Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor, and I appreciate the dialogue that came from my colleagues the previous hour discussing this health care issue that has so consumed this Nation.

And we are here now on the eve of the 6-hour meeting that is scheduled at Blair House that the President has invited both Democrats and Republican leadership to join. And Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor to talk about this issue and help to put it in a perspective so that as the American people watch what's going to happen tomorrow, they understand it in perhaps a better perspective than they might otherwise.

Now, I would lay it out this way. I think there are two points, Mr. Speaker, that need to be addressed by Democrats. And these are significant points of vulnerability where there has been a persistent criticism from the public. They have made the point that of all of the agonizing national debate that's taken place on health care, that the Democrats have first of all shut Republicans out. They shut Republican out of the room, shut them out of the negotiations, shut them out of the office.

And the second thing is, the Democrats haven't had transparency. They've been cooking up these health care deals in secret. And as this thing unfolded, some time in early September was the last time that I am aware of that a Republican senator or

a House Member was sitting in a room talking with Democrat leadership about how to come about this health care policy.

From that time forward, it became secret back-door meetings, and it became secret deals and combinations of secret deals that brought about in the end the American people were repulsed by what they saw. They were repulsed by the special deals that came down. They were repulsed by the idea that if you live in Nebraska, if you live in Florida, if you live in Maine or Vermont, you've got a different deal a different cost.

I would interrupt what I am about to say and yield to the gentleman, Mr. Kingston.

Reclaiming my time, of course that is what it takes to get the votes for a bad deal. That is what the American people know, that's what the Tea Party patriots know.

I would go further. When you start out and you have a good idea. Let's say it's a stand-alone idea. What about the idea of putting an end to the lawsuit abuse in America? We've passed that legislation out of this House, and Republicans were in charge, and we sent it over to the Senate, where it was blocked in the Senate. But it was a clear, concise idea that makes everybody whole that has been actually the victim, perhaps, of medical malpractice. Three hundred million people, some things are going to go wrong. It allows for them to cover all of their health care costs, allows for someone who is a victim to receive their loss and income. And actually it established pain and suffering and an additional $250,000 on top of that. And in Texas, there's three different increments that go to three-quarters of a million, but that's it.

Trial lawyers don't walk away with pockets full of money. It's a very simple concept that can stand alone, that the American people can look at and see that it isn't a special deal.

But if you put an idea out for health care and then you have to patch something else to it, and something else to it, and when you get this whole toxic stew that I've talked about so many times, and you still can't sell that to get 218 votes in the House or 60 votes in the Senate, and you have to go out and get a special deal in Nebraska to get a vote from the Nebraska senator and a special deal in Florida to exempt Florida from Medicare Advantage cuts, or if you go up and you build a bunch of public health clinics in Vermont out of that deal, or Louisiana--the list goes on and on and on.

The American people know that when you're buying votes with their taxpayer dollars, they reject that concept, Mr. Speaker. The American people know that if you have a good idea, it should stand alone, it should be able to be passed on its merits and move through the House of Representatives on an up-or-down vote so everybody knows what's going on.

We're not at that point. This is a conglomeration of a bill, and this is frustrating to me that we can't put a good idea out in front of the American people and vote up or down and go on to the next idea.

Reclaiming my time, I will bring this back to that, that time they had 51 votes counted in the Senate on the health care bill. I went back to the Midwest, and I usually fly into Omaha. Well, Omaha, of course, is a central metropolitan area for the State of Nebraska.

And as I went in, I did a whole number of meetings around on both sides of the river, the Nebraska and the Iowa side, did a lot of media around there and took phone calls on a call-in radio show. And this was the day before the agreement was made for the Cornhusker kickback. And the senator from Nebraska was the linchpin that could put together, hold together the entire health care package up or down. If the senator from Nebraska decides to pull the pin, the whole thing falls apart.

So the day before, people were calling in and they understood that the Nebraska senator held the future of this socialized medicine bill in his hand. They didn't know what was going to happen. In the middle of the night, there was some kind of agreement that got made. There were accommodations that were made. All of a sudden there was an announcement that Harry Reid had 60 votes and he could break the filibuster in the Senate and they could pass the socialized medicine bill. And what does it include?

First of all, it includes a provision that will allow for Federal funding of abortion, and it exempted Nebraska from the increased costs in Medicaid in perpetuity. Now, no one should ever sign a document or make a pledge for anything in perpetuity. Actually perpetuity probably lasts longer than forever.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Reclaiming my time, I can't name a single one. I haven't looked over the list of the Democrats but that would be quite unusual. It would be unusual to see Democrats in there negotiating a vote of ``no'' on the bill. I'd be very surprised if there was even a token Democrat that voted no.

I would guess that was nearly 32 Democrats that voted ``no.'' It would be in that neighborhood somewhere.

Wouldn't you want to know what their objections are? I would think that would be important.

Bart Stupak on the pro-life amendment worked very closely with Smith and Pennsylvania Representative Joe Pitts. They worked very hard to pass, and they received 64 votes on a pro-life amendment to that.

I understand that Bart Stupak is not on this negotiation either. And what we're seeing come out and what came out of the Senate, it looks to me like the package that's there--there's going to be a bill that still funds abortion and compels Americans to fund abortions through their premiums in one fashion or another, or brokers them through an exchange, and also one that funds illegals. And those are two things that are completely egregious to me, to think we compel taxpayers to do that.

There are a lot of things that get spun around this thing, as you know in this town. It's been, Republicans are blocking the bill. We have no capability of doing that, obviously, not from a vote-count standpoint, when the Speaker of the House has 40 votes to burn, a 40-vote advantage, and they're sitting behind closed doors cooking up a closed-door deal. They can't get enough Democrats to pass 218 votes here. I don't think today they can bring a bill to the floor and get it passed.

This is about, though, the public criticism of shutting Republicans out and about this bill being negotiated in secret. Those are the two things that the President seeks to resolve tomorrow. Six hours of C- SPAN time, and then he'll say, Listen, we're doing what I promised we'd do. We're negotiating this bill out in public, and, by the way, we're doing it with Republicans, so who can complain?

Well, for me, it controls the entire format.

Here's the real centerpiece that I don't think anybody has articulated at this point yet.

The President of the United States, as Senator Obama and as candidate for President, said to the Iranians, If you just simply unclench your fist, we will offer our hand. We will negotiate with the people that we have been at odds with since 1979, the Iranians and Ahmadinejad--with no preconditions whatsoever--and offer an open hand to the guy with the clenched fist.

And yet the President of the United States refuses to come to the negotiating table with Republicans with a blank slate. The President has insisted and demanded upon preconditions. He has to have his conditions of his bill that has failed, his concepts that have failed. And he also puts out there the threat that they have been putting together behind closed doors, too, of reconciliation. Reconciliation is what President Obama and others called ``the nuclear option'' when it was Republicans looking at a 51-vote opportunity on the other side of the aisle.

In fact, this is posted today on the Web site, biggovernment.com. This is a statement of our President, and we think about reconciliation. This is what blows things up in the Senate. This is the nuclear option. This is how they would circumvent the anticipated and very legitimate legislative process by taking a Senate version of the bill that sits over here on the calendar of the House, pass amendments to the Senate version of the bill in the Senate called a reconciliation package, then both bills would be here on our calendar.

Then the House, under the direction of Speaker Pelosi, would take up the fixes that the House Members have insisted on which is called the reconciliation package, pass it first, and then pass the Senate version of the bill, message them both to the White House where the President would sign them in the proper sequence, one bill amending the first bill. Then this would be, as far as I know, the first time in history that the White House has replaced a legitimate conference committee, which would be the Members of the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, having an open dialogue about resolving the differences. And what did President Obama say about this reconciliation nuclear option?

Here is what he said: Passing a bill with 51 Senate votes is an arrogant power grab against the Founders' intent. That's what President Obama said. The point is, he said that in 2005, not 2010.

Let me suggest to the gentleman from Georgia that the problem is, no, Republicans can't stop anything that Democrats decide they want to get together and vote for because of the margin of 40 votes to burn here in the House, 19 in the Senate.

But the problem is, Democrats can't agree among Democrats on what they want to push for policy. If they can't find the votes among all of these extra Democrats that there are and they still point their finger back over at Republicans and say, you guys, you wouldn't vote for the stimulus package, you won't support a health care, most of us wouldn't support that abysmal cap and tax, that cap and trade bill that, by the way, passed off the floor of this House. A bill that didn't exist passed off the floor of the House of Representatives and a bill that didn't exist was messaged to the United States Senate. That's another part of this component.

To the gentleman, in fact, I can say that with a factual knowledge, and I don't have to ask any of the 435 Members, did you read this bill, because I was here on the floor that night when we suspended the debate for 35 minutes to resolve, where is the bill? I mean, sometimes they will say to us, you don't have any ideas, where are your bills?

We have a lot of bills. We have 40 some bills that we've filed on health care. But we said, where is the bill that we are debating? This is actually Louie Gohmert from Texas that deserves a lot of credit, and Joe Barton also was very good on that night. So we looked down here at the well. The bill didn't exist. There was an old bill. There was an amendment that had never been integrated. Actually, even the amendment wasn't here. It wasn't findable.

So what was going on was we were debating a bill that didn't exist, so it was impossible for anyone to have read a bill that didn't exist. That bill was then passed and messaged to the United States Senate. A bill that didn't exist was passed and messaged to the Senate, so no one read the bill.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Not only would I support that, but I would go further, and I would have a lot more bills come down here under an open rule. I would sign the pledge and the oath that every appropriations bill would be open rule.

Another thing that happens around this town is the hole in the wall gang, the Rules Committee, sits up here on the third floor in a place where you very seldom see any press from the room. And only on one occasion have I seen a television camera in the room. They control what gets debated here on the floor and what is voted on on the floor. The last time we had a legitimate open rule on our appropriations process was in the spring of 2007. That was when Speaker Pelosi first came in and got the gavel before this draconian shutdown of the open debate process.

In that spring period of time through the appropriations process, I was successful in getting passed--not those I introduced--but those that actually passed this floor, nine amendments. As far as I know, that's the most amendments of any Member of Congress during that period of time.

Yet I have taken dozens of amendments up to the Rules Committee and submitted them, and I can't think of a single one that they ever allowed to be debated. That process has to change. That's got to be out in the open. We need the Rules Committee on television, out front, meeting in a published hour so that they can be watched by the press and the public and then, additionally, while we are here watching what goes on with the rules and the shutdown of what's going on, we need more sunlight.

Because they got a list from the Speaker as to what amendments to approve and which ones not to approve. And on this health care bill, this monstrosity here, I was before the Rules Committee at 1:30 in the morning, I offered 13 separate amendments, to ask to be able to debate them and get a vote on to approve this health care bill. And I was chastised by members of the Rules Committee because I had wasted paper and staff time to have them drafted up, because I should have known, as the gentleman from Georgia apparently should have known, that they weren't going to allow these amendments, so why should I try.

But any Congress that can pass a bill that doesn't exist, debate a bill that doesn't exist here, pass a bill that doesn't exist here, and message that bill to the United States Senate, I suppose can also put out a list and say, we're going to reject the amendment that you never offered in advance.

Another thing that happens in this Congress--and it happened on this floor today--is committee action. And the committee action that goes on is designed to take this language apart, take a look at it, examine the ramifications, hold hearings, get educated, evaluate the impact of legislation and then bring that legislation through the committee and amend it and perfect the legislation when you have a debate where you can focus it with people that are experts on the subject matter.

The legislation that came through today on this insurance across State lines political bill that came to the floor, had been amended in the Judiciary Committee with an amendment by Dan Lungren, passed by a majority of members, Republicans and Democrats voting for the Lungren amendment. The bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee, and on its way to the Rules Committee it magically became a different bill without the Lungren amendment language in the bill. That's what we voted on on the motion to recommit today.

So we have committee action that's a farce, as well as the Rules Committee which is a farce, as well as the debate here on the floor of the House, which is a farce, when we are debating a bill that doesn't exist. That's just three egregious things that need to change in a Republican-run Congress. I will stand to change all of those with anybody else that will stand with me.

Well, I hope, as I reclaim, that what we see tomorrow is more than a dog and pony show. I hope it's not just a show that's designed to resolve the two things that seem to be giving Democrats and the President heartburn, which are the very legitimate point that they have shut Republicans out of the process and the very legitimate point that the President has promised that negotiations will take place on C-SPAN. That seems to be what is going to be presented tomorrow.

But I'm going to say again, the requirement of preconditions that the President wants to negotiate from his position--and by the way, he doesn't have a bill yet that I know of. He just has platitudes and bullet points that are out there. But to start with his platitudes and bullet points--and maybe we'll be guessing at the amorphous combination of the Senate and the House version of this, that all needs to go off of the table, and this threat of reconciliation, the nuclear option needs to be renounced and rejected by the President of the United States.

I would be just as happy if he would just read his 2005 statement verbatim tomorrow. He should start out the meeting and say, Well, all in good faith, I want to talk about health care with you on C-SPAN. I know I made a campaign oath. It probably wasn't the best promise, but it was good political leverage and good theater at the time, so I'm going to try to follow through on that so that I can resolve some of the criticism. And by the way, I know we've shut you Republicans out of this thing. We've done so since clear back last September, but I'm going to open this up at least so we can have the semblance of negotiations take place, and to demonstrate my good faith--and then read from the 2005 statement.

Then the President should say, ``Passing a bill with 51 Senate votes is an arrogant power grab against the Founders' intent.'' That's what the President should say tomorrow. That's actually what the President said in 2005. That would demonstrate good faith. And then we would have a blank slate, a blank piece of paper, however you want to characterize it, except Republicans have their package bill. I'm suggesting we should concede that too. Slide that off the side of the table, really start with a blank slate, and then bring up, as the gentleman from Georgia said, a stand-alone idea can be debated and it be perfected and it can be passed. We need to do it with tort reform in a real way that takes the money out of the pockets of the trial lawyers as opposed to taking it out of the pockets of our senior citizens.

The gentleman from Missouri.

You know, I think they have been sitting up behind closed doors cooking up this reconciliation/nuclear option. They've been doing this for over a month. Senator Harkin announced, after Scott Brown won the election in Massachusetts--again, thank you, Massachusetts, Mr. Speaker--announced that they had already reached an agreement within a couple of days before Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts. This is a continuation of it, and the strategy was what I've described with reconciliation/nuclear option.

So, yes, they have worked behind closed doors. They are operating in secret, and they have cooked up this and they are going to say take it or leave it.

Well, it's truly not bipartisanship; it's only the show of bipartisanship designed for two things: so they can say, Well, we've negotiated with Republicans on C-SPAN. We didn't shut them out. That's really it.

The gentleman from Georgia.

Well, reclaiming my time, I would label the gentleman from Georgia as not necessarily right or left or center, but perhaps an optimist on the grounds that the Speaker has been around here for a long time, and she surely would have seen this over and over and over again over the last 20 or more years that I believe she has been here. So I actually don't think that it is about trying to arrive at a means to get Democrat and Republican votes. I think it's about trying to move a hard-core left-wing agenda.

The President has said he is for single payer. The Speaker is for single payer. Harry Reid is for single payer. That's all socialized medicine. That's government-run health care. Now it's a matter of--it isn't necessarily, in my view, what's right or wrong with the way they're looking at this.

I had said before the election--a year ago last November--if we elect President Obama, the most liberal President in American history, the most liberal Senator in the United States Senate, if we elect him, with a strong ideology--and by the way, he told us in Baltimore, the President said, I am not an ideologue, I am not, but I am not aware of anyone that actually believes that. A strong left-wing President standing with the Speaker of the House from San Francisco, Harry Reid from Las Vegas, those three are the ruling troika in America.

And I said before Mr. Obama was elected President that the three of them could go into a phone booth and do what they would to America--and they wouldn't have to ask any Republicans for sure--and the only thing they would have to do is be able to verify that they could produce the votes within their own Democrat Party to pass any bill. And what happened? Just what I said, essentially. The ruling troika cooked up a bill. They just couldn't agree in the House and the Senate and they had trouble finding enough Democrats to get it to pass. Now they come back to Republicans.

I would remind the Speaker of this, Mr. Speaker, and that is, Thomas Jefferson's quote, when he said, ``Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.'' This is a large initiative and it should never be advanced on slender majorities. It should be something that is debated and deliberated and perfected in a legitimate process, not a partisan process, which the committee markup actually was.

The gentleman from Missouri.

