Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, before I take up the subject that I came here to talk about, I can't help but remark that the gentlelady from Texas said that the people on our side had not had a good thought about how to invest in America. Not a good thought. I would submit that the good thoughts are right there on the immigration naturalization flash cards. What is the economic system of America? Flip the card over, and if you want to be naturalized as a citizen, you need to answer the question this way. Free enterprise capitalism.

Free enterprise capitalism has been the enemy of this administration. Tim Geithner said that free enterprise capitalism is what brought us to the brink of ruin. Can you imagine tearing asunder the very foundation, one of the principal pillars of American exceptionalism, and arguing that those that have stood up and defended it and refurbished it somehow hadn't had a good thought about America.

I would ask again, why do we need African American hospitals? Why can't we have hospitals that take care of God's children? Why can't we all be members of the human race? Why is there any legislation that's brought into this Congress that sets aside special privileges for people based upon their skin color rather than the content of their character? I think that this is the wrong path. We've got to embrace each other as individuals. This wallowing in self-guilt has gone on and on, Madam Speaker.

We had a President--Clinton--that went and apologized to entire continents. Now we have a President Obama that has apologized to entire continents as well for Americanism. In this bill, on page 109 of the bill, we have another apology, an apology from Congress. First, it's got some good things in there. It talks about Native Americans. It recognizes the special legal and political relationship that Indian tribes have in the United States. That's good. It commends the Native Peoples for the thousands of years they have stewarded and protected this land. Part of that's real good. Part of that record's not real good. This doesn't say so. In fact, the third piece says it recognizes that there have been years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes. That's true. There's also another side to that thing that isn't negative.

And now it says, on page 109 of the bill, we, as Congress, ask the President--the United States, acting through Congress, actually--to apologize on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States; as if there were no guilt on the other side.

Madam Speaker, I would direct the attention of this body to the Declaration of Independence. And there, on paragraph 29 of 32, as I count them, it says, and I'm going to stop short of violating the political correctness, but I am going to read directly from the Declaration of Independence.

He has excited domestic insurrections among us--speaking of King George--and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, and there I stop and commend the text of the Declaration of Independence which apparently violates this bill.

I urge the rejection of this rule for this and many other reasons.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my privilege to be recognized and address you here on the floor of the House and pick up-- I think, transition from the discussion that has taken place in the previous hour by the gentlelady from Ohio--and I appreciate the presentation that's been made here--and to fit the breast cancer issue in with the larger health care debate is what I will seek to do, Mr. Speaker.

And that is this: that the question about how breast cancer is treated and how it's tested fits back into the broader question of what happens if we end

up with a national health care act. What happens if we end up with socialized medicine? Do we get more of this or less of this? Do we get more government agencies that are laying out guidelines that are, as I believe--and I agree with the gentlelady from Wyoming and with the doctor from Texas--that do we get more government guidelines that cut down on the costs of the tests but raise the costs in lives? And do we get that in breast cancer, and do we get that on nearly every other aspect of health care?

This debate has gone on and on here on health care, and it reached its crescendo during the month of August in the aftermath of the cap- and-trade bill, the bill that no one read, not one single person read, not one Member of Congress read. I know that no one read the bill--I don't have to ask everyone here--because the bill was not available. When the bill was passed, it was not available in a form that resembled final form.

And I remember Congressman Louie Gohmert come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and raising the question, parliamentary inquiry, Is there a bill in the well? Is there a copy of the final bill, the one that we're debating and the one that we're voting on? But it's not in the well. Not an integrated bill, not with the amendments that were included in that.

And so the final question he asked after a series of them, Can we message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate? Apparently that is what we could do, and that is what happened. That bill, cap-and-trade, sits over there now before the United States Senate, as does a national health care bill. And they are, of course, taking it up and debating it and fitting it around some of these things that they're doing. And it looks like this is the week that the United States Senate turns the focus on their national health care act.

Now, we have taken this argument, policy-by-policy, ideology-by- ideology through this House, but it comes down to this just as a refresher, Mr. Speaker, what brought this all about: increasing costs in health care in the United States and, around the world, a growing focus on health care.

But I think that a lot of it emerged during the Democrat primary for President when Hillary Clinton looked at one point like she would win the nomination. She's the one that led the argument and led the meetings--both open and closed door--for what a lot of America still remembers as HillaryCare back in 1993, 1994, in that era. And since Hillary Clinton knew a lot about health care and that was the centerpiece of her campaign, she brought that to the debate and used that in the primary campaign.

And as the contest for the nomination on the Democrat side for the President shook down to one of two people, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the pressure that Hillary brought into that campaign to raise the issue of health care made it a central issue in the Democrat primary. And it forced, in my opinion, Barack Obama--then-Senator Obama--to run a health care agenda of his own, something to match up to and counteract with and seek to win the debate on the Democrat side of the primary voting aisle. And I believe that the urgency that America has is not reflected exactly off of the data that's out there and the economics of it and the need.

But it's more reflected because there was a political gain to be had in the nomination process for President, especially on the Democrat side, and as that debate emerged, and Barack Obama was successful in winning the nomination and then ultimately the presidency, he carried that mantle of health care reform through the entire process--inspired by Hillary Clinton, I believe--and pushed to a high level of a priority, which I'm convinced, Mr. Speaker, that they believe that it is the highest priority in America. They have made it that. They must believe that, and I'm not challenging that approach. I'm just suggesting that because it was a primary issue in the nominating process for President on the Democrat side, it gained some momentum that it wouldn't have had if we were going to step back and look at the health care issue.

And so it became something that the President, when he was elected, saw as a mandate, a mandate to go in and pass some kind of a national health care act.

Well, you would think that you could go right down through the logic line and flip the toggle switches and get down to something that makes sense. And the principles that were laid out by Barack Obama as a candidate--and later as a President--came down to this. Health care costs too much money. The economy is in a mess, and it's in a downward spiral. We have to fix the economy--this is the President's philosophy, and we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care that costs too much money. That's the rationale. It's threaded through a number of his speeches.

It never seemed rational to me. I couldn't follow the logic of ``the economy's in a mess; we have to fix health care to straighten out the economy; we spend too much on health care, therefore we're going to fix it.'' I can get maybe that far, but then the rationale on my side of the aisle, among Republicans, would be, Well, if we spend too much money on health care, where are we spending it that we don't need to?

The President concludes it's a half-trillion dollars in Medicare, which would inappropriately punish many of the senior citizens in America--some of whom are being led by AARP, who will apparently make more money selling insurance if a bill is passed than they will serving their membership if it's not passed. So they have come out to support this bill.

But the President said, We're spending too much money; let's spend more. And he wants to keep the bill down under $900,000 but the doc fix throws another $243 billion, is the original number, at this and it takes it over a trillion. And if you look at some of the other numbers, if you evaluate this as Judd Gregg did, Senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire, that they're doing the math on this bill in this fashion: 5\1/2\ or so years of expenses, 10 years of tax increase and income. So it shows up to only be a number that at some place around or a little bit under a trillion dollars, Mr. Speaker, in extra costs.

Judd Gregg says it's $2\1/2\ trillion once you take an objective look at the math and at the accounting. If you look at actually 10 years of expenses and 10 years of revenue, it is about a $2\1/2\ trillion dollar bill.

So if the President's statement is that we spend too much money on health care, about 14\1/2\, and some will even say 16 or more percent of our GDP on health care, we spend too much money on health care, therefore we have to solve the problem by spending a lot more. This diabolical, Orwellian logic is something that the American people are still breathlessly amazed that a President and leaders in this country can get by with such statements. Health care costs too much money, so we will spend 1 or 2 or maybe even approaching $3 trillion more, that will solve the problem, Mr. Speaker. If we spend too much money, let's spend a lot more.

Another one of the points is there are too many uninsured in America. Now, over the last 3 or so years, there has been an intentional effort to conflate the two words of ``health care'' and ``health insurance,'' and the effort has been on the part of the people on the left to blur the subject matter of the difference between health care and health insurance. They will say we have too many people that don't have health care in America. But they don't take into account that what health care really means is, do you get treated by doctors and nurses in clinics, hospitals and emergency rooms or don't you? If you get sick or get injured, can you get treatment? The answer to that is yes, everywhere. That's essentially what the law says.

So, according to statute and practice, the health care providers provide everyone access to health care. What we don't have are everybody in America that has their own personal insurance policy. And a lot of people on this side of the aisle have conflated the two terms and said, ``people don't have health care'' when they really mean, ``people don't own their own health insurance policy.'' And so it has been morphed and blended into this idea that somehow there is a right, and some would even argue that within the Constitution there is some kind of a

right that everyone would own their own health insurance policy.

