes ``punish'' all productivity in the United States.

If you have earnings, savings or investment, if you punch the time clock and go to work, if you start a business and put your sweat equity matched up with what capital you might have, package that together and start a little factory or a service company, or start marketing an invention, whatever it is that you might do, the IRS will come along and identify that productivity and tax it, punish it, shrink it, take away your incentive to produce it.

Production is what drives this economy, not spending. That's a Keynesian mistake. It's not and never has been an economy that is driven by government spending or the Federal Government borrowing and bonding and putting cash in the hands of people so they spend it into the economy to get this to recover. That is not the answer.

Our answer is we need to produce. We need to increase the production in America, in competition with the rest of the world, and market more goods and services and drive our gross domestic product up. And when we do that, we will see prosperity, the prosperity that comes from our efficiencies, from our productivity producing goods and services that have value. And so when Ronald Reagan said, ``What you tax you get less of,'' he was recognizing that we punish productivity.

The Internal Revenue Service and the income tax code are completely dedicated to taxing all productivity in America, punishing all productivity in America, setting aside everything that is good and productive about our economy and taxing it.

So if you punch a time clock and you go forward and you earn wages, you are taxed on it. At least the payroll tax. The Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid tax, that is on there. You will pay your income tax when you reach a certain threshold. If you have earnings, savings or investment, if you are going to cash in your dividend check, your capital gains, your interest check, all of that's taxed by the IRS.

If you go through life and you acquire an equity base, a net worth, and perhaps you pay the tax on all of your income as you go along, and maybe even your investments didn't appreciate in value and were never taxed in that fashion--if they were you would have paid it--but you have a nest egg of, let's say, $10 million, which is a pretty good lifetime of work, this year you could die and pass it along to your children because the Democrats are asleep at the switch. They would like to tax your estate. They just haven't gotten around to doing that, partly because the gavel in the Ways and Means Committee has been in three different hands, all of that within 24 hours by the way.

All of your productivity, all of your earnings from your work, all of your earnings from your investments and your management of whatever business you might start or your dividends, your capital gains, your interest income, your estate tax, all of that is taxed, all of that is productivity, all of that is punished by the Federal Government today. So what do we get? We get less productivity. We get less investment because the cost of capital goes up. And we get less savings because the interest income on the savings will be taxed by the IRS.

We will have fewer dividends because companies are looking to figure out how they can avoid the corporate income tax in order to not pay out the dividends that come from the profits. And their dividends themselves are taxed. When the board of directors cashes in on those dividends, they are looking at the tax liability; so they are thinking, let's roll it. I don't want to take that out because the IRS will come in and tax.

And by the way, investments in foreign lands, if they are repatriated into

the United States, there will be a capital gains tax against that or an income tax against that as well. So there is in the order of $13 billion in private sector capital that is stranded overseas that isn't coming back to the United States because there is a penalty there for bringing it into this economy. If we would just suspend the tax on all the capital overseas, we would see trillions come back into the United States. Five trillion perhaps in the first year, most if not all of that in the succeeding years.

That's why the fair tax is the right way to go. There are many good reasons why the fair tax is the right way to go, Madam Speaker. But the biggest reason--two big reasons--one big reason is the fair tax ends the IRS. It ends the Internal Revenue Code. It ends the punishment to productivity in America. It stops the punishment of earnings, savings and investment, and lets a person earn all they can earn, save all they want to save, invest all they want to invest, and in fact take the proceeds from the investments out and move them around, put them in an investment where they will return better rather than having to pay tax when you cash that check in.

So now we have all of these people that are involved in tax avoidance, all the tax attorneys that are involved, H & R Block involved in tax avoidance because the taxes may be avoided, they are delayed; but in effect they are often not circumvented. They must be paid eventually. Most of them. That's what this Tax Code is set up to do.

My position is this: I am for H.R. 25. I am for the national sales tax. I am for the fair tax. And what it does, it takes all tax off of productivity, it abolishes the IRS, it puts the tax over on consumption, where it provides an incentive for savings and investment. When you tax consumption, that encourages people to invest and save. And they can build their nest egg. And the capital comes back to the United States. That big chunk of that $13 trillion comes back to the United States.

And all of these high-rise buildings that have highly paid tax lawyers in it and the corporations that have whole floors of their buildings dedicated to tax attorneys, tax advisers, accountants for the purpose of avoiding taxes, all that goes away. And that human capital, the very smart people, moral, hardworking, ethical people who have legitimate jobs in today's environment, they could turn their focus into producing something that has value rather than tax delay or tax avoidance.

Think what it would be like to take all of those smart brains and turn them loose to help us figure out how to be more productive. Some of them will go out and start a business. Those businesses will go up, and they will be publicly traded businesses eventually. Some of them will go to work for other companies, and they will add to the value of those companies because of their creative ideas. Some of them will be such good nuts-and-bolts accountants that they'll find other ways for companies to make money, and it might well be their companies. Some are entrepreneurs, but the creativity of America is diminished because we're locking up a bunch of human capital to audit and punish the productivity of the American people.

What sense does that make, Madam Speaker? Why do we have a sense of class envy against people who would be productive and who would make money?

Now, I'm not among them. I'm not going to die a rich man, Madam Speaker. There is nobody in my lineage who's going to pass it along to me. I've dedicated my life to this public service and have made a little money in my time, not enough to talk about and certainly not enough to brag about, but I've engaged in this free enterprise economy.

I started a business in 1975 when I had a negative net worth of $5,000. I went out and bought an old, beaten-up bulldozer, an old D- 717A. That machine was so decrepit that I couldn't even put it to work to make my first dollar until I took the welder out and welded on it for 2 weeks before I could get it stuck together enough that I could put it to work. I put it to work. After 3 hours, I watched the old pressure gauge go from the peg of high pressure all the way down to zero--just about like that. As that happened, I dropped the throttle down and shut the machine off. I had to tear the engine all the way down and had to put it all the way back together in the rain. My wife was standing there, 4\1/2\-months pregnant with our first child, and I was torquing head bolts on a D-7, in the rain, in September. That's how we got started.

I have an appreciation for what it takes to start a business, to make that business go, to grow that business to where we can hire people and can pay wages and benefits. I certainly have an appreciation, Madam Speaker, for walking into my construction office sometime in the early 1990s when I first noticed this. My secretary had taken our Christmas tree and had decorated that Christmas tree with gold silhouettes of Christmas trees, of Santa and a sleigh, of baby Jesus, of the Star of Bethlehem, of snowflakes. Each one of those on that tree was engraved with the name of either an employee, a spouse or one of their children, and there were enough who were dependent upon King Construction to decorate that entire Christmas tree. That was the time it really hit me that the decisions that I made affected the lives of all of those families and their children. It was something that weighed on me heavily but that also gave me great joy during that time--to see that we had built something that so many people were dependent upon, something that was good and just and honest and decent and productive. Of course, the tax burden on that was one of the anchors that we had to drag all the way through.

So I had come to a conclusion that I wanted to eliminate the IRS, that I wanted to end this punishment for productivity, that I wanted to put the tax on consumption, to let people earn all they could earn, to save all they could save, to invest all they wanted to invest, to accept the proceeds of their investments, and to move them around without penalty. Sell anything you want to sell. Take your capital gains. Put it in the bank, and do what you want to do. Yet, when you spend the money, pay the tax.

I understand, and I would think that anybody at this level of government should understand that businesses don't pay taxes. Corporations, sole proprietorships, LLCs don't pay taxes. They collect taxes for government. They pass the costs of taxes through to the consumer, but they don't pay taxes. If they didn't pass those costs along, they would be broke, and we all know that. Businesses are effective and efficient collectors of taxes for government, but they are not taxpayers. So we can get to two principles here:

One I've spoken about in some depth, which is that taxing productivity reduces our productivity. Increasing our productivity is a solution for our economy, so we should take all of the tax off of productivity, and we should put it on consumption.

The next principle is that businesses don't pay taxes. They collect taxes from consumers. So why wouldn't we just allow the 44 or 45 States which currently have a sales tax to use the engine that they have, the system that they have, to collect the sales tax in the same fashion that they're collecting it at the retail outlets within their States now? No exemptions. We'd have to tax sales and service. Yes, government would have to pay that tax. They're paying it today in the embedded costs of the things that they buy. The government has to pay tax. There has got to be a tax on sales and service, and it would only be the last stop on the retail dollar.

So, if it's a farmer, for example, rest easy because, if you go out and buy a new combine or a planter or a tractor or a rotary hoe, or whatever it is that it might be that you need, you wouldn't have to pay sales tax on that equipment because that's a business input cost. So you can buy equipment. You can put it into your fleet. You can work it, but you don't have to pay sales tax on that equipment because it's a business input cost; but if you buy, for example, a cap to put on your head while you ride around in that combine or while you pull that planter on that new tractor, you'd pay sales tax on the cap because that's a personal item. That's how the differentiation comes down. We would have to tax all goods and services.

So, if people are sitting there thinking, well, my pharmaceuticals will be exempted, no, sorry, we can't exempt

them either. Pharmaceuticals wouldn't be exempted. Neither would Pablum or Pampers or any of these products that we would call ``food'' or preferred items for those organizations or entities that we think we'd like to untax, because, as soon as we start creating exemptions, then there's another exemption that has equal or more merit. Pretty soon, it would narrow the tax base to the point where the rate would be too high and we couldn't sustain this. It has to be no exemptions. All tax on sales and services must be paid.

If you were to go out and build a new house, you would pay a sales tax on the materials--on the lumber, on the plumbing, which are all of the things that go into a new house, and on the labor. Though, if you would sell that new house the next week, there would be no sales tax on it because it would be a used house, and the tax would have already been paid on the materials and on the labor. Now, that might seem like a high cost for a new house except that the cost of those materials that would go into the house would be, on average, 22 percent cheaper. That's because there is an embedded Federal tax in everything that we buy, which averages at 22 percent. Remember, these businesses don't pay taxes. They pass them along to the consumers. Here is how it works, Madam Speaker:

Their businesses will factor it into their prices, and they must. That $1 widget has an average of 22-cents' worth of embedded Federal taxes in the price. So, if you would pass this national sales tax, the Fair Tax, you would see competition drive the price down. Your $1 widget would be priced then at 78 cents. Twenty-two percent of the embedded cost of that $1 widget would go down to 78 cents. Yes, you'd have to add back in a 23 percent embedded national sales tax in that on the sales and on the service. Yes, that would take that up to just a skosh over $1 again. Yet people would get 56 percent more in their paychecks. They would have a lot more money to spend. The retail prices wouldn't look a lot different when you'd be done paying the tax than they would today, but the difference is that everybody would see how expensive the Federal tax is, and they would make less demands on government because it would make everyone a taxpayer.

Let me tell you the story of little Michael Dix, who is the son of an outstanding once and future State legislator in Iowa. Little Michael was about 8 years old when this happened. We have a 7 percent sales tax in the State, in many of the regions, and I trust it was in this one. He'd saved up his money, and he wanted to go in and buy a little box of Skittles--those little sweets that are there on the counter. They were 89 cents, and he'd saved his money and had counted it out. He went in and got his Skittles out and laid them up on the counter at the convenience store. He counted out his money, the 89 cents, all the way up to the right penny.

The lady who ran the checkout register rang it up, and said, Okay. That'll be 96 cents.

He looked at her, and he said, But they're 89 cents. That's what it says on the box.

She said, Well, no. You've got to pay the Governor. You've got to pay the tax.

So there he is with the 89 cents, having saved it to buy his Skittles. It's a transaction that's pretty important to Michael Dix, as it should be to any young child that age. He found out that he had to pay the tax and that she wanted 96 cents.

He turned to his dad, and he said, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles?

Imagine, Madam Speaker. Imagine what that does. I don't think Michael Dix is going to be a guy who's going to grow up demanding that the Federal Government produce more things for him. I don't think he's going to be one who's going to tolerate higher taxes. I think this young man is going to grow up to personal responsibility, very well aware of how burdensome the Federal and the State governments are. He'll make sure that when government provides a service that it's a good value for that and that it's a necessary service, not one that's frivolous--or, man, he's going to know always that the money came out of the pocket of Michael Dix and that it didn't come out, necessarily, of the pocket of some anonymous person.

It's personal. The national sales tax, the Fair Tax, makes this personal, Madam Speaker. It makes it personal for millions and millions of kids who are growing up in America and who are making billions of transactions. Every time, they're being reminded that the Federal Government is expensive. An expensive Federal Government that makes everybody a taxpayer becomes a Federal Government that those taxpayers demand less of. More freedom. Less taxes. That's the equation.

The national sales tax, the Fair Tax, H.R. 25, is transformative. It's transformative from an economic standpoint because it takes all of the taxes off of productivity, and it puts all of the taxes on consumption. It provides an incentive for earnings, savings, and investments. It abolishes the punishment for production, which is a tax on corporate, personal, and business income tax and taxes on capital gains, investments, interest income, and all of the components--the State tax included. It does all of those things. The Fair Tax does everything good that anybody's tax reform does. It does them all. It does them all better, and the American people are getting closer to understanding what this means.

The American people can visualize what happens--a world without the IRS, a world without punishment for production, a world that has little kids growing up like Michael Dix, who is now a young man who understands that paying taxes is a personal experience. It's transformative, Madam Speaker, for this country to move down the path of a national sales tax and toward abolishing the IRS.

Some will say they support a national sales tax, H.R. 25, the Fair Tax, provided that we first repeal the 16th Amendment, but that sets up an impossible bar. Can we imagine any piece of legislation that we would predicate upon the passage of a constitutional amendment? What if we had the flat tax and we had to pass a constitutional amendment before we could adopt the flat tax? What if we had to pass a constitutional amendment before we raised the debt ceiling? What if we had fixated in the Constitution of the United States a debt ceiling that we couldn't surpass? I think that would be a good thing, actually. I'd like to ratchet it down from where it is now. We couldn't pass that constitutional amendment. The bar is too high. The bar is too high to set the standard that passing the repeal of the 16th Amendment is a condition to adopt a national sales tax. Here is the reality of it:

H.R. 25, the Fair Tax, does this. It starts the process for the repeal of the 16th Amendment and abolishes the IRS. It abolishes the Income Tax Code in its entirety.

Can we imagine the American people freed of the burden of the IRS-- freed from the fear of audit? The American people get 56 percent more on their paychecks. They make their own decisions on when to pay their taxes, and the IRS becomes a thing of history, and the Internal Revenue Code--the punishment, the tax on all productivity--is gone.

Do we think for a minute, Madam Speaker, that this Congress of the American people would tolerate the reestablishment of the IRS or the reestablishment of the Income Tax Code? No, they would not. In fact, they would be so glad to get 56 percent more on their paychecks and would be so glad to have the freedom to make the decisions on when to pay their taxes rather than having the IRS tell them, You shall pay it out of every dollar that you make, that they would never tolerate the reestablishment of the IRS nor the reestablishment of the Tax Code. It's that simple. They would, I believe, chase the 16th Amendment down with a great joy that they would be relieved of it, and they would eventually abolish it and repeal it.

Yet, to set the condition as a bar to pass the Fair Tax, it is too high a bar. It's not an impossibility, but it's an extreme difficulty, and it becomes a semantics argument rather than a practical one. So, Madam Speaker, I'll make this point:

In 30 years of making this argument, I have never run into an argument for some other tax reform that is economically superior to the national sales tax, to the Fair Tax. I have not run into that argument. I have not been in a debate where I thought that the other side made a point that I had trouble addressing economically. The only

point that they can make is that, in their judgment, it's too difficult to pass politically.

Well, when you tell the American people that the IRS is going to be gone and that we're going to put those smart, good people at the IRS to work in the productive sector of the economy instead of in the burdensome sector of the economy, they're going to cheer. They're going to stand up, and they're going to applaud. They've done that for me over and over again.

The time is right. The economy is in a sad condition. We don't have a President who understands this free market economy. I don't think he believes in it. He has been nationalizing it right and left. He has been nationalizing the three large investment banks; AIG, the insurance company; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; General Motors; and Chrysler. The Student Loan Program has been completely taken over by the Federal Government. ObamaCare has swallowed up the most sovereign thing that we have, our bodies. Our skin and everything inside it has now been taken over and is managed by the Federal Government.

This President and this majority in Congress don't begin to understand the sovereignty of the individual or the free market system that we have, but the American people understand, Madam Speaker. The American people are going to be given a choice this November. They are going to choose freedom. They are going to choose liberty. They are going to choose constitutional conservatism. I look forward to the transformation, to the freedom, and to the liberty that comes from the people who step up to their own personal responsibility.

I thank you so much for your indulgence and for your attention here this evening, and 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 10 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, April 27, 2010, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. And I remind you, Mr. Speaker, that these deliberations here represent the most deliberative body in the world. And that's the argument that we've made for years. And even though it's not as deliberative as it was before Speaker Pelosi took the gavel, we still have some discussion time down here. We still have Special Orders. We still have 60 minutes and alternating hours between Democrats and Republicans when both sides do show up for those alternating hours.

But tonight that's not the case. This is the wrap-up and the finish of the week, Mr. Speaker. And many have gone to the airport and caught a plane and gone home to their district or wherever they might go.

But I don't think enough has been said yet this week. It's been a relatively short week, and not a particularly trying or testing week with anything that stands out here as significant accomplishment.

But I'm watching still as policy moves in America. And the policy that has been shoehorned through this House of Representatives and become the law of the land has caused the American people to fill up my town hall meetings.

We were not here on Monday. We didn't gavel in until, well, we gaveled in on Tuesday, and the first votes were sometime about 6:30 on Tuesday evening, so the work week is Tuesday evening for two or three votes. We call it naming post offices. That was the level of the significant suspension calendar. And then we had some debate on Wednesday and some committee activity. And today is Thursday. It's been low key. Last votes took place maybe 2 hours ago, something like that. So our work week is all day Wednesday, finishing the night on Tuesday and the early part of the day on Thursday and then going, a lot of people going home, Mr. Speaker.

That's okay with me because I don't support the agenda that's being driven here out of the Speaker's Office. I don't support the process that has been developed.

I do support the Constitution, liberty, freedom, fiscal responsibility, limited government, and I support the people that have been coming here to petition the government for redress of grievances. That's a constitutional right that we all have. And I've seen tens of thousands come here to say, don't take away my freedom, don't take away my liberty. Let me have the right to manage the health care of my own body, for example.

And the people across this country that have said over and over again that the fiscal irresponsibility with the profligate spending that's been going on for the last 3 years-plus in this Congress is more than they can abide.

And my town hall meetings on Tuesday, or excuse me, on Monday of this week, one in Council Bluffs and one in Sioux City, we're not jam-packed to the walls with people standing outside looking in the doorway, as they were during August of last year, when people believed that they had a chance to put the brakes on what we now know and the President refers himself to as ObamaCare. That packed our town hall meetings in my district, all over my district, all over the State of Iowa, all over the United States of America, hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings with hundreds of thousands of Americans that came in to express that they did not want the government to take over the management of our health care.

And I have never seen an issue that brought this much intensity and this many people out. And still the leadership in this Congress was determined to shoehorn a bill through here. And that happened maybe 3 weeks ago or a little more, early in the wee hours of a Monday morning, just a little after midnight, as I recall. The final vote was on a Sunday night.

The Speaker could not have allowed the Members of Congress to go home, let alone for an Easter break period of time, because she knew that if the Democrats in this Congress went home to listen to their constituents, that their congressional offices would be jammed full of people that said they were there to petition their Members of Congress for redress of the grievance of a government takeover of health care. And they would have filled the streets by the tens and hundreds of thousands. They would have demonstrated at congressional offices. They would have filled any town hall meetings. There would have been an outpouring of rejection of that policy like this country has never seen.

And so the Speaker kept her own Democrat Members here on the Hill and insulated from their own constituents, even to the extent that, as the phone lines either jammed or they were shut down, I don't know which, but the last 3 days I couldn't call my own office. And I know that there weren't that many people calling my office. They were busy calling the offices of Democrats who were determined to vote for ObamaCare.