Reclaiming my time, I will make another point of this that I think has been completely understated--if stated at all, Mr. Speaker--here in the House of Representatives or across the dialogue of this land, and that is this: This President and this administration participated with--the beginnings of this during the Bush administration--the nationalization of a huge chunk of our private sector. We have seen three large investment banks nationalized: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, AIG.

According to The Wall Street Journal last August, they printed that one-third of the private sector profits had been nationalized, and most of it by the Obama administration, depending on how you actually pick the dates that it is declared to be nationalized. But one-third of the private sector profits, and now we are looking at another 17 percent of our economy nationalized. That takes, at 33 percent, you add it up and you're at 50 percent, right there at half.

But the important thing, the part that seems to be missed in the dialogue of this debate is, when the government nationalizes and takes over the private sector economy, which they have done, and they want to take over the health care and take over the management of everybody's health care in America, this unique thing happens. When we look back to 1973, the decision of Roe v. Wade, and since that time when the Supreme Court made their ruling--which I think is not grounded in the Constitution and I reject the rationale of Roe v. Wade--we have continually heard every year since then, people on this side of the aisle primarily, a few on this side of the aisle, say the government has no business telling a woman what she can and can't do with her body. That is not the government's business. That is between the woman and her doctor and her priest. It is not anybody else's business. No one can tell a woman what to do with her body. That is what I heard from these folks over here mostly since 1973.

Now the same people, the same voices are saying government should tell everybody what they can and can't do with their body. Government should take over and nationalize everybody's bodies, our health care, and determine whether our health insurance is the one that they will approve; determine what tests we get at what age; what age you get a mammogram; how long you're going to wait for a hip replacement or a knee replacement; the government taxing the nondiet pop to try to tell you don't buy anything or eat anything or drink anything but diet pop; the government punishing trans fats so that we can have a healthier diet, managing our diet, managing our health care. They've done everything except promise to run us across the scales, check our body fat index and tax us for our fat and tax us for failing to exercise.

They already tax about every sin that you can put in your body by trying to control our behavior. This nanny state is wanting to fund the takeover of the private sector, our bodies. They want to do this, and it is the most private thing we have, the Federal Government taking over our bodies. The very people that said that the government has no business telling a woman what she can do with her body, they want to tell everybody in America what we can and can't do with our bodies.

Gentleman.

In reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Missouri, it causes me to think about what I have talked about for some time here on the floor, and I'll see if I have the notes on this. I can also speak from memory, however. I have long talked about the Democratic Socialists of America and their Web site. It seems as though Americans just don't seem to want to take a look at what's going on at dsausa.org.

I got to wondering on one of my nights that I wasn't sleeping very well. I guess it was bothering me that the liberals are deconstructing our Constitution, so I was doing a little research to figure out what they were thinking.

I went to their Web site, the Socialist Web site, and I just typed in ``Socialists in America,'' dsausa.org. What I came up with was this Web site that said, Here is what we want to do. At first, the definition in there says, We are Socialists. We are not Communists.

Now, I always want to trust those people who start out their introductory paragraphs with ``I am not a Communist.'' Okay. Well, tell me why you're not. Now I'm really interested, and I'm not actually sure after I read it.

Well, Communists, they say, want to nationalize everything right down to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Socialists really don't want to do that. They just want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies and anything else that's in their way. So they say this is the difference. So we're not Communists; we're Socialists. We do want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies, and we also want to nationalize the oil refinery industry and the energy industry in America. We want to take that all over, and we want to manage these corporations ``for the benefit of the people affected by them.''

Now, I read that, and I might have been a little blurry-eyed because I thought: Let's see. You'd run a restaurant for the benefit of the customers. That wouldn't be profit-based. You'd run a bar the same way. Oh, you can't benefit people by serving them a lot of drinks because they might hurt themselves or somebody else.

No. Really what it is is the benefit of the people affected by them will be the trade unions. They'd run the corporations for the purposes of creating jobs for trade unions to work in there, and they'd put the unions into the management of the companies. That's what they say at dsausa.org, Democratic Socialists of America.

So then I read further, and it reads, Yes, we are Socialists. We're not Communists, remember. We're Socialists, but we don't run anybody, any candidates, on our banner. We don't have a party that advances candidates to go on the ballot, because our legislative arm is the Progressives, the Progressive Caucus in the United States Congress.

If you go to their Web site--and they're quite proud of this, and they put a poster up over here on a fairly regular basis--there are 78 of them listed. There are 77 House Members who are proud Progressives, and the one other is Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont, who is a proud Socialist. He is a Socialist. He is a Progressive. He is on the list with the others.

The Socialists say the Progressives are Socialists. I don't hear the Progressives saying they are not Socialists. I'm going to take all their word for it. They are Socialists, and their agenda is the same agenda that has been advanced on the Socialist Web site, and we hear it on a regular basis here, and the agenda that is being advanced by the President of the United States is an agenda that, for all the world, looks like the one I read on the Progressive Web site and that I read on the Socialists Web site.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri before I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

In reclaiming my time, I have a remark to the gentleman:

Free enterprise capitalism is what defeated the Soviet Union and is what ended the Cold War, because our economy could outproduce their economy, and they eventually collapsed. I don't know why we are trying to emulate them.

I have a very brief question to the gentleman from Missouri before I yield to the gentleman from Georgia, which is: In the Akin household, when you serve breakfast to those kids growing up down there, to that whole conservative family, do you serve them grits on a regular basis, or do you not?

Am I going to have to go down there and have you show me?

Well, I'll reclaim my time, and yield to the man who does have grits for breakfast, the doctor from Georgia, Mr. Broun.

In briefly reclaiming my time, to the gentleman from Georgia, I'd make the point that, as to what's going on tomorrow that you referred to as a dog-and-pony show, I don't take issue with that statement.

I just think that the American people need to know that this isn't a negotiation taking place tomorrow. This is about putting up the front and the show that there will be C-SPAN discussions taking place and that there will be Republicans in the room.

By the way, there hasn't been any dialogue on our part about the dynamics of what happens with the faces of the Democrats who will be in the room or whose job it will be to enhance the image of the President of the United States. This is the President's image. He has lost his mojo, and he cannot get it back by simply continuing to work in the backroom with Democrats. That's how he lost it in the first place. So the President can't get his juice back. He can't get his mojo back unless he gets Republicans in the room--and he has got to have some of them either looking silly or nodding their heads, one of the two--and I'm going to suggest going cheek-to-cheek with the President of the United States after we've come all of this way.

The American people have won the debate, and we are with them. We've now recovered the fumble in Massachusetts. We've got the ball. We're playing offense. They're playing defense. This is the best that they can come up with--allowing the President of the United States to set conditions on the negotiations by which we are going to consider his defeated bill, to which 47 percent of the people say scrap it and start over, to which 23 percent of the people say just throw it out and do nothing--don't start over--and to which about a quarter of the people say, We'll pass the President's bill. Well, that's how far down he is when 25 percent of the American people think that might be a good idea.

So I think that we need to understand that this is about the show. It's not about getting anything negotiated. But if it were, I'd do tort reform.

The gentleman from Missouri.

In reclaiming my time, in addition to this reconciliation package is the, figuratively, gun to the head of Republicans. They've been cleaning their gun all weekend and spinning the cylinder. They'll put it to our heads tomorrow, and they'll say, We have cooked up this reconciliation package. We've got our deal.

They're going to think we believe they have the votes.

They'll put that gun to our heads, and they'll say, Now, you can either accept the terms we're going to offer at the Blair House tomorrow or we're going to drop the hammer and go with the nuclear option and try to push this thing through the Senate.

I don't think they've got the votes in the House to do it. I don't think they've got the votes in the Senate to do it. I will say, Mr. Speaker, if they try to move that, they're going to be looking at a whole stack of amendments in the Senate that will take an awful long time, with more exposure on the Senate votes than there will be at the Blair House tomorrow.

The gentleman from Georgia.

In reclaiming my time and in thanking the gentlemen from Georgia and Missouri, in our last minute here, Mr. Speaker, I'd make the point that I'm happy to say ``no'' to bad ideas, N-O to bad ideas. The American people are glad of that. They were glad when Nancy Reagan said, ``Just say `no.' '' We're just saying ``no'' to socialized medicine.

We're saying ``yes'' to good ideas, including ending lawsuit abuse, selling health insurance across State lines, full deductibility, HSAs, portability, and transparency.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 45 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, February 25, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 19 I was unable to vote because my arrival in Washington from Iowa was delayed by severe winter weather.

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

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 17 I was unable to vote because my arrival in Washington from Iowa was delayed by severe winter weather.

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

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 18, I was unable to vote because my arrival in Washington from Iowa was delayed by severe winter weather. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding some time on this subject matter.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, whether it is amended or whether it is not amended. And I do so, Mr. Speaker, because first of all, the United States of America was founded upon the principle of equality, the principle of equality before the law. And we have further built upon the principle of equality of opportunity.

As I have listened to each of the speakers address this tonight, there seems to be a continuing theme that there are specific groups of people that deserve a certain kind of specific consideration before the law and before the appropriations of the United States Congress, and specific access to assets that might be utilized for their specific use, as opposed to other Hawaiians that aren't defined as Native Hawaiians.

I recall the debate back in 1959 when Hawaii and Alaska were both brought into the union, and I recall the discussions that were there then about the success that Hawaii had had by assimilating peoples into the broader society of Hawaii, and about how we didn't have to worry about the expression--then it wasn't Balkanization--but we didn't have to worry about the Hawaiians dividing themselves into separate and competing ethnic groups, that they were assimilated.

Assimilation was the watchword of the day, the code of the day, and that was the message and the promise and the commitment that Hawaiians made to the United States Congress when they were brought into the Union as a State.

Well, today we see a piece of legislation that comes before us that defies the very concept that was a principle that was clearly understood here on this floor of this Congress when Hawaii was brought into the Union.

And when I look at what this does, the broad definition of Native Hawaiians that might mean Native Hawaiians anywhere where they are in the United States that could be brought under this umbrella of beneficiaries of assets that could be as great as 40 percent of the land mass of the State of the Hawaii to be governed and regulated by self-described, self-defined Native Hawaiians at the expense of everyone else, and I wonder how good these promises might be, the promises that we wouldn't set up gaming institutions, we wouldn't set up toll roads or roadblocks; this would just be a very compatible, logical pro-tourism industry. It might be. In fact, it probably will be, Mr. Speaker.

But I am so concerned about the broader fundamental principle that applies here. And I would argue that the

gentleman that has spoken on behalf of those Native Americans that actually are real tribes by definition that exists within statute and within the tradition of law, have no solution for the reservation system that we have. They envision it the same 100 years from now as it is today. And so we see the replication of pathologies from reservation to reservation and not the opportunities.

I would have supported the Dawes Act however many years ago.

I thank the gentleman, and I'd just make this point. When I read the material on this coming back up again, and I so appreciate Mr. Abercrombie's work, and I know his heart and his head are in this. This is in a verbatim email that I wrote up to my staff, and it goes this way.

This bill makes a resounding statement that even Native Hawaiians can't be assimilated into a Western society. I disagree. It is a fundamental statement that goes to the heart of what it means to be an American. If, after all these years, Native Hawaiians have to be tribalized in order to function in a modern society, all Americans then must, by the identical logic, be Balkanized.

Mr. Speaker, the philosophy is wrong underneath this. However good the thoughts are, Americans should be assimilated, not subdivided. We should not be pitted against each other, and Americans should not have certain assets designated to them because of the ancestry that they claim. We should be all Americans under one flag.

I thank the judge from Texas, and I appreciate the chance to address you, Mr. Speaker, here on the floor of the House.

I tell you, I am full of amazement that the President of the United States can make a proposal that he wants to come out here and negotiate on health care, and yet he doesn't want to negotiate on health care. He insists on bringing forward one or another of the bills that passed the House or the Senate, but he apparently doesn't have a bill yet. Bill Clinton had a bill. Hillary Clinton actually had a bill. This President actually doesn't have a bill. He has a position.

We asked him if he was going to keep his word and present his legislation at least 72 hours before it would be voted on. It is quite interesting that the platitudes that the President has released in bullet points this morning at 10 o'clock happens to be 72 hours precisely until such time as the meeting starts at the Blair House on Thursday at 10 o'clock in the morning. So there is 72 hours to digest some platitudes, but all the while that is going on, and you have spoken of it very well, then the secret meetings have been taking place in the White House and wherever. This is something that is clearly being done behind closed doors, in formerly smoke-filled rooms, with guards on the outside, albeit there for the security of the people inside the room. We don't know what went on in there.

But the President is not coming to the table looking to negotiate. The President is coming to the table looking to put the reconciliation gun to our head, cock the hammer and say, you can say ``yes'' on Thursday or we are going to pull the trigger on reconciliation. That is the nuclear option. That is the thing that was intolerable when Republicans discussed it, and I would like to think it is going to end up being intolerable to the American people. I thank the gentleman.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I appreciate my colleagues that have spoken in the hour previous and those that will perhaps join me in the hour that ensues at this point.

As one can tell from listening to that dialogue, we can clearly see that there is a high degree of concern about the direction America is going. I would like to get into that pretty deeply, but I also recognize that my friend from Georgia has something left unsaid, and so I would be very happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun).

Reclaiming my time, I very much thank my good friend from Georgia, who is always there when I need him, and he shows up sometimes before I realize I need him. This may well be one of those times.

Mr. Speaker, there are certain bonds that get built here in the House of Representatives. There are people here working late at night and they're up early in the morning and they are pushing an agenda, those that carry a Constitution in their pocket and those that believe it. There are some that carry a Constitution in their pocket that believe that it is a living and breathing document. That way of thinking that began to erode our liberties over 110 or 120 years ago is the way of thinking that says that there is no guarantee whatsoever, that the Constitution is not only a protection of the rights of the majority, it is the protection of the rights of the minority, whichever side of that equation you happen to be on.

This liberty that we have is not just in the document, but it is something that we have to preserve and protect. Those that set about with the argument that it is a living and breathing document are actually undermining our liberty and turning it over to people in black robes who then can decide in their fashion what they believe the Constitution is supposed to say. So I pose the question, Mr. Speaker-- and I posed this question to Chief Justice Rehnquist when he was alive and sitting on the Supreme Court--and that is, if the Constitution doesn't mean what it says, if it doesn't mean what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification, then what has it become? Has it become just an artifact of history, or is it a shield that liberal judicial activists can hold up to protect themselves from the criticism of the public that they would like to convince that they don't have the capability of reading a very simple document, that clear, plain, precise language of our Constitution?

I yield again to the gentleman from Georgia.

The tyranny of the majority, as our Founding Fathers defined it.

Reclaiming my time, if I can just make this point that however long we might talk to the people on that side of the aisle, they're not going to change their mind. They are the wrong people. I can tell you that I stood here for 7 years and made some powerful arguments, and I can't think of a single time when one of them stood up and said, Oh, my, I didn't realize that. I didn't think about it that way. I'm going to change my mind. It doesn't happen in the real world.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, and I appreciate him sticking around for a few extra kind words. The gentleman, the doctor, the marine from Georgia, thank you very much, Dr. Broun.

I want to move along into a component of this that is at the front of my mind. The first part of this is so that you, Mr. Speaker, and the people on the other side of the aisle--and I know your constitutional position from a formal standpoint, nonpartisan position from a formal and constitutional standpoint, that would be one of the points we would disagree on, but how did we get here is the question. Why is it that America is watching as the White House has rolled out, what is it, 14 pages of platitudes, no legislative language, that is supposed to be a bipartisan negotiating standard? Why is it that the President of the United States has refused to give up on ObamaCare--which some could call ReidCare, others would call PelosiCare, some of that is ObamaCare, and I call it TroikaCare. It is a health care policy that is put together by those three rulers and leaders that are untested in a single party government, and this is what you get. You get something, Mr. Speaker, that is put together behind closed doors in those formerly smoke-filled rooms with guards outside the doors, and they are trying to put together some kind of package that can garner now 51 votes in the United States Senate and 218 votes in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the President is chastising Republicans for not wanting to work in a bipartisan fashion.

So what has happened? I will make the point, Mr. Speaker, that the President of the United States has simply lost his mojo. He doesn't have it anymore. He had the most juice of any President I can think of when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. This was a Nation that was on the verge of euphoria because they elected the first black President of the United States, because it was a new way forward, because it was all about hope and change. And this hope and change was defined differently to people depending on what they heard from the ambiguities of the President of the United States. One side, the extreme liberals, believed that the President of the United States was going to jerk the troops out of Iraq come whatever calamity. They believed that he would never engage in a foreign conflict and he would sell off our tanks and airplanes and spend the money on social programs. The other side believed that the President might be somewhat stable with national defense and maybe wouldn't spend so much money. And everybody certainly believed that the President would work in a bipartisan fashion, but it didn't happen.