And so they set about to grant or provide a health insurance policy to every American, legal or illegally, lawfully present or not, people that will take care of their own responsibilities and people even that have refused to take care of their own responsibilities, and impose a health insurance policy on them all. And if they are not willing to write a check and pay for the premium or go to work for somebody that will do that or sign up for Medicaid, or, of course, those that are eligible for Medicare, if they are not willing to do that, the IRS will come in and audit them and levy a fine for not having health insurance.

And if this gets bad enough, you can end up in jail for the first time in the history of this country. The Federal Government is putting together a product called a health insurance exchange and approved health insurance policies or the public option, government-run health insurance plan, and if you fail to buy a policy within the statutory guidelines, those that are approved by the Health Choices Administration Commissioner, the czar, the IRS can come in and levy a fee against you, and eventually one could go to jail for tax evasion technically, but not buying a government-imposed health insurance policy actually. It would be the first time in the history of America that the government has produced a product, compelled its citizens to buy the product, and if they refused or failed to, then levy a fine, eventually lock them up in jail. It is the equivalent of debtors' prison for not buying the government-approved version of health insurance. It will be the first time in America.

And the President has said, and this is out of the House version, Mr. Speaker, and I understand the Senate has tweaked that a little bit and maybe taken the jail time out, so now they just put a lien on your house and sell your house. Never fear, though. There is a special way you can get a cheap mortgage in America that has been set up to take care of those people. The government has their fingers in everything.

This has been the most giant leap into socialism that we've had ever since the preparations for the transition that began on the 20th of January of this year. And the President has said, we have too many uninsured. And when you go through the list, they use the number 47 million uninsured. So from that 47 million, I begin to subtract the numbers of people who are eligible under their own employer but just don't opt in, or opt out; and those who are eligible under a government program like Medicaid, and subtract from that number those who are unlawfully present in the United States, where if ICE or the Department of Homeland Security had to deliver them their health insurance policy, they would be compelled to deport them to a foreign country, or those who are lawfully present in the United States but by law are barred for 5 years from having public benefits, and we keep subtracting out of that list those who make over $75,000 a year and don't have their own health insurance. And now with that list, we take the 47 million and we subtract all those in that list that I talked about, those eligible under their employer without it, those eligible for the government, those that make over $75,000 a year, and those who are ineligible because they are illegal aliens or immigrants, and now that 47 million magically becomes 12.1 million, Mr. Speaker; and this 12.1 million Americans without affordable options for health insurance now isn't this massive number that tells us we have a national problem. What it really is, is less than 4 percent of the American population. And we are down to 4 percent of the American population, and the proposal is to change 100 percent of America's health insurance program and America's health care delivery, all of that to try to reduce this number of less than 4 percent down to something that may approach 2 percent after it takes over 100 percent of the program.

With the insurance competition that the President has called for, he said, well, the insurance companies are greedy. He always has to have a straw man to kick over. The insurance companies are greedy. Was it today or yesterday he said, the fat cat bankers, and then sat down and had a meeting with them today. Somebody has to be demonized before we can move forward here. We can't just simply have people with divergent interests that can be brought together that are altruistic and want to engage in the economy and help people. We have 1,300 health insurance companies in America and about 100,000 different policy varieties that can be purchased in the various 50 States, and that isn't exactly that many different companies and policies available to every American because we don't allow Americans, at this point, to buy health insurance across State lines.

It is an easy fix, we tweak that here, John Shadegg's bill that's been out here for about 4 or more years to allow people to buy health insurance across State lines, and magically all 1,300 companies compete against each other, unless they happen to be the same company that's operating in different States, and when that happens, and magically these 100,000 policy varieties become available to everybody in the United States.

And so the idea the President proposes of creating a government-run health insurance company and government-approved health insurance policies to produce more competition for the health insurance companies, if you want more competition, just let people buy insurance across State lines. Magically you've got 1,300 companies competing, 100,000 policies to choose from, and it is far more effective from a competition standpoint than it is to put the government involved and have the government limit, write, regulate and control every health insurance policy in America. And when the President says, Don't worry, if you like your health insurance policy you get to keep it, have you noticed that he hasn't said that in a long time? It has been weeks and weeks, at least by my recollection, that the President has reiterated, if you like your health insurance policy, you get to keep it. The truth is, get ready to lose it. If you have a policy today, under the House version of the bill or anything that I understand under the Senate version of the bill, that policy would have to be cancelled some time between 2011, by 2011 or 2013. It would be cancelled, and there would be a new policy that would have to be issued that met the Federal guidelines. There is no policy in America that the President of the United States with confidence can look at and point to and say, you, Joe the plumber, or you, Sally the doctor, are going to be able to keep the health insurance policy that you have, that you love, that you paid for, because the government may decide that it doesn't have the right benefits to it, it doesn't have the right mandates, and maybe it doesn't cover all the things that they think government should cover.

And so that is just some of the basis for this, Mr. Speaker. There is so much more. And as this debate ensues down on the Senate side of the aisle, right down through those doors, straight across through the Capitol, we are watching a dramatic, and I think a titanic, colossal clash taking place in the Senate right now, and I mean in this period this week. As this unfolds, we need the American people to rise up. We need the American people to speak up. We need the American people to pick up their telephones. We need them to come to this Capitol building. We need them to fill up the Senate. We need them to surround this place and stand here and call out for freedom, call out for liberty, call out for the rights that are in the Constitution and not somebody else's idea of transferring wealth across America and putting it into the pockets of others and taking away the benefits of the people that have been industrious and have been personally responsible.

We take care of everybody in America. Jimmy Carter once said that the people that work should live better than those that don't. I caught that. When he said that, it seemed a little odd to hear that from him. And I don't know that he really ever lived by it, but he said it, and I believe that as well.

This bill is another class level, or it's another take from the rich and give to the poor. It's a class-envy bill. It's born out of spite and born out of class envy and it's driven by ideology and it's driven by the idea of socialized medicine.

Today I was asked to answer a series of questions that were requested by a publication here on the Hill, and it was, What is the biggest problem Republicans have? Mr. Speaker, my answer is fighting off Marxists and socialists that masquerade as liberals and progressives. That's the biggest problem Republicans have now. This is a Marxist and socialist agenda, and that's one of the reasons why the Blue Dogs have gone underground and become groundhogs. The shadow of socialism has pushed them underground. And they're not out here fighting for truth, justice, the American way and a balanced budget and personal responsibility and constitutionalism. They seem to have disappeared from the scene. But 40 or so of them will get a pass from the Speaker of the House and be able to vote ``no'' on this bill if it comes back to this House because there are enough votes stacked up on the Democrat side that about that many will get a pass.

I see that my good friend, Dr. Burgess, who took a small hiatus from the previous Special Order, is here with a brain full of information, Mr. Speaker, for you to absorb and pass along to our colleagues.

I would be very happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Burgess.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. He had me paying attention to those ideas.

From that standpoint on the immigration debate--and that's one that I've been engaged in for a long time--the effort that went out across this Nation to shut down the switchboard and to shut down the servers of the United States Senate sent a message. Yet, as the gentleman from Texas said, about 3 months later, they decided to try it again. They just didn't believe what the American people had told them, and they took another run at it.

On the immigration side of this, this was a bipartisan effort. It had the President of the United States--then President Bush--and significant numbers on the Republican and on the Democrat sides of the aisle. There were more Democrats than Republicans significantly, but this was a bipartisan effort, and it was something that was strategically driven by the White House. It still failed in the face of that effort because the American people rose up.

There isn't any reason, Mr. Speaker, for anybody to believe that the American people can't kill this socialized medicine bill. If they can kill comprehensive amnesty and do so twice in 1 year and do so in the United States Senate, as difficult as it may seem and as determined as the President seems to be, this scenario is doable.

They have learned a few things, too, over there, down that hallway in the United States Senate and off into their office buildings on the side. They've learned how to shut their phones off, and they've learned how to shut down their fax machines, and they've learned how to, essentially, plug their ears and wait for the noise of the American people to settle down, and then we'll try to pass something.

I'm suggesting this, that the Senators need to have a personal experience. They and their staffs need to have a personal experience--a respectful, polite and nonthreatening personal experience. Especially if you're a Senator, you probably have your finger on the political barometer, and have a real sense of what the public's mood is. You can run a poll, and you can hire a pollster to find out where the American people are or you can make a lot of phone calls and can send out emails and can send out letters. You can listen to people or you can put the data together, but you also have to measure the intensity. The intensity is the other part.

If we have an issue out here that I'm ambivalent about--and I really haven't found that issue yet, Mr. Speaker, on which I am. Hypothetically, if I'm ambivalent about an issue and if, on the one hand, I'm for it and if, on the other hand, I'm against it and if half of the public is for it and if half of them is against it, how would one decide then which side of the issue to come down on?

You have to pay attention to the people who have intensity. I pay attention to the people in this Congress who come in who have intensity--to people like Dr. Burgess who have intensity and to the people who have been elected to this Congress who are vocal and aggressive and who know what they believe because they've lived it. I pay attention to that level of intensity.