But I couldn't get through because the switchboard was jammed, at least the last 3 days here in the House. While you had Members that couldn't even be heard, their constituents could not call them. They couldn't get through to send them a fax. Yes, they could send an email, presumably. And we don't know whether those emails went on an automatic dump or whether there was an answer. Only their constituents can know that.

We know that there was a difficulty verifying if the Senate, during their period of time that this was an important issue, up till Christmas Eve, if in the Senate actually Members were answering their telephones.

But here they couldn't get through to call my office. I couldn't call my own office from my cell phone. And my own staff that I had to communicate with around the Hill, we had to call on our own cell lines to each other's cell phones.

That's not such a particularly great handicap, but on top of that, Mr. Speaker, the cell phones were jammed. The signal was so jammed with so many calls that we couldn't connect either by cell phone sometimes for hours.

Now, that's an awful lot of rejection focusing itself on an issue here that America had had the opportunity to debate since last July all the way into nearly--well, nearly into April. That's what's happened with ObamaCare.

And now, after the bill has passed--and I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, that if we would have had the bill go to the Senate for a vote and then to the House for a vote in order to qualify it to go to the President's desk for signature that turns it into the law of the land, ObamaCare could not have passed this Congress on the day that it was messaged to the President because the votes didn't exist in the United States Senate to support the bill. That was voted by other people.

And the ones that the folks voted to represent themselves, Massachusetts in particular, Scott Brown was elected by generally the liberal people in Massachusetts to block ObamaCare. And there he was following through on his word to do that, except it was circumvented. And they used a rescissions policy that had never been used in a piece of policy like this before to enable that to happen. And on top of that, a promise from the President of the United States that he would sign an executive order that he would have liked to have had the pro- life people in America believe that the President of the United States can sign an executive order that would amend a bill that the Congress had just passed. That's the executive order that deals with the Stupak amendment, which was designed to shut off Federal funding for abortion that might be enabled by ObamaCare.

Now, think about what this means. Here we have a Constitution that sets

up the structure. Article I, section 1 says all legislative powers will be vested in a Congress of the United States comprised of a House of Representatives and a United States Senate. It even prescribes that all spending will start in the House, not in the Senate. But this is an authorization bill, not an appropriations bill. So ObamaCare could have started in the Senate or in the House.

Well, we got a Senate version that was taken up by the House. But the Constitution establishes that all legislative powers are vested here in the House or in the Senate, but House and Senate collectively. We are the legislative branch of government. And the President of the United States, who wrote the book ``The Audacity of Hope'' had the audacity to offer to Bart Stupak that he would sign an executive order that would effectively amend Bart Stupak's pro-life language into the legislation that was here on the floor of the House at the time messaged from the Senate.

Now imagine, a man that taught constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago would believe as President of the United States that his executive order can effectively amend legislation that is presumably the majority opinion of the elected Members of the United States Congress.

If the President can amend legislation by executive order, then can't the President also just write the legislation by executive order and do what he will without having to consult Congress? That would be a two branches of government instead of a three branches of government. Maybe the President would argue that there is something that Congress can do that he can't, like appropriate money, for example. Well, that would be a very narrow role, and that would be turning his back on the constitutional responsibility that is vested in the United States Congress. And we should always reject the idea that a President can sign an executive order that has an effect on changing the legislation that the Congress has passed.

In fact, I may be the number one most authoritative voice in the United States Congress on this subject matter because, I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that on a State level when I was in the State legislature as a State senator, we had then our Governor, Tom Vilsack, filed an executive order. He was a fresh governor of maybe a little bit fresher than the President has been during this period of time. I think it was in the first couple, 3 months of his office, Governor Vilsack signed an executive order known as executive order number seven. I looked at it and concluded that he had violated the separation of powers and legislated by executive order. And when I raised an objection, of course it was refused and denied. The executive office didn't want to respond to a legislative office.

And so I went to court, and we filed the case of King v. Vilsack. Now, this is now our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, whom we had a good exchange in the Ag Committee. I think it was just yesterday. But in this issue we disagreed. He believed that he could amend the code of Iowa by executive order and sought to do so with that executive order. I believed that the legislative powers are vested within the legislative branch of government. And most of our State Constitutions, including Iowa's, are modeled off of our United States Constitution.

And so our State legislators across the land will take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of, fill-in-the-blank. For me it's Iowa. That oath is an oath that you can only take to uphold the Constitution as it reads, as you understand it, as it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification of the Constitution itself, or the subsequent amendments. There isn't any other alternative.

None of us can take an oath to uphold a Constitution as it might be amended by, what, the President's executive order? Or even a decision of the United States Supreme Court? Now, I put that list at 10 now, as the 10 last people that should be allowed to amend the Constitution of the United States. That should be the nine Supreme Court Justices and the President of the United States. Those 10 are the last people on the planet that should be engaged in seeking to amend the Constitution.

The Constitution sets up a framework for us to amend it when we don't like the results. We are required to adhere to it and live by it. And for a President of the United States to sign an executive order that's got companies that deal, that supposedly buys a dozen votes to support ObamaCare here and the President would exchange an executive order that was designed to assure those Stupak dozen that there wouldn't be Federal funding of abortion because his executive order would alter the language and the meaning of the bill. The smallest and tiniest of fig leafs was offered to Congressman Stupak. That executive order no one takes seriously today. It was simply a tool of utility to put the votes together to force this ObamaCare off the floor of the House and send it to the President for his signature, which he did. And now ObamaCare is the law of the land.

I was, I believe, Mr. Speaker, the last Member of Congress to leave the House of Representatives and leave the Capitol that night. It took me perhaps an hour to wind myself down and come to a point where I thought I could leave this place where such a cataclysmic offense to our Constitution, our budget, our freedom, and our liberty had taken place in such a shameful fashion. The shameful fashion includes the antics in the United States Senate, where they cut deal after deal after deal, including the Cornhusker kickback. Yes, and I know there was a successful effort made to peel the Cornhusker kickback out of there. It leaves in the Louisiana purchase, it leaves in the Florida gator aid, it leaves in seven or eight other special deals that were cooked up in the Senate so that they could produce enough votes temporarily to push that bill through on Christmas Eve. And then of course we had the Massachusetts election, which changed the dynamics over there.

Here deal after deal was made. And one day I hope to hold hearings in the United States Congress to find out what actually went on behind those closed doors. And I believe the American people have a right to learn what went on behind those closed doors. I want to hold hearings and investigations and bring people under oath and stand them up and let them take that oath and then testify before a congressional hearing, What were you offered by Rahm Emanuel? What were you offered by the President of the United States?

If you're AARP and your job is to represent the senior citizens that are your members, I want those representatives of AARP to come in and tell us, was the offer that you can sell insurance to the AARP members so good and so high that you decided to sell out your own members? What was it that the SEIU got? What was it that Big Pharma got? What happened to the $165 million that they promised that they would commit in an ad campaign in order to sell ObamaCare to America so that Big Pharma could have a larger market that was mandated by the Federal Government? What were the deals that were made? We need to know that.

If we can drag CEOs of private American corporations before the United States Congress, and if Henry Waxman can threaten to--actually, yesterday was the day he was going to do that and he cancelled it. I think he thought better of it. But if Henry Waxman, the chair of Energy and Commerce, can bring CEOs before the United States Congress and allege that they're making too much money, or he wants to see into their books and their records, or if Ed Markey, the subcommittee chairman, can hand a letter to David Sokol that is an intimidating letter because the president of Mid-American Energy, who testified against cap-and-tax, can be intimidated with the threat of the chairman of an important Energy and Commerce subcommittee at the request of that chairman to investigate the company that he represents. Witness intimidation, plain and simple, straight up front. It's documented. It's in public documents now. Along with the other activities that have to do with the President of the United States now nearly a year ago firing the CEO of General Motors.

Just simply summarily fired the CEO of General Motors. Didn't try to take his fingerprints off. Didn't imply that it was a decision that came about some other way. Didn't try to hide it. He proudly accepted, some will call it credit, I will call it blame for reaching

across the line between the public and the private sector and firing the CEO of General Motors and deciding who would be the new CEO of General Motors. He sent his car czar to make some of those deals. The President of the United States replaced and named all but two of the board members of General Motors. And he wasn't quite as engaged in Chrysler, but those same activities took place.

And the White House, and when it's the White House it's the President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, dictated to the bankruptcy court exactly the terms that emerged from the bankruptcy court, General Motors and Chrysler. That situation is appalling and breathtaking when you think of the nationalization that has taken place.

And Mr. Speaker, when you look at the beginning of this is at the end of the Bush administration, Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, came here to the Capitol, September 19, 2008, and asked for $700 billion in bailout money that he would deal out the way he saw fit in an attempt to stop what he believed was a potential or maybe even an impending meltdown of the world's credit. He thought it could have all come crashing down. He couldn't guarantee there would be a fix, but he said if you try to give me any new ideas they won't be as good as his own.

So he ended up with $350 billion in the beginning of this, in about October of 2008, and then another $350 billion that was approved by a Congress that was elected later and by a President who was elected later. And that was President Barack Obama, who supported and approved all of the TARP funding, all of the nationalization beginnings. And he followed through on the balance of that and the takeovers of three large investment banks: AIG, the large insurance company to the tune of around $180 billion, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, culminated by executive order right before Christmas of last year that hardly made the news.

You know, if we just went in and looked what happened on late Friday night after the news cycle and the press goes off to their golf game or home to their family, we would find all kinds of, I mentioned earlier, cataclysmic things that have happened in the United States on late Friday night.

I would like to go back and just amend something here to the power in Congress. Give me the right to veto and put back in place anything that happened after, say, 2 o'clock on a Friday before the press comes to work at around 9 o'clock on a Monday morning. Let me go back and fix those things that happened. We would have a lot better country today that wouldn't have reverted. But Friday night, this is when the President pulls those moves because that is when there is the lowest news cycle. So that's what happens.

Three large investment banks taken over by the Federal Government with the approval or the active involvement of President Barack Obama. AIG the insurance company taken over and bailed out, $180 billion. President Obama approved or enacted that. The takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee pledged he would never vote to support or bail out. And I remember the date that I heard that the first time and the most clearly was October 26, 2005, right over there from that microphone, when Barney Frank said, ``I won't vote to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And if you think so and you're investing in them, don't count on me doing that.''

Well, we might not have had the starkest and clearest and cleanest of votes, but we have had a persistent and a relentless defense of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's irresponsible financial practices going through many years prior to 2005. But I stood here on this floor and engaged in that process. And the amendments that came to put capital requirements and regulatory requirements on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were shot down and voted down and fought against. The most aggressive opposition came directly from the Democrats, who were in the minority at the time. But Fannie and Freddie had worked the lobby and had a broader bipartisan support than they might have otherwise had.

So three large investment banks nationalized, AIG nationalized, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac nationalized. And now, Mr. Speaker, I say you and the American people share the liability of $5.5 trillion in contingent liability of Fannie and Freddie. And before I go to the car companies' nationalization, I would remind you and all who may be overhearing this dialogue that of all of the financial reform that has Wall Street under the focus and under the spotlight and under the magnifying glass, of all of the tactics that have been used, and the President going back up to Wall Street to give his speech today, of all of that, the President didn't mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. There is nothing in the financial reform bill that reforms Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

What's in the financial reform bill is a $50 billion slush fund to let the administration decide which businesses are too big to be allowed to fail and to go in and implement a government takeover of the private sector. And what are the criteria? The judgment of the executive branch. Yes, there are some guidelines, but not many constraints. And it gives the Federal Government the power and the authority to look over every credit transaction in America. Every credit transaction in America.

And so presumably that means that if you're in a small, little rural area, it used to work this way: you go in and maybe pick up some grocery items or buy some gas, they'd put it on your tab. You'd come around and pay the bill at a later date. They'd want to look that one over.

If you go in--and someone mentioned this, and I thought it was a pretty descriptive way. If you go into a furniture store and they have a special on mattresses and so you can buy the mattress and come pay for it 30 days later, nothing down, that's a credit transaction the Federal Government would look in on and have to approve.

It would give them the ability to look in on your credit card, Mr. Speaker. Not necessarily take it out of your pocket, but electronically look in on those credit records. And that would give the Federal Government the authority to examine everybody's transactions. All of your credit card transactions, all of your debit card transactions. Presumably, if you have credit involved with your bank accounts, to look at those loans in the bank accounts. Maybe technically not your checking account because that's not a credit account.

But a Federal Government going that far and that deep and having that kind of authority, let alone looking into all of the Wall Street transactions that take place--the investment banking transactions, the derivatives, the credit default swaps--all of the components that come along that have to do with higher finance, the mortgage transactions that take place and to track them all the way through. And some of this is good. Looking at high finance and being able to track that and being able to identify is primarily a good thing as long as that oppressive thumb of the Federal Government doesn't go in the middle of our back down to individuals in this fashion, and as long as we don't leave it to the discretionary judgment of the Federal Government on which businesses are too big to be allowed to fail.

If the Federal Government can come in and take over three large investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and if we have a President of the United States who seems to be following through on the playbook that is on the Web site of the Democratic Socialists of America--DSAUSA.org, Mr. Speaker. I hope everybody is paying attention to it, or you can Google ``Democratic Socialists of America'' and hit the button and there will be a Web site. And that Web site changes a little bit each time that I speak about the DSAUSA.org.

But on the Web site--I saved all of those pages so you can run but you can't hide. Things never die in cyberspace, Mr. Speaker. But on their Web site is now or has been the language that starts out with this. It says, We are socialists. We are not communists--which doesn't give me a lot of comfort. There's a marginal difference, and they tell you what the difference is.

Communists want to nationalize everything. They want to own all real

property. They want to take over everybody's house, all real estate, and they want to tell everybody where they have to work, what they will pay for goods, and what they'll be paid for the work that they are told to do. That is more the pure form of communism. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Well, that also seems to fit the socialists, doesn't it, because they want to do the wealth transfer. They want to share the wealth. That's what the President told Joe the Plumber. Funny. That's what is also the mission statement of ACORN: Share the wealth. The exact language comes right out of the mission statement of ACORN. And the SEIU linked in so closely to ACORN that it's just the funding streams are a little bit different but they are commingled, and often they are trading shirts with each other. Whether it's a purple SEIU shirt or a red ACORN shirt, there are a few more wearing the purple SEIU shirts today than there are ACORN.

By the way, at the risk of digressing, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that even though ACORN announced that on April Fools' Day they would be shutting down ACORN National, I carry this acorn around in my pocket every day to remind me that they have not gone away. It actually may have been an April Fools joke on us that ACORN was going to shut down ACORN National. They could have done that.

But now it's the same people, the same faces, the same boards of directors, a little mixing and matching, changing the names, changing the titles. Funding streams have been shrunk significantly, thanks to Hannah and James and the work that went on behind that. But the same structure is in place. It's the same people, the same problems.

In fact, it reminds me of what happened after the wall went down on November 9 of 1989, and it appeared to be the end of the cold war. The Soviet Union thereafter imploded. A little more than a year after that, the Soviet Union was wound down, and there were those who got together to celebrate the end of the cold war. It was worthy of celebration. A 45-year cold war had looked like it had come to an end, but it didn't convince the communists that they had lost it philosophically.

They didn't believe that our free enterprise capitalism and the vigor that comes from being an American was what had defeated them. They thought they just maybe needed better managers that were more pure in their ideology. And so even though they had to scatter from the light, they went back and reformed new alliances and new allegiances, and they come back at us again and again and again, even more insidious and even harder to find and harder to identify. But philosophical enemies of the liberty and freedom of the United States and western civilization, they remained.

ACORN remains an entity out there that has spent millions of dollars undermining the integrity of the legitimate ballot system here in the United States of America. They produced and admitted to over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms, and they argue that it didn't result in a single fraudulent vote--which is completely, I think, a specious argument. Why would you spend millions to produce false or fraudulent voter registrations if you didn't think that was going to result in some kind of favorable result for you in the ballot box?

And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that even though there were major problems with ACORN in Ohio, if that election would have been closer and we would have scrutinized it more closely, we would have found out more about what could have been happening in the ballot box in places like Ohio and Minnesota. When we go to court, who wins in the end in the close elections?

And what if all of those false or fraudulent voter registrations had been kicked out at the beginning and no one had walked in? And that doesn't mean that the ones that were discovered were all of those that actually happened. I have to believe that the voter registration list was significantly corrupted in all of the States where ACORN was carrying out this practice and has significantly corrupted voter registration lists, and opens things up for more and more corruption.

And this United States of America, built upon the foundation of our Constitution itself, that Constitution, one might think, is the framework for law, and it's what we have to preserve if we're going to be a healthy and a viable country. And I agree.

But the very foundation underneath the Constitution itself is legitimate elections. And when elections are delegitimized by organizations like ACORN, and if the American people lose the confidence that we have legitimate elections, there the Constitution falls because the foundation for the Constitution itself is legitimate elections and the people's confidence in those legitimate elections as well.

So ACORN went right at the very component of America that is essential. And that is not that we just have clean, legitimate elections. We must do that if we're going to uphold our Constitution; but we also have to have the American people that believe that we've conducted ourselves in a legitimate fashion, that their vote was not undermined by an illegitimate vote.

That's the ACORN side of this.

ACORN, by the way, another place that I want to do investigations-- the other side of the great election divide--and hold hearings in this Congress and subpoena witnesses and go in and drill down and investigate them completely. And I believe that many of those investigative lines, when we follow the money, will lead to the White House itself, Mr. Speaker.

So we have financial reform that's up in front of us. We have ACORN that has dispersed itself to some degree but are reforming under the same managers, same faces, and some of the same funding streams.

I have raised the issue of how ObamaCare was pushed through this Congress and how it takes over another chunk of our private sector. I will summarize and add up: The three large investment banks that were taken over by the Federal Government; AIG, the insurance company, taken over by the Federal Government; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taken over by the Federal Government; and now we have General Motors and Chrysler taken over by the Federal Government; $700 billion in TARP spending at the beginning of that; $787 billion in the stimulus package at the tail end of that. And we have all of 6 percent of the American population that believes that the stimulus package actually worked and stimulated jobs.

Well, the data shows the exact opposite. Unemployment went up, not down, while that was going on. The promise was we wouldn't see unemployment go over 8 percent under the stimulus package, but what really happened is unemployment went to 10 percent. And it's hanging in that zone, 9.7 percent in unemployment.

The vision of borrowing money from the Chinese and the Saudis and pouring it in to projects here in America, extending jobs for the public sector, creating government jobs--and calling creation of government jobs economic development, I don't think we've ever had a President that believed that in the history of America until we get to here, this point in our history.

I don't even believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great Keynesian economist that he was, and he embraced John Maynard Keynes' philosophy--not quite to the extent that Keynes would have liked to have had him do, but in a substantial way--didn't believe that government jobs were a replacement for private sector jobs even though he created a lot of them. And we did a lot of make-work projects across the country, and the evidence of that is still out there.

But our President has said to us a little more than a year ago that he believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve and that he should have spent a lot more money in the thirties, and if he had done so, that would have brought about a recovery instead of waiting for World War II to come along to become and I quote--well, I better not quote that--but the general language is that World War II came along; it was the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. That's close to a quote. I know I've got the philosophy exactly right. And I don't actually disagree with that statement about the stimulus plan with what the Second World War happened to be.

But I would argue that we didn't recover from the Great Depression in the Second World War even. When the stock market crashed in October of 1929, and as it spiraled downwards and

it hiccuped its way up and down and we went through that vast spending era of the Great Depression, and we saw unemployment go up and then come back down and go up again, and when we got to World War II, December 7, 1941, we were still in the Depression. And unemployment was a number that was approaching 20 percent for part of that time, and we had 25 percent unemployment, I think, at the peak.