When the President of the United States, today's President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, was working in a complicit fashion with George W. Bush when TARP unfolded 1 year and several months ago, it turned out to be first $350 billion, and then another $350 billion. We see it as one package. Well, it was not. Under the 110th Congress, and it would be in the last months of the Bush administration, $350 billion was approved for TARP--Troubled Asset Relief Program. Henry Paulson came to this Capitol on September 19, 2008, before the presidential election and did what I call his ``Chicken Little routine.'' He said, The sky is falling, the sky is falling and it is a financial calamity, and the only way we can prop the sky back up is you give me $700 billion and do so right now. And maybe, just maybe I will be smart enough and wise enough to do this, but if you tie my hands and you put any strings on this money, if you try to alter or amend the latitude that I demand, then the whole sky is going to come crashing down. The economic world will collapse. Because he had been thinking about it for 13 months, he presumed we had only thought about it for 24 hours, and we had to bite the bullet and take the bait so that they could set the hook and reel us in on TARP.

Well, Mr. Speaker, that was one of the things that happened. It wasn't actually the first. But through the course of this, President Obama, then-Senator Obama, was right along the way supporting for, voting for every irresponsible spending that took place as a United States Senator, and then as a President-elect United States Senator, then as President of the United States newly inaugurated. That is when he really turned up the heat. That is when he really opened the floodgates, and that's when the spending really moved on and that is when we really saw the nationalization of these eight huge entities. That would be three large investment banks, Mr. Speaker. It would be AIG, the insurance company. It would be Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.

Now, that's six of the eight. The American people are watching this, and they're thinking we have a constitutional republic. We elect our representatives. Their job is to use their best judgment and their best resources to come to the best conclusions possible and to make decisions for the American people because, first of all, the American people can't all be investment bankers. They can't all know what's going on on the inside of Wall Street. They can't all know what the United States Treasurer is doing, and they can't understand necessarily all of the advice that's going into the White House or into the offices of the Members of Congress.

They can provide their input, and we need to listen, but they also trusted the judgment. That's how our Founding Fathers set this up. That's why this is a constitutional republic, because every one of us has his own unique franchise. Every one of the 435 Members of the House and of the 100 Members of the Senate has a unique franchise.

We owe the American people this, Mr. Speaker: first, our best effort; second, our best judgment.

Our best effort is clear, which is to work as hard, as diligently and as efficiently as you can. Our best judgment includes input from the American people, and it includes input that comes from the experts and the data and the analyses and the studies and the testimony and the hearings that come before these committees so that we can come to a good conclusion.

The American people, to some degree, trusted those conclusions, but they saw TARP come down the pike. Then they saw the takeover of some of the large investment banks and the investment brokers like Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG--bing, bing, bing, one after another--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the Federal Government. They are getting more and more uneasy as this unfolds.

Then, Mr. Speaker, as the American people had this knot in their guts, along came the nationalization of General Motors and Chrysler. That's when the credibility of the White House

tanked, because, even though the American people don't necessarily understand Wall Street, they understand cars. Most of us own one or more of them. We know pickups, too, and people who know pickups certainly know cars. I'm not sure it's the other way around, Mr. Speaker. We know cars. We make cars. We market them. We sell them. We fix them. We race them. We buy them, sell them, trade them. We collect them. Americans have a love affair with cars, especially with their American cars.

The President of the United States nationalized two huge, important American automakers. He took them over. He dictated the terms to the bankruptcy court, and the hearings that were held before bankruptcy changed not one single dot or cross on a ``t'' from the proposal that was dictated by the White House going into the bankruptcy court, according to testimony in the Judiciary Committee on just this.

So the President dictated the terms, or his people dictated the terms, and the President appointed a car czar, a 31-year-old car czar who had never made a car or sold a car. We don't think he has ever fixed a car. We don't even know if he owned a car at the time, but if he did, we ought to take a look and see if it was an American car or if it was a foreign-made car. We began to lose faith quickly when we saw the White House take over our automobile business.

The Speaker of the House, Mr. Speaker, made the point that she would not give the automakers bargaining control over the unions, over the United Auto Workers union. When she said that and when that term stuck and when the President of the United States and others leveraged the bondholders out--the secured creditors who had hard collateral invested in these companies--and when they had secured collateral that they could foreclose on, they were aced out. One of the reasons they were is that those secured entities that held those were some of the investment banks that were bailed out by TARP. So they had leverage that said, Give up your positions because we've got the money, and we can control your boards of directors.

So the White House dictated then the terms of these bankruptcies to the automakers. They took the secured credit away from the investors, and they handed it over to the labor unions. Additionally to that, the President of the United States fired the CEO of General Motors, and replaced the board of directors of General Motors down to the last two. All but two were directed by the President of the United States, and the American people were repulsed by the very idea that the President of the United States would be engaged in nationalizing companies.

As I look at this, I just have a little piece of document that I've printed off of the socialist Web site, the Democratic Socialists of America. Mr. Speaker, I would encourage you and the others who are interested in this to go to the Web site dsausa.org. There you will find some of the text of the strategy that appears to be the strategy of the White House.

``Social redistribution,'' it reads. Social redistribution is one of the goals. ``The shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society will require''--this is the Democratic Socialists' Web site--``the shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society will require, No. 1, massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs, income maintenance, and infrastructure rehabilitation.''

A massive shift of income from corporations and the wealthy. In other words, share the wealth, Mr. Speaker. This is right off the socialists' Web site.

Item No. 2 reads, ``A massive shift of public resources from the military to civilian uses.'' We've seen that, too.

Furthermore, on the socialists' Web site, it talks of the nationalization of major corporations. It says they don't have to do it all at once. They can do it gradually. They want to nationalize the oil refinery business. They want to nationalize the energy industry in America. All of that is on the socialists' Web site, Mr. Speaker. All of that looks stunningly like what we've seen happen over the last year and a half.

The American people have had enough. Eight large entities. The last two were the automakers, and the automakers were the ones that gave the American people the insight into what the rest of those decisions were.

Right after that came the stimulus plan--$787 billion poured into the economy for a purpose that only 6 percent of the people think it produced. Only 6 percent think that the stimulus plan worked.

Right behind that came cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax. This was another plan to punish American business and to punish everybody in America who uses energy under the extremely myopic and ill-informed idea that anybody is ``trying to save the planet, trying to save the planet.'' I don't want to sound like a broken record. I'm actually quoting a high- profile person in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker.

Well, you're not going to save the planet if you're going to use false data--data that has been either jiggered or data that has been sorted and selected to produce the results that they want. It looks like the data that produced the hockey stick graph was selected data, and the language that came out of some of the leaked emails said we have to hide the decline. Michael Mann wants to hide the decline. Phil Jones wants to hide the decline.

Well, the American people understand now that it wasn't just something that they didn't understand. Cap-and-trade, the science behind that--if you call it science--is another one of those things the American people thought they didn't understand, but surely, the experts did, just like they didn't understand Wall Street, but surely, the experts did. Now they're finding out the American people knew more about Wall Street than the people of Wall Street did, because they want fiscal responsibility. They aren't skimming the cream out every quarter and, come what may, letting the economy become unstable and, perhaps, crash. It's the same with cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, and the pseudoscience behind that. They understand now that the results have been rigged to some degree--they don't quite know what.

Right behind that came comprehensive health care reform--socialized medicine, Mr. Speaker. The American people rose up again, and they filled the town hall meetings in August, and they kept them full into September, and we came back here and argued and fought this legislation. As that unfolded, finally, on the 7th of November, a version from the House passed here on the floor. In the following month, on Christmas Eve, a version in the Senate, a significantly different version, passed there with a 60-vote super majority. On Christmas Eve, the elves were just putting away the last gift that they had put together, the last toy for the kids, and they were going to go to bed to sleep while Santa delivered, but Harry Reid had to have a vote over in the United States Senate. So the Christmas Eve gift to the American people was socialized medicine, Senate style.

Now we have a House version and we have a Senate version, and the American people rose up. Not a single pundit on Christmas Eve, on the day that that bill passed, had said that there was a chance for Scott Brown to win the United States Senate race in the special election in Massachusetts, which was scheduled for and did take place on January 19 of this year. Not a single pundit predicted it on that date. No one saw it coming. Some poll showed Scott Brown down 30 percent. Others showed him down 21 percent on that day. His opponent went dark, and they stopped the campaign. People thought that everybody would be distracted over Christmas, and so there wasn't any point in doing politics during that period of time from Christmas Eve on through New Year's Eve and on into the new year, when you finally get back into the rhythm of things.

Yet the thing that didn't get anticipated was that, oh, we talked politics all right when we got together for the holidays. We do several King Christmases to get it all taken care of in the right way. We talk about politics. We talk about religion. We talk about the weather. So do all kinds of Americans, and so do people in Massachusetts. So, when they came through the other side of that and with the intervention that

we had, Scott Brown obviously won the election in Massachusetts in the ``Scott Heard Round the World.'' That was the death knell for socialized medicine in America. The President of the United States immediately refused to receive the message from the people in Massachusetts, and he insists on pushing ObamaCare back at us over and over and over again.

While that was going on--excuse me, Mr. Speaker. I think I need to make this point--from the 19th of January, there were a lot of other maneuverings that went on. Senator Tom Harkin said that they had already negotiated a settlement between Democrats so that they could figure out how to pass a bill before Scott Brown won the election. That strategy, I presume, was predicated upon an assumption that they would have 60 votes in the Senate. In any case, they contemplated the idea that they might have to try to move something through on reconciliation--the tactic that they use in the Senate on rare occasions which Democrats call the ``nuclear option,'' but it's not too handy to call it a ``nuclear option'' today.

Mr. Speaker, even though the blizzard shut this town down for a week and it was hard to get some business done, they have been meeting behind closed doors again. Even though the American people are revolted at the idea of cooking up this toxic stew called ObamaCare-- ``TroikaCare'' I called it earlier--this toxic stew that started with socialized medicine, single-payer government runs it all, this big, old, dated, 15-year-old, tainted soup bone called HillaryCare, they dropped it into a pot to cook up this health care bill. Then they saw that nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted the plain old, straight, single- payer that President Obama, as candidate Obama, had promised that he was for to the American people.

So they started throwing in some other kinds of vegetables and things to change the flavor of it or the looks of it a little bit. So they gave some options about it the other way, but it still turned out to be the same soup bone in there, that same tainted meat that cooked up this toxic stew. This toxic stew, called ObamaCare, is something the American people don't want. They don't want the taste of any toxic stew, and once it is, no matter what you add to it it's still toxic. It's still tainted. The American people don't want a potful, and they don't want a bowlful, and they don't want a cupful, and they don't want a spoonful. Mr. Speaker, they want no measure of this national health care plan that has been cooked up. It's tainted. It needs to be thrown over the side, thrown out, and we need to start over. That's what 47 percent of the people say--they want to start over. Another quarter of them says to just throw it out and do nothing. There is maybe a quarter of them who think--I think the number was actually 23 percent--that ObamaCare should be passed, and that's a pretty low percentage.

Thomas Jefferson said a large initiative should not be passed on slender majorities. Well, now they're trying to push a large initiative through without a majority. I say that because, Mr. Speaker, the American people have spoken. The American people realize now what they have produced in the past election. They know they have got a new election coming up here in November of this year. The political center of America has moved, and the elections haven't caught up to reflect the movement of the political center, but no one doubts it will happen. They are just as confident that there are going to be significant seats that are going to be picked up here in the House of Representatives.

So I'm going to make this point, Mr. Speaker, which is that nothing good can come from the President's insisting on pushing ObamaCare back out onto the table on Thursday. Nothing good can come from closed-door, secret meetings, planning a strategy called ``reconciliation-nuclear option,'' which is the equivalent of holding a gun to the heads of Republicans, figuratively speaking, and then saying, Listen, I have all the cylinders full; the hammer is cocked. This is reconciliation- nuclear option. Now you can either accept this that we offer to you, ObamaCare through this version, or, if you don't, we're just going to pull the trigger, drop the hammer and run that reconciliation package through the Senate and over here to the House where the House would be sitting with two Senate versions passed.

Then they would pass the reconciliation, which are the changes that the House insists on in the Senate bill--not the House--excuse me--the Speaker and the House Democrats insist on in the Senate bill. If they pass that, they would then hold it and not message it to the President. They would wait, and then they would pass the Senate version of the bill, message that to the President, ask him to sign the Senate version. Then the reconciliation-nuclear option package would go to the President of the United States, and he would sign that right afterwards, probably in the same bill-signing ceremony, and the second bill amends the first bill.

That, Mr. Speaker, is how honest this is, and I'm not suggesting that it is. That should give the American people an idea of what's going on here, and it is something that repulses them and me.

The job of the Speaker is to bring out the will of the group, not to bring out the will of the Speaker.

We have some negotiations to take place. Before we go to those, I want to make a point that is very useful to me, and it is something that was originated within the mind and the thought process of my friend from Minnesota. This is the Declaration of Health Care Independence. I could read this whole thing down here, but it recognizes six points above of what went wrong. Those six points are that everything that's going on right now, except for what Republicans have done, has denied our American liberty. It increases our taxes. It cripples the economy. It creates a new tax. It creates a bureaucracy that will devise ways to increase the spending. It empowers bureaucrats to do what they will to us. And it costs us quality and choice. Those are the negatives.

Mr. Speaker, the positives are these in this Declaration of Health Care Independence: These are the things that we say are the new rules for the road going forward. We're going to consider working with people who believe in these principles. These principles are, number one, we're going to protect the doctor-patient relationship. Number two, we're not going to add to the debt. Number three, we're going to improve, not diminish, the quality of care. What we do is going to be transparent in its negotiations and in its meaning with no favoritism to anyone from any State, equal protection under the law. We're going to treat people the same whether they're Members of Congress or whether they are your regular citizens that don't have the privileges that we have here. We are not going to fund abortion. We are not going to fund illegals. There will be no new mandates on the States, individuals, businesses, or employers. I said equal protection. And we're going to utilize the marketplace of ideas and choice with competition.

That, Mr. Speaker, is what this Declaration of Health Care Independence does. It currently has at least the signatures of 96 Members of Congress. Somebody printed that there was a small number of people that have supported this. That's only 2 days of trying. Ninety- six Republicans have signed this. Not a single Democrat has come forward and been willing to sign it at this point. And we need to send a strong message to the leadership, going cheek to cheek with the President of the United States and dancing a tango and acting like we want to do business and we don't have any rules for the road. These are the rules of the road. And I will, Mr. Speaker, make the announcement here that I will not vote for a bill that doesn't honor and respect these parameters. And I want to start with single standalone pieces of legislation, and I want to start with tort reform.

I need to recognize the gentlewoman from Minnesota because she was here first for so much time as she may consume until such time as Mr. Gohmert gets nervous about it.

Exclusively with Democrats.

I have not seen the bill.

Reclaiming my time, I very much thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

In transition to the gentleman from Texas, I will just say I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, who will not be at the summit, who will not have a forum, who will not have a microphone, and that will be there will be no outspoken conservatives allowed to address that issue on Thursday at the Blair House. That's a given. I make that prediction for the American people, Mr. Speaker.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas who has so patiently waited and has so much to say. And I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota for joining us.

I thank my friend the judge and Congressman from Texas for joining us here this evening. And to bring this together and bring it to a close, Mr. Speaker, I'd just say this, that there will not be outspoken conservatives that will be part of this discussion. There may be outspoken liberals; that would be if the President speaks up. That would confirm that, in my view, Mr. Speaker.

But the American people have rejected the very idea that the Federal Government would do what it would do, take over 100 percent of the health care in America and all of the health insurance policies that are in America, and, by the way, if they say that they won't, but they'd actually regulate every single one, it's true.

I talked a moment earlier, some minutes earlier, about the nationalization of these eight huge entities and what that means to free enterprise, but the real utter irony that we have, Mr. Speaker, is that not since 1973, since Roe v. Wade, have there been thousands and thousands of people who have stood up and said the government has no business telling a woman what she should do with her body. That is a sacrosanct decision made by the woman and her doctor and her pastor or her priest. I've heard the argument over and over and over again. And it is made by men and women. It's been made for two generations. And now the very same people that are arguing that you can't tell a woman what to do with her body, are now advocating that the Federal Government should take over the management of everybody's body.