As to the level of intensity that needs to come from the American people, this is the week. This is the week for that intensity. So, if you're ambivalent, fine. You can sit home and send an email. If you care, you can make a phone call. If you care more, you can go down to your Senators' district offices. If you care more yet, you can come to Washington, D.C. At 1:30 tomorrow, there will be a large gathering in the park just north of the Senate Chamber. From there, we are going to see how much the American people care.

They've been called to rally to defend their liberty a number of times this year. We saw it on April 15 in a big way. We saw it on September 12 in a big way. We saw it here on November 5 and on November 7. On November 5, there were 20,000 to 50,000 or more people here outside this Capitol building, who came here and said, Don't take my liberty. Let me own my own health insurance policy. Don't tell me the

standards by which I can buy it. Let me have my own freedom, my own liberty. I don't need government-run health care in America.

That was the message. Of that whole group of people who was there-- tens of thousands--any one of them would have fit just perfectly at my own church picnic. They are salt-of-the-Earth, American, liberty- loving, constitutionalist, fiscally responsible, family people from across America. They are the people who are this American family who don't want to see a socialized America. They understand we are a unique people and that we are not social democracy Europe.

The socialists, for the most part, stayed in Europe. Freedom-loving people came here. There is a certain vitality in Americans which is unique to the rest of the world. It was hard to get here. You had to take a chance and maybe be an indentured servant; but earn your way across the Atlantic, and you could settle in and maybe drive a stake in Iowa and homestead 160 acres. One of my great-grandparents was an indentured servant who worked in a stable in Baltimore for 7 years before he got his passage worked off. These were people with a dream, who just wanted to have a start because we had economic opportunity. We had liberty, and they could shape their own lives.

So we got the vitality from every donor civilization in the world. As for everybody who sends people here--every country--whatever would be the particular characteristics of their cultures, there is always that skim off the top, the cream off the top, which is the vitality of a culture, the vitality of a civilization.

One of the reasons America has such vitality is that we skimmed the cream, and they came here. They arrived in America with almost unlimited natural resources, low-income or no taxation, no regulation, manifest destiny, a Protestant work ethic--and Catholics got with it pretty good--and with a foundation rooted in Christian morality and work ethic. That giant petri dish created this teeming America that settled the continent from sea to shining sea in the blink of a historical eye.

We are not anybody else in the world. We are a unique people. We live in the unchallenged greatest nation on Earth, that the Earth has ever seen. I'm watching it be torn apart by people who don't understand what I've just said, by people who get out of bed every day and look around. They see these beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, and they can't wait to get out their jackhammers and chisel away at those pillars of American exceptionalism, which are the foundation that made this a great nation.

So now we've seen eight huge entities nationalized, most of it under this administration but not all of it. There are three large investment banks; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, AIG, all of that was nationalized. According to a Wall Street Journal article, one-third of the private sector profits have been nationalized, mostly by this administration, without an exit strategy.

Right away they set up the payroll czar to go in and tell the banks and the other institutions that they are paying too much to their executives. Now we have Barney Frank's Financial Services bill, which is about ideology, as the gentleman from Texas said, as much as socialized medicine is about ideology and not about a practical application. In that bill it looks like they are going to be able to regulate all the financial institutions they take an interest in--with a little carve-out there--and tell those institutions what they are going to pay their people probably right on down to the person that scrubs the floor at night.

This freedom in this country has been dramatically diminished by the Pelosi Congress and the Obama presidency. This liberty that America needs to maintain our vitality is being quashed by the socialization, the nationalization of our economy, and the intentional creation of a dependency class of people that are designed to be the political base that will support those who will continue to do class-envy politics, share the wealth, so to speak.

By the way, that ``share the wealth'' phrase that came out of President Obama's mouth as a candidate in speaking to Joe the Plumber is in the mission statement of ACORN.

I am happy yield to the gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

It strikes me that the Secretary of the Treasury, I believe, is a natural-born citizen, not a naturalized citizen. Had he been a naturalized citizen, he would have had to pass the test. There are flash cards that are made available by USCIS, United States Citizenship Immigration Services. It's a stack of these glossy flash cards to train with so you can learn to pass a naturalization test.

In these flash cards it will be, for example on one side, when was the Declaration of Independence signed? Flip it over to the other side, July 4, 1776.

Who is the Father of our country? Flip it over. George Washington.

What is the economic system of the United States? Flip it over. Free enterprise capitalism.

You can't even be naturalized as a citizen of the United States unless you can pass that test. Apparently the Secretary of the Treasury says that free enterprise capitalism is what brought us to the brink of ruin.

It's an astonishing, breathtaking thing. It's no wonder we can't get this economy sorted out. I sent a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury after a hearing that we had, a joint hearing between Financial Services and the Department of Agriculture to deal with derivatives and credit default swaps. His question was this, that President Obama has been elected at least in part because he criticized President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq.

Now, here is a list of the companies that have been nationalized by this administration and initiated in the previous administration, to be fair. I would like to know with each of these companies, Mr. Secretary, what is your exit strategy? How do you go about divesting the taxpayers' investment in these companies that were formerly private and get them, they are now managed and controlled, with influence control, if not majority control, how do you get them back into the private sector so that they can be allowed to succeed and fail?

It was a long time getting the answer back, and it took a long time to analyze the answer, but it boiled down to well, there really isn't a plan, but the Secretary will know when the time is right and take those steps when it's appropriate. That, I think, Mr. Speaker, tells us what's going on here.

If the Secretary of the Treasury believes that free enterprise capitalism brought us to the brink of ruin, I can't believe that he would be willing then to divest the Federal Government from the private sector, of their shares of investment in these formerly private-sector companies. That is, it is the socialization of our economy.

The 33 and so percent, as The Wall Street Journal said of the private-sector profits, and if they take on this health care industry, that's going to be another, another one-sixth of our economy. If that, if that goes on, that's going to take us up to or greater than half of the private sector that we had in the past.

Mr. Speaker, I think it's important that we understand that there are a couple of different sectors to the economy. One of them is the private sector. It's the growth sector. It's where people produce goods and services that have value. There are about three different levels of the value that an economy needs to produce. First, the economy needs to produce things that people must have for survival. I mean, we have talked about it for more than 50 years and called it food, clothing, and shelter, the things that are necessary for the survival of mankind; you have to have food, clothing and shelter. They come from generally out of the Earth, one way or another. So that's the number one level of our economy, those necessities for survival.

The second level, and that's private sector. Government produces hardly anything that's necessary for survival. They regulate, and they slow down the actual efficient production of those things that we need for survival.

The second level, those things that improve our efficiency, technology, for example, information technology, industrial technology, that caused us to be more efficient. Those efficiencies help us produce more of the necessities of life. The second part of the economy that's gotten the most important value is the second level that produces the efficiencies in our economy.

The third level of the private-sector economy is the disposable income. That's the income that we use to go do the things that we enjoy, to give our life relaxation and travel on vacation, do those things, or we buy the things that we don't have to have, not necessities, but the extras in life.

Those three levels, all private sector, all rooted back in, if you chase them back, you cannot go on vacation, and you can pass up buying that fancy pair of shoes or that nice car or the cabin at the lake or the boat or whatever it might be, and then those are eliminating the things that are not necessities of life.

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And you can actually sacrifice some of the things out of the second level of our economy that help with our efficiency, but when get down to the necessities, it's life itself. All of this is rooted in the private sector. The other side of this economy, the public sector of the economy, is where government comes in and they decide that they're going to redistribute wealth and they're going to provide services that they think that people need, and for some degree people have decided they would like to have government provide some of those services. But government regulates, government slows down and intimidates private sector commerce, and once you get to a certain place over the things that are necessary for government. For example, we build roads with user fees and less so with general fund tax fees. So if you drive on the road, you pay the tax for your gallon of gas that goes in the tank and you help build the road. That's a user fee. But things that government provides that are necessary, military, for example, Department of Defense, that provides our safety and our security. Without it, we can't function. We can't have legitimate forms of government. Government provides other things that are legitimate; the judicial branch of government, for example, so that we can have law and order. And law enforcement, while I'm on the subject matter.

As we look down through government, the list becomes less and less of a necessity and more and more of a redistribution of wealth. At a certain point when your safety and security are there and they're secured and a line goes across to providing government services so we don't have to worry about them ourselves, every time we pay a tax dollar, we also give up a measure of our liberty, a measure of our freedom, because government makes the decision and the people that are producing in the private sector make less of a decision.