And we got into the Second World War and we began to manufacture everything as fast as we could. A lot of the women that had not worked before went to work. Rosy the Riveters. And my mother among them who tied parachute knots in Omaha is what she did every day. Tied knots in parachutes. That was part of her war efforts. And, God bless her, she turned 90 years old yesterday. And I honor my mother with all of the love that I have. She did her part of the war effort, as my father did his 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific.

But the economy didn't recover in the Second World War back to where it was. It wasn't the Second World War that was the complete recovery package that one would think the President, according to his words, would be the recovery.

I would just look at what are the indexes. Some of the indexes would be what did the stock market look like and when did it get back to where it was in October of 1929. One might think that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and his Keynesian spending was what brought us out of that. That's what my history people taught me. My teachers taught me that.

I went back and looked at the records and found out that wasn't the case. We still had high unemployment, and we still had low and stagnant growth and some reduction of growth in the thirties.

What we saw during World War II was that unemployment rates went way down because we needed everybody to do the work. We saw unemployment rates go to the lowest they've been in history, 1.2 percent. Now that's almost unheard of today, but unemployment was 1.2 percent. It was 25 percent as a high ratcheted down to 15, 10, on down to 1.2 percent near the end of World War II. Still, still we did not recover from the Great Depression from the 1929 stock market crash. It wasn't World War II. It wasn't even the Korean War. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years before the stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, came back to where it was in October of 1929. That happened in 1954, Mr. Speaker.

So one can't, I don't think, legitimately argue that the World War II stimulus plan even brought us out of it. We increased our production and stabilized our economy and put people to work. The unemployment component of this got a lot better, but the growth and equities that had to do at least at a minimum with the Dow Jones Industrial Average didn't get back to where it was until 1954, from October of 1929. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years before the stock market got back to where it was when it crashed in 1929. This was a long, long, long painful recovery that America went through, and we went through not just the Great Depression of the thirties looking for a recovery, but we went through the Second World War looking for a recovery, we went through the Korean War looking for a recovery, and finally limped our way back.

I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that a big reason for that is, when you over leverage a country or a company, you have to pay and service the debt. That means that you have to pay the interest on the borrowed money. And by the way, that borrowed money came from Americans back then instead of the Chinese and the Saudis now. But you have to service the interest on the debt. The war bonds had to be paid off as well. So that has to come out of the tax revenue that's coming in. The tax revenue that comes in comes from--not government--it comes from the private sector. The private sector has to be viable. It has to be vigorous. There has to be profitability there in order to attract more capital investment. Capital investment necessarily increases--wise capital investment necessarily increases our productivity. Increased productivity increases our gross domestic product, which allows us to buy sell, trade, make, gain, produce more goods, sell more goods, cash in at the cash register more, whether it's the factory or the retail. And when that happens, this private sector economic growth then pays its share of taxes. And in the end, it's the people in America that pay the taxes, not the corporations, not the businesses, and it certainly isn't the government.

So what we have going on here now is, the government is swallowed up with those eight huge entities that I talked about. Three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler, those eight entities that are swallowed up by the Federal Government represent, according to an economics professor at the University of Arizona as far back as last August, one-third of the private sector activity in the United States swallowed up by those eight huge entities nationalized and taken over by the Federal Government. And behind that came what? ObamaCare swallowing up another 18 percent of our economy.

Now if you want to add 18 percent to--one-third is 33 percent, correct, Mr. Speaker? Yes, I know. You're nodding, and I appreciate your math is correct--that's 51 percent. So 33 percent and 18 percent adds up to 51 percent of our private sector economy. This now taken over and managed or dictated the terms of its business contracts, every bit of health care in America will be, according to this term of ObamaCare, signed into law a couple weeks ago or three, will be directed by the Federal Government.

And some people--let me say some people without the largest of minds--are arguing that because we still have a surviving private sector health insurance industry, that the health care in America hasn't been nationalized. I would challenge them, Mr. Speaker, point to me--point for me to a sector or a component or an activity within health care in America that is not slated to be changed, altered or directed by ObamaCare. There isn't a single health insurance policy in America that the President can tell anyone, You get to keep that policy, that it isn't going to increase the premiums dramatically or perhaps reduce them marginally. That's going to happen. The premiums change for everybody in America unless there's somebody who happens to sit exactly on the dividing line. Young people will pay a lot more in premiums because they're a lower risk. We went from a 7-1 community rating that's out there now, which means that the most extreme cases-- the lowest premium compared to the highest premium--are 7-1, which means that if we have a young healthy person paying $100 a month on a similar policy, an older person that may not be completely healthy could be paying $700 a month on a similar policy or even an identical policy. Now this has been pulled back to a 3-1 community rating which means that now that--just say we've got two people. They're both insured. The youth at $100 a month. The older person, say my age, who is a greater risk, at $700 a month. That's $800 between the two of us. Now when you go to a 3-1 community rating, that means that there can't be that much disparity. So you dial that thing back down. And you charge the young person then $200 a month and the older person $600 a month. Now we're dealing with $800 again. But the $800 comes $200 from the young person at doubling their premium and a reduction in the older person at $700 down to $600. Now you've got the $800 that comes together for that monthly premium of the two insured. That's how that works.

So health insurance premiums change because they changed the rules for everybody, and they'll have to be approved by the Health Choices Administration czar or whomever that happens to be who has that title, and what was the Senate version of the bill. That part I didn't commit to memory, Mr. Speaker. Everybody's health insurance changes in America, and this government effectively cancels every policy subject to the approval of the new rules that will be written that aren't written yet. Nobody knows where they are. The health insurance underwriters are pulling their hair out, trying to figure out what happens and how do they do business. The Federal Government's dictating completely every health insurance policy in America. Can we find a health care provider that doesn't have

their way of doing business altered by this bill? Certainly the funding stream that comes in is altered. There's $500 billion cut in Medicare for our senior citizens, $523.5 billion--over $500 billion cut out of Medicare reimbursement rates.

I represent the most senior congressional district in America. Iowa has the highest percentage of its population over the age of 85 of any of the States. We're the oldest two or three over the age of 65. There is good longevity there, I like that, and healthy practices, presumably. But the district I represent, out of the 99 counties in Iowa, 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa. And I hear the President say there's waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare so we're going to slash $500 billion out of there to pay for ObamaCare. And has the President pointed his finger to a single bit of waste, fraud and abuse that is in Medicare that he would fix? The promise is that's what he will do. But if he can't identify it or won't identify it, or if he's holding the access to that information hostage to the passage of his ObamaCare bill--he's got the bill. He signed it. It's now the law of the land.

Now it's time for the President of the United States to turn over all of those magic cards to show us, where is the waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare? I don't say it doesn't happen. I hear those cases, too. But what's the solution to fix it? And do we really have to pass a bill in order to have legitimate clean government? If there's corruption, let's go find it. Let's go root it out, root and branch, pull it out, and let's legitimize all of Medicare in the country. But we don't need to be going in there and arguing that--if there's $500 billion worth of waste, fraud and abuse, how do you arrive at that number if you haven't found the waste, fraud and abuse yet?

So now I'm going to tell you, seniors will be penalized or they won't keep their word, and we'll be borrowing more from the Chinese to fund ObamaCare because--I'm going on record here in the Congressional Record on this day, April 22, 2010, to say that we will not see $500 billion in cuts in Medicare. They were never sincere about that. That's only a number that they needed to reach so they could argue that ObamaCare doesn't cost over $1 trillion over 10 years. Remember the argument now became, CBO scored this at $132 billion in savings over 10 years. That's $13.2 billion per year, the 10-year budget window that we're talking about. That is not loose change to American taxpayers. But to the overall budget, it's very marginal as to whether it's a savings or whether it's an increase in spending. But that includes and is predicated upon the cut to the spending which is a punishment to our seniors of $523.5 billion. It's also predicated upon a tax increase of $569.2 billion, and it was predicated upon the avoidance of the doctors' fix which is in the change of $360 billion. All of that distorts this to the tune of about $1.4 trillion that with an honest accounting would get added back into this ObamaCare bill.

So you take $1.4 trillion in costs that are distorted, and you would subtract $132 billion from that, and you're down in the neighborhood of--let me get that number here right--subtract $132 billion from the $1.4 trillion. Now you are down about $1.27 trillion in increased costs. Now remember what the President said. I have to refresh you, Mr. Speaker, because I'm wondering if any Democrats would actually be able to pass this test.

A couple little questions about history: Why did we go into ObamaCare in the first place? What was the argument from the beginning? What happened during the campaign that presumably gave the President of the United States a mandate to impose ObamaCare on America? And I remember this discussion, but I suspect that Madam Speaker Pelosi does not choose to remember this. Barack Obama--then Senator and candidate Obama said, We are spending too much money on health care. We've got to solve the problem of spending too much money on health care. And so he argued that the solution for that apparently is to spend a lot more on health care.

Now that doesn't pass the first little bit of third grade logic test. I could go to my little granddaughter, who is now 5, had her first little loose tooth here over the weekend, and say to her, If we're spending too much money, does it solve the problem if we spend more money? And she would give me that quizzical look like, How could you say something so irrational, Grampa? It's not rational to argue that spending too much money is solved by spending more money. But that's the argument that came. It's a matter of fact in public record. We're spending too much money. We have to solve that problem. And lo and behold, ObamaCare spends a lot more money, and somehow they still argue that they're solving the problem of spending too much money.

The second thing is that we have not enough competition in the insurance companies, not enough choices. We have 1,300 health insurance companies in America--or we did until a month ago when ObamaCare was signed into the law of the land. We have 1,300 health insurance companies, 100,000 possible policy varieties, and the President wants another one to compete with. Now he didn't get that. But he got the exchange, and the exchange will decide who are the winners and who are the losers, and they will write the mandates for every single policy in America. And let's just say, if you don't cover contraception, then there is going to be a requirement to cover contraception; if you don't cover Viagra, there's going to be a requirement to cover Viagra; if your policy doesn't cover mental health, there will be requirements to cover mental health.

Mandate after mandate after mandate, when we only have a couple-- three of those in law prior to ObamaCare--will come raining down out of the Federal Government. And whenever there is a mandate, it makes an argument for four or five or six more health care mandates, and every mandate increases the costs over the premium and takes away our liberty and takes away our freedom.

All of these things that I have talked about pale in comparison to the part that knots up my innards more than any other, and that is this: since 1973, the people generally on the left side of the aisle in America have made the argument with regard to Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and abortion in America, the people on the other side of the aisle have argued long and hard that the Federal Government has no business telling a person what they can or can't do with their body. That's the argument. So they argue that the Federal Government can't regulate nor diminish nor make it more restrictive for a woman who seeks an abortion to get that abortion because it's not our business what a woman does with her body. That is their argument. Men and women made that argument.

Over here on this side of the aisle, over and over and over again they made that argument. Now the same people, Mr. Speaker, are making the argument--and have made the argument and the President has signed it into the law of the land--that the Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body, but instead, now the same people are arguing that the Federal Government has every right to tell everybody in America what they can or can't do with their body.

The President of the United States, with the iron fist of the leadership within the House and the Senate and the complicity of a bare majority of the Members of the House, has imposed and nationalized our very bodies. The most sovereign thing that we have is our own personal self, our skin and what is inside our skin; the management of same has been taken over by the Federal Government. Now they tell all of us, you shall buy a health insurance policy; and if you can't afford it, we're going to tax somebody else and send you a refundable tax credit and you, by golly, are going to pay for that policy.

And if you are working and making enough money and you don't have a policy, if you happen to be working for a business that has less than 50 employees, then we are going to fine you a percentage of your income. The IRS is going to come in and do the audits, first electronically and then personally, to impose that health insurance policy on you. And it won't be the one that you could buy last month. It will be the one that you can buy next year or the year after, after they write the

new rules. The Federal Government's nationalization of our bodies.

So they have nationalized eight huge entities, a third of the private sector activity, and another 18 percent of our economy, health care, and nationalized and taken over the most sovereign thing we have, our skin and what is inside our skin, and taken away our ability, as individual free people that exercise the rights that come from God, clearly identified by the Founding Fathers and delineated in the Declaration of Independence, which is the foundation for the Constitution, the sovereignty of man, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that you and everyone in this Congress and those who aspire to come to this Congress should know that the Founding Fathers understood that those rights are prioritized rights--life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness--not just a grab bag of rights that they pulled out of the sky or randomly put into a package, but set there in an order of priority, a priority that the thing most paramount is our lives, the management of our lives as well; and that liberty, as a secondary right, is subordinate to the right to life.

The pursuit of happiness was not the pursuit of happiness as it is envisioned in the minds of a lot of people today. Pursuit of happiness, by the way, is subordinated to liberty and to life so that no one in their pursuit of happiness--and by the way, pursuit of happiness meant to our Founding Fathers more the Greek understanding, the word ``eudaimonia,'' which means pursuit of truth, pursuit of knowledge, pursuit of perfection in both body and mind. That is what pursuit of happiness was understood to mean when the Declaration of Independence was signed and they pledged their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor.

The pursuit of happiness was the pursuit of truth and purity. That pursuit of happiness, though, is still subordinate and cannot--in anyone's pursuit of happiness can they infringe upon the liberty of another because our liberties are established in the Bill of Rights, for example, now--we understand them more clearly.

And they are also enshrined in title VII of the Civil Rights Act: You shall not discriminate against people based upon race, creed, color, ethnicity, now and a lot of times it's age and disability. Those are real rights. They are the rights that are protected. And the rights to freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to keep and bear arms, the rights to property that come in the Fifth Amendment, the right to be protected against double jeopardy, to be judged by a jury of our peers, all of them, those are all rights. These rights are our liberties.

Our liberties that are guaranteed to us cannot be taken over by someone else in their pursuit of their happiness. They have to honor and respect that as our liberties are always subordinated to the right to life being the most paramount right. These things are all taken away by ObamaCare: right to life itself, because it puts people in line to take the health care that the Federal Government prescribes and it's unconstitutional in a lot of ways, at least four ways.

First, there is nothing there in the enumerated powers that grants this Congress or the President of the United States to join together and impose a product on us that is neither produced nor approved by the Federal Government. Never in the history of this country has that ever happened. That is a constitutional violation. There is nothing in the commerce clause that allows such a broad definition that people that would not engage in commerce whatsoever would have to buy a product produced or approved by the Federal Government. It is a violation of the equal protection clause for the reasons that I have said, the Louisiana Purchase, Florida Gator Aid, and the list goes on.

Some Americans are treated different than others in the bill. It is a violation of the Ninth and 10th Amendments, the States' rights component of this as well. I encourage the 20 States attorneys general to go forward with their lawsuits. I am working for a repeal of 100 percent of ObamaCare. Pull it out root and branch; I don't want one DNA vestige left behind. Let's get it out. Let's pull it out all the way, Mr. Speaker, so there is none of it left. And then we can start putting components in place as individual stand-alone bills so the American people can clearly see that their voice is being heard in this United States Congress. And we can do it, we must do it, and we can do it in a reasonable time frame. We can put a discharge petition down here on the floor now for signatures of these Members of Congress.

The second thing we can do is seek to get that vote on the floor. The Senate is doing the same thing. And when we have the other side of the election, we can shut off funding for the implementation of ObamaCare. We can do that. In 2011 and 2012 we can elect a new President who will sign the repeal on his first order of business January 20, 2013. And then we start the reform process.

That is where we need to go, Mr. Speaker. And for those who think that it can't be done, it can't be accomplished, I have a survey on my Web site that asks the question: Do you believe that it's more likely that ObamaCare will be repealed than the Cubs will win the World Series this year? And the last number I saw, 58 percent believed it is more likely we will repeal ObamaCare and 42 percent thought it was more likely the Cubs would win the World Series. They went to spring training; they're playing ball. We are going to play ball all the way to 2013 and beyond. We are going to get this job done, Mr. Speaker. One hundred percent repeal of ObamaCare it must be to preserve the liberty that Americans had last month that they deserve every month in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

So with that, Mr. Speaker, I would express my gratitude for your indulgence and your attention, and especially that little nod of the head, and 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 4 o'clock and 8 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 26, 2010, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege and honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And having listened to my colleague, Doctor and Congressman Burgess, speak in the previous segment in the previous hour, I'll pick up on some things that are on my mind and see if we can clarify the direction that this Nation has taken and the direction that this Nation needs to go.

This is tax day, April 15. This is the day that there are a lot of bleary eyes from people that have stayed up way into the night trying to do their own taxes. We have some people out there that have borrowed the money to pay the tax preparer so that they can file their taxes on time. And we have people that have paid the tax preparer to file an extension because they couldn't get their paperwork in on time.

We have a huge amount of American dollars that are invested in paying tax preparers and doing tax preparations. And I often think about this economy that we have and ask the question, you know, what about these sectors of the

economy? Is there anything contributed to the economy by paying accountants and IRS agents to collect money?

And I'll argue that the White House gets it wrong. The President's economic advisers get it wrong. They seem to believe that this economy is a giant chain letter, and if they can just go into the U.S. Treasury, or borrow from China or borrow from the Saudis and dump a few hundred billion or a few trillion dollars into this economy and give a lot of it away and get people to spend the money, or do it on contracts and the shovel-ready projects, which actually are some of this that has the least amount of demerit and some merit to it--they seem to think that throwing these dollars through the economy stimulates the economy and then we grow.

But the flaw in that premise is this, that, you know, this economy isn't built on spending. It's not built on something that's viewed by the White House as a giant chain letter, where you just dump in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and somehow we go out and spend money and the economy spends. That's the Keynesian economist approach. That's the approach that John Maynard Keynes actually rebutted himself back during the thirties when he said that he could solve all the unemployment in the world.

Now, remember who Keynes was. He was an economist who was a contemporary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he was credited with producing the concept that if you have a shrinking economy, you can stimulate it by borrowing money and spend; the Federal Government can dump that money into the economy and have that flow through the economy and stimulate it.

Now, John Maynard Keynes made the remark about the early or mid- thirties that he could solve all the unemployment in the world. This is how good this Keynesian economics approach it is, that he would solve all the unemployment. This is the author of his own program, of course. He would solve all the unemployment in the world this way. If he could just go to an abandoned coal mine and go out into that abandoned coal mine with a little drill rig and drill a whole bunch of holes out there across that coal mine, and then he'd take American currency, cash money, greenbacks, and then bury them down in these holes in this abandoned coal mine. And then Keynes went on to say, he'd fill that whole coal mine up with garbage.

Now we would have an abandoned coal mine with holes punched in it with drill rigs all over the place, presumably in some kind of grid pattern or random pattern, these holes all full of cash, hundreds of feet of garbage piled over the top of it. And he said he could solve all the unemployment in the world by just simply now turning the world's entrepreneurs, or the American entrepreneurs, loose to go dig out the garbage, dig up the money and take the cash.

That's pretty similar to what you're talking about with these Keynesian economics. You try to get people to work to do things that are make-work. And the President himself said, we're not going to pay people just to dig a hole and fill it back up. I thought that that was an interesting metaphor or way to compare that since I've spent my life digging holes and filling them back up. And I can tell you that it pays if you're digging the hole for some purpose, that builds something that has value.

Our economy, our economy, Mr. Speaker, needs to be built upon the foundation of increasing our productivity. Americans have to make things. We have to produce things. We have to expand services so that our economy grows.

If you think of it in terms of what it would be like if we were still back in the tribal village, and if we didn't have any money to work with, and we had to trade, how do we grow wealth?

Well, some of us would make bows and arrows, and some of us would make the arrowheads, and some of the people would skin the hides and make the clothes. And pretty soon we'd find out that some are good at one thing, others are good at another thing, and then we start to trade these products back and forth, and we have clothing, and we have weapons, and we have utensils, and we have gardeners, and we have hunters and people that specialize. And after a while, this wealth builds because we acquire material goods that increase.