The utter nationalization of the most private thing we have, our health care. Take away our choices, take it over and manage it, give us whatever insurance policy the Federal Government will approve, tell us what we have to pay for it, tell us what mandates will be included in it. And if we can't afford it, they will give us a refundable tax credit, and if we can't afford it and don't buy it, they're going to fine us, and they're going to fine the employer that doesn't produce it.

This is a mandate for the first time in the history of America that the Federal Government would mandate that a person has to buy something that is imposed on us by the Federal Government, and I say ``no'' to it all.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 12 minutes p.m.), under its previous order and pursuant to House Resolution 1084, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 23, 2010, at 10:30 a.m., for morning-hour debate, as a further mark of respect to the memory of the late Honorable John P. Murtha.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) for leading on this Special Order tonight and for leading on fiscal responsibility here in the United States Congress.

This balanced budget amendment is something that I am proud to be an

original cosponsor of. I have done so every time that this has been offered since I have been here in Congress. And the dialogue that is here tonight adds so much to something that has been missing completely, I think, from the administration and from the White House.

We went from a point of Republicans pushing towards a balanced budget and listening to the PAYGO arguments of the Blue Dog Democrats demagoging on the issue. I don't know where they are today. It seems to me that they have gone underground. Maybe they are the Ground Hogs rather than the Blue Dogs at this point.

I don't hear anything from them about balancing the budget any more, because they understand that in order to fund this kind of profligate spending that we have, this $1.4-plus trillion deficit created by this Obama budget, that, by their method, we would have to raise taxes dramatically.

What I wanted to do is keep the taxes low, slow the growth in government; and for years I said, slow the growth in government so that the economy can catch up. I am now to this point where I would say the other way is that I don't believe the economy can catch up with the spending that we have. I think we actually have to shrink government in order to get it back in line.

This is going to be a very big task. It isn't going to happen under Speaker Pelosi's watch. It isn't going to happen if President Obama has a veto pen to control our spending in this Congress. But we do have an obligation to advance, as much as we can, this constitutional amendment. We have an obligation to offer a balanced budget, which we did this year. The Republican study committee balanced budget, that is something that I had pushed for for some time, and we will have a balanced budget offered this year.

So I just encourage all of my colleagues, Madam Speaker, and everybody in the United States of America to step up to this level of responsibility. If we can do it with our family checkbook, we must do it with our government checkbook. If we fail to do so, our economy will continue in this downward spiral.

We have got to get our capital, our money, our spending back underneath us and realize that government cannot grow us out of this economic problem that we are in. It has got to be the private sector. And the private sector cannot continue to pay the taxes to service the interest and the debt of a deficit that we have been spending under this administration.

I would point out, also, that Speaker Pelosi took the gavel at the end of November elections in 2006, January of 2007. At that time, we saw capital investment in industry go significantly downward. And I watched the members here and the freshmen from the other side tonight talk about how this was all Bush's problem. Well, if they are taking responsibility for anything that turns good, they have to accept the responsibility for what has happened since Speaker Pelosi took the gavel. All spending starts in the House of Representatives.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia, and I yield back.

I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. I appreciate the previous hour, the gentleman from Virginia leading it, talking about the responsibility that we all have to provide a balanced budget here in this Congress and recognizing that the political forces that are at play here, let's say in Congress and across the country, everybody wants their measure. It has been something where Federal dollars have been distributed on down through the chain from the Federal Government to the State to the counties to the cities, other political subdivisions, parishes. Other examples of that, individual organizations get appropriations.

It has been very, very difficult for this Congress to find the discipline to produce a balanced budget. So that's one of the reasons why I believe strongly that we have got to amend the Constitution so that we have real strict constraints, because Congress hasn't shown the discipline to balance the budget.

That would not be the case for the individuals that are here on the floor tonight that are pushing so hard for this constitutional amendment. Every one of us that are cosponsors of the resolution led by Mr. Goodlatte would vote for a balanced budget, of course, and we would also and have supported a constitutional amendment.

I wanted to transition the discussion just a little bit tonight, Madam Speaker, from this fiscal responsibility on over to the health care responsibility. First, I'd take us back to the President's statements and throughout the campaign and into his Presidency and after he was inaugurated as President over here on the west portico of the Capitol building, and that was January 20th of last year. That first anniversary just rolled around last Wednesday, Madam Speaker.

The President of the United States, President Obama, said that we are in an economic problem--I don't want to overstate the language he used, but we couldn't fix the economy without first fixing health care, that health care is apparently a contributor. Too much health care spending is a contributor to the economic problems that we are in. So it didn't make sense to me and it didn't connect that when you have what was described as an economic meltdown, a chance that we might be losing the fiscal structure of currency and trade between the countries and the global financial structure, if we're risking a meltdown of the global financial structure, I don't know how we could think the problem of spending too much money on health care, solving that is going to solve the economic potential meltdown. But that was the position that the President took, Madam Speaker, when he said over and over gain we can't fix the economy without first fixing health care.

So, even though it didn't make sense, that was the position that President Obama took, and here we are. The average industrialized country spends about 9.5 percent of their GDP on health care. Our numbers are about 14.5 percent of our GDP. Some will say a little over 16 percent of our gross domestic product on health care. So the President's proposal is we spend too much on health care, but his proposed solution is spend more on health care. In fact, spend a lot more on health care, even to the point where he drew a line and said, I won't sign a bill that costs more than $900 billion.

So the House went through a lot of logical contortionism and contrived a bill that tried to stay underneath that level and then sent it over to the Senate, where they went through a few more, let me say, accounting contortionist activities to try to be able to proscribe their bill from going over $900 billion, why? Because the President said he didn't want to sign a bill that costs more than $900 billion.

Well, it turns out that the accounting gimmicks were so stark that anybody else would have been laughed out of the Econ 101 classroom if they had proposed such a thing as, let's say, 10 years of revenue and 5\1/2\ to 6 years of cost to get down to a number that's just slightly under $900 billion. When you look at the first real 10 years, according to Senator Judd Gregg from down this hallway in the Senate, the first real 10 years is $2.5 trillion. We have some other numbers out of the House side that shows around $2.1 trillion in cost for the first 10 years. And when you look at what John Shadegg has put together, you really see some numbers that escalate all the way up to $6 trillion.

So the President's problem is, we have an economic problem that he wants to solve by, first, fixing health care because we spend too much money, and we're going to fix it by spending a lot more money, trillions of dollars more, $1 trillion to $2 trillion to $3 trillion to maybe as much as $6 trillion more. Illogical? As I said, you'd be laughed out of an Econ 101 classroom to come up with an argument that you could do an accounting that showed 5\1/2\ years of cost and 10 years of revenue and then claim that it only costs $900 billion under that.

So we know that's, number one, a flawed premise, a flawed result. The American people understood that, even though the people in the echo chamber in the White House and the leadership chambers here in the House and in the Senate didn't seem to understand that. The second thing, the President of the United States consistently said that we need more competition in health insurance, that the insurance companies aren't competing, they don't have competition. So in order to do that, he proposed that we create a Federal health insurance program. A Federal health insurance program, that the Federal Government get in the business of competing against the private sector health insurance industry.

Now I wonder if the President was briefed on how many health insurance companies we have in the United States. That number is 1,300. There are

1,300 health insurance companies in the United States. Now that would seem to be a lot of competition to me, to have 1,300 companies and have the Federal Government get into this and create one more company--the Federal Government, as big as it is, as much advantage as it would have. Then we would have, though, 1,301 companies in the United States selling health insurance. How many policy varieties do we have? Well, Madam Speaker, that number falls in the area of 100,000 possible policy varieties out there in the marketplace.

So 1,300 companies, 100,000 policy varieties that one could choose from if they could buy insurance across State lines. The President wouldn't go for allowing people to buy insurance across State lines. That would be a little bit too much liberty for an American to have. So instead, he would want to impose a single-payer--he said he was for single-payer many times during the campaign--a single-payer plan, which would be a Federal health insurance plan to supplant or replace all 1,300 companies and 100,000 policies with the beautiful, wonderful Federal Government offerings that would surely be adequate for anybody in America and satisfy all of us, unless we just weren't quite enlightened yet. That seems to be the message I'm hearing from the White House.

So we find out that we had two flawed premises. One was, if we spend too much money on health care, spending more doesn't solve that problem. The second premise was, if health insurance companies need more competition, the way to get it is not to put the Federal Government in the business and try to replace them and drive them out of business. The way to get it is to open up sales across State lines so that that young man that is paying $6,000 a year for health insurance in New Jersey can buy his health insurance from Kentucky, where a similar policy would cost him $1,000 a year, not $6,000. That would be an example of what's going on. If we took the House version of the health care bill, a young man in Indiana, would see his health insurance premiums go up 300 percent. His $84 a month would be $252 a month, almost exactly a 300 percent greater health insurance premium because of the mandates and the language that is in the House bill or in the Senate bill.

So the American people watched this, Madam Speaker. They watched it all across America. We watched the reaction, the rejection of the American people of this irresponsible spending. It was discussed pretty deeply in the previous hour. The nationalization of these huge entities, which was discussed by the Democrats in the hour before. It sounded to me like George Bush had nationalized all of these companies and had taken over the private sector, and now here we are, President Obama is stuck with all of that, and that they don't really have any choice, except to go do a lot more of what it was that they said that George Bush did that was wrong.

Well, I'm not here to make a statement into the Record that George Bush got it all right, Madam Speaker. He got a lot of it right. A few of the things history will judge that he didn't get quite as right. But what we have seen in the last 16 or 17 months--and at least 12 of them have been under the Obama presidency--we have seen the nationalization of eight huge formerly private-sector entities, entities that are making a profit and competing in the private sector. That's three large investment banks, AIG the insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler. And throughout all of that, put on one end the $700 billion worth of TARP and on the other end the $787 billion worth of economic stimulus plan that looks like maybe only about a third of that has been spent at this point, but they still want another $150 billion or more dollars in Son of Stimulus, or Stim II, some call it.

This is Keynesian economics on steroids, and I have heard the President say--and I doubt if he will make this statement from this Well, Madam Speaker, tomorrow night--I have heard him say that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal actually did work, but the problem that he had was in the second half of the decade of the 1930s. He failed to spend enough money. If he would have just spent a lot more money, then the New Deal would have actually been a good deal, but FDR got a little nervous about spending too much money, so he pulled back. Those were the words the President used, ``pulled back.'' And then what we had, according to his description, was a recession within a depression, and it was brought about by the Federal Government not spending enough money. Well, this wild program, these Keynesian economics on steroids have been driven by this presidency--not driven by George Bush--driven by President Obama.

And by the way, every nickel and dime, every nationalization, every single move that was taken in the last months of the Presidential campaign and in the last months of the Bush presidency, were all things that were approved by and supported by President Obama. He voted for TARP. He spoke for TARP. He sat at the table in the White House and spoke in favor of TARP. That's $700 billion, and you can't hardly say that it was not President Obama's responsibility when he spoke for, went to the White House and negotiated for it, voted for it and took it over--and by the way, that TARP was only--and I say only, Madam Speaker. The original TARP was $350 billion. That's half of what Henry Paulson asked for. The other $350 billion had to be approved and authorized by a President to be elected later, by a Congress to be elected later. That's this Congress, this 111th Congress. That's this President, President Obama. It's the Pelosi Congress, the Reid Senate, and the Obama presidency, all of this except $350 billion in spending.

So it brings us to this point where the American people have seen that they thought that they had elected people that were responsible, that understood high finance and the whole big picture that a government has to do so well--that is this constitutional Republic, this representative form of government, Madam Speaker. And so when we saw the TARP plan come through and the nationalizations of a couple large banks and then AIG, and we watched how some of those insider deals worked out pretty good in the long run for those people that were inside, as we marched down this line--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--the American people were getting ever-more nervous at the spending and the nationalization, the government takeover of private business.

But when they got to the takeover of the car companies, Madam Speaker, that, for sure, wasn't George Bush. That was all President Obama. When that happened, the American people's lightbulbs came on because they know cars. And when the car czar turned out to be a 31- year-old fellow that had never sold or made a car--we don't know if he actually ever fixed one or what he drove--but in any case, he was not qualified to be the car czar, and I think that that was a universal opinion or he wouldn't have been gone.

But the American people saw with that example that the Federal Government, that they really didn't know what they were doing inside the White House echo chamber, and they got ever more uneasy, ever closer to the civil type of a revolt that took place. We saw it happen in Virginia, and then we saw it happen again in New Jersey, and then in Massachusetts a little over a week ago when Scott Brown was elected to the United States Senate--the most improbable place. And when the exit polling was tabulated, and they asked people, Why did you go vote for Scott Brown? Over 70 percent said, I did so because I want to kill the bill.

I want to kill the socialized medicine bill. Madam Speaker, that bill may be dead. On the other hand, it might be a--I know it's a monster. It might be a cold-blooded monster. And on a cold day, and it is a cold day here, you can't tell if a cold-blooded monster is alive or dead. But I want to make sure that it's dead and that bill stays dead and that the American people are glad that it is dead, and they don't want to see it resurrected by the White House, by the Speaker of the House, by the majority leader of the United States Senate or anybody else.

They breathed a big sigh of relief and a shout of joy went up all over America when Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, because people are going to be allowed to keep their liberty. And we

want to make sure they're allowed to keep their liberty. And for that reason, some of us, and my colleague from Texas certainly in the middle of this, worked to put together a declaration of health care independence. We want to put a marker down that we all adhere to, that we can keep our word on because there remain people in government, I mean, at least in Congress, that do give their word and keep their word.

As cavalier as it's been dealt with here in the last few months coming out of the White House, those of us that'll sign on this declaration of health care independence, we intend to lay our word down and keep our word. And I say that here, and I haven't backed up on mine. Neither has the gentleman from Texas. I think I'd get along pretty good in east Texas. There's some times I'd like to go down there and visit those folks because it's quite interesting the people that they send up here from that territory. And I'd like to yield so much time as he may consume to my friend, the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert.

Reclaiming my time, listening to the gentleman from Texas recount the circumstances by which the Declaration of Independence was written, and I recall reading through a fair amount of that history and watching a movie or two, some of the frustration that Thomas Jefferson felt with John Adams' scrutiny of his language and later on Ben Franklin's and then the broader Congress, I've never been in a position where I could so sympathize with Thomas Jefferson as I do. But also I so much more appreciate the artful work of the Declaration of Independence because it was a product of a lot of fruitful minds that had to come together and to be able to take all of the ideas and patch them together and then turn it into something that is beautifully eloquent at the same time. It's pretty hard to do. It's like a piece of sheet music and trying to patch in different stanzas here and there and have it come out and have it actually play right before the orchestra.

And the Declaration of Independence has stood up under the tests of time as one of the most beautifully written documents anywhere. But part of the reason is not just its eloquence but because it speaks to the heart of humanity. We know we hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think if he could go down do to the Jefferson Memorial and realize that of the four panels inside of the memorial, three of them--the quotes of Jefferson--three of them referenced his belief in God. It's hard for the people on this side to argue that Jefferson was a Deist when three of his quotes referenced God.

And, by the way, there are two typos in there, Madam Speaker, that I would challenge the historians to go down there and check on them. One of them comes to mind right away. The other one I'll think of when I go back down there to read it.

I wanted to take up this issue of our Declaration of Health Care Independence which will be rolled out tomorrow, and we will lay it out in more of a clear, concise form. But it's laid out on these principles that you've heard Mr. Gohmert talk about and the prediction of what would happen--let me say what would have happened if that horrible socialized medicine bill would have been sent to the President's desk where, if he could sign his name at all, he certainly would have signed the bill. He had no reservations about what was coming out of the Pelosi House and Reid Senate. The people of Massachusetts did; the President did not. And the American people line up against this in any form, any of these forms that have been proposed, at least 70 percent in opposition.

And so here's why first the American people lined up against this socialized medicine proposal, either the House or Senate version or the ObamaCare as it's sometimes described, because we know that a Washington takeover--and the American people know, Madam Speaker, that a Washington takeover of American health care would deny fundamental personal and economic liberties, and it would devalue our individual liberties, and it would reduce the principle of limited government as established by the Constitution. That's number one.