So I'll say these two sectors of the economy, the private sector, from which all new wealth emanates, and the public sector--when I'm in a crankier mood, I call it the parasitic sector--of government, the sector of government that sucks the lifeblood out of the private sector economy. The public sector--the parasitic sector--is growing and it's growing by leaps and bounds, by the trillions of dollars, and there are less and less decisions made by capital which always is rational and more and more decisions made by government. We had a car czar that had neither made a car nor sold one. I don't even know that he owned one. He's not with us anymore. But we have a government of people that haven't written out paychecks, that have not started a business, have not operated a business. If they've operated in the private sector, they started in up near the top of a department and never saw the inner workings of the bottom of what small business is like that we've got to have to grow us into the larger businesses.

We need to have the underpinnings of American exceptionalism put back underneath us again. We've got to refurbish those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism. We've got to promote liberty and encourage the freedom that's necessary; and people have to be willing to take risks. Capital has got to be able to make a rational decision but capital also has to know--that's investors' money, Mr. Speaker--has to know that they will also, if they fail, they're going to lose their investment, and someone else will pick up a bargain and build it on what was left of the company that went under. I've stared that in the eye. I went through the eighties with my

construction company. We had our ups and downs. I know what it's like to live with a knot in my gut for 3\1/2\ years, to hold the company together. And we succeeded. Others around me did not. Some people got drug down and the load was heavy. And others succeeded significantly beyond a level where I did; and I'm glad that everybody had the opportunity to do that. And if the government comes in and then appoints an overseer, which is what the Barney Frank Financial Services bill does, and they go in and look at capital investments and business management and they decide who's going to make how much money with another regulator for our financial institutions, we have given up a big piece of our liberty, a big piece of our freedom.

But what we're focused on, Mr. Speaker, we're focused on this week, this national health care act, this socialized medicine act that barely passed out of the House of Representatives, that is down there now being debated in the United States Senate, and the issues as set before the Senate seem to be a couple of big ones:

One of them is the pro-life amendment. Here it was the Stupak amendment where 64 Democrats had the opportunity to vote, to put up a pro-life vote that they didn't believe that the taxpayers of America should be compelled to fund abortions through money that is extracted from them unwillingly. So, therefore, the Stupak amendment came up, and 64 Democrats voted for it. Sixty-four Democrats and, I believe, every Republican are on record saying I am pro-life and I don't believe, or at least we should not compel American taxpayers to fund abortion when they're funding a socialized medicine program. That was what the Stupak amendment actually was. Even though it made exceptions for rape and incest, even though it doesn't fit with the tenets of the Catholic Church, it was a subject that was raised and pushed through here.

Now with the Stupak amendment passing, now these 64 Democrats have cover. Now if a bill comes back down this hallway through the center of the Capitol, it's had that language, not necessarily stripped out. When Senator Ben Nelson offered similar and some said identical language to the Stupak pro-life amendment, it was defeated in the Senate. And so the Senate bill doesn't have a pro-life amendment in it. And if it comes back to this House, we will see, I think, a conference committee that is appointed and stacked by Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid and I think they are likely to strip the Stupak amendment out and drop it back in here to the House; and what I think will happen will be some of those 64 Democrats that said, I'm pro-life, here's my vote for the Stupak amendment, I think they'll roll over and they'll say, I voted for the Stupak amendment, but on balance I think this bill is good, even though we're going to compel Americans to fund abortions in the United States. That's what they're set up to do and that's the dynamics; and we need people in the Senate to kill this bill, so that this scenario doesn't play out here in the House.

Another piece is this public option, the public option that seems to be, or the government option that seems to be rejected by the Senate, but the liberals in the House insist that there be a government health care option; so they're trying to configure a way that they can define something that isn't necessarily a government option that can come to conference and be merged together. And right now the staff in the House and the staff in the Senate are merging these two bills, trying to get ready to drop something on and give America a Christmas that will be the least merry of anything in my lifetime. It will be something that dramatically erodes the liberty in America.

But those are the two big issues: Is it going to be a pro-life bill? And is it going to have in it a government option? I suggest that they will put together and construct a scenario by which they will be trying to compel taxpayers to fund abortions and compel taxpayers to buy government insurance because, as the gentleman from Texas said, it is about ideology, it's not about policy, it's not about producing the best result because if they did that, if they were for that, they would be for reforming medical malpractice abuse in America, lawsuit abuse reform, they would be for selling insurance across State lines, providing full deductibility for everybody's health insurance, transparency in billing.

The list of things that we can do that are constructive, that don't cost money, is long indeed. But tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and every day this week until somebody loses their nerve, the United States Senate needs to be jammed, it needs to be filled up with people that come here respectfully and politely and follow the rules and follow the law. But give the Senators and their staff in Washington, D.C., in their district offices at home and their offices here a personal experience. It needs to happen this way, Mr. Speaker--the American people need to let these Senators know that there will be a reckoning if their liberty is taken from them and this socialized medicine bill is imposed upon them. I don't want to see it, I don't want to see it for my children, I don't want to see it for my grandchildren. I don't want to see it for America's destiny. I don't want to see America's destiny, the vitality of America's destiny stripped away piece by piece as we leap off the abyss into socialism and embrace the European version of a social democracy and more, a managed economy, managed health care, very limited freedom. The only budget that they didn't grow was the Department of Defense budget. Everything else has to have a 10 percent or more up. The idea that you can borrow from your grandchildren that have not yet been born and compel them to pay debts today and spend money without any sense of responsibility, believing that that grows the economy, when we've established that even the Secretary of the Treasury believes that free enterprise capitalism is what brought this economy to the brink of ruin.

Mr. Speaker, we need new people with clear thought and a respect for America and the strength of America. We need the right people in charge in this country, because, as I have often said, you don't take a poodle to a coon hunt. You want to take a registered coonhound along. He's got it in his blood, he understands it. You can train a poodle to bark treed, but his heart's not in it. These people won't even bark treed, and we need the right people in charge. And tomorrow we're going to see the American people step up to this Capitol, and they're going to demand that we preserve their liberty.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 1 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, December 15, 2009, at 9 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives. As I listened to the dialogue of my colleagues, Mr. Lungren of California and Mr. Gohmert of Texas, I can't help but pick up a little bit where they left off.

I would like to address the situation of freedom, and then I hope to transition it into some other subject matters, all of them related to the subject matter that has been brought up by Mr. Lungren, who knows it well; and that is to propose a concept that's going on here that has to do with our western civilization. And as we studied western civilization, and maybe it has become a dirty word among the politically correct left, but it clearly has been a subject matter for hundreds of years in one way or another; and as we have watched what has happened across Europe and compare it to what happens here in the United States, there are those, especially on this side of the aisle, that believe somehow we're an appendage of the modern, forward- thinking, liberated, progressive Europeans who have become a social democracy and in many cases a post-Christian Europe.

I will argue, and I will to greater length, that we are a different country, that we're founded on Christian principles, Judeo-Christian values, and we've learned to assimilate people into this culture, but the foundation of our culture has been the law, the rule of law, and the values that flow from the religious foundation of the people that came here to settle this country. They are the ones that wrote the Declaration, they are the ones that wrote the Constitution, they are the ones that ratified it. And the core of the civilization remains the same.

I want to draw this comparison, this juxtaposition, if I might, Madam Speaker, and that is that in Europe for more than 100 years, they have had socialized medicine. It started in Germany under Otto Von Bismarck. He did so for a political reason. It wasn't necessarily a reason of what was best for the German people, it was how Bismarck was able to expand and strengthen his political base. So he looked out across Germany and decided that if he is going to pacify the people, if he is going to get loyalty there, he was going to make sure that everybody had what they will call free health care in Germany.

And so he, I will say, adeptly, as from a political perspective, was successful in passing legislation that established socialized medicine in Germany more than 100 years ago. And that was contagious enough that it was adopted by, by now every country in that part of the world. And the country that I pay the most attention to and look back on historically has been the experience in the United Kingdom. They had a higher level of freedom when they went into World War II. And of course, they were looking at their enemy more in the eye than we were. And Winston Churchill helped lead them through that time. But in the aftermath of the all-out effort to expend every resource they had to preserve the British Empire, they also saw their economy with too much of a burden on it, and it was collapsing at the end of World War II. There were all kinds of stresses on it.

You can imagine, Madam Speaker, all the rebuilding that had to take place, the restructure of government, the lessons learned and the repositioning of assets, resources and conviction that takes place in a time of war. If you win the war, you don't undergo quite the changes as you do if you lose the war. But Great Britain was afraid their economy would collapse. And among the things that they did, just as we have knee-jerk reacted to an economic downward spiral here in this country and passed TARP legislation, $787 billion in an economic stimulus plan--and I say ``we'' as this Congress, and I opposed those things-- just as this administration, it actually started in the previous administration, began nationalizing huge economic entities in America, three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, about one-third of the private sector profits in the United States nationalized because we have fear of failure. Well, the British had fear of failure in the aftermath of World War II.