First they provide the necessities of life, which the simplistic term is food, clothing, and shelter. And then we add to our material goods, all of this out of the wealth that comes from producing something that has value and trading it or selling it and then taking the money and buying something from someone else for something that has value to us. That's how this economy works. And it's got to be based on our productivity. Americans have to build things. We have to make things.

And here we are on tax day with these millions of Americans that have filled out their forms and spent their money to do so so that they can do their best to comply. And a lot of Americans that don't want to walk close to the edge of complying with the IRS, they don't want to face an audit, and so they perhaps pay a little more in taxes than they owe because they don't want the question to come up.

Frank Luntz produced a number that was pretty interesting to me, and it was this: that 58 percent of Americans would rather have a root canal than a tax audit. I didn't ask him if that was without anesthetic. For me, I'd take the root canal without the anesthetic before I would want to go through a tax audit. But a lot of the American people today are very concerned about a potential tax audit, so they're paying a little more taxes than they might otherwise.

They had to file. They drop it in at the last minute. And we have post offices that will close at midnight tonight so that people that are hustling up to fill out their tax returns can drop those in and get them postmarked by midnight. And that will be advertised, and they'll plan it. And procrastination will take place. It's not something we enjoy doing.

This day, this day that the 16th amendment enabled all those years ago was a day that brought tens of thousands of Americans into this city, and they have been demonstrating and rallying and giving speeches and singing God Bless America. These are true patriotic Americans that are here in this city today. And they're at over 700 locations around America.

We're going to try to get a real count on how many Americans came out today that carried an American flag, that brought up the new standard of the constitutional conservatives that are the new majority makers for America. The new standard is an American flag and a yellow Gadsden Don't Tread on Me Flag to fly. That Don't Tread on Me, it carries a message that adds to Old Glory. And I am very, very happy to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I have one flying outside my office at 1131 Longworth. Anybody that walks by there that sees that flag knows where I stand. That's the new standard of liberty. It's a new standard of freedom, and it supports and defends the United States of America. It flies with deference to Old Glory, and it supports and defends the principles that are in the Constitution and the principles of free enterprise and free enterprise capitalism.

I would wonder, watching the activities and the behaviors at the White House over this last year and a half or so, if they actually would agree with one of the questions that are on the naturalization flash cards that are put out by the U.S. citizenship immigration services. These are the people that provide the services to naturalize new legal immigrants to become American citizens. These flash cards, a stack about this thick, Mr. Speaker, and nice little glossy things about like that. And I regret that I didn't bring one over here.

But there are around 120-or-so questions, and it'll start out on the one side of the flash card, you can read it and it'll say, Who's the Father of our country? And you snap it over the other way and it'll say, we know this, Mr. Speaker, George Washington.

You look at one side of another flash card and it will say, Who emancipated the slaves? Flip it over to the other side: Abraham Lincoln.

Now here's the one that might stump the White House today. And it's this: What is the economic system of the United States of America? Flip that flash card over: free enterprise capitalism.

Haven't seen a lot of that going on out of the White House in quite some

time. In fact, when I look at what has been happening out at the White House, it starts with this. At the tail end of the Bush administration--with the full support and endorsement of then-candidate and United States Senator Barack Obama and now President, we saw the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson come to this Capitol September 19, 2008. And he came into our closed-door session and he said, You need to give me $700 billion, and you need to give it to me now. And if you ask any questions or if you try to amend my request in any way, you'll mess up the works. But what's bound to happen or what could be happening is we could see a complete meltdown of the global currency and the confidence and capital and collateral, and we could see the entire world money supply fall apart if they lose this confidence.

So he said, Give me $700 billion, give it to me now, and if you have any ideas, they will not be as good as his own ideas. He said that he'd been watching this now for, I believe he said 13 months and we had only been watching it for 24 hours--some had--therefore, his ideas were a lot better than ours and his should not be questioned. And to come to this Congress and ask for $700 billion of the taxpayers' money without an assurance that his plan, if he carried it out and he got the money, would actually work. Well, that was the TARP proposal. Seven hundred billion.

The Congress eventually authorized and appropriated $350 billion in one chunk in early October, I believe it was, of 2008 and another $350 billion to be reauthorized by the next Congress, people to be elected later, approved by people to be elected later and approved by a President to be elected later and a Secretary of the Treasury to be confirmed after his tax problems later.

So that started this, $700 billion in TARP. And we saw in rapid-fire succession behind that came the nationalization of three large investment banks, government takeover of three large investment banks.

Then we saw, while this was going on, government takeover of the insurance company, Mr. Speaker, AIG, to the tune of about $180 billion dumped in because, remember, these entities are entities that are too big to be allowed to fail.

Now, that's a new concept for America. We never had that concept before. All through our history books and the current documents, I know of no place where we had come to a conclusion that these businesses were too big to be allowed to fail and so, therefore, we were going to prop them up with taxpayer dollars. But that is what happened.

$700 billion in TARP; three large investment banks nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government; AIG nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the Federal Government; and, by the way, formally locked into that full nationalization by Executive order of the President right before Christmas last year. And that saddled the American taxpayers with a $5.5 trillion contingent liability in addition to the capital that had to go in to prop up Fannie and Freddie--and never mind all of the people that got rich out of that, including the Chief of Staff at the White House.

So we don't know what happened in all of those places because the chairs of the committees here in this Congress control the investigations of this Congress. But we saw $700 billion in TARP, three large investment banks nationalized--AIG nationalized, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac nationalized.

By now, Mr. Speaker, people are nervous, but they think they've elected some folks who understand high finance better than they do. This is a constitutional Republic, and we are to elect people to this Congress that owe the American people our best judgment and our best effort. And they trusted that best judgment and best effort and they trusted that we had access to more information and we'd use our good judgment.

But when the Federal Government got into the nationalization of General Motors and Chrysler, all almost simultaneously, the American people began to lose their faith in the judgment of the White House and their Congress and their government. Because even though the American people may not have confidence that they understand investment banking and high finance and insurance or the secondary mortgage market, the Fannie and Freddie components of this, the American people understand cars. We love our cars. We especially love our American-made cars. We love them. We drive them. We fix them. We show them. We collect them, and we make them.

And we know that if you want to make an automobile and sell a lot of them, it takes a lot of dealers to sell them. Anybody's intuition can tell them that if you go out in your garage or up in your attic or out in your shop and you invent the master widget and you patent that master widget and decide you're going to sell that widget across the country and the world, what you do easily is first lock down your patent, set up your manufacturing so you can meet the demand, and then you go out and set up dealers. And if you want to sell a lot of widgets, you have to have a lot of dealers, and you have to support and promote your dealers.

But when the Federal Government came in with a bankruptcy settlement that cut the numbers of dealers by 3,400 dealers in America, the American people know that the automakers didn't have a financial burden with the auto dealers. The auto dealers owned their franchises. They supported themselves. They paid for the services that they got out of the automakers. And for the White House to decree that there was going to be 3,400 dealers that got shut down in America, not only was that an unjust taking of the property rights of their franchise, but it also brings about sales of less automobiles. You can't sell more cars with fewer dealers even though they'll say, Well, we had bigger and better dealers that were healthier. That is not the point.

A lot of car dealers are face-to-face, retail marketing, neighborhood niche marketing. That service that goes on between the restaurant and the church and out there in the dealer's lot, a lot of that got shut down. But the American people saw that happen, Mr. Speaker, and then they really lost their faith in the judgment of the White House and this Congress and the Federal Government and they began to pay attention.

And we saw bankruptcy terms that were dictated by the White House, and when that was presented to the bankruptcy court, there wasn't a change that was made by that court. They accepted the terms that were dictated by the White House.

And we had a car czar at the White House that was 31 years old that had never made a car, sold a car, I don't think fixed a car--I don't know if he owned one, and if he did, I don't know if it was an American car. So all of this brings a high degree of nervousness on the part of the American people.

And then they see the President of the United States go down there and do his glad-handed grip and grin with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. When I saw those fellows standing side by side with this grip and grin of this two-handed handshake--the old buddy handshake--I looked at that, and someone asked me in the Washington Journal program--I believe it was the following morning--what that made me think. Well, I thought a lot of the things that other people thought, but I also thought that Hugo Chavez is a nationalizer of the businesses that he's taken over in Venezuela, including a cargo rice plant not too long earlier than that. He is a piker when it comes to nationalization compared to our President, Mr. Speaker.

Three large investment banks nationalized. AIG nationalized. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--formerly private, marginally quasi-government at the time--nationalized. General Motors nationalized. Chrysler nationalized. The CEO of General Motors fired and replaced by the President of the United States. The President of the United States appoints all but two of the board members of General Motors.

And the shareholders, the secured creditors saw their assets in those companies wiped out. Even though they were secured assets, they wiped them out and they handed share ownership of 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors over to the unions. And the Speaker of the House, Mr. Speaker for the evening, made the statement going into this that she would not give bargaining leverage to the automakers over the

unions, and that is the way it shook out. The unions got bargaining leverage over the automakers. And now we have a Federal Government that is running the car companies, and the unions have an ownership share, at least in General Motors, to a significant amount, 17\1/2\ percent is my recollection.

And then on top of that, if you're a government, a Federal Government, and you're running a car company like General Motors or Chrysler and you're having trouble competing, you're also running the regulatory organization.

So I am not, Mr. Speaker, suggesting that I know anything that the American people don't know about what might have brought about the intense scrutiny of Toyota that cost them at least a $16 million fine for their throttle and untold amounts of negative publicity on their throttle control and a number of other things.

But I will only submit, Mr. Speaker, that I have the American people coming to me on a regular basis and ask me if that intense scrutiny of the regulators on Toyota couldn't have something to do with the need of the Federal Government to see General Motors and Chrysler succeed, perhaps, more.

I don't have any evidence that would suggest that. But the appearance of impropriety certainly exists, Mr. Speaker, and the American people don't want to see one-third of their private sector activity nationalized and taken over by the Federal Government. But that's what's happened, one-third of the private sector activity swallowed up in those eight entities that I talked about.

Oh, and by the way, on the tail end of that is $787 billion in this thing called the economic stimulus plan, of which 6 percent of Americans think actually worked, 94 percent believe that it didn't help and didn't do any good.

Now, this is a pretty sick scenario, $700 billion in TARP, $787 billion in economic stimulus plan, eight huge national entities nationalized--and these are net private entities that are nationalized--one-third of the private sector activity nationalized. Now where are we? Now we get to ObamaCare, and ObamaCare is another 18 percent that was formerly private. Now it's under the auspices of the Federal Government, command and control and regulate.

Yes, some will say that these are private insurance companies, and it's not the Federal Government. But the Federal Government will effectively cancel every health insurance policy in America and reauthorize only those that meet the new standards that will be written, not the standards that we have today.

The options that the American people have will be diminished, not increased. American freedom will be diminished and not increased. The costs will go up for these premiums, because the Federal Government will impose more and more mandates on these health insurance policies. They will require that every health insurance policy covers contraceptives, and they will require that it covers mental health, and they will require piece after piece after piece, and one of these is require that health insurance policies cover the children up to age 26. Huh. I didn't really raise a family with the idea that my kids would start to grow up at age 26, and the law has been that 18 is a good place to say that they are grown up. Now, we like to keep them around longer than that and get them a college education and transition them into adulthood, but we do not need the super nanny Federal Government setting a 26-year standard because somebody in this Congress thought it was a good idea.

I had a young man come to me this afternoon at one of the Tea Party rallies; and he said, well, I am 23 years old. Don't you want me to have insurance under my parents until I am 26? And I said, no, I want you to grow up. When do you think you are going to be an adult? You are not one yet at 23?

I mean, well, then why 26? Why not 28? Why not 32? Why not all the way to Medicare eligibility? Then you have got the whole thing covered.

This is the mentality that's going on. This is a President that believes in single payer. He said so over and over again. He debated Hillary Clinton, who was for single payer. The bill that she brought back to this Congress in 1993 and 1994 was single payer. That means that the Federal Government pays it all.

They got all they could get to toss us into the abyss of socialized medicine. They went as far as they could go. They imposed a bill on the American people, that ObamaCare bill that about 3 weeks ago passed off the floor of this House and went to the White House for his signature. On the day that it passed this House and went to the White House, it could not have passed the United States Senate. On the merits of the bill, it sure looked to me like it couldn't pass the House either, Mr. Speaker.

But, nevertheless, ObamaCare became the law of the land, and it's going to take 4 years to implement the socialized medicine policy, but immediately the tax increases kick in. And so I will lay out a better sequence, I think, Mr. Speaker, and it is this.

The American people are rising up. They have filled this capital city up time and time again. They did so on November 5 of last year. They did so on November 7. They did so the previous 9/12. The day after September 11, the 9/12 Project Group, hundreds of thousands came to this city.

They are doing it again. This coming September, there will be other rallies across the country. The tens of thousands that are here in this city today are multiplied across some 700 locations, thousands and thousands of people that I think will add up into the millions that come to the streets and say, enough, I have had enough. I have had enough of watching my country run into the ditch. I have had enough of watching this overspending, this irresponsible increase in our spending without regard to trying to balance a budget or any sense of fiscal responsibility.

If you simply want something for your constituents and you sit on Appropriations Committee or you are in tight with the Speaker or you have somebody, then a staff that can write that number in for you, the spending just comes, and we will see.

We will see again no appropriation bills probably come out of this House, no budget probably come out of this House, because if we passed a budget, however irresponsible the budget is, it still is a spending constraint and a debate point. So they are going to avoid a budget and just spend all the money they want to spend. But they have a little trouble because there is an election coming and the American people are getting real savvy to these tricks.

So what I think will happen will be we will see a continuing resolution or several of them that deal with these appropriations components, kick the can down the road. Then there will be an election in early November, and then I think they come back with an omnibus spending bill that will take these continuing resolutions, these CRs, as we call them, and stack it up in about 3,600 pages and someplace between 500 billion and a trillion or more dollars will get spent. And there won't be any amendments allowed, and there will be a limited amount of debate, and, once again, the American people will not have the opportunity to scrutinize what's going on here in this House of Representatives.

I suggest this, that I have a bill that's called the CUT Act, to cut the unnecessary tab is what CUT stands for, cut the unnecessary tab, the CUT Act. And it recognizes that there is an upward spiral of spending that's naturally built into this system. The President proposes his spending. The House, by Constitution, has to start the spending here. If the House doesn't want to say no to the President of the United States, they just simply take the President's proposed budget and add the things into it that they want, and they send it over to the Senate, who doesn't want to say no to the President and doesn't want to say no to the Speaker of the House or the will of the House. So they simply accept the spending that's come from the President, increased by the House, and they stack their spending goodies on top of that.

The Senate is really good at adding lots of billions of dollars, and now it has to come back around to the House where the Speaker will not want to say no to the Senate or the President again. So it will jack up the spending

again, and the bill will go to the President's desk, and we will go deeper into debt.

That's the spending spiral that happens when you have a ruling troika, Mr. Speaker. That's when the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate, all of the same party, all with super majorities--well, Harry Reid is just one short of that super majority over there--the three of them could go into a phone booth and decide what they want to do with, to or for America.

What has happened has been a sad, sad state of affairs indeed, irresponsible spending, ObamaCare, unconstitutional, and in a whole number of ways, no budget coming forth, the tax cuts that were so important in stimulating our economy back in 2003, that would be those cuts that were signed into law May 28, 2003, the second half of the Bush tax cuts. Those tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year.

Right now, Mr. Speaker, it's a good year to die, because there is no inheritance tax. However, it goes back to a super high rate the first of next year, and no action has been taken.

And even though we have a bit of an extenders package today, there is nothing there for the blenders credit for biodiesel, and it's hanging our capital investment out to dry. The people that have followed the direction of the Federal Government and risked their capital, when the government put out the message that was we want to see renewable fuels developed in an industry and to replace at least in part gasoline, we built an industry, the ethanol industry, the biodiesel industry. In fact, the first legislation that I drafted and introduced as a new Member of Congress was that blenders credit for biodiesel.

And these biodiesel plants now, with hundreds of millions of dollars invested and hundreds of thousands of employees altogether, have shut down, many of them, perhaps all of them in my State are shut down and they are being mothballed. There is silence there where there was production before, 24/7 production in many of their cases. Now it's silence. You might hear a fan run. It's a cooling fan; that's about it. They have to make a decision on whether they walk away and cut their employees loose and leave them unemployed and lose that good core workforce or whether they try to eke it out and stay in. And this Congress has an obligation to turn that card over and get that blender's credit passed so that the 14 plants that I know of in Iowa that are shut down that are viable with it can get up and running again. One of those plants is being dismantled and shipped to India.

I make this point to the Speaker and the environmentalists that are in this Congress, that if it's your idea to build a second generation of renewable fuels, such as cellulosic ethanol or sugar-cane based or whatever it might be, unless we have a viable first generation which we have built--and it's not viable today without the credit--if we don't have a viable first-generation renewable fuel, then we're not going to be able to build a second generation. You cannot attract capital to that industry when government doesn't keep their word. And this time it has gone on too long; it has gone on since the first day of this year.

This is the 15th of April. That's January, February, March and half of April, and all of those have been money-losing weeks for the people that stepped forward to do the bidding of the government. So I'm hopeful that we get that turned around and get that passed out of this House and we do so soon and send that component at least to the President. It is a responsibility, and it is irresponsible to just kick the can down the road.

But, Mr. Speaker, I take us back to ObamaCare. And what is the solution? First, I think I should go through a list of some of the things that are wrong. A half a trillion dollar cut in Medicare punishes our seniors. I represent, I believe, the most senior congressional district in America. A half a trillion cut, and what happens? AARP, or the American Association of Retired Persons--or People--cut a deal with the White House to support a half a trillion dollar cut to the benefits to their members. And why? I think it's because the bill mandates that people buy insurance, and AARP is in the insurance business. I don't know that, but I would sure like to hear the straight story about what went on back there with the President and Rahm Emanuel and the representatives of AARP.

I'd like to know what went on with the health insurance companies, why so many of them supported this. This is anathema to their beliefs. But could they have just concluded that the Federal Government is going to compel everybody to buy health insurance, therefore it's a bigger market for them? And why would they feed the alligator, hoping that they get eaten last? Haven't they seen the pattern? Do I need to explain that, Mr. Speaker? Okay, I will.

I'm glad that you nodded in the affirmative. And that would be this: back in the sixties--I think the year would have been '62 and '63--we had at that time all of the property and casualty flood insurance in America was private, not government. And because we had had some floods, there was an argument made in this Congress that the Federal Government should provide all the flood insurance--or should provide, excuse me, competition in the flood insurance business. And so the Federal Flood Insurance Program began just to keep the insurance companies honest and make sure they could provide the flood insurance that was necessary in the flood plains that we had.

So one would think that the Federal Government would set up a little company and sell flood insurance and these other companies would just get more competitive, leaner and meaner, and more of them, perhaps, and we would have good flood insurance in America. But what happened was the Federal Government squeezed out 100 percent of the private sector property and casualty flood insurance so that today, Mr. Speaker, if you want to buy flood insurance for your home or your office or your factory or your farm, or whatever it might be, you have no choice but to buy that flood insurance that's provided by the Federal Government. That's what has happened. One hundred percent of the private sector in 1962, and over a number of years the Federal Government swallowed up all of the private sector flood insurance.

Now, one might say this is an anomaly, it really isn't a pattern, it was a circumstance, it had special circumstances involved with it so we can't anticipate that the Federal Government will swallow up the health insurance industry. Well, here is the definitive irony, and that is this: years ago--about the time that I was going to college anyway--I believe that all of our student loans were private, not government. And then government decided they wanted to get into the business, so they took a chunk of the student loans over. But they said, oh, we don't want to own it all, we don't want to run the whole thing, we just simply want to provide some competition here because that will make everybody better. I don't know why anyone would think that the private sector doesn't provide enough competition, and I will talk about that in a moment, Mr. Speaker.