It would have increased costs and taxes upon every entity that we could possibly mention, and it would have crippled our American economy, and it would have created inescapable new taxes, mandates. If the Federal Government were for the first time in the history of the United States to produce or approve a product and then require every American to purchase that product--the people that couldn't afford it, send them a check and then say, Use this voucher to buy yourself some health insurance, or, by the way, If your employer has 50 or more employees, they have to provide your health insurance for you. Unless you're in the construction business, then it's five or more employees because of the exemption that was written in by the construction labor union. So all of these little construction companies that are sitting here with five and maybe tomorrow are going to have six employees, they're only going to have five--those that have six through 49 would be treated differently than every other employer because they were in the construction business, because somebody in the construction business had unions that were strong enough to leverage a piece of favoritism into the legislation.

But if there is a mandate there, it is a tax. Whether it is a tax that is levied and you have to pay the tax to the IRS and they go out and buy your insurance for you or if the Federal Government mandates you go out and buy that insurance, the only difference is who actually handles the transaction. You handle it yourself to avoid the IRS levy against you, which would be the fine. The punishment for not paying it, the same thing. A mandate to buy insurance, to compel people to buy a product produced or approved by the Federal Government for the first time in history that that has ever been done is a tax, a new tax, and it's a new tax on everybody that has to participate that wasn't otherwise or wouldn't otherwise have been participating.

That is one of the other bad things about this. It would institutionalize, Madam Speaker, a massive, ever- expanding Federal bureaucracy that is impersonal and impractical. And that bureaucracy would devise new ways to grow and get more power and diminish the liberties of the American people. That's the nature of bureaucracies. They've always done that. And we've put people in white shirts and ties and sent them off in an expensive Federal building, and then they set about building empire. And they'll come back here and say, We need a little more empire, and they'll write rules that we'll never see. And those rules will have the full force and effect of law, because this Congress has abdicated a lot of our responsibility when it comes to rules.

So the bureaucracy grows. The huge administration state grows.

And it also would have--and I say ``have'' because I believe this bill is dead and I want to make sure it stays dead--it would have empowered bureaucrats to interfere with a doctor-patient relationship and that the process of doing so would have undermined quality, would have limited choice, would have increased the costs.

These were the downsides that were coming at the American people that caused them to rise up and express themselves in two Governor races. Those were nationalized races in Virginia and in New Jersey. And when they had the opportunity to have a national election for a United States Senator in Massachusetts, they took it.

The American people appealed to the decency of the elected majorities. And their leaders here in this Congress did not respond, except to do more force-feeding of liberal, social engineering policies, expensive policies and things that people don't want. The level of elitism and arrogance is breathtaking. And I don't think it has ever reached this high in the history of America. That cavalier disregard for the Constitution, when someone would ask Speaker Pelosi, where in the Constitution do you see the constitutional authority to pass a national health care act such as you have done here out on the floor of the House of Representatives? A cavalier attitude, Madam Speaker.

We take an oath to this Constitution. And people will take the oath. They will do so with their hand on a Bible, and they will walk out with no other thought to it at all. There is a whole movement over on this side of this Congress that believes the Constitution doesn't mean what it says. They will make that argument. I sit on the Constitution Subcommittee. I have heard the argument over and over again, a living, breathing Constitution. Some time back in the 1930s, the Supreme Court had some language threaded into a decision that says that the Constitution is living and breathing.

If the Constitution is living and breathing, if it doesn't mean what it says, then, Madam Speaker, I would ask the question, what is it for? Who is protected by a Constitution that is living and breathing and changing and can be amended by the whim of any judge in any Federal courtroom anywhere in America? I had an attorney tell me once, if you give me a favorable judge and a favorable jury, I will amend the Constitution in any courtroom in the land. And that happens by precedents that find their way up to the Supreme Court.

I take this stand, Madam Speaker. That's this: This Constitution does mean what it says. The text of it means what it says. And it means what it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification, either the base document, or the amendments if things flowed through. And if it's something else, then the Constitution is no guarantee whatsoever. It simply is an artifact of history, or else it can serve as a shield for someone in a black robe to hold up and make the argument that you're a layperson, so you can't begin to understand what this Constitution means. Leave it to us. We're the professionals in the black robes. We dropped the powdered wigs; we still have the black robes.

I don't think putting a robe on makes a person exclusive when it comes to understanding the English language. I think we have a lot of people--and I'm a ditchdigger by trade. A lot of people digging ditches can read this Constitution and understand what it means. I think we have a lot of TEA party patriots that do read the Constitution and understand what it means. We see a lot of people standing under American flags and yellow ``Don't Tread on Me'' flags with a Constitution in their pocket. They understand what it means better than some of the people who have taken an oath of the Constitution in this House of Representatives, Madam Speaker.

This Constitution is threatened by socialized medicine, the bill that has to stay dead.

We also offer solutions and a framework to go forward, a solution and framework to go forward, and we say, we the people and representatives of the United States, make this declaration, that as a matter of principle, we want to protect the doctor-patient relationship which the gentleman from Texas talked about. And we want to reject this national debt that gets heaped up on us over and over again that was the subject of the previous hour. And we want to improve quality of care, and we want transparency in the negotiations. And we want to treat every American citizen in this same fashion that we treat our public officials, and vice versa. If it's good enough for an American citizen, it ought to be good enough for an elected public official, wherever they might be serving.

And I appreciate the discussion about the funding for abortion. When there's a policy that is seeking to be advanced by this side of the aisle in the United States Congress that would compel the taxpayers to fund abortions, something that is abhorrent to the value system of America, the majority value system of America, that is about as egregious as it can get, to be roped into being a citizen, held down to pay your taxes and have that money extracted out of your pocket to go to the Planned Parenthood or the abortion clinic.

When you think of conscientious objecting taxpayers, that is about as close as you can get to having a complete revolt on your hands. And when I looked out last Friday at the March for Life, the numbers in the Mall here and standing on that stage, people as far as the eye could see. It was reported to be in the neighborhood of 200,000 pro-life people bussed from all over this country, and some flew in to come and stand up and march, pray and speak for life, as they do every year, as they do every day in these United States. That is the largest continuing demonstration in the history of this country. There's no movement that has brought those numbers of people here to Washington, D.C., year after year after year for 37 years. And to think what they would have had to say and do if there had been a socialized medicine bill passed that compels people to fund abortions or brokers policies that pay for abortions. Those people that came, I among them, would have been in even greater numbers than 200,000. And at some point they aren't going to be as polite as this good group of people are when they see that happening.

So I'm glad that marker has been put down. The new mandates that are being proposed on patients, employers, on States--we've heard from the States. In fact, that is the Corn Husker Kickback. ``Exempt me from the cost of the new mandates'' is what that statement was. But in reality, there was a moral portion that was negotiated in that, too, and it was language that didn't hold up to the standard of the Stupak amendment, which wasn't good enough for me. I supported it, but I would have liked to have done more and better.

It was an eroded standard that was offered in the United States Senate. And it was rejected by the pro-life organizations in the country. That moral position appeared to have been traded off for a monetary one, which is an exemption from paying the increases in Medicaid that would come about because of the socialized medicine bill in the Senate that brought about these special deals. Special deals, Madam Speaker, for--let's see, let's go to Maine. Was that $11 billion for community health clinics in Maine? Eleven billion dollars. Well, there's a kickback there. That didn't get a lot of publicity. But that is part of the deal.

The exemption from the--say the elimination of the Medicare Advantage programs in Florida for that Senator Nelson, the Corn Husker Kickback in Nebraska, the Louisiana Purchase in Louisiana, the list goes on. We don't know what all is in the bill. Those we do know about. Those are all special deals. All those special deals are completely rejected by this declaration.

Another one of those mandates that came would be setting up health insurance policies in the country that are funded by the taxpayer and that compel employers to insure their employees or individuals to buy the insurance if they are not working or if they have an employer that is not mandated to buy. And within all of that we would fund illegals, give them their own health insurance policies so we could put another, bigger magnet out here, a jobs magnet, a welfare magnet, and now your own private health insurance policy magnet, argued and defended for by Luis Gutierrez, for example, and Mr. Honda of California. Many others believe that it's a matter of social justice that American people would owe a health insurance policy, an individual health insurance policy, to people that break into the United States illegally.

What a reach that is from a justice standpoint.

We cannot be expanding any further benefits, health care benefits to illegals in America. We provide emergency services by law. And a lot of times, we don't backfill the bank accounts of the health care providers. For example, if you go down to Arizona, in Arizona the most southerly trauma center is the University of Tucson Hospital. That is at least 70 miles north of the Mexican border because the rest of those hospitals have closed. They can't afford to provide free health care services to the illegals. And the American taxpayers can't afford to pay them either. So those are some of the things that are on the list here and things that are important for us to talk about.

I'm happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas to pick up where I left off.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the judge from Texas.

On the transparency side of this discussion, too, to broaden that out, Madam Speaker, when I address transparency, I am speaking of two things. One is transparency in the negotiations, so everything is out there in sunlight. And the other is transparency in billing, so people know what is being paid for health care services.

The part about the negotiations that is so important, if they took place on C-SPAN out in the open, out in the light of day, if it is a big negotiating table that is there and in comes Big Pharma and here comes AARP, here is the health insurance companies, here is a doctor sitting over here. The patients, I would like to think they have a place at the table, but I am not sure just what entity speaks up so well for them.

But here's how a piece of legislation gets passed in this Congress today. This is what happens. Think of the scales of justice, blindfolded. Justice is blind, and here they are balancing these scales of justice. That's what I see. There's an image in that; that image of justice and equity. I'm reluctant to use the word ``fair.''

But in legislation, it works out this way. It's kind of a scale, and somebody comes up with a bad idea. Let's just say it's cap-and-trade or it's socialized medicine. They put all their ideas over here and, clink, here's the way the scale sits. All the bad ideas weigh it down. And then people start to say, Well, wait a minute. I've got a couple of ideas that are pretty bad. Let's take them off the table and put an idea over here you think is a good idea. And then it starts to weigh a little bit. You don't see that scale move. It's still sitting there.

Then one large entity after another starts to come to a conclusion that passage of this bad bill is inevitable. So they take away their opposition to a bad bill and they begin to negotiate for their own carve-outs and exemptions in a bad bill so it damages everybody but them. When they get their carve-out, the political capital over here that is on the ``no'' side either goes to neutral or over here on the plus side because they've agreed to support a bill now because they've got their exemptions so they're not affected by the bill. That might be the Cornhusker Kickback. That might be the Florida exemption for Medicare Advantage or the $11 billion in clinics in Maine or the Louisiana Purchase or it might be exemptions from executive pay controls in Big Pharma. It could be anything. They will add and add and add over on this side until all of this ``no'' political capital that knew it was a bad idea when it began, enough that has moved over to the plus side or moved to neutral to where if you put that final little weight on the scales--I like to call it the straw that breaks the camel's back--clink, it goes over this way.

Now there's enough support to pass a bill. And that's when they ram it through and they don't let you up for air because they're afraid they will lose votes. When that little moment comes when they think they've got the votes, it comes through. That's why the United States Senate was doing business for 3 constant weeks without a break and that's why they were doing business on Christmas Eve, to pass socialized medicine with a 60-40 majority on December 24, Christmas Eve, because they finally stacked the scales to the point where, clink, it would go over on the side where they could barely pass the bill. That's what they did.

If those kind of negotiations are taking place out in the open where the American people understand it, they would be revolted by the concept of how this is business, how very little of it is a discussion about what is the best policy for America and how much of it is a discussion about how you get the support of this group or that group or how you leverage to get the vote of a Member of Congress or United States Senator. Instead of evaluating the policy and stepping back and looking at it objectively and coming up with new ways to make something right for the American people, it becomes a political equation.

If we could get it out in the sunlight, we could get rid of some of those political equations and come a lot closer to getting the right policy for the American people. That's why transparency matters so much. That's why C-SPAN in those negotiation rooms would matter so much. That is actually a very big part of this Declaration of Health Care Independence. And I am proud to be part of it, and I'm looking forward to our press conference tomorrow.

I'd be happy to yield just a moment to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I thank my friend from Texas for being up late at night and coming down here. When you have a friend that will stand with you like Judge Gohmert, in the end we can, I think, together, do some good things for the American people, Madam Speaker. So we'll be working to get to that point.

We want to empower rather than limit an open and accessible marketplace of health care choice and opportunity. And if we're going to do business now, the rules have changed. There are new rules for the road. These are the new rules for road, and we're going to find out when people are serious. If they're ready to address lawsuit abuse, the people that are advocating for socialized medicine, if they're ready to address lawsuit abuse, we're ready to do business. If not, there's a new sheriff in town.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 10 a.m.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I have been listening to the dialogue that has been poured before us from the three gentlemen here, my colleagues, speaking mostly about health care, the National Health Care Act, and what this could mean.

I would like to pick this up from the place where Todd Akin left off, and that would be the importance of the State of Massachusetts. I do not believe that it can be overstated, the impact of the election returns last night. I listened to Carl Cameron on FOX News who is, I believe, a very well-informed and probably a deeply researched individual. He said that this was the most important congressional race in 50 years. Well, I can remember that far back, and I would completely agree with him. And I would suspect it may be the most important congressional race in the history of our country, Mr. Speaker.

The situation in Massachusetts where Todd Akin laid out the poem that said, ``and fired the shot heard around the world,'' well, this in Massachusetts last night was a shot heard around the world. It was the Scott heard around the world. He will be here tomorrow, straight down that hallway,

swearing into the United States Senate.

So how did we get to this point, and what happened? And what is the significance of what took place in Massachusetts last night, Mr. Speaker? Those are the issues that I think are important to the American people here. I will make the point that we're a Nation that, let's say, we have people who are studying every day to be nationalized American citizens. We're a Nation that has skimmed the vigor off of every donor civilization that has sent immigrants to the United States.

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, 390 years ago. They disembarked from the Mayflower because they came over here for religious liberty, religious freedom. They established those freedoms and liberties right there in the Bay State. Now this Nation was founded on the same principles and the same liberty that came to us with the Pilgrims and were built upon as the years unfolded. And it's rooted back, a long ways back. A Western civilization itself, I would trace it back to the Greeks 3,000 years ago and the Age of Enlightenment, especially the English-speaking division of the Age of Enlightenment, which brought us free enterprise.

And if there is an immigrant in the United States who is studying to take the test to become a naturalized American citizen, there is a whole stack of flashcards that are there that are put out by the United States Citizenship Immigration Services. They are glossy flashcards. The government spent a lot of money to make these things real nice. You look on one side, and it will say, Who is the founder of our country? You flip it over to the other side, George Washington. Who saved the Union? Flip it over, Abraham Lincoln. Who signed the Emancipation Proclamation? Same man. Next question, What is the economic system of the United States of America?

You flip the card over, and if you are going to pass the test to become an American citizen, you have to answer what it says on the back of that card, free enterprise capitalism, Mr. Speaker. The economic system where we don't have the government setting prices. We have the market setting prices. We have supply and demand setting prices, and we let people invest equity, sweat equity and capital to buy, sell, trade, make, gain, invent. We protect the intellectual property through patents and trademarks, and we also encourage people to make money. We know that when you generate that wealth in the legitimate private sector that everyone prospers, that a rising tide does lift all boats.

And that's what people were thinking, I believe, in Massachusetts yesterday. I spent 3 days there. They were an outstanding 3 days. It was a fantastic experience. I went to polling places. I went to campaign headquarters, both sides of the case. I went to union halls, and I talked to as many people across the State of Massachusetts as I possibly could. The center line was this: the Federal Government spent too much money. It's gotten too big. It's gotten too intrusive. They're imposing too many mandates and regulations on the American people. They have their own universal health care in Massachusetts, and they aren't particularly happy with it.

One of the things they have a conscience about is not imposing that version on the entire United States of America. They understood that for them to cast a vote wasn't just, How did their ballot for Scott Brown, how did it affect the destiny of Massachusetts? It wasn't a selfish vote. They understood they have a national responsibility, Mr. Speaker.

It was a national responsibility, and I understand this, I think, as well as most in the country because Iowa is first in the Nation caucus, and we take our jobs seriously, and we're all politics all the time. Generally, every 4 years we very, very often have at least one Presidential candidate from Massachusetts that we host. They go around through Iowa, sit down, have coffee with us and we talk to them. We look them eye to eye. I have done that more than once. We take our retail politics seriously.

But when we go to the first-in-the-Nation Presidential caucus and cast our ballot there, even though it has more impact than probably the single vote of anyone from any other State with regard to who is nominated as the President, Mr. Speaker, it is still only a recommendation to the rest of the country. Iowa gets to go first. We take it seriously. Somebody has to be first. I don't have confidence in anybody else to do a better job. But it's still only a recommendation.