And so one of the things they did to try to provide a safety net for people would be to adopt a national health care act similar to Bismarck's national health care act in Germany. And that's socialized medicine. They passed it in 1948.

I sat reading through the Colliers magazines, the yellowed copies of that just a few years ago, that had been saved for me by a World War II veteran that had watched this national health care in the United Kingdom pass. And the things that they predicted that would happen before its passage and

implementation into law were the ones that came to pass within a year. The doctor said, we're going to have long lines, and I won't be able to treat all the patients with the care and the attention that I have in the past.

When the government sets the fee that you get for doing the work, and the people that are receiving those health care benefits don't have to pay for them, there's an overutilization of the service. It's human nature. It's kind of like former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas, said of the people that utilize Medicare the most in America. He said, well, the people there, they wake up in the morning and feel good, and since it doesn't cost anything, they go to the doctor to find out why. Well, some of that happened in Great Britain. And it has happened in Canada. It has happened all over Europe and most of the industrialized world except in the United States. Government supplanted one of the responsibilities of the people; and there was less reason for people to be cohesive and hold themselves together. If you look across Europe, this post-Christian Europe that I've talked about, the churches that were built when there was a dynamic faithful force, and I will say prior to, during and post the industrial revolution, if you look at just the churches, just the edifices, the gothic architecture that's there, you can see there was a powerful force. That force has been significantly diminished. And I will argue that it has been diminished in a real part because the role of our faith, the role of our families, the role of communities pulling together, the nucleus of which were the places of worship, the churches, has been replaced by the government.

So if the government can provide you with all the health care that you need and your own personalized health insurance premium, which is advocated by the people on this side of the aisle--on the opposite side of the aisle, I want to make that clear for the record, Madam Speaker. If government can take care of rent subsidy and heat subsidy and give you a childcare credit--so pay you for the children that you have--and if the government can pay you for the earned income tax credit so if you don't make enough money they cut you a check for that, if the government can replace all that the churches did with the check that comes unwillingly from the taxpayer, when all of that happens, then people slow down their attendance or they stop going to church. They forget about the core of their faith. They forget about the reason of the blessings that we have, and slowly, society falls back to a dependency class that settles upon the government that has replaced the need that the churches were fulfilling out of the willing giving of their membership.

I believe that one of the reasons for post-Christian Europe is because they have replaced the responsibilities and the duties and the activities and the services that come willingly from the churches with a service that comes unwillingly from the taxpayers but guaranteed as an entitlement to the people. That is what we're poised to do in this country because the people on this side want to create a dependency class. If they can create a dependency class, then their goal is to expand the political class. That is the short version of the subject matter that I think was very well raised and articulated by the gentleman who spoke ahead of me, Mr. Lungren.

I would also ask my friend from Texas, Judge Gohmert, if he was able to get everything off of his heart before he goes back to where his heart really is, which is in Texas.

So I yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

If the gentleman will briefly yield, and reclaiming my time, I would make this point, that the bankruptcy courts through which the auto makers were pushed, when I listened to the witnesses that were before our Judiciary Committee and point-blanked them on this question? Do you believe that there was anything that changed throughout the course of the bankruptcy court as a result of the testimony or evidence that was presented to it, or was the deal, the proposal that was presented by the administration, as an investor in the car makers, did that proposal remain in tact all the way through the courts, or were the judgment of the courts applied to the final product? Their answer was, without equivocation, no. The deal was the deal, and the courts essentially rubber-stamped the deal. That's the testimony that I heard, but it is, of course, summarized in a nutshell for the benefit of this dialog.

I again yield to the gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

It is interesting to me, Madam Speaker, to listen to this presentation and to think about the impact of the core of the faith on our Founding Fathers. Clearly, Ben Franklin was a leader of them. Part of me is a little curious about what it would have been like to have heard his entire confession, but it was interesting to hear the statement that he made.

I'd reflect also that, for 60 years, the Founding Fathers and their successors

and the leaders of this Nation and others would come in, and they went to church in this very Capitol building. For 60 years, they worshiped in this Capitol building on a regular basis.

The first Black man to speak in the United States House of Representatives was a pastor who came here right at the end of the Civil War to speak about the passage of the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments.

As I watch things transition here in the House, I'd like to say also, as another word to add to this discussion, that George Washington's Thanksgiving proclamation said--and it was a prayer--God grant this Nation the degree of prosperity which he alone knows to be best.

I think that's consistent with the presentation from the gentleman from Texas.

You know, this isn't exclusively about how we make a lot of money. It isn't exactly how we are able to turn this economy around and to put a lot of cash into people's pockets. There's something more important than this. I've long said that, if I have to choose between an education without a moral foundation and a moral education without the best academic foundation, I'm going to take the moral education. That's what I want my children to learn, and that's what I want my grandchildren to learn, and that's what I want this Nation to learn.

There is something about prosperity, but I look back a decade or more ago, and there was a very well-educated Unabomber who didn't have a moral foundation. We have smart people with good educations and not moral foundations. They are destructive with their educations, their academics and their brilliance. We want a society where we have the opportunity to get back to the point where we don't lock our doors anymore.

Madam Speaker, did you ever think, when you forget your car keys and you can't get in and you're standing out there and it's January and 20 below, why it is your car is locked? Well, it's because of the people in society who don't have a moral foundation. It's because of the thieves. Why do you lock your house? It's the same reason. It's not just simply endemic that we have to build cars with keys or houses with locks or dead bolts and bars across them. We do that because it's a sign of the erosion in our moral foundation. There are still places in America where people don't lock their doors. There's a place in America where I live.

Yet, today, standing on the streets of Washington, D.C., it happened to me, and it wouldn't have been hard for many others to have experienced the same thing. When an ambulance goes by, people on the street will stop talking because the siren is too loud, and some of them are irritated because the siren has interrupted their conversations. That's the level of compassion that emanates from the curb sometimes in the cities of America to the ambulance, itself. Where I live, if an ambulance goes by my house, we already know who is inside, and we know who the family members are who are reached by it. That's that neighborhood component. Those neighborhoods exist within the cities, too, Madam Speaker. I don't mean to imply that they don't.

When people are in a transitional stage and the more there are and the more it erodes the moral foundation, the more we need to take our resources to defend ourselves against the people who would steal our property and who would assault our very families and individuals. That's the lack of a moral foundation. If we get that right, then at least, in theory, we won't need nearly as much for, let's say, the police force, which could go out and serve papers and could do those things. They won't need to be occupied in fighting off violence all the time as they are.

The Supreme Court and the Detainee Treatment Act

Now we have a situation here that is also of great concern. Madam Speaker, yesterday, Mr. Gohmert and I and a number of others did a press conference over in front of the Supreme Court building. We did that to take up the issue of Guantanamo Bay--the Gitmo detainees, the enemy combatants, the radical Islamist jihadists, who have declared war against the United States, who have committed their training and their lives and their assets and their resources into killing us, and who have succeeded to a significant level, particularly on September 11, 2001.

I've been to the locations of ground zero in New York and at the Pentagon here in Washington, D.C., and I've seen the impact of the attacks on our Nation. I've been down to Guantanamo Bay, Madam Speaker, and I've talked with and have observed the detainees down there. We've had over 800 detained in Guantanamo Bay. We tried to get as many of them released and sent back to their home countries as we could. We still boiled it down to, at that time, about 241 enemy combatants, radical Islamist jihadists--the worst of the worst--who didn't have a place to go. We didn't have a process to deal with them. They were committing acts of war against the United States. At least that's the evidence that we have.

So President Bush started this fairly early in the process, and Congress passed legislation called the Detainee Treatment Act, which set up military tribunals to try these enemy combatants, is what they were called if I remember correctly in legislation, and established those parameters--all consistent within internationally set standards, all consistent within Geneva Convention standards.

Then they also set up an appeals process in the event that an individual who was to be tried or who was tried under the Detainee Treatment Act were to appeal that decision or to appeal even being tried before the Detainee Treatment Act, their appeals would go to the U.S. Circuit Court of D.C., the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

That's what happened in the Hamdan case. The Hamdan case is a landmark precedent case. That's the case of Osama bin Laden's chauffeur, who argued that he should have some constitutional rights and that the limitations that were set by the Detainee Treatment Act were too broad. So he took the case--his attorneys--and I don't know that these were pro bono attorneys, but I know there are dozens--and I'll say--scores of pro bono attorneys who are seeking to establish new precedents. They took the case to the D.C. Circuit, which upheld the Detainee Treatment Act that had been passed by Congress, signed by President Bush. They upheld it to the letter in the D.C. Circuit.