So when the Federal Government got involved in the student loan business only to provide some competition and do a segment of the market and let them compete against each other, a lot of us said, no, the Federal Government is positioning themselves to take over 100 percent of the student loans program. And however that was denied for some time, it hasn't been denied in this Congress since Speaker Pelosi picked up the gavel, not by the other side of the aisle, not by George Miller. It was his goal all along, and he will tell you that he's been honest about that. But in any case, that's what happened. Written into the reconciliation package of ObamaCare was the final nail in the coffin to anything except Federal student loan programs. The private stuff was all swallowed up, it's wrapped up, it's packaged up, and it's wiped out.

So we have examples before us: flood insurance, formerly 100 percent private, Federal Government got involved in that, now it's 100 percent government. You have the student loan program that was formerly 100 percent private, the Federal Government got involved in that, now it's 100 percent government. And here we are, the health

insurance program, where the President of the United States has consistently said we don't have enough competition in the health insurance industry so he just wanted to start one more company, a Federal health insurance company, just to provide some competition. No, it would never replace all those other companies, just to provide some competition. Now, here are some facts that I mentioned that I would bring out a few minutes ago:

When ObamaCare passed, we had 1,100 health insurance companies in America, 1,100. That's not a mistake; it's not a decimal point out of line. We have--or at least a couple, 3 weeks ago had that many companies, 1,100 health insurance companies selling right in the neighborhood of 100,000 possible health insurance policy variations. So if you go shopping out there, 1,100 companies, 100,000 policies and 50 States--and, yes, you can't buy in all those because buying insurance across State lines is not something that has been accepted.

So, simply, if you wanted more competition, you would allow people to buy insurance across State lines and you would end this question. But the President's idea was create some Federal competition because what happens is when the Federal Government gets involved, then they turn in and they subsidize. And when they subsidize, then no private sector can compete with them. Oh, and by the way, a little known tidbit fact, the Federal Flood Insurance Program that they run 100 percent of now is $19 billion in the red. So the premiums don't reflect the risk, and people continue to build in the flood plains out of proportion to the high risk that's there, and we have more and more property that we have to protect with Federal taxpayer dollars, and it just snowballs, and it gets worse and worse and worse.

Well, ObamaCare drives up cost, it discourages research and development, it will reduce quality, it discourages doctors and health care providers. I said that our doctors in America, they may not be on suicide watch, but they are assigned to only use plastic silverware, and it's kind of hard to conduct surgery with that, so it has been real hard on the health care providers.

The freedom and the liberty component of this is the worst part when we think, Mr. Speaker, that, ever since 1973, the people on that side of the aisle--I'll call it the left side of the aisle--primarily, and a few on our side made the argument that Roe v. Wade is settled law, that a woman has a right to an elective abortion under any circumstances and that the government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. That argument was made by men and women--by almost everybody on that side of the aisle and by a few of the people on this side of the aisle. It's a pretty interesting point. The Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body.

Now look at it. The very same people who have made this argument since 1973 are saying to us, Well, the Federal Government has every right to tell everyone in America what they can or can't do with their bodies, and that includes thou shalt buy a government-approved health insurance policy or sign up for Medicaid. We'll make sure we can give you a stipend if you don't have the money, and we'll tax you if you do have the money. If you're an employer with 50 or more employees, you'll have to make sure they all have government-approved health insurance. If you're an employer with 49 employees, thou would be stupid to hire the 50th one.

So we'll see a lot of small businesses that will reach that level of growth, and they'll stop. They might go out and create another entity and roll some employees into that and stop. We will not just see all kinds of machinations of business configurations for the purposes of tax delay or avoidance that is driven by this Tax Day and the IRS, but we are going to see, also, business models that will be configured in order to avoid the Federal mandate because the Federal mandate requiring people to provide health insurance because they're employers is immoral and is unjust and is impractical, and it will create convoluted business arrangements.

I am for, Mr. Speaker, abolishing ObamaCare, for repealing ObamaCare. I have introduced a bill that repeals ObamaCare. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has also introduced a bill that repeals ObamaCare. They happen to be verbatim in their language. Parker Griffith has one and, I believe, Bob Inglis. They are a couple other names that come to mind. I am for all of them. I want to work with all of them and with everyone else who has a bill. It's interesting. Within the 2,700 pages of ObamaCare, nobody read it all, I don't believe. If they did, they didn't understand it all.

I have a bill that I drafted that addresses this, and it's far better than the one they put in. I asked the College Republicans to sit and listen while I read through my bill, every word of it, and I asked them to pay attention and not to lose their concentration. I read the 40 words, not 2,700 pages, not 40 titles, not 40 pages, not even a page. I read 40 words on a page that essentially say to repeal ObamaCare, every bit of it, to pull it out by the roots. Now I'm going to embellish beyond the language. Take it out. Repeal ObamaCare lock, stock and barrel. Pull it out root and branch. Make sure there is not a vestige or a remnant of any DNA particle of ObamaCare left in the Federal code, because this policy that was and had become a toxic stew that was now force-fed to the American people has become a malignant tumor in our society, and what we do with malignant tumors that are on the verge of metastasizing is we take them out, and we pull them out by the roots. We cut out the entire tumor. If there happens to be a little good tissue around the edges, it's better to err on that side than it is to leave some malignant cells.

There is not one single part of ObamaCare that should be retained by this new Congress, and I expect to have a discharge petition down here at the well sometime in the next few weeks asking Members to sign onto it, working our way towards 2018 so we can send a repeal bill out of the House of Representatives. Hopefully, the Senate will pick this up as well.

The sequence becomes this: Yes, if we could get it there--and it's a hard task to get it there, and I'm not predicting it's possible. Everything is possible. Scott Brown is in the United States Senate today. So, with that optimism in mind and knowing that northern Iowa beat Kansas in the NCAA tournament, I'm pretty confident there is a chance that we can repeal ObamaCare in this Congress. There is a chance. We put the marker down, Mr. Speaker. Then we have an election in November.

The President is fond of saying, Push the reset button. I think what we have in America today is that millions of people are in a different place politically than the administration is. A lot of them didn't know what they voted for. They voted for change. They had Bush fatigue. They wanted to shift the way we do business. Some of them--and a lot of them now--have buyer's remorse for what they did. You have the newly activated constitutional conservatives across this full spectrum of people. You have the 9/12 Project Group, all of the patriot groups, the Independents who are newly activated, the Republicans who are in greater numbers, newly activated constitutional conservatives, and all of that.

Mr. Speaker, they intend to make a difference, and I intend to make a difference with them. The constitutional conservatives I've described represent the new majority makers in America, the heart of the heartland, and the values that flow from there which index from California to Massachusetts into the Northeast, the Northwest, the Southeast, and beyond.

This Congress today doesn't represent the will of the American people. By 2 to 1, they oppose ObamaCare. It's still the law of the land today, and it can and must be repealed, every single bit of it. There is no excuse for those who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare to be anything except in favor of a full repeal of ObamaCare.

After this Congress has reset at the election in November and after the swearing in of the new Congress on January 3 of 2011, we will exert the will of the American people, and ObamaCare will be repealed. I expect that the President will veto such a repeal. When that happens, we will have on record the will of this Congress, the will of the United States Senate.

We will have the opportunity then with the appropriations bills to refuse

to allow any of the appropriated funds to be used to implement ObamaCare. With simple majorities in this House, which is where all funding and spending has to start by Constitution, we will be able to shut off the implementation of ObamaCare. We can do that for all of 2011 and send another repeal bill to the President's desk, which he is likely going to veto. In 2012, we can do the same thing for the appropriations cycle so that there is not a shred of ObamaCare that gets implemented, not in 2011, not in 2012.

Then we will have a new Presidential election in 2012, and we will have a new President. We will have a President who will sign a repeal of ObamaCare, and we will put it on his desk in January or February of 2013. We can begin the process then of real health care reform.

We need to do it, Mr. Speaker, not with a big Republican bill, not like this 2,700-page ObamaCare bill. We need to set up our priorities for health care, and we need to move down the line, one after another after another, with clear, standalone pieces of legislation that actually fix this problem and reform it in a way that the free market and the doctor-patient relationship are improved. The trial lawyers are going to have to give up a lot. We'll just go right on down the line, one after another, with standalone pieces of legislation. We can actually implement real, logical free market reforms and have that all done before ObamaCare would be implemented under the plan that is laid out today, because those pieces don't come into place, in finalizing most of them, until the beginning of 2014.

So what we can do is go through the sequence of this: Repeal ObamaCare; win the majority; shut off the funding for the implementation of ObamaCare; run a new election; expand a new majority in the House and the Senate; elect a new President; and repeal ObamaCare; pull it completely out by the roots so there is not a vestige of it left behind, not one single particle of its DNA left behind.

We can do all of that, Mr. Speaker, and still bring real reforms and put them in place and have them up and running before ObamaCare would have even kicked in. The American people will have their freedom, and they will have their liberty. That is the most egregious violation. From a constitutional perspective, ObamaCare is unconstitutional in several ways:

One, there is nothing in the enumerated powers that grants this Congress authority to establish ObamaCare--we can go into that in more detail--and it's a violation of the Commerce Clause. There are people and have always been people who have been born, who have lived and died who have not participated in health care at all but who would be compelled to buy a product produced or approved by the Federal Government for the first time in history just to be an American. In spite of what some of the people have tried to argue, there is no example to the contrary.

It is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. People in Florida are treated differently than the people in Texas. It's not the Cornhusker Kickback any longer, but there is a package in Louisiana that treats Louisianans differently than it does the people in all the rest of the country.

There's a strong argument on equal protection violation. And there's a 10th Amendment violation; these powers need to be reserved for the States or the people respectively, not the big reach of the Federal Government.

All of this needs to happen. We can do this and we will have the leadership in this country and in this Congress to get it done.

I see that we have a strong leader from east Texas, the Aggie, my friend, Judge Louie Gohmert. I would be happy to yield so much time as the gentleman from Texas may consume.

Reclaiming my time, I very much thank my friend from east Texas, the Aggie, for coming to the floor this time of the night. I know it's been a long day, sustainful of lots of energy in rallies all across the city and the country and 700 plus of those.

We want a smaller government, not a larger government. We want a constitutional government. The number one priority that's being asked of us is to cite the sections of the Constitution that grant us the authority in every bill we introduce in this Congress. I've never done that, but I think it's a very good idea.

I'll say I have cited it when it comes to the time to pass a constitutional amendment or to repeal. I'm going to continue to pay attention to that. I think that's a very good idea. The thing that seems to draw the most emotion and the most mindset and the most thought is ObamaCare, the urge for the full repeal of ObamaCare, because we know intuitively that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, as I said; it's unfundable, it's unsustainable, and, Mr. Speaker, it's unforgivable to do this to the American people. The American people will not forget and they will not forgive and those that they do support in this new majority that's being driven by the constitutional conservatives, those that they do support had better keep their word. And when they give their oath here on the floor of this Congress, the new freshman class, which will be a large one, they better take their oath seriously to the Constitution. I continue to stand with it. I know the gentleman from Texas does. Many of my colleagues do the same. It's a serious oath.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the attention that you've given us this evening and the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House. We covered a little bit of the subject matter that's important and imperative to this country.

I would yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, April 16, 2010, at 1 p.m.

Madam Speaker, I very much appreciate being able to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and what has been referred to in the past as the world's greatest deliberative body--and what has to struggle to reach that standard these days, I would say, Madam Speaker.

You know, we are not done yet. This legislation passed the House sometime this morning. I will just say, first of all, I am grateful that this usurpation of American liberty technically in its final phase didn't take place on the Sabbath during Lent, although most of the machinations, debates, and battles, and some of the votes, actually did take place on the Sabbath during lent.

Our Founding Fathers would have considered it a serious violation of the standards of decency to assault liberty on the Sabbath, especially during Lent, and I consider it the same. Sacrilegious may have been something that would have come to mind.

But what we have seen is the Senate version of the bill, which has come over here to the House and was voted on and debated on first, and voted on. And the identical form is the Senate--was the legislation that most of us heard President Obama refer to, and I believe it was in the conference February 25 at the Blair House, as ObamaCare.

Thirty-some million more people put on the rolls, and many of them on Medicaid rolls, many of them don't quite fit the standards that seem to be the highest ideals of the initiation of this legislation. The argument is, if there is $130 billion, it will be reducing the deficit over a 10-year period of time, $130 billion over 10 years. The American people can move a decimal point one place to the left and figure out what that is annually, $13 billion a year by their calculations.

Madam Speaker, I could take you down through the list of the spending that has been out of control by this Congress. It all has to be initiated here, promoted by the President of the United States, trillions, trillions of dollars added up, $700 billion in TARP, $787 billion, which rolled into over $800 billion and the economic stimulus plan, of which only 94 percent of Americans believe did any good, and that

trillions that have been added, that have been advanced by the U.S. Treasury and the debt and the deficit that's created by the Obama budget, and we're being told that we should give up 100 percent of our personal control of our own health insurance and health care in America and completely transform the entire health insurance industry, the entire health care delivery system, when we have 85 percent of the people in America that today are insured and 85 percent of them are happy about it.

And we would transform the entire health care delivery system and the health insurance system in America for what? And the argument is, we will reduce the deficit by $13 billion a year.

Madam Speaker, I would point out that if we were interested in reducing the debt by $13 billion a year, it would be a piece of cake to take $13 billion out of the abusive lawsuits that are being driven by the trial lawyers in America. These numbers come to us in stark relief.

The health insurance underwriters give us a number that 8.5 percent of the overall health care costs in America are driven by the abusive lawsuits. That 8.5 percent, when you do the calculation, comes out to be $207 billion a year. That's the cost of defensive medicine, the litigation, the unnecessary settlements that come, not the part that makes people whole, and the part that goes directly into the pockets of the trial lawyers in America, who are bringing lawsuits and driving physicians to do defensive medicine to the point where it's been going on so long that it's taught in our med schools how you protect yourself from litigation.

You spend the money on unnecessary tests instead. That's my low number, $207 billion a year, which is the Health Insurance Underwriters. That's 8\1/2\ percent. These numbers and estimates go from $207 billion up to $210 billion a year, which is the number that's produced by a Government Reform Committee analysis, on up to $650 billion a year.

So if we were really serious about trying to reduce the deficit, we can do this to $13 billion a year for the entire massive ObamaCare legislation that was rammed and force-fed through this Congress, at a tremendous amount of bone twisting. $13 billion a year and $130 billion over 10 years. Think, if we could abolish the abusive lawsuits and finally end the unnecessary tests, those that are defensive medicine, and take that waste out of our health care system. If we could save $200 billion a year up to $650 billion, you've got to be a piker to brag about $13 billion when you're the President of the United States. And the money that they spent to twist the arms here to get down to that. And then, to add the reality to this that the $13 billion a year--I'll say the round number of $130 billion in deficit reduction by the CBO, which was under a tremendous amount of pressure. We'll find out if they're legitimate or not over time, but their credibility may fall into question. I don't question it here tonight, Madam Speaker.

But here are the things to calculate that aren't part of this calculation when people hear that number of $130 billion deficit reduction. That is a half a trillion dollars in Medicare reimbursement rates that are cut out of the reimbursement process today; $500 billion cut out of Medicare. Nobody believes this Congress will vote to cut that spending. Nobody believes that. The people that voted for this bill don't believe that, and the people that voted for this bill will not vote to cut Medicare for half a trillion dollars. That's an accounting gimmick that's designed, like a red herring, to throw the hound off the trail.

Another one of those components of this calculation is $569.2 billion in tax increases. Tax increases on medical equipment, for example. Tax increases across the whole plethora of things that add up to $569.2 billion. And another calculation--and we will get the precise number in a moment--$200-plus billion for the doctors fix.

So when we add this up, Madam Speaker, $500 billion for Medicare to cut the slash of the underreimbursed Medicare as it is today. According to the CMS, the Centers Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Federal Government, by their calculation of cost, not by the actual cost of providers, only reimburse 80 percent of the Medicare costs to deliver their services. And still, they would cut half a trillion dollars out of them?

Add the half trillion to the $569 billion in tax increases, and now you have 1 trillion, 69 billion, 200 million in cuts with the tax increase on one side, the cut in Medicare on the other side. Those two things change the revenue of this. You add to that the $200 billion that is the doctor fix, and now you're up to that area of about $1.25 trillion dollars of funding that are distorted in the calculations of the Congressional Budget Office, because they do what? They do the calculation on what's presented to them.

And we're supposed to be elated over a CBO score of a deficit reduction of $130 billion that I guarantee you, Madam Speaker, and I would guarantee to the American people as well, we will never realize such a thing. We will see a complete transformation of our health care system, except that we have launched an effort to repeal this abysmal piece of legislation.

I would be very happy to yield so much time as he may consume to the relentless doctor and Congressman from Texas, who lives this and has made a pledge of his life's effort to come here and get this health care policy right in America. And he can't have slept very well last night.

Dr. Burgess.

I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I know that since he had a little trouble sleeping last night, if he has a little longer period of time to vent himself tonight, he may be able to get caught up with this and rest a little. But I do not believe that we're going to be forgetting this, nor will we be backing off.

The first order of business this morning issued a bill draft request to repeal this legislation that passed the House last night, the Senate version of the bill. It's not curious at all that it's happened more than one of us has stepped forward to do that. I'll continue to work on that cause and work to have legislation that can repeal the Senate version of the bill and can be converted into a discharge petition that can then bring a repeal to the floor of the House. There are 212 House Members who voted against it. That means if they will all stick to their convictions--and there was one resignation last night, so that means we have seven more on top of that--that if all of those would sign on the courage of their convictions and seven would have a conversion, we would be able to bring a repeal to the floor of the House. That's one of my efforts, Madam Speaker. And I intend to remain committed to that.

Going back on Dr. Burgess's comments with regard to cost, he said the doctors' fix has to be in the area of $360 billion. I spoke of the $500 billion cut in Medicare reimbursement rates as part of that bill and tax increases in there, aggregate, that are $569.2 billion. The things that aren't in this bill that change the overall cost of the bill totals $1.4292 trillion that, if they were presented in a fashion that was designed to inform the American people, would have shifted the balance of that scoring from, I'd say, a deficit reduction of $130 billion to a deficit increase of $1.429 trillion, minus $130 billion. So we would be in the area of $1.3 trillion is what the additional cost of all this is that is masked by the cuts in Medicare, the tax increases that people don't seem to be focused on or animated by, and by the necessity to pass a doctors' fix. All of that. And the net, that would be the net deficit that was created by this bill, when you subtract those numbers, works out to be $1.3 trillion, a net deficit created by this bill.

All of this to solve a problem that the President has identified as us

spending too much money on health care. So we spend too much money on health care, and the economy's in a downward spiral--this is all the President--and we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. The problem with health care is we spend too much money, and the President's solution is spend a lot more. Speaker Pelosi's solution is spend a lot more.

So that's what got done last night, Madam Speaker. The American people end up with a huge liability that goes on to our children, our grandchildren; and babies yet born will be paying interest on a debt that shows no sign to be reduced anytime within the calculations of the people that are in control of this country today, that being the White House, the gavel here, in the White House, and the gavel in the United States Senate.

So when Dr. Burgess talks about a story that begins with ``Once upon a time'' and ended with ``happily ever after,'' I don't know if there is a happily ever after for America. But we're living in a once-upon-a- time time, Madam Speaker.

Now, I wanted to take up this issue and roll us back to the Stupak amendment and what happened here in the House last night. The Stupak amendment was brought forward in the weeks before the November 7 first passage of the House version of the bill. It was driven, I think, by the best merits of seeking to prohibit American taxpayers from having to fund abortions. I would like to prohibit abortions; but if we can continue to prohibit American taxpayers from having to fund abortions, at least we're maintaining the current status quo.

That changed last night, Madam Speaker. But the Stupak amendment was motivated and designed to prevent Americans from having to pay for the elimination of innocent unborn human life. That was properly motivated, and it was very hard work here in this Congress. Every Republican supported the Stupak amendment. There were 64 Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment. Everyone got at least some cover to be able to say, I am pro-life.