What happened in Massachusetts last night was not a recommendation that affected the rest of the country like Iowa makes when they do the first-of-the-Nation Presidential caucus. What happened in Massachusetts last night was a decision for the rest of the country, a decision that will bind the destiny of America. They understood that, and they stepped up to that cause, and their conscience and their sense of responsibility kicked in.

So I am very proud of what the citizens of Massachusetts have done. They have mobilized the political effort that many of them hadn't seen ever in their lifetimes. I talked to a lady that said that she has worked in political campaigns for 50 years, 50 years; and she said that when the polls closed, and they counted the ballots, they cried their eyes out, and then they got up, and they went to work again. Well, this time I imagine there were tears among these groups. They probably did cry their eyes out, but they were tears of joy. And a great shout of joy went up all across America that finally, finally somebody heard.

I have asked for reinforcements. I have prayed for the cavalry to come, and at the last minute they came riding over the hill in the person of Scott Brown. Now we have a chance to save, serve and protect our liberty; and this debate now begins on an entirely different field, on an entirely different terrain, and I believe an entirely different outcome. I am completely in awe at how the most improbable sometimes comes along to save us with something that appeared to be inevitable.

The gentleman from Tennessee has been willing to stick around, and I would like to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Tennessee who happens to be a doctor, who knows what TennCare looks like and knows what America would look like if we adopted TennCare, CanadaCare, United KingdomCare, GermanCare, name your country. But this is America, and take care to protect America. The gentleman from Tennessee.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. He mentioned that he has taken calculus. I would submit that they put me through calculus, too, a couple of years, and they actually never told me at the beginning, middle, or end that there wasn't much purpose of going through all of those calculations. It was more about how to discipline the mind to think rationally, logically, and reasonably. That is also why they send people to law school. Our President went to law school and actually taught in law school. He taught constitutional law, which is a bit of a surprise to me that he can advocate some of the things that he does.

The basic logic that comes isn't rooted in law school and it isn't rooted necessarily in calculus. It isn't rooted in geometry or algebra. It might be two plus two equals four. But the rationale that was presented to us consistently and repeatedly by Presidential candidate, President-elect, and then President Obama, Mr. Speaker, was health care costs too much money. I have been browbeaten by the Europeans. They would say we spend 9.5 percent of our GDP. You spend 14.5 percent of your GDP. That is way to much money. Well, never mind, we make more money than they do. And never mind, we have better health care than they do. Never mind that we are willing to spend that. We don't like to spend it when we are looking at it in large, but when it comes time to save our lives or our health, we are glad to spend that kind of money.

We don't know what the threshold is, but our GDP, about 14\1/2\ percent spending, some say as high as 16 percent, we spend too much money; so, therefore, we should solve the problem by what? This is this two plus two. What the President proposed to us didn't spend less money. Anybody in third grade, if you say you have a problem with spending too much money, what do you do about that, you could hand them a 50-cent allowance, and you spend a quarter, not all 50 cents, and a kid can understand that at age 6 or 7, maybe even less than that.

But we are here listening to, being browbeaten and demagogued because we have a health care policy that spends too much money. It is 9.5 percent in the rest of the industrialized world and 14.5 percent here in the United States. So what does the President propose to do about solving spending too much money? Spend more. Spend at least a trillion more.

If you look at the real costs involved, look at Judd Gregg's numbers, the first real 10 years, it is $2.5 trillion more. If you look at the contingent liabilities that go along with this and all of the other components, it may be as high as $6 trillion more. So the problem of spending too much money is solved supposedly in a rational fashion and advocated by the President, the Speaker of the House, the majority leader of the United States Senate, and all of the people that line up to vote for their bills, solve the problem of spending too much money by spending a lot more money.

Now we have kind of forgotten about all of the browbeating that went on about we need more competition in health care insurance. The President made that argument over and over again. Well, he has the bully pulpit, but, you know, they have yet to invent the saw that will cut off the branch of truth. We can go out and stand on the branch of truth and we can say, All right, how many insurance companies do you need in America, Mr. President, to have the extra competition? Funny, a guy that doesn't much believe in the free market system thinks we ought to inject competition into the health insurance industry. So the President wants one more health insurance company in America and then that is going to fix the problems.

So I ask a simple question: How many companies are there in America? The answer comes back, 1,300; 1,300 health insurance companies, Mr. Speaker. And that is a little bit of a round number. So if you have all of these companies that are competing, 1,300 of them--I have never had that much competition, and I made my living on low bid in the construction business. When I had seven or eight or nine people bidding against me, I already knew somebody was going to make a mistake on the bid and lose money and take the chance for profit away from the rest of us.

So if there are 1,300 companies and they are competing, throwing one more in there doesn't really help that mix. But it wasn't the President's idea to provide more competition anyway; he just thought we would believe that. His idea was to get government in the business of providing that which the people in the private sector could do very well themselves.

And, by the way, these 1,300 companies offer a different variety of policies that individuals could shop and buy, approximately 100,000 different policy varieties, Mr. Speaker. So you can multiply 100,000 policies out there and you can look at 1,300 companies that are brokering them, and imagine how is it the Federal Government getting into the business could legitimately compete with those kinds of entities.

And if you want more competition, the way you provide that is open up the trade from State to State so people can buy health insurance in Tennessee instead of New Jersey. The gentleman from Tennessee knows what that is like. That would make sure that all 1,300 companies competed against each other, and these 100,000 policy varieties would probably get to be less because they wouldn't have to accommodate some of the silly mandates that come down from the States.

So a young man buying health insurance in New Jersey, a healthy 25- year-old might pay $6,000 a year for a typical policy. Or he could go to Kentucky where there are fewer mandates, and a similar but not identical policy might cost that same individual $1,000. Now, what kind of a smart, young person usually on a limited budget would write a check for $6,000 if they could write a check for $1,000. Wouldn't we then have more people insured if they had more options? That's the answer.

Furthermore, there are things we want to fix. We want to fix lawsuit abuse. The health insurance underwriters produced a number. The one that I trust the most--and I have seen numbers on the cost of lawsuit abuse in America on health care to go as low as 5.5 percent of the overall cost of health care services provided. I have seen it go as high as over 30 percent. The number that I trust is 8.5 percent. So 8.5 percent of the cost of health care in America is $203 billion a year, and this is included in the additional tests that have to be given because they are done for defensive medicine purposes. Also, the litigation and settlements that don't have a medical reason for them. We want people to be whole. If they have suffered from malpractice, the legitimate system is there, but the abuse has taken this way out of sight. So $203 billion a year going almost all of it to the trial lawyers, not to the patients but the trial lawyers.

And do you think there is a single Democrat in the House of Representatives or a single Democrat in the Senate who would stand up and say this is completely and totally utterly wrong to be funding trial lawyers on the backs of health care patients and acting like we are reforming health care and protecting the trial lawyers completely, not allowing insurance to be sold across State lines, and denying full deductibility for everybody's health insurance premiums?

I had a conversation with an orthopedic surgeon a couple of months ago. He said to me, I have a small practice. He said 95 percent of the MRIs that he orders are completely unnecessary except he has to cover everything because someone might try to hit the jackpot. So he has to order those tests. Everybody in the business orders all of those tests.

If you cut out that 95 percent, his number is that it costs patient's insurance companies, taxpayers, a million dollars a year just to fund the unnecessary tests in one that he calls a small practice. That gives you an implication. You can multiply that $1 million across the whole country, and what you come up with is $203 billion in additional costs. We can't get them all out of there. There is a bill that we have introduced that finds about $54 billion over 10 years. I think it ought to be tougher than that. I think we ought to tighten this thing down more.

The argument again that has been made out of the White House and out of the majority party and from the Speaker's office itself, too, is that Republicans don't have any solutions. Well, they must have sat up some night in one of those formerly smoke-filled rooms to come up with an idea like that. It is completely and utterly false, Mr. Speaker. Republicans have introduced at least 42 separate bills in this 111th Congress that reform health care. And I can tell you exactly how many of them were incorporated into this document that was promised to be a bipartisan document, and that is a complete double aught goose egg. None. No free market solutions, no patient choice solutions, no medical malpractice lawsuit abuse reform, no selling insurance across State lines, no full deductibility, no real transparency, none of the components that give people options and choices have been considered.

And why? Because if you put free market solutions in and you give people the liberty and the freedom to make their own decisions on health care, first, they are going to take a financial responsibility and a personal responsibility. If you help out on the lawsuit abuse, more people are going to say, I don't need that test either, Doctor, and so let's save the money and not do that. But the bottom line is Republicans have always injected free market solutions in place; for example, health savings accounts.

Health saving accounts are just starting to grow the way they need to. That is 2003 legislation, wiped out by this proposal that comes from Speaker Pelosi, the President, and Harry Reid. No more health savings accounts if you read the legislation and figure out how it is going to come out. Imagine this, Mr. Speaker. If a young couple had engaged in health savings accounts when it was first set up by this Congress in 2003 and they invested $5,150 as the maximum amount into their health savings account, and if they spent $2,000 a year out of that health savings account in legitimate expenses and accrued the balance of that account at 4 percent per annum and compounded it, they would reach retirement age, the two of them in reasonably good health with $950,000 in their health savings account.

And what is the interest that Charlie Rangel has on that: Tax it. They want to tax it. I want to give an incentive to buy a Medicare replacement policy and let them keep the change. That Medicare replacement policy would cost about $72,000 per person today. That is one of the Republican solutions, but it doesn't fit very well with socialized medicine, you know. That is what happens.

This is an effort to try to mix. They didn't try to mix, but the reason it doesn't mix is because it is oil and water. It is freedom and liberty. It is market solutions and individual responsibility and doctor-patient relationships on this side, and over on this side it is socialized medicine, one size fits all. Big Brother at the top draconianly mashes this down on everybody else in America, and you have to accept the policy that they give you and you have to then get in line.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. They are simple, real-world solutions. They are free market solutions. They are commonsense solutions. And there is this other part about human nature. It is helpful when a country has its leaders that believe in the principles that built this as a great Nation, and also understand the human nature part.

There has to be incentives in place. And a nanny state can never be enough of a nanny to take care of people's failings. I think it was Phil Gramm that said this first, that I heard it anyway, and that is you take the safety net out there, that safety net that taught a man to fish, and then you give him the fish instead, and you turn the safety net into a hammock.

So here is the safety net down here, and as Congress keeps cranking that safety net up higher and higher and higher, and it becomes more and more of a cushy hammock. And you know, there is a reason why the most successful civilizations in the world generally originated someplace in a temperate climate instead of down by the equator. Because there wasn't an incentive. You didn't have to prepare for winter.

Where I live, you by golly got to be ready for winter, which means in that window of time that we have from around the first of April until about the first of December you got to get all the things done you are going to get done outside. That means all the food has got to be put up. That means all the staples have to be put in place to get your work done. We got to get our construction work done then, because in the wintertime it gets cold and it gets dark soon. That means you have industrious people.

Now, I am not drawing a comparison between the Mason-Dixon line. I am drawing a comparison between the equator. And I want to make that point clear for my colleagues here. But the industriousness of people, that was necessary. Squirrels put away for the winter, grasshoppers freeze to death. And if you give people the hammock instead of the safety net, they are not going to take care of themselves, and more than likely they are going to have to require us to do that because we are not allowing them to be tested.

There is a value to adversity. When I think of the things that I have gone through, and I don't wish them upon anybody, the challenges that are there, but every one of them put a little more steel in me, a little more mettle in me, and caused me to be better organized, work harder, be more industrious, prepare more. And if you take away that reward for planning for your future, you will have people that don't plan for their future.

If you pay young women to have babies if there is not a man in the house, they will have babies. If you pay them as long as they don't go to work, they won't go to work. These are simple things that anybody can understand that seem to have completely escaped the President of the United States and the majority party and the troika of leadership we have in this country called Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. And I just relate a very quick story that was presented to us by Dr. David Janda, who has written a book. He is out of Michigan. He has practiced in Canada. When he first went up there to work in the emergency room, and he is an orthopedic surgeon now, he had a patient come in, a young man who had torn up his knee playing softball, torn meniscus, ACL, I think, one of the ligaments. And he looked at him and he said you need surgery. I can schedule you in the morning. And he is in a Canadian emergency room. Must have been his first day at work. He found out that he couldn't schedule this young man for surgery the next morning. He couldn't even schedule him for a review to get the surgery approved under the Canadian health care plan.

So he had to back up and put him on crutches. And 6 months later this young man was allowed to be examined by the doctor who approves the request for surgery, and 6 months later they actually did the surgery. Almost 1 year to the day, the surgery took place in Canada that would have taken place the very next morning in the United States. Meanwhile, this young man can't go to work, his leg atrophies, he is running around on crutches. His life has been altered because different things happen in your life in that fashion. He didn't get back in the groove. What does that cost when you let people come out? That is an example.

And I know that we have experts here tonight. And so watching that clock tick, I am very interested to hear what the gentleman from Georgia has to say, whether it be about the Hawkeyes, the Yellow Jackets, or his field of expertise.

And reclaiming before I yield, I want to pose a question here for consideration. Canadian health care plan, the average length of time to wait for a knee replacement is 340 days, a hip replacement 196 days. Where I come from, we don't stand in line. I went to Moscow a while back, and I watched people hunched over in their shoulders with their big coats and hats walking around looking for a line to stand in. And then when they got to the end of the line, then they went and looked for another line to stand in. I think a lot of times they didn't even know why they were even standing in line.

And it occurred to me, and it may not be universally true, but it occurred to me that free people don't stand in line. And if you are standing in line at Kentucky Fried Chicken, that means that somebody ought to have a free market opportunity to set something up next door. And people will go over there and get their service. But that is what the free market principle does. People don't stand in line when it is a free market principle. I would submit also that people die in line.

I yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota.

The gentlelady from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time, I would propose that it actually goes another step yet, and that is, we talked about the government takeover of the private sector, and we talked about between 30 percent and 33 percent of the private-sector profits nationalized by mostly this President's administration. We've seen the nationalization take place, the government takeover, but the most personal and private property we have is our own bodies. This is a government nationalization, a government takeover of our individual persons and bodies, managing our health care and seeking to tell us what we can eat and what we can't, what we can drink and what we can't, managing our own personal bodies. What could be a more egregious violation of liberty and freedom than that?

I would like to pose a question for a response here and maybe go down through some things in my mind and see if there is dissent among the esteemed Members of Congress that are here on the floor.

First I would ask you, if they impose a centrally controlled system of government-run health care, will it result in a loss of personal and economic liberties? And is it an indisputable violation of the principle of limited government established by the Constitution? Would you agree with that?

I will ask another question. If they impose a government-run health care system, would such system result in increased costs in taxes to individuals, to families, to businesses, as well as to all taxpayers at the Federal, State and local levels?

What kind of harm would that do to the American economy and the businesses and jobs and productivity and quality of life?

I will yield.

Reclaiming my time, the value of life changes.

And another point, a point that I think John Shadegg made very well, is that this policy here--whatever number they attach to it or whatever they might try to do--will have mandates in it. And what it will do is it will require certain health insurance policies to have those mandates covered in there, and it mandates that people buy them or employers provide them. And his case is that that's a tax. I would ask the man who is the judge if he could explain why it's a tax when the government makes someone buy a policy and then takes it out of their taxes if they don't and puts them in debtors prison if they hold back. If you have to buy something, why does that make it a tax?

They're polar opposites, Mr. Gohmert; they're Tennessee and Minnesota.

Should they be negotiated publicly and free of political favoritism, Mr. Gohmert?

Reclaiming my time, I have this other thought. It occurs to me, and I believe in H.R. 3200 there was an amendment offered that would have required Members of Congress to live under the same law. That offer for that exemption was voted down by Democrats. So if you had a bad policy, wouldn't you want to exempt yourselves from that?

I would ask the gentleman from Tennessee what he thinks of that.

Would you support language that would require that Members of Congress stand in the same shoes as the citizens of America?

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, it's quite likely that this fellow right here, the health choices administration, czarissioner, would probably rule that those high-deductible, high-copayment, low- premium policies wouldn't fit his idea of what health insurance is in America. So the low-income people who can only buy in, according to the way this thing was laid out in negotiations in the Senate, would have about four different tiers of policies.

It's interesting: those who have the lower premiums pay the least amount. Those who have the highest premiums pay the highest amount. The people who can pay the highest premiums are the ones who get the best kind of health insurance out of that, and those who can afford the least have to have the highest copayment, but they can't do the high deductible because that doesn't fit the socialist model. That's part of what's going on.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota and the other participants here tonight from across the board, from Tennessee and Texas.