The Supreme Court, by the way, had been forbidden from hearing a case which came out of the Detainee Treatment Act because, under article III, section 2 of the Constitution, this Congress stripped that authority from any court other than from the District of Columbia Circuit. Even though the D.C. Circuit upheld the letters of the law and the content of the statute, after the decision of the D.C. Circuit and outside of the bounds of the law, itself, of the article III, section 2 language which stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction, the Supreme Court reached over and heard the case anyway. They got outside their zone. They went across the fence, and decided they were going to graze in the pasture that was set aside exclusively for the D.C. Circuit. They overturned some components of the Detainee Treatment Act.

So we came back to this Congress again, and I argued we should have ignored the court because they didn't have jurisdiction to hear the case and that Congress had said so, and it's clearly a component in the Constitution--article III, section 2 stripping--but the Supreme Court heard the case anyway, and it came to a decision. Here is the article III, section 2 language that was designed to prohibit the Supreme Court:

It says, ``In all the other cases before mentioned''--that would include the Hamdan case, and I'm quoting from the Constitution now again--``the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction both as to law and to fact--'' so far, the Supreme Court would be okay, Madam Speaker, but this is the part to pay attention to--``with such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.'' Congress made exceptions and Congress made regulations. Congress essentially forbid the Supreme Court from hearing such a case on the Detainee Treatment Act. They did so anyway.

I read that decision through carefully--about this thick, Madam Speaker--and it took a while. The case came out on a Thursday. I got my hands on

the printed document on Friday. On Saturday morning, I went out. This must have been June because I remember sitting in my backyard, reading carefully down through this Supreme Court decision called Hamdan. I marked up the margins with all of my opinions. When I got through that stack of paper, it was a little thicker because it was wrinkled up a little bit, and it always swells a little when you write on it.

I looked up at the sky, and I thought, My gosh. The Supreme Court has defied Congress and the Constitution. They heard a case they didn't have any business hearing, and now they've issued this decision, this opinion, which as I said is all it was, which is now going to redirect Congress to go back and to redefine the Detainee Treatment Act.

So my position was that Congress should simply pass a resolution that we restate the Detainee Treatment Act and ignore the Supreme Court because they were outside the bounds of the jurisdiction that's offered to them in the Constitution.

I would agree with Justice Scalia that the cases of article III, section 2 stripping are legion. That was the word that Justice Scalia used. Those cases are legion. Yet, by the time I had analyzed the case--and not that I had the leverage that was going to turn this thing around the other way--the Chairs of the Judiciary Committee in the House and the Senate and the President of the United States, President Bush, all had conceded to the Supreme Court, and had said, Now we are going to comply.

So, at that point, it was too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It was too late to reel this back in again and to cast it out and get it right. So Congress came back and passed new legislation, new legislation on the heels of the Detainee Treatment Act which set up enemy combatant review tribunals. Then it was adjusted for the decision of the Supreme Court. We tried again. Along came the Boumediene case. Then it narrowed somewhat our ability under those decisions of the Supreme Court if we conceded those positions which the majority of Members of Congress did and the administration did, but it left intact the ability under military tribunals to try these detainees, these enemy combatants, these radical jihadists, who we are faced with.

So we continued forward then with the development of Guantanamo Bay, with the housing of these detainees down at Guantanamo Bay. We had built the courtrooms. We had built up secure rooms and had set up a place where the family members could observe the trials and where the press could observe the trials. There was a microphone that projected to them with a bit of a delay and an officer sitting there with his ear tuned to anything that came out which would be classified/secret information that could put the people of the United States in jeopardy. He was the person who could put his finger on the mute button of that microphone and could delay things so that the observing rooms could be cleared of reporters and family and so that we could go to the classified types of information that would be part of the trial.

The facilities down at Guantanamo Bay are perfectly suited for the task at hand of trying these enemy combatants. They were built for that. There are not any facilities anywhere in the world which are custom-built to try enemy combatants other than Guantanamo Bay down in Cuba.

I went down and visited the place one weekend shortly before Easter of this year. I would say that that location might be the best place you could be if you were going to be someone who is an enemy combatant, which is similar to being a prisoner of war. I don't believe there have been prisoners of war, prisoners who have been picked up in armed conflicts, who have been treated as well as the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I don't know how they could be treated as good as the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. They are living down there in private cells. They each have their own room. There are some exceptions, but essentially they each have their own room. They have got their bunk and their personal possessions. They each get their own personal Koran. The Koran comes to them in a zip-locked bag all carefully packaged up so that no, and I put this in quotes, no ``infidel'' has touched the Koran and desecrated it by the hand of an infidel.

They get their own sterile Koran delivered to them. They get a prayer rug that's embroidered, fancier than anything in my house and fancier than anything I have see in anybody's house. They get their own personal little skull cap or prayer cap that they wear.

They get a menu to choose three squares a day, nine items, all of them approved for Islamic meals. They have a little arrow in the bottom of every cell or maybe under the mattress that points east to Mecca, wherever that's dialed in on the compass of the world. As you move around, it's a little bit different direction to point to Mecca.

You will notice if you go, Madam Speaker, into the Middle East, and you look up on the ceiling of a hotel room, there will often be an arrow there. That's the arrow for which direction to Mecca, which direction to pray, if you are a Muslim. They have an arrow in each of the cells that tell them which direction to pray.

The thermostat is set at 75 degrees in their air conditioned, Caribbean prison, because they claim that 75 degrees is their cultural temperature. I would suggest that it ranges up over 140 degrees myself, but 75 degrees, they claim, is their cultural temperature. That's the climate control that they get.

They are not even exposed to the elements unless they volunteer to go out. They are in that 82- or 83-degree temperature that is very stable, especially during the day in the Caribbean. It seldom goes down below 60 degrees at night. They are in a perfectly controlled environment in the best location you could ask for to be able to have an outdoors environment.

The attacks on Americans in Guantanamo Bay average about 20 a day. About half of those attacks are these detainees throwing human waste in the faces of our mostly Navy guards. These guards are trained to restrain themselves from retaliation, and they take pride in restraining themselves from retaliation. That's about 10 times a day they are throwing human waste in the faces or were trying to rub it in the faces of our guards.

The other 10 times a day, out of the 20 assaults, come down to physical assaults with their cuffs or their chains, an assault, or they are trying to physically injure the guards, about 20 attacks a day. Now if that happens in a maximum security prison in the United States, they will go into solitary confinement. There will be charges brought against them.

If found guilty--and of course if they're guilty, we likely will find them guilty--then these prisoners in American prisons would get an extended stay in their maximum security prison. They would watch their diet be dialed down to fewer calories per day and they would go into solitary confinement for a period of time.

That, Madam Speaker, that is what happens in an American prison. Down at Guantanamo Bay, with these worst of the worst, the most vile American haters, the planner and the planners of the September 11 assault on the United States, the worst thing we can do to them, if they should get a guard down and injure that guard and rub human waste into his face and perhaps nearly strangle the guard, the worst thing we can do to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed if that happens is, we reduce his outdoor exercise time down to 2 hours a day. It's the worst penalty we can do.

They get their air-conditioned cell, their private room. They get a menu that's designed to fit their religious beliefs. They get their Koran and their skull cap and they get their rug. Oh, and by the way, out of the 800 or so that were down at Guantanamo Bay, one of them asked for not a Koran but a Bible. When the word got out that there was an individual there who wanted a Bible, the ability to keep order down at Guantanamo Bay became very precarious. There was going to be such a rejection of the idea that there would be a Bible in the hands of someone down there, that they denied this inmate a Bible.

We are promoting religious freedom to the people that are there and giving them all of the trappings that they require, with arrows to pray towards, and Korans, and skull caps, and prayer

rugs. But if there is a Christian in the mix, they are denied their equal rights, their right to faith and religion.

The temperature is set for the cultural temperature, at 75. That's Guantanamo Bay. Perfectly set up, though, to try these enemy combatants, to house them. Some of them need to be locked up for life, and some of them need to be executed.

We can't get there because the world has said we think that you were hard on these prisoners down there. So we are adjusting American policy because of critics in places like Europe, critics that are international, let's see, what do we have, Amnesty International, and other global Web sites that allege the United States is cruel and inhuman.

No one could have been any less cruel or any more human in dealing with these detainees than the United States has. I have gone there to see it, Madam Speaker, and it is a place where you would want to be if you had to be locked up.

Now, because of the politics of this, the Obama administration has decided that they have, the President, 2 days after he was inaugurated on January 22 of 2009, issued an executive order that said we are going to close Guantanamo Bay. It's 7 pages long, it's written in English, but it's posted on the bulletin board down in Guantanamo Bay in Arabic and in English, a bulletin board cover with Plexiglass in the middle of the commons area, right over by their foosball table.

So they can take a break from their foosball and read the promise from the President that they are not going to be there a day after January 22, 2010. I don't know if the President can keep that promise, but that's certainly the promise that's made to the detainees.

That number has been reduced a little bit. We had the Uyghurs, some of them were sent to Bermuda. There have been others that have been infiltrated back out to the rest of the world.