That went on from November 7, this cover of being pro-life Democrats, until last night, Madam Speaker. And now it's a legitimate question to ask, Is there such a thing as a pro-life Democrat? Or was it always a political position that was contrived to posture to pacify constituents rather than a deeply held internal conviction that one is willing to stand and sacrifice for? I'm having trouble at this point finding a real pro-life Democrat. I'm sure some of them in their most private world do care a lot about ending the destruction of innocent unborn human life.

But after the Stupak amendment, after the long negotiations that took place, after the events that took place yesterday of Congressman Stupak in one room, the pro-choice people in another room, shuttle diplomacy going back and forth, and finally about 4 o'clock yesterday, Congressman Stupak held a press conference and revealed that the Stupak 12, the dozen that had pledged that they would hold out to defend innocent unborn human lives and oppose Federal funding of abortion, decided that they had found a solution that would take them off of the pressure hook and out of the pressure cooker that was being put there by the Speaker.

We have to believe if the Stupak 12 would have stuck together, this anti-liberty, anti-life bill would have failed last night. But it did not.

Now what was the rationale that came before that Stupak press conference yesterday? And in the Stupak dozen, I would point out that we still don't know who they all are. We probably know who some are, but we don't know who they all are. And you can't count votes in this United States Congress or any legislative body unless the people that are on the list are public.

If they say I will be a ``no'' on the Senate version of the bill unless there is a fix that will put real pro-life language in it, if they will step up at a press conference and take their position and make that pledge before God and man, you can generally count on them. But a lot of them were pledged by Congressman Stupak, but they were anonymous, Madam Speaker.

I never believe an anonymous oath stuck for anything because they can always flip and vote the other way. And when pinned down later on, they can say, I was never one of the Stupak dozen. So they had the option. Those who were not public, those whose names didn't leak out into the press, they all had the option to vote yes or no. If they voted no on the bill because it didn't have pro-life protections in it, then after the final vote, they could always say, Well, I stood up for innocent, unborn human life. I was one of the Stupak dozen.

But if they voted yes, Madam Speaker, and when they were accused later on of flipping their position and not sticking with their publicly announced convictions on pro-life, they could always say, Well, I was never part of the Stupak dozen. I really didn't make that pledge or that oath. I was not part of that deal. So don't write me into this presuming I flipped positions and didn't stick to my convictions because I never announced my convictions. That is what goes on when people who are supposedly part of a coalition remain anonymous and their names do not become public. Their public statements are not part of the record. And so therefore they can vote any way they want to vote and always hide from the accountability. They don't have to give or keep their word. And for months, the Stupak dozen remained anonymous.

And now we have to wonder, was there a single Member of Congress, was it all Democrats on that dozen, was there a single one that had the courage of their convictions that put up a vote to defend innocent, unborn human life? Or did they all find a way to slip into the excuse of, the President of the United States is going to sign an Executive order that will take the Stupak language and make it the law of the land. That is the summary of the Stupak conference yesterday, as I heard it.

The President's Executive order makes protection of innocent unborn human life from the assault of American taxpayers' dollars, pro-life American taxpayers' dollars protected by an Executive order of the President of the United States.

Now, I have to believe that a duping has taken place here. We are the people who have to take an oath, and we are glad to do it. An oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. We take that oath right down here on the floor together, and I carry the family Bible in to take my oath, to uphold this Constitution of the United States. And we are upholding a Constitution--what we understand the text of the Constitution to mean. And what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification.

It cannot be anything else. It cannot be a living, breathing, growing, moving, changing, morphing organism. The Constitution has to mean what it says. If it doesn't mean what it says, it is no guarantee whatsoever. It is simply a document that allows a judge or a manipulating attorney to manipulate society however they choose to do so. Or the Constitution could just become instead a shield that an activist judge can hold up and say, that is the Constitution. It was my job to interpret it as a growing, moving, changing, morphing document; and because society has changed, the Constitution has to adapt to it. That is nuts.

It is nuts to think that the Constitution has any value if we are going to put it in the hands of an activist judge and have it turn into something that is malleable, that they can shape in their hands however they want to. There wouldn't be any reason for a Constitution if it was growing, moving, changing, and morphing. The text of it has to mean what it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification of the basic document, the Bill of Rights, or each of the amendments in their time as they came through.

And the Founding Fathers put provisions in place so if we weren't satisfied with this Constitution, its text in its original understanding, then we could amend it. A fair amount of wisdom. It is a high bar. But still, it needs to be a high bar to amend the Constitution because this is our guarantee.

And to think that we would have Members of this United States Congress at this very high and presumably well-educated, well-informed, and sophisticated level, that would take an oath to uphold this Constitution, each

2 years as they are seated in this Congress, and believe somehow this Constitution doesn't mean what it says, that there really isn't what you would call a separation of powers, that the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government somehow are not defined specifically in here with our individual duties. All legislative powers are vested in the Congress; they are not vested in the President of the United States.

You don't have to read very far into the Constitution, Article I, section 1, ``All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.'' All legislative powers, Madam Speaker.

And yet, Congressman Stupak and the other 11 of the Stupak dozen found it convenient to believe that this doesn't mean what it says, that a President of the United States can amend the legislation of the land, the law of the land, by Executive order? Who could dream of such a thing? What kind of country could we have if the President can amend the legislation, the Federal code, by Executive order? Any President could come in on a whim and amend the very reasoned deliberations of the House and the Senate that we have come together and concurred in, and sent the document to the President of the United States to be signed into law, and the President could then just simply sign an Executive order to change it?

If the President can do that, why didn't he just write the entire socialized medicine ObamaCare package? If he can run this country by Executive order, we don't need a legislative branch, unless we come together to appropriate money. And why can't you do that by Executive order, too?

This is the kind of thinking that subverts our Constitution. And this initiated and promised from the President of the United States, who used to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago as an adjunct professor. I will just read this again, just in case we forget what Article I, section 1 says. ``All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.''

The gentleman from Michigan and the 11 other gentlemen and gentleladies who are either publicly part of the Stupak 12 found something that was the best deal that they could find to let them do what they were probably willing to do for a long time before they finally capitulated, and that is vote for this socialized medicine bill, because that is where the political power has gone. So they will migrate where political power is instead of standing on their convictions to defend innocent, unborn life.

How can it be that the President of the United States will sign an Executive order that alters the legislative language of the United States Congress? What utter arrogance on the part of the White House. What utter naivete, at best, on the part of the Members of this Congress that buy into such a thing.

Madam Speaker, I'm not without experience in this category. I didn't just open up the Constitution and read Article I, section 1. I have a deep and long history with defending the Constitution and the separation of powers.

And, in fact, as a State senator, I exercised that at some expense to myself and my family. As a State senator, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Iowa. And some time in 1999, I received a fax that came from an anonymous source, and I never found out where, but it was a photocopy of an article that was written in the Washington Blade here in Washington, D.C., and it said, at that time State of Iowa Governor Vilsack, now Secretary of Agriculture, had signed an executive order, an executive order that granted special protected status for sexual orientation and gender identity. And it was--I want to say it took great credit for that executive order advancing the special rights of people who often read the Washington Blade newspaper.

It seemed to me that somebody had a little bit of extra exuberance that somehow that information would be sent out here to Washington and it would be posted in the paper and nobody in Iowa would have probably picked up on it, but I think somebody out here found it, cut it out, and faxed it to me. That was on a Wednesday evening. I read that article, checked the Iowa Administrative Bulletin, and there on page 632 of the Iowa Administrative Bulletin I found the executive order.

Now, the Governor had had a press conference that day. He'd talked about several other actions on his part, but he didn't talk about the executive order, executive order number 7, granting special protected status for sexual orientation and gender identity.

And I went to our attorneys and I said, I believe this is a violation of separation of powers. I believe he is legislating by executive order, and I believe it's a constitutional violation. And even our attorneys on our side of this analyzed it and said, No, you're wrong. This is very carefully written and artfully drafted and nuanced in such a way that it isn't a violation of the Constitution, and this executive order will stand.

And it didn't make sense to me, and they couldn't explain it to me. And often I find out, if they can't, it isn't just because I can't understand it; it might be they don't either.

So I sat down at the word processor and I put all the language in section 19B.2 of the Iowa Code. I typed it in so I had the words to work with. Then I took the executive order number 7 on page 632 of the Iowa Administrative Bulletin and I patched that in to the code of the civil rights section of the Code of Iowa, Iowa law, just like our Federal Code here, Federal law. And where it struck out words in the Iowa Code, I put strike-throughs in them; and where it introduced words, I put underlines in them, and pretty soon I had a document that showed me what the Code of Iowa would read like if that executive order were allowed to stand.

And it was clear to me that the Governor had legislated by executive order. He'd added two more categories to the special protected status of the Civil Rights Act which was patterned off of title VII of the Civil Rights Act in the Federal Code. So it was clear to me that the Governor, the chief executive officer of my State, had legislated by executive order. I didn't have anybody that agreed with me, but I believed it.

So I sat down and I wrote up an analysis of it. And I set that up and I sent it out to about a dozen of the people out there whose judgment I trust, and I asked them to give me an opinion. And that was on a Thursday night.

And before I got an opinion back from anyone, I was driving down the road that Friday morning about 10:15 or so, maybe 10:30, listening to one of our radio talk show hosts, our top radio talk show host in Iowa, who happens to be one of the people that's talking on WHO radio. And that is the original station where Ronald Reagan had a microphone when he learned the broadcasting business, so anyone that has access to that microphone has a legacy to uphold.

And as our talk show host was talking, he brought up this executive order, which I didn't think anybody knew about but me, and he began going down through a list of items that he objected to and an analysis of it. And as I listened, as I drove down the road, it occurred to me that this sounds a lot like the points that I had sent out the night before to my friends for their opinions. And I pulled my pickup truck-- where I come from, they're just a pickup--off on the gravel road at an intersection and I dialed on my cell phone into that radio program.

And he asked me what I thought and I told him. I said, I believe the Governor is legislating by executive of order. I believe it's a constitutional violation of the separation of powers.

And he said, What are you going to do--at the time--State Senator? He said, What are you going to do, Senator? And I said, I'm going to sue the Governor.

And he asked me, Do you have the support of the legislature? I said, There are 150 of us between the house and the senate, and if 149 of them think it's a bad idea, I am suing him anyway, because he's violated the Constitution of the State of Iowa by legislating by executive order.

Now, to move this longer story into a shorter version, Madam Speaker, it comes down to this. I followed through

on that. There were a number of people that joined me as plaintiffs. I'm very glad that they did. They were stalwart, and we stood together. But the case of King v. Vilsack went before the courts, and the courts found in my favor and in the favor of the Constitution and in the favor of the people that stood up to defend the Constitution, and they vacated the executive order because it was unconstitutional. It was an attempt by an executive officer to legislate by executive order rather than allow the constitutional authority of the legislative branch to make those decisions. And so that executive order number 7 was vacated by the courts.

And I believe it was a help to the administration, the Vilsack administration, so that they didn't follow down that path and continue to try to run the State of Iowa without regard to respect for the legitimate authority of the legislative branch.

Well, now Governor Vilsack is the Secretary of Agriculture. We've had our times together, but I'm appreciative of that time, because that gave me the background and that gave me the responsibility to analyze these issues and come to a fundamental conclusion.

If a Governor can't legislate by executive order, neither can a President. It's the height of arrogance to think that you can do so by executive order, especially when the President has so much on the record that would say otherwise.

And I would point out that President Obama was very, very critical of President Bush for his signing statements, not executive orders, that-- essentially not an executive order that it would amend a statute that hasn't even gotten to the President's desk yet, but a signing statement that points out reservations about constitutionality of certain segments of a bill.

And here is what President Obama said of signing statements. This is March 9, 2009. He's been inaugurated for a couple of months, a month and a half now. And the title of this memo is, from the White House, ``Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies; Subject: Presidential Signing Statements.''

Now, remember, this is the President who, as a candidate, was critical of President Bush for his signing statements. And he says this: ``In recent years, there has been considerable public discussion and criticism of the use of signing statements to raise constitutional objections to statutory provisions.''

This is the President who has objections to the utilization of signing statements, which I have some of those same reservations to be objective in this.

And he goes on and says: ``There is no doubt that the practice of issuing such statements can be abused,'' an implication President Bush abused those.

Continuing, ``Constitutional signing statements should not be used to suggest that the President will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements.''

I'd better read that again. ``Constitutional signing statements should not be used to suggest that the President will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements.''

That's President Obama as recently as March 9, 2009. And here he is, March 21st, now the 22nd, 2010. So let's just call this a year and a couple of weeks later, the President of the United States apparently believes that he can go beyond the signing statement, even though he's critical of signing statements and the ``constitutional signing statement should not be used to suggest that the President will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements.''

Well, there apparently is a policy disagreement between Bart Stupak and the other 11, however anonymous they might be, and those who are willing to vote for this bill, regardless. But we know the President of the United States doesn't disagree with the policy in the bill that he's about to sign tomorrow.

He and Bart Stupak disagree, as do the 11, as does every Republican that voted for the Stupak amendment and presumably some of those that are part of the 64 Democrats that did the first time around.

But the President's taken a position that signing statements are to be used carefully and with great restraint even though he said as a candidate he didn't support signing statements at all. And now the same President is telling us that he can amend a piece of legislation that's been fought over since last July by everybody in America, finally passes the House of Representatives, goes to the President's desk, and he's going to amend it by executive order to keep our Stupak happy. And I went to court to sue a Governor who is now the Secretary of Agriculture successfully to make the point that the chief executive officer of the State or the United States has no authority to amend legislation by executive order. King v. Vilsack's in the books. This executive order doesn't have any weight or substance. It will either be thrown out in court or will be disregarded. Mr. Stupak has to know that.

That is another thing that the President went on and said with signing statements, With these considerations in mind and based upon advice of the Department of Justice, the President, speaking through this memo, I will issue signing statements to address constitutional concerns only when it is appropriate to do so as a means of discharging my constitutional responsibilities. In issuing signing statements I shall adhere to the following principles: Ya-da-da.

Only when it is appropriate to do so as a means of discharging my constitutional responsibilities. The President doesn't have a constitutional responsibility to sign an executive order. It would alter the language in the legislation. That is the responsibility of this Congress. And to think that there would be a piece of legislation that was passed here that could not have passed if the convictions of the people that were required to vote for it would have been reflected in their vote. But no. The false promise of an executive order brings about the flip of a dozen votes and a bill that couldn't pass--in fact, a bill that couldn't pass the United States Senate today passed the floor of the House last night, and it's on its way to the President because the President promised an executive order that would, in effect, amend the legislation that will soon be signed into law. It is a constitutional violation. I have been to court to prove it.

And I would go further and say why would anybody believe that it is the intent of the President to follow through on such a thing if, in the ultra-hypothetical situation, he really had an authority to sign an executive order that would bring about this effect? Why would anybody believe this?

I went back today and a looked through the transcripts of the Illinois State Senate. And here's what I found. State of Illinois, 92d General Assembly, regular session, Senate transcript 20th legislative day, March 30, 2001. Not so old in our time.

Where's the President on the issue of protecting unborn human lives? Well, before the Illinois legislature, several times the Illinois Born- Alive Infants Protection Act was introduced, it was introduced to provide legal protection to all born babies wanted or not, including the right--and it gave them the right to medical care. Then-Senator Barack Obama voted multiple times against such legislation. The President has not stood up to defend innocent unborn human life. When he was asked at the Saddleback Church in August of 2008 when his life began or when life begins, his answer was, That is above my pay scale.

Well, he seemed to think it was not above his pay scale when he spoke on the floor of the Senate that day. And the sum total of the dialogue of the President would tell any careful reader with a somewhat critical eye that the President of the United States must believe that a woman who was seeking an abortion, even though the baby survived the attempted abortion, has a right to a dead baby anyway.

Here's what I read from that transcript on that day, which is March 30, 2001. The floor of the Illinois Senate. And the question came from Senator Obama: ``Thank you, Madam President. Will the sponsor yield for questions?'' Presiding answer responded: ``He indicates he will.''

In which case State Senator Obama followed with this. He said: ``This bill was fairly extensively debated in the Judiciary Committee, and so I won't belabor the issue. I do want to just

make sure that everybody in the Senate knows what this bill is about, as I understand it.

``Senator O'Malley, the testimony during the committee indicated that one of the key concerns was--is that there was a method of abortion, an induced abortion, where the--the fetus or child, as--as some might describe it, is still temporarily alive outside the womb. And one of the concerns that came out of the testimony was the fact that they were not being properly cared for during that brief period of time that they were still living. Is that correct? Is that an accurate sort of description of one of the key concerns in the bill?''

Senator O'Malley, presiding officer, apparently responded and then from, yes, Senator O'Malley, the sponsor of the bill, said, ``Senator Obama, it is certainly a key concern that the--the way children are treated following their birth under the circumstances has been reported to be, without question, in my opinion, less than humane, and so this bill suggests that appropriate steps be taken to treat that baby as a-- a citizen of the United States and afforded all the rights and protections it deserves under the Constitution of the United States.''

That is Senator O'Malley.

Senator Obama responded: ``Well, it turned out--that during the testimony a number of members who are typically in favor of a woman's right to choose an abortion were actually sympathetic to some of the concerns that your--you raised and that were raised by witnesses in the testimony. And there was some suggestion that we might be able to craft something that might meet constitutional muster with respect to caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion.''

Senator Obama continued: ``Unfortunately, this bill goes a little bit further, and so I just want to suggest, not that I think that it'll make too much difference with respect to how we vote, that this is probably not going to survive constitutional scrutiny. Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections.''

In any case, watching the clock tick down, Madam Speaker, I'm going to follow with this--let's see, ``that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a--a child, a 9-month-old--child that was delivered to term.'' In other words, he draws a distinction between the unborn child that is struggling for life after an attempt of abortion and the child that is 9-months-old.

And he goes on and says: ``That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it--it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child and if this is a''--so he admits that. He admits then abortion is killing a child if you allow that child to be named as a citizen of the United States by law.

Now continuing: ``And if this is a child, then this would be an anti- abortion statute. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional. The second reason that it would be found unconstitutional.

``This essentially says that a doctor is required to provide treatment to a pre-viable child, or fetus, however way you may want to describe it. Viability is the line that has been drawn by the Supreme Court to determine whether or not an abortion can or cannot take place.''

Not true, actually, Madam Speaker. They didn't draw that line. They made exceptions for life or health of the mother and that includes now, according to Dole v. Bolton as to economic or the familial health of the perspective mother, who I consider as a mother that day.

It goes on, and I will just bring this to a conclusion, as the President of the United States continues all of this dialogue on the floor of the Illinois Senate, standing up in opposition to the Born- Alive Infants Protection Act which protects the life of a child that has survived an abortion from being pushed off into a cold room and starved to death so no one can hear that child scream itself to death, the President argues in the substance of this that this woman has a right to a dead baby.

It concludes this way: ``As a consequence, I think that we will probably end up in court once again, as we often do on this issue, and, as a consequence, I will be voting `present.' ''

This President said he would vote ``present'' on the issue of the Born Alive Act, which is the most outrageous position, and it finds itself in direct contradiction to the Born Alive Act, which is almost identical to the Illinois act that was passed unanimously in this United States Congress, in the House, and by a voice vote in the Senate, or vice versa; I actually don't remember which way, without opposition in each Chamber, but opposition in the Chamber of the Illinois Senate, by the President of the United States, who now we are going to trust to write an Executive order that's not going to be constitutionally upheld, that doesn't have the convictions of the President, but it gives just the smallest of fig leaves for the Stupak dozen. That's what the American people have seen, Madam Speaker. That's what brings some of their outrage.