I will just summarize what's going on here.

I think that a government-run health care system takes away our liberty. It nationalizes our bodies. It will result in increased costs and taxes. The taxes come in the form of mandates as well as whether we think we're paying taxes or premiums. It should not add to the crushing national debt or impose mandates. No tax dollars should go for abortions or for illegal aliens. It should be negotiated publicly, out in the daylight. It should apply to all Members of Congress. It should provide equal protection under the law. It should be free market-based, and it should protect the vital doctor-patient relationship.

That's the summary of what we want to do here, and it's what we have the opportunity to do because the cavalry came riding over the hill just in the nick of time in the form of, today, Senator-elect Scott Brown and, tomorrow, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I apologize for the delay in getting down here to answer the call of the gavel.

There are some distractions taking place around America as we speak. A lot of America has been transfixed by

what has happened this year. I could go back and recap some of the events, but we pretty well know what they are: $700 billion in TARP spending. We've watched three large investment banks be nationalized by the Federal Government. We've watched AIG be nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government. We've watched Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be taken over by the Federal Government and then by an Executive order right before Christmas, have them open up the debt ceiling on Fannie and Freddie to where every American is a guarantor of the national debt, which could be $5.5 trillion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We watched negotiations take place behind the scenes that told the bankruptcy court how to push our automakers through there, and both of them were nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government. Then we watched the $787 billion economic stimulus plan be passed in an urgency that hasn't produced a product and a resolve, except a debt that is going to drag down the economy for the American people. Then behind that, out of this House came hurry up and rush cap-and-trade, cap-and- tax. Pass it. It passed out of the House, and it went over there on the docket of the Senate.

The American people began to realize what was happening. They couldn't believe it. They didn't think, first, the $700 billion TARP was really real. Somehow they trusted that we knew what we were doing here, as a majority. The majority knew what they were doing. So they sat back, and something else happened, and something else happened. That's the list that I have given you, Mr. Speaker.

The American people have risen up. In the month of August, they filled up town hall meetings all across America over and over again. Hundreds and thousands of people came out so that their voice could be heard. Some of them stayed up all night long just to craft their question and do the research so that if they got a chance to ask a Member a question--you could tell there was a tremendous amount of American intensity going on all across America.

Into September and after Labor Day, we came back here and the grind began. The effort to pass a national health care act began. The socialized medicine effort wound up again, and they began pushing this through, Mr. Speaker. Speaker Pelosi's agenda, Harry Reid's agenda, and President Obama's agenda, the idea of nationalizing proud, private sector companies and taking over one-third of the private sector profits and doing so in a little more than a year in the United States.

Then taxing all of our energy and putting restrictions on America's economy, where the end result is to send jobs to India and jobs to China. The American people watched that, and they thought, Well, surely these people know what they're doing. But the more mistakes they saw and the list of misguided liberal ideas that had been passed out of the House and sent to the Senate--and some passed out of the Senate--was stacking up higher and higher and higher, Mr. Speaker. And the American people, in groups, incrementally began to realize that they knew better than the people that were in charge of Congress, and they lost their trust and their faith in the good judgment of the people that they elected in this constitutional Republic, especially when they saw that there was a determination on the part of the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the United States Senate to nationalize our bodies, to take over the management and the control of the most personal and private thing we have, that is this thing inside our skin, our bodies, and the Federal Government deciding what we were going to have for insurance and who was going to pay for it and what the premiums would be and what kind of mandates would be on it and what kind the coverage would be and the decisions that we would have.

And then on top of that, an effort to start to tax, oh, let's say, trans fats or foods that they think we shouldn't eat, or sin taxes so that they could manage our lives, regulate everything that we do, nationalize and take over the control of our very private bodies and then tell us what we can eat and probably when we can sleep. It's way, way too much government intrusion on a proud and independent people.

So when we looked across America, we looked around for, ``from whence cometh our help?'' Well, we had help from all over America. The Tea Party Patriots came up from all over America, and they had huge rallies. They came to this Capitol on 9/12, and they filled this city up with people with American flags and yellow ``Don't Tread on Me'' flags, and they cried out for relief from the overspending that's been taking place. They held up their Constitutions, and tears went down the cheeks of men and women who love this country. It happened all over, in every State, and it really packed people in here in Washington, D.C.

Still their hearts were hardened, and still they were determined to force socialized medicine down the throats of the American people. And then more people came to this Capitol, and as they came closer to a vote on health care here in the House of Representatives, a call went out one day, and 3\1/2\ days later somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 Americans showed up here in the United States Capitol so their voices could be heard. They filled up over here on the west side of the Capitol and packed people out there with their American flags and their yellow ``Don't Tread on Me'' flags. They cried out for relief from this oppressive government that was taking their liberties away and my liberties away.

And still their hearts were hardened, Mr. Speaker. Two days later, we called people back to town. Over here on this side of the Capitol, thousands came again, and again they pleaded with the legislature and the Congress here, Give us some relief. We just want fiscal responsibility. We want our liberties. They told us, We're not Europeans. We're Americans. We're a different people. We didn't come here for dependency. A lot of people came here under the New Hampshire motto, ``Live free or die'' in the United States of America, have a chance to succeed, take the risk of failure, take your own personal responsibilities. All that they asked for was a chance to succeed, and that was taken away, taken away by a President of the United States, a Speaker of the House, and a majority leader in the United States Senate, three people.

The American people began to understand that when the House bill passed here by a vote of 220-215, that if three people changed their minds, that bill goes down in defeat on the House floor, and the rest of that saga doesn't happen, Mr. Speaker. But it went over to the Senate where they ground it out and churned it out and cut deals in back rooms. There are no longer smoke-filled rooms, I don't think. At least there are not on the House side, because by order of the Speaker, that's another freedom that you lost. And if you want to eat an omelet over here in the cafeteria, it shall be made out of the eggs of a free- range hen. Don't forget that, Mr. Speaker. That's another liberty that we've lost.

So the health care bill went to the Senate, and they cut deals. And we heard things like, Louisiana Purchase II. How do you buy off the Senator in Louisiana? And then we heard things like the Florida purchase of the Senator down there so they could be exempted from losing their Medicare Advantage. Then we saw the ``cornhusker kickback,'' Senator Nelson. I can say that now. We changed the rule. Why? Because he lost the amendment, which was the pro-life amendment, the Stupak amendment, in the Senate by a vote of 45-54, so crafted some new language that would still leave the United States Government in the business of brokering abortions through mandated health insurance premiums and got a special exemption for Medicaid increases in Nebraska, the ``cornhusker kickback.''

The American people saw this with revulsion, and still they came forward and produced 60 votes to end the filibuster in the Senate on Christmas Eve, Mr. Speaker. And about that time, I had a conversation with my senior Senator in Iowa, Senator Chuck Grassley, who is engaged in this debate in a serious way with the full intention of trying to find the best policy that could be put together in the legislative body, but he had to walk away from it at a point because they didn't need his vote. They were going to go for the most liberal, the most left-wing, the most leaning into socialism policy that they could pass, and it wasn't going to be

with Republican votes. So that's what they did. They put the votes together to end the filibuster, and the deal was made on the 23rd of December. The vote for the end of the filibuster came up on the morning of the 24th, Christmas Eve morning.

I talked to my senior Senator, and I said, What can we do now, Senator? How do we kill this bill? And he said, We have to pray, and we have to pray for a victory in Massachusetts in the special election in the United States Senate. Mr. Speaker, you know, that didn't seem very plausible at the time. I started to take a look at this, and I followed the Senator's advice. I put a little work in up there myself. I just came back from Massachusetts a few hours ago. A few minutes ago they've announced that Martha Coakley has conceded to Scott Brown.

Mr. Speaker, I want to tell you, there was a shot heard around the world up there in Lexington 200-plus years ago. There is another shot heard around the world tonight. In fact, it's the Scott heard around the world tonight, and it's the American people rejecting socialized medicine. It's the American people rejecting overspending and fiscal irresponsibility and living for the now and passing out the government dole and making sure that nobody has to worry about anything except how their children and grandchildren are going to pay this massive debt that's been created in the trillions of dollars.

Voting here on the floor to increase the national debt by smaller increments, $300 billion, and next time it will be a big old chunk, and there is no restraint whatsoever in spending. The Blue Dogs are more groundhogs. They have gone underground, Mr. Speaker. They used to come down here and harangue Republicans about spending too much money because we would have a little deficit at the end of the year. Now, I have always been for a balanced budget, and I will vote to balance it every time I get the chance. But the Blue Dogs demagogued Republicans for a long time. Now they are groundhogs. They went out and saw their shadow and they went underground because the people on their side of the aisle are spending money irresponsibly, like crazy.

How could you possibly take away, spend enough money and take away enough liberty that the three-and-a-half to one Democrats to Republicans in Massachusetts would elect a Republican to come down to the United States Senate and vote against cloture so that the Harry Reid bill could be killed in the Senate? How could you ever spend that much money? I didn't believe it was possible, Mr. Speaker.

Some would say a miracle has taken place tonight, and I wouldn't disagree with that. I believe there has been intervention. And I am grateful for it. It is what I asked for and what I worked for.

I spent 3 days up there and experienced a lot of good people in Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I want to say into the Record that working with the very liberal agenda of the Massachusetts delegation doesn't always give a person the most positive attitude about the people that they represent. I come from Iowa, where we have the privilege of making a recommendation to America on who we think should be the next President of the United States. We take it seriously, and we have a lot to say about it, and we are grateful for that privilege and that honor, but it is only a recommendation, Mr. Speaker.

Tonight, today and tonight the people of Massachusetts not only made a recommendation, they made a decision, not just for the people of Massachusetts, they made a decision for the United States of America. And that decision is no socialized medicine in this country. Keep our liberty. Get the budget under control. Let people take care of themselves and each other. The government is not a nanny. That is the message that comes from the place where liberty began.

Yesterday I was standing at Plymouth Rock. Three hundred and ninety years ago the Pilgrims landed there. And here we are, 390 years later, Massachusetts, of all improbable places, has brought us back to that rock of liberty. I could not be happier tonight. This is all I could ask for. I am looking forward now to the battle we have ahead to preserve the liberty that we have left and restore some of that we have lost.

I am happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Wyoming (Mrs. Lummis).

Some would say it is all about health care and socialized medicine. In fact, quite a few did say that.

But if you listened a little more closely, they are also telling people on our side of the aisle, Don't you spend too much money, either. We are tired of you being irresponsible with our tax dollars and with our children and grandchildren's future. That is definitely a core in the center of this. And underneath it is that list of things that I gave at the beginning: The TARP funding, the stimulus plan, the nationalization of eight formerly private entities. They see all of that spending, and they see government trying to manage everything. And as liberal as Massachusetts is, they said, Enough.

The first version of it is, and some have said it is all about health care. And for them it was. For others it was health care and too much spending. For others, it was health care, too much spending, and the government injecting themselves in and taking over private businesses. They don't want to have a social democracy here in the United States. They understand we are not Europe. I mean when the first people arrived here in the United States it was down at Jamestown in 1607. And then 1620, the Pilgrims landed up at Plymouth Rock. They came for freedom and liberty, for religious freedom and economic freedom. I think it is the sweetest of symmetry in history to think that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and 390 years later in 2010, their descendants in Massachusetts said, We are going to send you somebody to defend our freedom for America.

I was asking for reinforcements. We are outmanned and we are outgunned. We are fighting a scrappy fight. We need reinforcements, and we get some reinforcements tonight.

I thank the gentlelady from Wyoming for the interesting charts. I think it's important for us to refresh ourselves with these trends consistently. They have changed dramatically under this administration.

I think the American people now realize that Republicans in the majority disappeared here in November of 2006, and Democrats have been in control of this Congress ever since then. In the previous years, they all said that if you would just let them have control of this Congress, things would be better. Give us the majority, they said over and over again. The 30-something Group, which now I think is in the 40- somethings, just consistently, night after night, made the same case: the economy would be a lot better off if you had Democrats in charge.

Well, they came into control in November of 2006 and immediately what we saw was a significant decline in industrial investment. That was the first indicator of what was happening with our economy, and it happened this way: Charlie Rangel became the likely, and not yet formally named, but he did become the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. And he went on the talk show circuit all over America; he was a very busy guy. And the pundits were asking Chairman Rangel, Which one of these Bush tax cuts don't you like, or do you like them all? And Charlie would never be able to say that he liked any of them, but he never really answered back on which ones he didn't like.

But because of his answers and the process of elimination, from November through February it became clear to the investors in America that there wasn't any Bush tax cut that Charlie Rangel liked and that he liked spending better, and he was going to do what he could do to let them expire so that the government could collect more money so they could start more programs and grow government spending.

Investment knew that; business figured it out. And as they did, the capital investment went down; the industrial investment went down almost in direct proportion to the appearances of Charlie Rangel on national TV. Because capital is always smart money--it wouldn't be capital if it weren't smart--and so if the cost of investing in a business goes higher because there's a tax increase, what do you do? You invest less in business because the return isn't as likely or the margin isn't as good.

So when America and the world were promised that the Bush tax cuts were going to be, let me just say that they would say it this way, ``allowed to expire,'' which is willfully kill them and raise taxes, industrial investment dropped off. When industrial investment dropped off, of course when you invest in capital investment, you get a return in productivity. If you stop investing in industrial investment, then you start losing efficiencies.

There was a professor--actually, he was a professor that served underneath Lenin in Russia, his name was Professor Khodnev. He did a study, it's called the Khodnev study. Nobody really knew about this study until MIT University did a computer study some 25-or-so years ago analyzing what happened with capital investment and returns and how the cycles of the economy went. Somebody remembered that they read this old study from Professor

Khodnev, a Russian who was commissioned by Lenin to prove that capitalism would be self-defeating and expire.

So he went through their data and he showed that there was a decline, that unemployment would go up and gross receipts would go down, profits would go down and capital investment would go down. He showed a cycle that showed that when the capitalism of the economy peaked out, it would then drop back down over the course of about 26 years. That showed capitalism's decline. Then it would go back up again to peak out again in another 26 years. It's a 52-year cycle, Professor Khodnev's 52-year cycle.

And so he was commissioned to prove capitalism was self-defeating, but he found out that, well, it defeats itself for a while, but then when you get down to the bottom, entrepreneurs start to come up with good ideas. They all figure out what they're going to do, and they invest in research and development. They implement new ideas, new ideas improve technology, technology improves productivity, improved productivity improves profitability. And when you're down at the bottom of this trough where you're making these investments, your productivity then goes up because of the capital investment at the trough. And as it goes up, your profits go up.

Then you get up there 26 years later to the peak and you realize, this is pretty good, I'm making money, I think I'll coast awhile. They stop making capital investments like they stopped under the beginning of the Rangel term and then your productivity drops off. And you don't realize it for a while. You're not quite in a free fall, but you're coasting. I remember seeing a poster on a fellow's wall years ago of a little kid sitting on a tricycle. He's got his hands on the handlebar and his hair is flying a little bit, he's got his feet off the pedal and a great big grin on his face. He's having fun, but the bottom of the poster says, If you're coasting, you're going downhill.

And we went downhill, Mr. Speaker. We went downhill because taxes were too high and because the wrong message got sent to capital investment, apparently because of Khodnev's theory that was matched by the computer study at MIT, by the way, and you can pick your cycles within the cycles too.

But it's the nature of capitalism to invest money, improve your productivity, and then have that equipment get old. Then you can't compete so much anymore and your productivity then diminishes in the face of this competition. You still get profits because you've got the return back on your capital investment and you own your equipment, but if the profits get narrower and narrower and the harder it is to get that competitive production out of the older equipment, then you peak out and you start to slide. And then you think, what are we going to do now? Well, let's go invent some things. Let's get our productivity back, and let's compete with the rest of the world.

That's what needs to happen, but it has to happen in a competitive environment, Mr. Speaker. It needs to happen with low regulations and low taxation. And you can't be punishing business. And we can't have a President that is demagoging the capital investment in America and telling the bankers that they're greedy. Bankers will pull back.

I think this is a lesson out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: he went around and punished capital throughout the thirties. And then he had his New Deal that he said was a good deal; I said it was a horrible deal. The President said it would have been a better deal only FDR didn't spend enough money. Well, now we're finding out what America thinks of the FDR-New Deal-President-on-steroids Obama who went to Copenhagen twice and went 0 for 2. He wanted to get the World's Fair in Chicago; that was a goose egg. Then he went to Copenhagen to get a deal for cap-and-trade. He got a fig leaf, but not a deal. So that's 0 for 2 in Copenhagen.