Madam Speaker, I want to make this point that of those who were released, and the numbers of those who were released is a number greater than 500 by the Bush administration, there is about a 1 in 7 incidence of recidivism. Of those that were released--these were not the worst of the worst that were released, these were the best of the worst that were released--it was more than 500.

That more than 500 went back around the world and at least one out of seven went back and began to plot against or attack the United States. That's a lousy recidivism rate. Some will say, well, we have a greater rate of that when we release people from the prisons in the United States.

We have a closer eye we keep on them too, Madam Speaker. At least in America we have a police force out there that when people break the law we have a tendency to go find out who they are, where they live, and pick them up and try them again, and lock them up again. But when you turn somebody loose in the world, and they go back into the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan, and they train and plot to attack Americans, it's kind of hard to catch them a second time.

If we do that with one out of seven, then what happens with the worst of the worst? What happens with these 241 that are now down around 220. If they get released into the world, these are the most dedicated killers of freedom-loving people that exist on the planet, at least in incarceration. They are going to make common cause with the others that they can find around the world, and they will turn around and attack the United States.

It is inevitable, and the equation that the President of the United States and Eric Holder, the attorney general, needs to understand, Madam Speaker, is, that of these 221 detainees that they are looking desperately to try to find a way to bring them to the United States, or at least a large share of them to the United States, if they are adjudicated in civilian courts, as they propose will happen with KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom I have laid eyes on and watched him operate and read his documents--he blamed the attacks of September 11, 2001, on us, Madam Speaker. He wrote that in his defense document. You would think in his defense document he would try to defend himself. Instead, he attacked us.

He said, it's your own fault, America. We told you that we hate you. We declared war on you. We said we were going to come and kill you. You failed to defend yourselves from us, and so, therefore, it's your fault that 3,000 Americans were killed September 11. You had to know we were coming because we said we would, and you didn't defend yourselves. That's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. That's how evil he is.

Now the President has said, and Eric Holder has said, that we will feel better when they are prosecuted in the United States and when they are executed. I will say the President and the attorney general have repeatedly said that KSM will be constricted, and I will say it opens up a whole array of new appeals to think that KSM, while it would be announced that he would be convicted and implied, at least, that he would be executed, by the President of the United States, who is a lawyer, a Harvard lawyer, an instructor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, even though he was an adjunct professor, that's the announcement from the President of the United States and the Attorney General that says essentially this, that some say it's the Old West story. I say it's a Mark Twain story; first we will hang them, then we will try them.

I would point your attention, Madam Speaker, to a writing by Mark Twain called ``Roughing It,'' sometime about the turn or the middle of the 19th century Mark Twain wrote a story, ``Roughing It,'' about a Captain Ned Blakely. Ned Blakely, who sailed off to the Chinches Islands to get a load of whatever the product was there.

As he sailed into the bay, he had the meanest man on the islands come aboard, named Bill Noakes. They had a big fight, and Captain Ned Blakely won that. Bill Noakes came back another time, they had another big fight. Even though Captain Blakely won that over a period of time, this mean Bill Noakes shot and killed the first mate of Captain Blakely.

The first mate happened to be a Black man, a Black man whom had great favor of Captain Ned Blakely, a Black man who was trying to get away from the confrontation, was actually running, and he was chased down and shot to death by Bill Noakes in the narrative by Mark Twain. So no one wanted to take on Bill Noakes. He was too mean out on the island. There were about a dozen ship's captains that were part of what we would say would be the law in that era. Ned Blakely went and arrested him and planned to hang him in the morning.

When the other captains found out about it, they came to see Ned Blakely, Captain Blakely, and said to him, You can't hang this man; he has to have a trial. Captain Blakely said, Fine, let's have the trial. I will help you with the trial. I will help you prosecute the man. How soon do you think you could do it? They said, Well, we think we could have the trial in the morning.

But Captain Blakely said, Well, I am going to be a little busy in the morning with the hanging and the burying, so let's do the trial in the afternoon. That's how Mark Twain described this. First we will hang him, then we will try him. Actually, he said, First we will hang him, then we will bury him, then we will try him.

That's about the message that came from the President of the United States and the Attorney General of the United States. He essentially declared Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four other compatriots to be guilty and subject to the death penalty, and predicted that they will be convicted and executed, an unbelievable prediction for the President of the United States and the Attorney General of the United States, to take that position.

We are doing what? We are bringing these Gitmo detainees to the United States, not because there is any logical reason to do this; there is no rational reason to bring these enemy combatants to U.S. soil. There is no constitutional reason, Madam Speaker, there is no statutory reason, there is no rational, logical reason. There is no strategic or tactical reason. We don't get more safety with bringing them here, we don't get the odds of a conviction with bringing them here.

KSM has confessed his own guilt and asked for a death penalty. As Scully Simpson said yesterday, take the plea, attorney general, take the plea, Mr. President. If he wants to plead guilty

and submit himself to the death penalty, why would you bring them to the United States and bring them within six blocks of Ground Zero in New York City and subject them to the circus of a civilian court? We know what that looks like. O. J. Simpson's circus court comes to mind, that media circus that would come.

For what purpose? Not because it's constitutional, statutory, logical, reasonable or tactical, none of that. Madam Speaker maybe, just maybe, if we want to be charitable we could say maybe the President and the Attorney General would want to demonstrate to the world that America has a legitimate civilian court and that equal justice will be provided under the law for anyone on the entire planet, not just people that have set foot in the United States, our citizens of the United States or our Americans.

Madam Speaker, if that is the motivation for the President and the Attorney General to express to the world that we are equal justice under the law and an open judicial system, that we have the courage and the confidence and the wherewithal to try these enemy combatants in a civilian court, so now the rest of the world is going to like us, because we have done something that isn't really smart, and may be the most colossal blunder in this administration? It could be the most colossal blunder of many administrations, Madam Speaker.

All for what? All to ask the rest of the world to like us, to trust us, to respect our judicial system? Could that be the reason? And if it is the reason, and it's the only one that seems to be threaded with anything that one could construe as logic in this decision, that it had to be approved by the President and announced by the Attorney General, if the rationale is the rest of the world will lift their criticism of how we've dealt with these enemy combatants if we just bring them out of the military tribunals, this court system, and put them in the civilian court, I will submit that if that were a sound logic and it had any chance of being effective and it would be good for the public relations of the world, they've already messed it up; they've already destroyed any benefit that might come from trying KSM in a civilian trial within six blocks of Ground Zero in New York City because the President of the United States and the Attorney General of the United States have both announced that KSM and his four co-conspirators are guilty and that we're going to prove it in an open court, without cameras, but prove it in an open court, and we're going to sentence them to death.

Now how in the world is anybody around the world going to believe that this was an objective decision, that it actually is the result of a court when the verdict is already announced by the President of the United States and the Attorney General?

Madam Speaker, this is self-defeating logic here, and I think that they have actually defeated their own rationale.

I want to, in the moments that are left, just go through some pieces of this rationale so that it goes into the Record. And that is this:

The Obama administration is acting dangerously by bringing foreign terrorists to our shores from Guantanamo Bay. This is a direct threat to our national security. And by doing this, the Obama administration is opening us up for another terrorist attack.

You've heard a host of other concerns from my colleagues. I'm the ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee, and I will focus a little bit on immigration, Madam Speaker. The truth is if we bring these terrorists to U.S. soil, we may not be able to keep them in detention. Even worse, we may not ever be able to deport them. So if we manage to convict these terrorists, which is a question, they may one day become our constituents' new neighbors. And how? Well, because of the confluence of two factors: One of them is the Convention Against Torture, and the other one is the Supreme Court 2001 decision called Zadvydas.

First, the Convention prohibits the return of aliens to countries where they may be tortured. So if we could release any one of these detainees, we would send them back where? We can't send them back now because of that fear. The U.S. Department of Justice regulations implementing the convention, the Convention Against Torture, that is, made no exceptions whatsoever for anyone's activities. Whether they be rapists, murderers, participants in genocide, or terrorists, they're all equally protected. Hundreds of criminals have already received relief from deportation as a result of the Convention Against Torture, and so has an alien involved in the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Osama bin Laden himself could probably frustrate deportation by making a torture claim under this convention. I mean, after all, the more heinous a person's actions and consequently the more hated they are in their home countries, the more likely they are to be subjected to torture, so the stronger is their claim that they couldn't be returned to their home country for fear they would be tortured when they arrive.

So the ability of terrorists to frustrate the deportation process might be tolerable, but if we were certain that we could keep these terrorists detained, that would be the condition by which it would be potentially tolerable. But this may not be the case because section 412 of the PATRIOT Act does wisely provide for the indefinite detention of terrorist aliens, indefinite, regardless of whether they qualify under the Convention Against Torture or whether they have other available relief from removal. However, it's very possible that the intervening Supreme Court will rule this provision unconstitutional and there would go the indefinite detention section under the PATRIOT Act.