But shifting subjects and bringing this into the Congressional Record and towards the conclusion, I will point out a press release that does give me some hope. This is a press release that also comes from Chicago, AP. The headline is this: ``ACORN disbanding because of money woes, scandal.'' It's an article by Michael Tarm, and it was filed at 8:57, fairly fresh news for us.

It says, ``The once mighty community activist group ACORN announced Monday it is folding amid falling revenues--6 months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

Hannah and James, in 6 months, according to this article, have brought about the destruction of ACORN, ACORN the criminal enterprise, ACORN that has been involved in advocating for a Community Reinvestment Act and then deciding they are the brokers of who is writing the most bad loans in bad neighborhoods. ACORN, the organization that admitted to over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms, ACORN that has been under multiple prosecutions in multiple States, at least 14, I believe it is 16 States in the country for voter fraud, voter registration fraud and a number of other activities.

ACORN, the organization that was raided in New Orleans, Louisiana, at their national headquarters, and the Attorney General of the State of Louisiana brought out a massive amount of records, copied those records for ACORN, and they are being sorted through to this day. ACORN, the organization that seemed to want to change the shingle but it couldn't change the faces of the people that were running the organization, and the pressure that's come in this Congress to shut off funding to go to ACORN; the United States Senate shut off funding to ACORN. Thanks to Senator Mike Johanns, who offered the amendments to get that done.

And then there was a judge, Nina Gershon, in the Eastern District of New York, who decided that Congress didn't have a constitutional authority to end funding to a multiple criminal enterprise entity because we failed, our government failed, our Solicitor General apparently failed to make the argument before the Eastern District of New York that Congress had some motive other than punitive. And so there was an unprecedented decision made by Judge Nina Gershon, and she ruled that it was a bill of attainder and we should not have punished ACORN, and that ACORN has access to, and should, to Federal funding for grants and contracts, not only what's going on in the past, what's going on now, but in the future, because they have been successful in the past, and Congress failed to prove.

Well, there isn't going to be that center of ACORN to appropriate funds to as long as we keep the pressure up, Madam Speaker. America is a better place because of this good news tonight.

I am not convinced that this is the end of ACORN. I think people like that re-form again and shape new organizations and come back in an insidious way, but we have got to follow and track all the money all the way down.

We have got to stand up for the principle of life, we have got to stand up for the Constitution. We have got to respect article 1, section 1, where all legislative authority is vested in the Constitution of the United States.

Follow through on ACORN. The sun did come up this morning, even though it was behind the cloud, and there is still some free air left in America.

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 10 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 23, 2010, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this flawed health care bill.

It's my privilege to be recognized here on the floor and address you as we watch this Nation lurch forever forward toward their version of socialized medicine.

It's astonishing to me to think that the people on the other side of the aisle who have spoken in the previous hour could even stand and make the statement that we are going to put 30 million more people onto the insured rolls and somehow we're going to cut spending and reduce the deficit. How in the world could that be? We're going to ensure 30 million more people for less money than we ensure the people we have today? Are we going to go back to President Obama's mathematical logic that seemed to have gotten him elected into office when he and Hillary Clinton vied with each other on who had the best government-run health care plan? When President Obama said--and he said consistently and continually--We spend too much money on health care. We have to fix that.

He said as the President of the United States that we're in an economic downturn, an economic crisis, and we can't fix the crisis of our downward spiraling economy unless we first fix health care.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember that? The astonishing statement that the solution to our economic downward spiral is socialized medicine? That is what came out of our President's mouth.

So we have to first fix this health care. And what's wrong with health care? According to the President, we spend too much money. Now, I don't necessarily quibble with that particular statement. We spend too much money on health care. I just disagree on where that too much money goes.

But he argued that we spend too much on health care. We have to fix it in order to fix the economy. And what's his fix? All of the way through his political history up until the reality of being President of the United States was a single-payer plan. The Federal Government writes the check for everybody's health care in America. That's been the President's solution all along. It's clear. It's as clear as his statement eight times on national TV that there were going to be C-SPAN negotiations over health care.

But the President's logic was, and apparently remains, the economy is in a crisis, the problem with the economy is health care, the only fix for health care is to turn it into socialized medicine because we spend too much money. And we've heard these gentlemen say, We're going to save money. We're going to save $300 billion, and it's going to be trillions of dollars by giving 30 million more people a health insurance policy that is paid for by the taxpayers in America. Now, how can they do that?

First I need to dispatch this thing of President Obama's statement that we can fix the economy by fixing health care. I never agreed with that. I always believed that our economic problems were too much spending, too much irresponsibility, too many Federal guarantees. We had the implicit guarantee that the Federal Government would prop up these businesses that are, quote, ``too big to be allowed to fail.'' Now ``too big to fail.'' And so, that was implicit.

And those big businesses took great risks to grow against their other competition that was taking great risk, and the economy was on the verge of collapsing, and that is when we became deemed ``too big to fail,'' and the Federal Government dropped in and bailed them out with our tax dollars. Treasury dollars that are just simply advanced, appropriations that were approved by this Congress in the form of $700 billion dollars in TARP funding, $787 billion in an economic stimulus plan--none of which the American people in anywhere near a majority believed actually worked.

So the free enterprise system was sacrificed off for the nationalization of the huge entities in our Federal Government. And the President continued to insist, even though he had the brilliant Tim Geithner there as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, too smart to be allowed not to be confirmed, to help bail out these businesses that are too big to be allowed to fail, and the only way we can fix all these economic problems is to first fix health care because we spend too much money on it. And so the President of the United States argues, well, here is a solution for everything: we will just spend a lot more money on health care in America.

In terms of numbers that we have seen from Senator Judd Gregg, say that when you look at the 10 years after, the first full 10 years, $2.5 trillion, the President has repeatedly made the breathtaking statement that we want to spend all of this extra money in the trillions of dollars on health care in order to fix the economy that we can't fix without, and the problem with spending too much money is solved with spending a lot more money.

That's the President's position. And any third grader can figure that out, Mr. Speaker. That position could not be sustained in a third grade logic class. I don't think they actually have logic classes in third grade, but it couldn't be sustained.

And so we went from this breathtaking position of spending a lot more money on health care to solve all the Nation's woes on down to, well, the problem really is that we don't have enough competition among insurance companies. So the President said, let's create a Federal health insurance company to compete against the privates, and that way we will have competition that it will drive done the costs. I don't think the President ever counted the private health insurance companies, 1,300 of them, 100,000 public health insurance varieties; and still the President wanted 1,301 health insurance companies and 100,000 and about a dozen health insurance policies. And that was going to solve all the problems, Mr. Speaker.

So we see that the massive, multi-trillion dollar Federal takeover of the management and of the approval of everybody's health insurance in America is based upon two flawed premises. I wonder what would happen if President Obama were sitting in the square in Athens and he had to sit between Socrates and Plato, and he would make the pitch we're going to solve the problem of spending too much money by spending a lot more, and we're going to solve the problem of not enough competition in 1,300 companies by adding one more company with 1,301. Those two fellows would have just eviscerated him with clearest logic of chopping his axiom down and tossing it off into the Aegean Sea.

But, instead, we are so polite in this country. We aren't willing to say that these premises don't even make the third grade level. And now here we are, a Nation that has seen its President use all the leverage possible to force the situation where we are, even though, even though it was all Speaker Pelosi could do to squeeze the votes to pass the first version of this bill. Even though she has 41 votes to burn when this happened, Speaker Pelosi didn't have any to burn when it was over.

It barely, barely passed the House. The Senate, they had no votes to spare, and on Christmas Eve that bitter pill was dropped into our stocking by Harry Reid and company over in the Senate. And most folks thought that this thing would become law, until Scott Brown was elected to the United States Senate. And when that happened, it changed the whole dynamics, Mr. Speaker.

But here we are today, the President of the United States doesn't hear ``no.'' He doesn't hear that the American people have stood up and screamed, no, don't spend any more money. You poured trillions in this economic stimulus plan and in the TARP funding, and what do we have to show for it? A declining economy and a growing unemployment and 15.4 million people on unemployment, a mismanaged economy with a government that has taken over three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler and given us a couple of trillion dollars' worth of wild spending programs.

And the President had told us in a meeting a year ago February that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve. He should have spent a lot more money. If FDR had spent a lot more money in the late thirties, then this Keynesian economy would have turned around, and it would have recovered before World War II came along.

That was an experiment that is called the Great Depression. And the New Deal failed throughout the thirties. And the stock market that crashed in October of 1929, even though we had World War II, even though we had the Korean war, did not recover to the place where it was in October of 1929 until Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been passed away for 9 years. 1954 is when the Dow Jones Industrial Average caught up to where it was in 1929.

And this President doesn't learn this lesson from history. If you borrow money, if you raise taxes, if you spend that money with government, you're competing against the private sector. And, necessarily, if government spends money, they can't spend money unless they first take it from somebody else; and when they take it from somebody else, they are borrowing the investment capital away. They are taking it away. They are taxing investment capital. There would be a whole row of entrepreneurs out here, Mr. Speaker, that maybe have a little capital, and they have a way to borrow some money, and they have an idea about expanding an existing business or creating a new one, businesses hire people and they create careers and jobs.

The Federal Government raises taxes and dips into the capital base and raises the cost of that capital because of the higher taxes, and that diminishes the jobs in the private sector. It might create new government jobs in the public sector, but it diminishes them in the private sector.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I cannot be convinced that our President of the United States, he may understand, but I can't be convinced that he believes that there is a difference in this economy between government employment and private sector employment.

The private sector is the sector that creates the wealth. The government is the burden on the wealth creators. If you have a career, if you're an entrepreneur, if you have a business, and if you employ people, and the Federal Government raises taxes and raises the cost of the capital, it takes away your ability to generate more revenue for expanding more careers and jobs or for paying taxes. And eventually if the Federal Government swallows up all sectors of the economy just to macro this and fast forward it to where I think even the people on this side of the aisle could understand, if the government runs everything, there is nothing left to tax except government. That's where this country is going.

I have looked on the Progressives' Web site. They are linked in with the Democratic Socialists of America. Their Web site used to be managed by the same people. It says on there they want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies. They want to take them over. They want to nationalize the oil refineries business. That was offered by Maurice Hinchey of New York. They want to nationalize the energy industry in America. That was offered by Maxine Waters of California. They are both members of the Progressive Caucus. The Progressive Caucus is the progressive arm of the socialists. They want to nationalize our economy and take it over. If the Government takes over the Fortune 500 companies, where they have already taken over one-third of the private sector profits, if they do that, they will have killed the goose that lays the golden egg, and there won't be any tax revenue then that comes into the Federal Government because the Government will be the entity that has to tax itself. And I know how that works. I have been to Cuba. I know how that functions down there, Mr. Speaker.

So we have a couple of flawed premises here. We spend too much on health care, the solution is to spend a lot more, and we don't have enough competition in health insurance companies, so one more, the Federal Government, competing against them solves the problem. I could not have advanced either one of those ideas and gotten them past first base. But that's where we are, Mr. Speaker.

And so it comes before us this weekend, this nationalization of our health care, the Federal management of our health care that has been debated since last July or so, that has filled the town hall meetings in the United States with hundreds of thousands of people and their cumulative total and every State in the Union that I'm aware of. They certainly filled them up in Iowa, they filled them up in Texas, and they filled them up in Minnesota and everywhere else. And the American people came to reject the idea that the Federal Government can take over our health care.

Now, some will argue that this isn't a nationalization of our health care. And I will submit in response to that, how far do you need to go before you concede that it's nationalized? If you set up a health choices administration commissioner who has the power and the authority vested in him by the legislation to approve every health insurance company in America, every health insurance policy in America, that is a nationalization.

It doesn't matter if the Federal Government is just managing the private companies. They will tell the private companies how they have to operate. Hugo Chavez tells companies how they have to operate in Venezuela. It doesn't mean they aren't nationalized. He will come in and say, you're going to give me so much of a cut out of your gross receipts, and you will meet all these standards. This is what you will

do to manage help; this is how it will look as far as the facade in front of your building. They dictate right down to the minutiae of what you have to do if you want to do business in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez dictates that. We call it ``nationalize.'' If the Federal Government dictates these things, we say, what, no, that is just private? No.

I would make the argument that our military takes care of our national security, and sometimes they will hire private contractors. The left was critical of Blackwater; and they would like to, and some suggest did, reduce Blackwater's involvement overseas in places like Iraq. But if the Federal Government writes the check to Blackwater and says take care of the security for, let's just say, for the airport in the Baghdad, is there a difference between whether they are nationalized, whether it's people in uniform wearing military uniforms or people wearing paramilitary uniforms, if all the shots are called by the Federal Government? I don't think so, Mr. Speaker.

So what we're seeing here is the nationalization of our health care, the Federal Government dictating everything about our health insurance policies. The Federal Government would decide, in fact, they would cancel every health insurance policy in America over a period of time, 2 to 4 years, by the time they rotated through the Federal Government, would cancel every health insurance policy in America. And then if those policies didn't meet the new guidelines yet to be written into the rules and approved by the health choice administration commissioner, then what we have would be a Federal Government that would say, all right, your company hasn't met the guidelines and your policies haven't met our guidelines, therefore you're not doing business in the United States. That's just a fact, Mr. Speaker.

And so that is the nationalization of our health care. They want to tax you if you don't buy diet pop. They want to tax your medical devices, your hearing aids, your wheelchairs, your oxygen. And that's in order to fund this. So the people on this side of the aisle that spoke in the previous hour that have argued that they are actually going to save $300 billion over a period of 10 years because they--do you know how long they have been massaging these numbers and they send something back to CBO, the Congressional Budget Office and go back and forth, in secret, by the way, until they get some numbers that they think they can defend as the clock ticks down?

Well, now they are at maybe $300 billion in savings. But what they're not telling you it is a massive increase in taxes to raise revenue. The first 4 years of this bill produces revenue before the costs actually kick in. It is a half a trillion dollar cut out of Medicare reimbursements so that we are starving the health care services of our seniors in America.

That's just two of the ways that they manipulate these numbers. And that is where Judd Gregg comes in and makes the argument that if you calculate the first full 10 years of this bill, it's $2.5 trillion; and of course that's not considering the things that they would offer for reconciliation.

I would also make the point, Mr. Speaker, that this House doesn't have the will to pass the Senate bill. The Senate version of the bill can't pass the Senate today. They all know that. That's a given. They're not taking the bill back over there. It passed this Congress. The Senate version of the bill passed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve morning, to be charitable. Harry Reid's lump of coal in the stocking for America was this Senate socialized medicine bill that barely had enough votes to pass. It had none to spare.

And Scott Brown was subsequently elected as the United States Senator from the improbable place of Massachusetts. And today, the Senate version of the bill can't pass the Senate. They couldn't bring that bill back there to pass it because maybe the Senators over there don't have buyer's remorse, but the people in Massachusetts had buyer's remorse. And they've reversed their position, and millions of Americans have reversed their position. They have done so because they've seen this spending that is out of control, and they don't want someone to take over their health care, so they reversed their position.

There are a lot that have buyer's remorse from the Presidential election in November of 2008. A lot of them would like to have a do- over, and they are not going to get one. But they have buyer's remorse. And so when you add the coalitions of people that are opposed to this national health care act, this socialized medicine, it becomes Americans with buyer's remorse that regret that they put the votes up that they did for ``hope and change,'' and I put that nicely in quotes, votes for hope and change, they put it up, they had more hope, and we got a different kind of change than they thought they were going to get. But now they regret putting that vote up. That's the buyer's remorse crowd.

And then you have the newly energized Americans that are across the vast middle of America. They started out with 9/12 project, people that came out here by the hundreds of thousands on the 12th of September, and patriots of a number of different categories including TEA party patriots that lit up this country. And on April 15, they had rallies across this country. I joined in some of them. Then they filled up the town hall meetings across this country and began to also come to this Capitol to petition for redress of grievances, as the Constitution says, in a constitutional fashion.

They did so November 5, November 7. They did so again in December on the Senate side. They came back again a few days ago, and they are going to be here tomorrow starting in the morning with the central event at noon on the west of the Capitol, and it will have thousands of Americans here that say: Keep your fingers off of my health care. I want to preserve my liberty. I want to preserve my freedom, and I want to preserve fiscal sanity in the United States of America.

I see that my friend and colleague, my neighbor to the north, has joined us here on the floor this evening, and I would be so happy to yield such time as she may consume to Michele Bachmann.

8.5 is the number I remember.

Will the gentlelady read from the poster?

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota for this presentation tonight and for many more that have gone in the past and more that are in front of us before such time as we can put this monstrosity deep into a hole where it belongs for at least another generation. That's what happened when HillaryCare was brought forward, almost a generation ago, and that's what needs to happen here this weekend, Mr. Speaker.

I recognize that my friend from Texas is here--from east Texas. An Aggie from Texas. He will make it clear to us if we don't make it clear, anyhow. Judge Gohmert from Texas, who has more to say about this health care monstrosity and this government takeover, I'd be happy to yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Texas, I appreciate the work that he puts into this and the research that gets done and the memory that it taps into. We reviewed this Declaration of Independence not that long ago, and we established--the three of us, actually, very intensively working on it along with a few others--the declaration of health care independence and produced a document that reflects many of the same values that are in the Declaration of Independence. And it lays out the rules of the road for going forward, a very reasonable thing to do. It anchored that philosophy of the declaration of health care independence, which I imagine is on all of our Web sites, Mr. Speaker, into these values into the declaration itself.

I listened to this discussion, and what I get out of this is one thing: this national health care bill doesn't play in Peoria. I mean, Peoria where the national headquarters of Caterpillar are. The world's largest heavy equipment manufacturer has written a letter that says that their shareholders, their employees, and their retirees will be disadvantaged by this, that there will be a 20 percent increase in their premium costs, and the first year would cost them $100 million.

And over the course of this bill where this Congress sets up the cost estimates and the budget in a 10-year period of time, that's $1 billion. It's a $1 billion tax on a great American corporation, Caterpillar, based out of Peoria, Illinois, which has been viewed to be the center of America. If it doesn't play in Peoria, it doesn't play for America. Well, this bill doesn't play in Peoria, Mr. Speaker.

Then one of the other components of this is the unconstitutionality of the legislation. We're virtually guaranteed that if a bill passes here Sunday or any other day, that there immediately will be lawsuits that will be filed as soon as it becomes law, if it should become law. And I believe that the President is sitting at the White House now, looking for a chance to sign something. But there would immediately be lawsuits because of the unconstitutionality of the bill. Congressman Gohmert's talked at length about the violation of the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution. And remember, the powers that are not vested in the Federal Government are reserved for the States or the people, respectively.

There is no one that can point to the authority in the Constitution that would grant this Congress the authority to compel an American citizen to buy a product that's produced or approved by the Federal Government, every American for the very privilege of being an American, being compelled to buy a product that the Federal Government has designed and approved. That would be the first in the history of America. The Congressional Budget Office wrote about this back in 1994 when HillaryCare was preparing to do the same thing.

Here's the conundrum, Mr. Speaker. First they want to establish socialized medicine, so there is a long hard leftward push on this. But in order to solve the problem of preexisting conditions--people that can't buy insurance that can sick, and we have solutions for that that I'll not go into tonight because of the interest of time--they would argue that they will compel every insurance company to sell insurance policies to applicants without regard for their preexisting conditions. So someone could have a very expensive and serious cancer, have not ever had any health insurance, and walk into the health insurance company and say, Sell me insurance now. I have got a diagnosis that says it is going to cost me a few hundred thousand dollars. People won't buy insurance until they're sick if you prohibit insurance companies from considering preexisting conditions. That's just a fact.

So the way they solve that problem of people refusing to buy insurance if you're going to compel insurance companies to issue is they compel every American to own a health insurance policy, and that's where we get into trouble. That's where the unconstitutionality of this comes up. That's

why there's no precedent for the Federal Government producing or approving a product that requires every American to buy it. And as Mrs. Bachmann said so clearly, put the IRS in charge of doing the enforcement, and the IRS in charge of doing the collection, the IRS in charge of collecting the insurance premiums for the insurance companies and transferring that into the insurance companies--that's what will be going on with the Federal Government.