Then he went to Virginia to try to win the governorship down there, about three stops across the river. Well, we've got Governor McDonnell. Then he went to New Jersey to save that for the very rich and, as of yesterday, former-Governor Corzine. We have Governor Chris Christie. Then he went to Massachusetts, a place where you would never have to call the President of the United States to Massachusetts for reinforcements, never. No one could imagine a scenario like that and have the President's political capital on the line. He has a situation where he couldn't win because the race was already too close.

But this is worse than taking a black eye, this is a thumping. This is a real thumping. It is a movement along the east coast. And if it can move like this on the east coast, it can really move across the rest of the country as a dynamic sea change.

The American people reject some other things, as I said earlier. The most personal thing you have is your body. And the government comes in and nationalizes General Motors; that's like nationalizing the Dallas Cowboys. But your body? The most private thing you have, to have the government decide they're going to manage it and tell you what you're going to pay for insurance and set up a health choices administration czar to write the rules after the fact? To pass legislation that would appoint someone to have power over life and death, someone to be appointed later--maybe by, let me see, and confirmed by some Senators to be elected later. Well, they have gone way too far. And the wisdom of the Founding Fathers has been, I think, ratified and established.

While I'm here talking about how things have to change, Mr. Speaker, I, not by accident, have an acorn here in my pocket. We know what ACORN has been doing to try to redirect America's destiny. They have admitted to over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms. They have said that they've gone to swing States and turned up their organization. They said they're a 501(3)(C), not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization.

I went down to their headquarters at 2609 Canal Street in New Orleans. And there, where they run most of their operations out of, there was a huge ``Obama for President'' sign right smack dab in the front window of the national headquarters of not-for-profit, tax exempt, 501(C)(3) ACORN campaigning for the President of the United States. He was elected about 8 months earlier, 9 months earlier; they still had a sign in the window. The President wrote the book ``The Audacity of Hope.'' This is a lot of audacity to see what ACORN is doing. They've got to be pulled out by the roots, Mr. Speaker.

That is the next piece that comes along. The American people have to step up and make sure that our elections are legitimate, that they're not stolen, that every American citizen registered to vote that counts a ballot has their vote counted. But the rest of those people don't have any business voting, and once is enough. And the threats that came and the stories that we've heard--we will pick up more about Massachusetts; but I suspect that they're not going to look very far because on a victory you don't go examine very deeply.

Yet, in the close races, those that can scramble things and those that can produce fraudulent voter registration forms, those corrupt criminal enterprises will take and steal our liberty and our freedom, and I think we've seen it happen in several States. Thank God it didn't happen in Massachusetts tonight.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Wyoming.

I thank the gentlelady.

I think there are lots of things that had to do with the election in Massachusetts tonight. I think a lot of it was that the American people are fed up and that they've had enough. You know, people will rise to their responsibility. I don't know how many times I've seen a town that needs a mayor, a small town, but nobody wants to bother. Somebody else can do that. If the wrong person steps forward and says, Well, I'll be mayor, well, we've got a little syndrome--and I won't say the person's name--but it's a syndrome that says, if somebody who's going to do a lousy job steps up, somebody who'll do a good job will step up to protect them from the damage that will be caused. I think that's part of what happened in Massachusetts. I think, when this announcement was made that the Coakley candidate would support the bill, whatever it was that came out behind closed doors, that that really mobilized a lot of people.

We need to be thinking about what actually has happened here. In this House, a bill was passed, and there were amendments that were offered in committee, but there wasn't much of a process here. I offered something like 13 amendments in the Rules Committee at 1:30 in the morning, and there was nobody there to hear that. It's like if a tree falls in the forest. The Rules Committee sat there and chastised me for wasting their time for asking them if they'd give me permission to come down here to the floor and argue for the liberty of the American people. They had the audacity to chastise me for using up paper. It was a waste of paper to print these amendments because, surely, I should have known that Speaker Pelosi wasn't going to let these amendments come to the floor. So what was the point of putting them on record?

My advice to them was take that 2,000-page bill and put the paper back in the tree. The world would have been a lot better off if we'd had a few more trees and a few less 2,000- or now 4,000-page bills.

I think something else we need to talk about, Mr. Speaker, is they're not going to break the filibuster in the United States Senate on this bill anymore. So what kind of shenanigans do we have to guard against?

Are they going to delay the certification of the votes in Massachusetts to try to delay the swear-in of Senator-elect Scott Brown? I like the sound of that. I haven't said that before. Senator- elect Scott Brown. Are they going to delay that? Are they going to try to keep him off the floor?

Are they going to try to push a bill through with the 60 votes they have and defy the will of the American people?

Is Speaker Pelosi going to try to take the Senate version of the bill now, which is something that the House has lined up to reject, and bring it to the floor of the House before people figure out what's going on and send it to the President even though the American people have not just at every opportunity--and the election today was an opportunity today for the voices of the people in Massachusetts and America to be heard. Thank you, Massachusetts. Not only that, the people have stepped up to do everything they can, and they have created opportunities that their voices be heard, and I say still their hearts are hardened.

If they circumvent the will of the American people, if there's a bill from the Senate that gets brought to the floor and sent to the President because everybody over here just sucks it up and decides they're going to go ahead and lose those seats, there will be holy thunder to pay in the ballot box in November. I pray the streets will be peaceful until then, and I'm not sure they will be, Mr. Speaker.

This is a rejection. This is a referendum on socialized medicine in Massachusetts today. This is President Obama's socialized medicine agenda rejected in Massachusetts. This is heavy-handed legislation and backroom dealing rejected in Massachusetts. This is special deals for different States, exemptions, carve-outs for Florida, Louisiana and Nebraska and others rejected by the people in Massachusetts. No secret deals. That's all rejected by people in Massachusetts.

A situation that we have now is--and I said this going into the election a year ago November--excuse me. Well, it was last November actually. Going into the election, I said, If you elect Barack Obama as President of the United States and if you return majorities to the House of Representatives for Democrats and to the United States Senate--and I didn't anticipate it was going to be 60. I think, if you went back and did a recount in Minnesota, it wouldn't have been 60, but that's what it turned out to be--I predicted then that those majorities and a President Obama, the three of them--President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Harry Reid--could go in a phone booth and dictate to America what they wanted to do to this country. I put that in an op-ed here a couple of days ago, or at least in a press release, because I wanted to make sure it was down in print.

There is no formal function that has taken place in the House of Representatives all year long or in the United States Senate all year long that controls the negotiations on the part of the ruling troika in America--Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. They plan to and strategize to draft a whole new bill, one that's not guided by anything except their judgment on whether they can get the votes to pass it and bring it directly to the floor of the House of Representatives--bypass the committee process, not allow any amendments, just write a draconian bill like King George would write. You know, he vetoed the will of the colonists, and now the colonists have vetoed the will of the President today.

I yield.

I thank the gentlelady. This is an exhilarating day for a lot of reasons, and many of us have poured our hearts and souls into this. I have argued that even when you are surrounded and there isn't hope, it is no time to give up because you never know when the cavalry is going to come over the hill. Well, they came over the hill in Massachusetts today.

There was a fellow that gave up, though, and I think it is important to put this into the Congressional Record.

[From the Washington Times]

Bookie Pays Off Early, Predicts Brown Win

(By Joseph Curl)

Boston On Monday, an Irish bookie paid off bettors who had

wagered that state Sen. Scott Brown, a conservative

Republican, would win the special election for the

Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat held for nearly 50 years by

liberal Democratic icon Edward M. Kennedy.

``Enough is enough. It seems that Senator Brown just has to

get out of bed tomorrow to win convincingly. As far as we're

concerned, this race is well and truly over,'' said Paddy

Power, Ireland's largest bookmaker, 24 hours before the

actual election.

Before shutting down the betting, Mr. Brown had gone from

5-4 odds to 1-5 (meaning if a bettor put down $5, they only

stood to make $1 if Mr. Brown wins). The odds against his

opponent--Democrat Martha Coakley, the state's attorney

general--soared from 4-7 to win to 3-1 to lose.

``Paddy Power has also cut the odds on the Republicans

winning the 2012 presidential election from 11-10 to evens

and have installed Senator Scott Brown at odds of 20-1 to win

the Republican presidential nomination in 2012,'' the

bookmaker said.

Mr. Brown, Mrs. Coakley and Joseph Kennedy, a Libertarian

who is running as an independent, entered the final day of

campaigning before Tuesday's special election to fill the

U.S. Senate seat left empty by the death of Edward M.

Kennedy.

The Irish bookie also paid off early on the 2008

presidential election. About a week before Election Day, Mr.

Power paid out more than $1 million to all bettors who

wagered on then-Sen. Barack Obama, saying Sen. John McCain

was too far behind in the polls to win.

One fellow gave up, and his name is Paddy Power. He is the lead bookie from Ireland. This is in the Washington Times printed today, so you can guess he capitulated sometime in the night, and it made the Washington Times. Paddy Power started to pay out the bets to the people that bet that Brown would be elected over Coakley today. And he said the polls were far enough apart that he didn't need to wait until the polls closed and they counted the votes. It was over. So Paddy paid out somewhere around--here we go. Mr. Brown had gone from 5-4 odds to 1-5. Meaning that if you bet $5 that he would win, you would pay out $1. And so Coakley went from 4-7 odds to 3-1.

Now, the people from Nevada would understand all that instinctively, but I believe that, if I read this right, Mr. Power paid out more than $1 million to all betters who wagered on the Obama race. So he paid out the bets. He just decided that he didn't need to wait for the polls to be counted. He gave up, but he predicted it right.

From my view, Mr. Speaker, I think when we have a public policy that is completely wrong, that violates the Constitution and it violates the spirit of the American people, in fact diminishes and damages, the American people should never give up, should never give up until it is all over. Then, you figure out how to start it all over again.

I had a poster in my construction company office for years, and I just found it as I cleaned out my office over the Christmas break and I was snowed in. It was of this shore bird, a tall, long-legged bird, and he was swallowing a frog. And the frog is going down the throat of this bird, but the frog has his arms out and he is holding that bird by the throat. He is not going to be let up, or if he does he will be swallowed. The message is, Never give up.

We didn't give up in this House. A lot of us stood and we fought. And we have got a lot of battles ahead of us, but the cavalry has arrived, we have got reinforcements. And now, there are people who will not be sleeping tonight trying to figure out how to pass a bill the American people don't want.

I think that this time in history, this vote and this election and this special election in Massachusetts represents the most significant congressional race in my lifetime and maybe in the history of the United States. Time will tell. Time will tell on that. But I am exhilarated to see the spirit of freedom and liberty that has emerged in a place where we didn't see a lot of that in the past.

I yield to the gentlelady, and then I will come back with any closing comments.

I thank the gentlelady for joining me tonight in this Special Order.

You have heard, Mr. Speaker, my enthusiasm to put an end to this socialized medicine bill. You haven't heard what has been refreshed, at least, although I am confident you have heard, the things that the Republicans would like to do.

Republicans have introduced at least 42 different health care bills here in this Congress. We have passed good pieces of legislation in the past when we were in the majority and sent them over to the Senate, where the trial lawyers blocked any reform. And one of those is to reform lawsuit abuse in medical malpractice.

The number that I get from the health insurance underwriters is 8.5 percent of all our health care costs is wrapped up in lawsuit abuse-- the litigation, the defensive medicine, and the premiums that are unnecessary because of the lawsuit abuse. That 8.5 percent represents $203 billion a year going out unnecessarily wasted out of health care.

This 4,000-page bill. And we don't know how many pages it is now. I don't know if they are back there now writing more pages, or if they are burning up pages trying to balance out their carbon footprint. But in this 4,000-some page bill, there is not anything in there that does one single thing to reduce one penny in unnecessary health care costs that has to do with lawsuit abuse.

So that is number one. We want to fix that. We have introduced legislation on it. We passed it out of the House in 2005 when we were in the majority, and sent it over to the Senate where the trial lawyers blocked it, lawsuit abuse.

John Shadegg for years has been pushing legislation to allow people to

buy health insurance across state lines. So today, in Governor Christie's state, someone who would pay a premium there, a young 25- year-old man, buys a health insurance premium for about $6,000 a year, a healthy young man, can go to Kentucky, can buy a similar--not the same, but a similar policy, for $1,000 a year. So why wouldn't we adopt the Shadegg language and let the people in New Jersey save $5,000, and let them buy that policy in Kentucky until they start to lower the premiums and lower the mandates in New Jersey?

Buying insurance across state lines does a lot to lower the cost of health care. And the President has said there isn't enough competition in the health insurance industry. Remember, he demagogued the health insurance industry mercilessly for a long time: Not enough competition. So he wanted to create a new Federal health insurance company that would offer a handful or a dozen health insurance policies.

Here are the real numbers, Mr. Speaker. There are 1,300 health insurance companies in America--1,300 companies. That is a lot of competition. The President's idea is, well, we need 1,301, then. And that will be the deciding factor. And of those companies, there are approximately 100,000 different varieties of policies. If one wanted to go shopping, you could conceivably buy 100,000 different policies. That is a lot of policies and a lot of options and a lot of companies, and they are not allowed to compete across state lines. In fact, some of them don't want to do that. Some of them want to protect their little bailiwick, and some of them are trying to establish a de facto monopoly in their States. The Shadegg bill fixes that, and it breaks that down and lets people go out of state to buy insurance. Those are two big things.

I want 100 percent deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums. If a corporation or a company, a sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability corporation, if they can deduct health insurance premiums for their employees, why if they don't provide that insurance can't the employee deduct 100 percent of that premium in the same way? It is completely unjust.

When I bring that up, some say it costs too much money. Well, then let's level the tax a little bit. It is $32 billion, if I remember right, on the number. That is not too much money to give people equity and give people justice.

So let's have full deductibility of everybody's premiums. Let's buy insurance across state lines, make all of the insurance companies in the country compete against each other. Let's end this lawsuit abuse, Mr. Speaker. Let's have transparency in billing, so we can start to reduce the cost shifting that takes place. Because some people underpay; others have to overpay.

And, by the way, cutting Medicare by half a trillion dollars and alleging that there is waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption out there-- and they'll be able to find that all if we just let them cut Medicare by half a trillion--how is it the President of the United States can make an allegation that there is waste, fraud, and abuse, and can end corruption to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and not point one finger at the people that are corrupted or doing it? And how is it that the President of the United States can hold a right hostage to an ultimatum?

We have a right to a legitimate government; we have a right to government oversight. If there's waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption in Medicare, we shouldn't have to be held hostage to pass socialized medicine to find out where it is so the government can go fix it. That should happen every day, automatically, every time, by due-diligent public servants. A half a trillion dollar cut. By the way, wiping out Medicare Advantage. Oh, except for Florida. That's the carve-out on there.

The American people are full up to here of those kind of shenanigans. They're tired of special arrangements. They really don't like the idea that everybody's Cadillac health insurance plan is going to be taxed at 40 percent, except the unions. They're not going to be taxed quite so much. Give those an exemption because, after all, they helped the President get elected.

So this is like a huge, right-out-in-the-open, shine-the-spotlight- on-it, political payoff. This is America. And this is what the people in Massachusetts revolted against today. A peaceful revolution. People that came up and said, I'm going to exercise my right at the ballot box. And if they exercise their good judgment and their right at the ballot box, then you don't have to go to the other form of changing government, which gets a little bloody. The French had it kind of rough after our Revolution. We don't want that in this country. We're grateful for people that go to the polls and provide that kind of revolution with good judgment and good energy and good organization and a great and wonderful spirit.

For me, I get to pack 3 days of good memories about Massachusetts into my mind, and I can carry that with me forever. That's something that will never change now. I look forward to going back up there. Massachusetts, that deep, deep blue State turned a little purple today, Mr. Speaker.

So I appreciate your indulgence and you listening and I appreciate the opportunity to address you here before the House of Representatives on this glorious day. I look forward to every day we have from here on out to the end of this session as we shape this policy and we start to move back to sanity in America. I look forward to the elections in November of this year, 2010.

I look forward to the new faces that will come, the freshman class. It will be a large freshman class--a class of vigor, people that are full of energy, that really do come to change this country. I intend to team up with them, bring us a balanced budget, bring us back more liberty, strengthen our families, strengthen our foreign policy and, by the way, while that's going on, we need to shape a President for 2010.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 34 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at 10 a.m.