So it's unconstitutional on two other grounds I can think of. And one of them would be a violation of the equal protection clause. The equal protection clause means that because we have people in different States that would be affected differently by it, if you live in Nebraska, you've got a different benefit than if you live in Iowa or Minnesota or Texas. And because of the Cornhusker kickback--and yes, they say they're going to fix that. It's in the bill. If anybody votes for a rule that deems the bill passed, they voted for Cornhusker kickbacks, they voted for the Louisiana purchase, they voted for the Florida Gator aid bill that exempts the senior citizens in Florida from the cuts in Medicare Advantage that will be brought against the senior citizens in Iowa and in the other States.

And it sends money by backroom deals into clinics across this country at the insistence of Bernie Sanders, a self-evolved socialist from Vermont. Self-evolved. I didn't lay that label on him. He lays it on himself. So that's another place where it's unconstitutional, Mr. Speaker.

And another way is a violation of the commerce clause. There are people that don't do business with health insurance companies. The Federal Government does not have the authority under the commerce clause to impose a health insurance policy on somebody that's not engaged in interstate commerce. And that could be a person that's born, doesn't do health care, and dies within a State, that doesn't cross State lines. There's no way you can argue they were involved in interstate commerce. So this massive stretch, it is unconstitutional.

It does fund abortions, and it funds abortions in a number of ways. Congressman Gohmert has laid that out pretty clearly. Even though the Speaker has publicly said it doesn't fund abortion, it does. And when you look at Congressman Gohmert's argument and you track the legal language, you have to understand it starts out about $700 million a year for that subject and grows to about $1.5 billion a year. It's in the categories of the authorizations within the bill itself. And then it also funds abortions through the Federal health insurance exchange that just says that there has to be a policy offered that doesn't cover them that someone could buy.

A policy doesn't have to be something that meets their other needs. It would just be something to assuage the conscience of a single taxpayer. The other part of this could be a whole series of health insurance policies that do fund abortions under the Senate language.

So when the President says he won't sign a bill that does fund abortion, that's just simply not true. And the liberals have been making the argument ever since 1973--ever since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and Doe v. Bolton, both on abortion issues--they have argued that the Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body, two generations of arguments saying that over and over again. The Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. They argue about whose body it is, but that's been their argument, their statement since 1973.

And now the same people, this side of the aisle, the liberals, the progressives, the Democrats in Congress are now arguing that the Federal Government has every business to tell everybody in America what they can or can't do with their bodies. That undermines their argument that they call pro-choice or else their pro-choice argument undermines their argument that we ought to have nationalized socialized medicine. They can't have that one both ways, Mr. Speaker. They have got to settle on one side or the other. I think they're both untenable arguments myself.

Then the bill also funds illegals, and the President has said that he won't sign a bill that funds illegals. And the Speaker has said it doesn't fund illegals. I will tell you that I have been through this policy for 7-plus years. I know this policy. Two and a half years ago under the rewrite of SCHIP, the children's health insurance legislation, they changed the language for proof of citizenship to qualify for Medicaid. Prior to that, it required that an applicant would produce a birth certificate and a couple of supporting documents to show that they were an American citizen or their naturalization papers and supporting documents.

They lowered the standard to only require that an individual simply attest to a nine-digit Social Security number. Just attesting to a nine-digit Social Security number means that you don't have to speak English, you don't have to have anything except be able to write down nine numbers. Nobody checks it; they just qualify for the benefit. That's the case with Medicaid, and the Congressional Budget Office put out those numbers on those additional costs there. And here the Congressional Budget Office has now, through their calculations, shown that under the Senate version of the bill--the reason is because they lower the standard of proof. Even though it says, We're not going to fund illegals in the bill, they lower the standards of proof. CBO's numbers then--their calculations produce this number--6.1 illegals could qualify for taxpayer-funded health insurance benefits under the Senate version of the bill.

So we have a bill that's designed to expand the dependency class in America in order to expand the political class on the left side of the aisle that funds abortions against the will of the American people and violates any principle we have here that American people of principles should not be compelled to fund abortions. And it also funds illegals.

While expanding the dependency class, we have 38 States that have initiated legislation that has already been signed into law in Idaho by Governor Butch Otter, compelling his State attorney general to file a lawsuit in Federal court because of the unconstitutionality of this bill. They're already set up. The idea of facing almost 17,000 IRS agents to eat out our substance, to sit in our kitchens and go into our offices and look through our books and look through our health insurance policies to determine and verify if it's the proper policy, that's approved by Uncle Sam.

Mr. Speaker, we need to kill this bill this weekend and have this rally at noon tomorrow. We'll have it on the west side of the Capitol.

I yield back.

I thank my good friend from Georgia (Dr. Gingrey). I was prepared to correct that, because I was entirely convinced that you did misspeak and that Mrs. Gingrey's favorite Member of Congress has to be Congressman Dr. Phil Gingrey, as every mother's son should be their favorite if she only has one. If she has several, then it starts with first favorite, second favorite and on down the line.

I'm pleased to be here with the Doctors Caucus and the friends that have done battle with me and others here in this Congress and across this country to kill this idea of taking over our health care and establishing socialized medicine. This is an American effort, an American endeavor to tell the liberals and the progressives in this Congress that we will not have them take away our liberty.

And Dr. Gingrey mentioned the Tea Party Patriots. They have come to this city and packed this Capitol. There are a number of Tea Party groups that are out there. A lot of other Patriots out there in other ways. The 9/12 Project people that have started, and then we saw the Patriots show up on April 15 and then again and again throughout the town hall meetings, and last August, the end of September came to this city, and 10,000 to 50,000 people packed this city on November 5 to say, Take your hands off of my health care. Two days later, on November 7, they filled us up again on the other side of the Capitol and said, Take your hands off our health care. Kill the bill.

The message, Mr. Speaker, and consistently for almost a year has been, Kill the bill. Kill the bill. The American people want this bill killed. Seventy-five percent of the American people do not support the idea that the government ought to step in and cancel everybody's health insurance policy in America. Not the first day, but over the course of 2 years, the Federal Government would cancel everybody's health insurance policy, and the policy you would get would be the policy then that the health choices administration commissioner decided was available to you or your employer or subsidized by some other taxpayer or fined if you don't buy it.

The idea that the Federal Government would cancel every health insurance policy and the health choices administration commissioner, whom I call the commi-czar-issioner, would be the one that would write the rules for the 1,300 health insurance companies in America and the 100,000 health insurance policies that exist as options among the 50 States in America today, and watch that happen where the Federal Government would then decide, Well, you have a policy that is catastrophic with low premiums. We can't have that because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that somebody else's supermandated policy has. So your health insurance policy for a 25-year-old man in New Jersey, a healthy young man, would cost him about $6,000 a year compared to the $1,000 a year for a similar but not identical policy for a healthy young man in Kentucky the same age.

Why would this country not allow the young man from New Jersey to buy a health insurance policy in Kentucky? New Jersey has the mandates. Kentucky has significantly fewer mandates. I believe they have a higher percentage of the insured because when their premiums go up, if you raise premiums 600 percent, you aren't going to have as many people covered, unless you pay for that with the Federal Government.

Here's one of the flaws, Mr. Speaker, that came out this way. Some people believe that the highest ideal was to ensure that people could buy insurance that had preexisting conditions. So if we pass a law like that and tell insurance companies that you cannot consider preexisting health conditions when you decide to issue a policy, the health insurance companies then wouldn't be able to look at medical records or make that decision. The buyers would know that, and so they wouldn't buy insurance until they got sick. Then on their way to the emergency room or maybe on the gurney, they'd fill out an application and buy that insurance policy--the very same equivalent to, if you didn't buy your property and car casualty insurance for your house and you waited until your house was on fire, and while the fire truck was pulling up, then you would fill out the insurance policy and buy the insurance. You could save a lot of premiums that way, get the same coverage, except somebody has to pay.

And so the liberals--the progressives in this Congress, the people that are associating with the socialists, and some of them actually are--decided that you can't have a health insurance company that's denying people coverage because they have preexisting conditions. So they would impose that and say, No preexisting conditions can be considered, but the only way that you do that that way is you have to then--because people won't buy insurance until they get sick, then you have to mandate that everybody has to buy insurance. And when you mandate that you do that, you cross that constitutional line that was much objected to back in the nineties when Hillary Clinton was putting together HillaryCare.

And then there was a ruling, if I have it here. I will have to ad lib it. But the ruling was such that it said back then that never before in the history of America--and it didn't happen with HillaryCare, so it was just poised to be so--had the Federal Government produced a product or approved a product and required the American people to buy that product, whether they chose to participate or not. That is some authority that does not exist in the Constitution of the United States, and we have to be able to say ``no.'' When we break these principles that drain away our personal liberty, they drain away the American vitality at the same time. They diminish all of us, Mr. Speaker, and that's the difference.

This side of the aisle over here, the left, for more than 100 years in this country, have always driven to increase the dependency class in America. They looked around and took a little message off Otto von Bismarck's plan, who put together socialized medicine in Germany over 100 years ago. Bismarck's approach was to create a dependency class that knew that they had to have him in office in order to get their benefits that would be coming, and he created the idea of a national health care act then.

And the philosophy that's flowed from the non-English-speaking Europe, the post-Enlightenment, non-English-speaking Europe, has been a philosophy that has always created dependencies. And the expanding dependency class, the people who have had a nice safety net to be on for a long time now, now we've cranked that safety net up to being a hammock, and now this Congress wants to bring them the grapes and the drinks and the fan. So the safety net that's become a hammock diminishes our vitality. We don't get out of that hammock when it's comfortable. We need to have some reward for us working and taking care of our families.

Our side of the aisle is about American vitality. Their side of the aisle is

about supporting the dependency class because the dependency class supports them politically and expands their power. That's the motive, and all the things we talk about about the nuances of this policy are about the political configuration.

We watch people making decisions on whether or not they're going to vote for or against this bill. Today the people that are deliberating on whether or not to vote ``yes'' are deliberating on whether they can preserve their seat in this Congress, whether they're willing to essentially walk the plank that they are on, being nudged down that plank by the Speaker of the House to go off into Davy Jones' political locker if they vote ``yes'' on this bill, knowing the American people have completely rejected it and spit it out.

And this is a toxic stew that has been cooked up. It starts back with HillaryCare. HillaryCare got matched up with ObamaCare during the primary campaign as Democrats were deciding which Presidential candidate would be their nominee. Hillary brought together her 1994 HillaryCare bill and began to make that argument before the active Democrats, and then Barack Obama, Senator Obama, he had to catch up and play a health care challenge with HillaryCare. So he believed that he got a mandate on that from the American people because he was elected President. So in order to put this all together, they set this big pot out here on the political stove to make this stew, this socialized medicine stew. And they went back in the pantry of HillaryCare and got that old bone off of there with the meat stuck to it that was the meat of the HillaryCare and dropped that in the pot and turned the heat up. And there it sat, this toxic soup bone cooking, this HillaryCare socialized medicine.

And people didn't want that. It was tainted. It had a smell to it. The American people had rejected it just 15 years earlier. So what do they do? Instead of realizing the American people don't want this toxic stew, they started to throw more bells and whistles into it, more vegetables and things that they could encourage people to maybe take a taste because it might look a little better now.

I would be happy to yield.

I wish I knew the lyrics to ``Rainbow Stew.'' I looked those up here a couple of weeks ago when Phil Gingrey's mother's favorite son was talking here on the floor.

And I just kind of played off of that a little bit and decided to call this a toxic stew. But you keep throwing things into this stew to try to add up the flavor to it and make it more attractive so that people will taste it. And eventually, no matter what you put in that pot of that toxic stew, it still started with a tainted old soup bone. It's still tainted meat in that stew, and you can't change that, no matter how much you add to it.

So we have this toxic stew, and the American people have decided that they reject it. They don't want a pot full of toxic stew or a bowlful or a ladleful or a spoonful. They want no measure of this toxic stew called Obamacare or Pelosicare or Troikacare, as I call it sometimes. The American people have spit it out. They have spit it out time after time after time, going clear back to last July and August. They let everybody know in this country. And then it had implications, the Governor's election in Virginia where President Obama went down to work for the Democrat candidate, and they were rejected down there. And Virginia elected a Republican governor.

And then the race, of course, was in New Jersey at the same time. President Obama went to New Jersey and again, the Democrat was rejected. And the new, fresh air, fiscally responsible, don't tread on me, I want to deliver and protect my liberty Governor Chris Christie was elected in New Jersey.

Now, we think about this, Mr. Speaker. President Obama twice went to Copenhagen, once for the Olympics, and once to be able to get his cap- and-tax approved at the Copenhagen Conference. President Obama went 0 for 2 in Copenhagen. He went to Virginia and went 0 for 1, he went to New Jersey and went 0 for 1. And on this great streak of lack of success, as the President's mojo was diminishing dramatically, he decided he was going to go all in in Massachusetts and go help Martha Coakley take Teddy Kennedy's vacant seat in Massachusetts for the United States Senate. And we all saw what happened. We saw the President go, well, let me say, well, what shall I call that? It's goose egg for one up in Massachusetts. He went zip, nada in Massachusetts. Scott Brown serves in the United States Senate today, and his voice and his vote put an end to, we believed, Obamacare. We thought somebody would hear in the echo chamber of the White House. So far they haven't heard. They are still pounding away on the same failed agenda.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Gingrey. And in the interim here I thought I would take a look at the lyrics of ``Rainbow Stew,'' which I have here now. And parts of these lyrics echo to me pretty well. And it has--the message is that we will all be drinking free bubble-ubb and eating that rainbow stew. That is when we reach this utopia is the tone of Merle Haggard's country western song from years ago.

I'll take us down to this part. The President has promised the American people a whole string of things. He's promised that he won't sign a bill that costs over $900 billion. He's promised that the negotiations--eight times on national television he said negotiations will take place on C-SPAN. There won't be backroom deals. This will be all out in the open, and it's going to lower the cost of the health care. We know it goes the opposite, the whole string of things, that there isn't even a pretense that he is going to keep his word on.

And here's Merle Haggard's part of the song ``Rainbow Stew.'' It says: ``When a President goes through the White House door, an' does what he says he'll do, we'll all be drinkin' free bubble-ubb, eatin' that rainbow stew.'' They'd like us to eat the toxic stew, and the American people won't have any part of it.

What's going on here in this Congress is a unique thing. What the gentlemen in the Doctors Caucus talked about in the previous hour was about the idea of the Slaughter House rule. The idea that a bill would come to the House--not the floor of the House. It would go up there in the hole in the wall in the third floor in the Rules Committee, that tiny little room that hardly ever has any press in it, and only one time in the history of this country that I know of has there even been a television camera in there. And they make their deal up above.

It will be what the Speaker writes in her office by conferring with the people that she decides to confer with. She will give her directive to the Chair of the Rules Committee who will carry out that directive. And what they're threatening to do and what they will, I think, attempt to do is write a self-enacting rule that deems that the Senate bill has passed the House even though it would never be seen nor debated or voted on the floor of the House, just be the Rules Committee that will deem that. Send the rule down here and then Democrats can vote for the rule that doesn't necessarily mean they're for the Senate bill.

Then, whatever they do with their reconciliation, write another bill, which is apparently put together and may be out, this reconciliation bill that is what they call the House fixes, that is all the deals that have to be made to satisfy the Democrats in the House to get enough of them necessary to get enough votes for passage. That is 216.

So they'll write a bill, what they will call fixes, and they think they'll pass it off the House and pass it off to the Senate where the Senate probably will take it up. But it would be impossible for the Senate to put all of the fixes in that the House wants. And they can't do this unless the Senate bill has gone to the President's desk, received his signature, and it becomes law.

So for the first time in American history--we will see if this happens, and I think they'll surely try it--we will see a bill that today cannot pass the Senate, that cannot be accepted by the United States Senate, one that can't be passed on the floor of the House, just deemed passed by a rule that would go to the President for the President's signature and become the law of the land.

That is a breathtaking thing to think that this great deliberative body, this constitutional Republic that we are could be so reduced that we wouldn't even have enough will to put a bill on the floor to vote it up or down so there is a recorded vote and the constituents and the voters in America could hold the people accountable that decided to come in here and take away our liberty.

If they're going to take our liberty, they ought to do it with the lights on, and they ought to do it with a recorded vote, not with a Slaughter House rule that deems that a bill passed--a bill that can't pass the floor of the House; a bill that would not be accepted by the United States Senate--could still become the law of the land under the Slaughter House rule.

I'll yield to the gentleman.

Well, depending on what the President wants. We can't hardly go by what he says. So I think he is closer to the Senate than he is to the House because he served in the Senate. But I think the answer is probably, yes, but we have to qualify it. Yes, depending.

Here's what I think. I think the President will sign any bill that says National Health Care Act in it. I don't think the substance of it matters. I don't think if it costs more than $900 billion to them it matters. I don't think if he said that it's not going to fund abortion--and it does--he will sign it anyway. He says it doesn't fund illegals--and it does: 6.1 million according to the Congressional Budget Office. 6.1 million illegals would have access to American taxpayers' dollars' benefits under the Senate version of the bill, and the President says it doesn't have anything to benefit illegals.

And the Speaker pointed her finger at our leader, John Boehner, on February 25 and said, This bill doesn't fund abortion, and we know it does.

So if people can't be held accountable to their word, and if the language, the plain language in the bill says one thing and people's word says another thing, I don't know what their intentions are or where they'd say ``no.'' I think he's salivating to sign a bill.

Yes, I will.

I thank the gentleman. I'll just try to close one point here in this narrow window that we have, and I know that it's narrow, and that is this: This bill does fund abortion. And ever since 1973, the argument has been made by people on this side of the aisle, women and men both, consistently and relentlessly, that the Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. But today, the same people are saying the Federal Government has every right to tell everybody in America what they can or can't do with their body, and they don't see the hypocrisy in it. They don't see the conflict or the lack of rationale. You can't be right both times. You can't say one thing for two generations and then just flip and decide that, well, it's convenient now to expand the dependency class, so now we're going to use the logic that the Federal Government has the right.

The Federal Government does not have the right to take over our health care. There is no constitutional foundation. There is no constitutional authority. It's a violation of the equal protection clause. It's a violation of the commerce clause in the Constitution. There is no authority.

The American people have rejected it. And now what we have is a situation where we have the arrogance of power of people that have not heard yet from the American people. We need this. The center of America has decided they want to protect their freedom, their liberty, and their own health insurance policies. We just need to have an election to reset the Congress so that Congress reflects the will of the American people. Until then, we're going to stand and do battle until we can have a Congress that reflects the will of the American people.

And I point out again, this is a bill that takes away liberty, has no constitutional foundation. It funds abortion and it funds illegals to the tune of 6.1 million according to the Senate version of the bill and the Congressional Budget Office. And so I would just take it to this point. I know we are down very close to the wire, and I thank the gentlemen I have joined.

Madam Speaker, we find ourselves in a unique circumstance in this Congress after over two centuries. This is likely the very first time that something is positioned to happen that the Founding Fathers never envisioned: That there would be a bill that couldn't be passed in the Senate, and that wasn't supported by the Senate, that wasn't supported by the House, that could nevertheless become law. The first time in history.

There are only 59 votes over there in the Senate. They would not pass this bill that this House is being asked to pass. Even the Democrats don't support the Senate version of the bill. That's on a promise that it would be on a reconciliation package that we know will not be sustained on the Senate side.

And another unique component of this is that ever since 1973, the people on that side have argued that the Federal Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. Now their position is that the Federal Government has every right to tell everybody in America what they can or can't do with their body. Madam Speaker, this bill funds abortion. It funds illegals. It steals liberty. It's unconstitutional. It kicks off lawsuits. It spends trillions of dollars. It's irresponsible. It's a theft of liberty, and it's wrong.