In Zadvydas, the Supreme Court ruled that under a different law, aliens who had been admitted to the United States and then ordered removed could not be detained for more than 6 months if for some reason, such as the Convention Against Torture, they could not be removed. In the Zadvydas case, the Supreme Court made a statutory interpretation, but they also put up a warning and said to us that they were interpreting the statute to avoid a serious constitutional threat. So the Court believed that a statute permitting indefinite detention of an alien would raise a serious constitutional problem.

So already, Zadvydas, that decision, has resulted in the release of hundreds of alien criminals into our communities. Jonathan Cohn, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, testified, and I quote, that ``the government is now required to release numerous rapists, child molesters, murderers, and other dangerous illegal aliens into our streets. Vicious criminal aliens are now being set free within the

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 38 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, December 14, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma for yielding, and I appreciate the debate that we have here tonight.

I am going to stand with the gentleman from Oklahoma and thank the gentlemen from Minnesota for the work that they've done on the credit default swaps and the regulation that is there. I do think it is an improvement, and I am certainly going to support that amendment.

But I think it is important for us, as Members of this Congress, to bring a perspective to this. And the words of Mr. Bachus from Alabama echo in my ears, Mr. Chairman, and that is, it isn't so much about this stack of the bill that Mr. Frank says might be too heavy for us all to carry; it's about the culture of the bill that may be too heavy for the American people to carry. It's about the difference between believing the Federal Government can regulate more aspects of our society, more aspects of our economy, and the difference in believing whether people can become and entities can become too big to be allowed to fail, or whether small businesses might be too small to be allowed to succeed. And it's about the difference between a free enterprise economy and a managed and controlled economy. It's about the difference between liberty and the difference between a socialized economy.

I have watched as this economy has spiraled downward over the last 15 or more months. And we've been involved in this, we've been engaged in it intensively. And it comes down to two divergent philosophies; one of those philosophies is echoed in some advice we got from one of our top economic advisers--who will remain nameless--who said to us 2\1/2\ years ago at the beginning of the subprime mortgage discussion, what's going on is these large financial institutions are doing what everybody else does. They're doing that because the other people are making money, and they're making money. And their psychology is, if things fall apart and melt down, there is likely to be a bailout; if they do what everybody else does, they will get bailed out like everybody else. That is at the root of this: Whether you can be allowed to fail so that we have a free enterprise system.

There is a stack of immigration cards produced by U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services, glossy flashcards. And you look through those flashcards and it asks, Who is the founder of our country? George Washington. Turn to another one, What is the basis of our economy in the United States? Flip the other side of it, free enterprise capitalism. It is a principal tenet of the American way of life that you must answer that question accurately if you want to become a citizen of the United States, and yet here we are debating whether we're going to have a managed economy or whether we're going to have freedom in free markets. Mr. Chairman, I am going to submit that we have got to be able to take a chance to succeed and fail.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

So I will point this out: We had a chance, and we should continue forward, to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act. We should regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We ought to require them to meet the same standards of every other financial institution in the United States. We should let people fail, though, so that others can succeed. And AIG should be split up. This is the seventh Federal agency when we have already too many. We need to have free enterprise succeed.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I've just returned within the last few hours from Afghanistan, arriving here this morning sometime around, oh, 7 or so after a long and very busy weekend in places in Afghanistan that we know as Kabul and Kandahar, Bagram, and also, a forward operating base called Spin Boldak.

And it's been my opinion for a long time, and having made at least nine different visits over to theaters that we do call theaters of war, that would include six to Iraq and three trips to Afghanistan, there are some other trips along there that I haven't chronicled, Madam Speaker, but I've found that sitting in classified briefings here in the United States Congress, here in the Capitol Building or over in the secure building in Rayburn, or going out to briefings at the White House and listening to our top military officers, our top civilian officers, including the State Department officers, give us their briefing on what's taking place in a region like that is not a fair substitute for actually going into the theater and receiving the briefings there from the people that are hands-on, on the ground, in the field.

And having an opportunity to sit down and eye-to-eye discuss these situations, generally with people from our home State, where we always have something in common and where we can get down to the frank matters of fact without hesitation because we more naturally trust each other, and we also know somebody that knows somebody, and whether we actually know the troops or not, we know the family members that are related to their family members, at a minimum. And so we build that level of trust and rapport.

This trip was similar to a number in the past. It included briefings from top military personnel, top State Department and civilian personnel, included a meeting that lasted for an extended period of time with President Mohammed Karzai of Afghanistan in the palace in Kabul, and the trip, as I mentioned, out to the forward operating base south and a little bit east of Kandahar, right on the Pakistani border.

The position that I have taken over these years has been a strong national defense position, Madam Speaker. And I would go back and catalog some of that for the benefit of your attention, and that is that, from the time we went into Iraq, and as I watched things, the liberation of Iraq and then the stagnation of our operations in Iraq, the war of attrition that we fought there for a while that wasn't coming to a successful conclusion.

And on one of my trips into that area before the ``surge'' became a word that was used in the common vernacular here in the United States at least, I had worked through that policy and agreed with the officers who were about to request that President Bush order the surge in Iraq.

So, in short, Madam Speaker, I was for the surge before the surge had a name. And it has proven itself, I believe, to be the successful tactic that's brought about what I have also defined in this Congress-- to have achieved a definable victory in Iraq. And I will get to Afghanistan. But I introduced a resolution in February of this year that defines the victory that we've achieved in Iraq. And it goes through the list or the chronology or the history of the incidents that took place in that country, the things that we and coalition forces did to liberate the Iraqi people, and the milestones along the way, the ups and the downs of the struggle that's taken place in Iraq.

And yet, if you put it all together, and you look at the successful ratification of a Constitution, successful elections in Iraq, the emergence of the Iraqi security forces as becoming ever more proficient and ever more stable, the definition of what we were seeking to achieve in Iraq has been very closely achieved to this point. Now, there's no such thing as a locked in, guaranteed, free, and moderate people of any kind. There's not a guarantee in the United States. But by comparison with what Iraq was to what it is today, it's significantly more stable. And we expect there will be a continued transition of power in Iraq, a sharing of power in Iraq that will be brought about by legitimate elections.

And so this accomplishment in Iraq, I bring out and make this point, Madam Speaker, so that should I utter a contrast, I want you and everyone listening to understand the foundation that I build this judgment on, and that's that foundation that I believe we have achieved a definable victory in Iraq. And now, that being said, and I can certainly discount some of the things that are going on there, and I could lay some conditions on the statement like anyone who might choose to rebut such a position. But, by the same token, a lot's been achieved.

And on my first trip into Afghanistan which was some time, I believe, in 2005, without checking the records, and perhaps 2004, but we were in some of the more difficult times in Iraq at the time that I first went to Afghanistan. But when I came back from Afghanistan, even then, in the middle part of this decade that we're in now, I said then that we'll be in Afghanistan a lot longer than we'll be in Iraq. It wasn't conventional wisdom at the time. People didn't know how we were going to get out of Iraq. They didn't know how we were going to achieve a definable victory there.

But even then, I said we'll be in Afghanistan a lot longer because, Madam Speaker, Afghanistan is a lot closer to the Stone Age than is Iraq. Iraq has resources, they have oil, they have a tradition of education. They have a history of a more moderate and more modern government that has, actually, a central government that reached out to the corners of Iraq.

Afghanistan has none of those traditions and none of those histories, and they don't have the natural resources at this point, at least, that have been developed that's going to help the treasury of Afghanistan. They had a gross domestic product, the previous time that I was there, I remember the briefing documents, of $7.5 billion. That's the gross domestic product of Afghanistan.

Now it's reported it's gone up to around $11.4 billion in the GDP. That's only over the last couple of years. Almost a 50 percent increase. And I suspect, Madam Speaker, that some of that has to do, since it's measured in American dollars, with the fall of the American dollar, the diminishment of the value of our American dollar. And when that happens, it's going to automatically and inversely increase the GDP of any country that's indexed to it, such as Afghanistan. But the GDP of Afghanistan is very minimal.

And at one time I compared Afghanistan's GDP to the value of the beer brewed in Wisconsin. They were about the same. A couple of years ago, the $7.5 billion GDP of Afghanistan and the value of the beer brewed in Wisconsin was $7 billion. So that gives you a sense of how tiny this economy is, not to disparage the beer brewers in Wisconsin of course, Madam Speaker. And this tiny little economy has struggled along. It's very much agriculture and agrarian-based, and a large percentage of the agricultural value output in Afghanistan is poppies, poppies from which heroin and opium are made, and that produce about half of the value of the ag products in Afghanistan, and perhaps more, if one were able to get an accurate accounting.

The poppy business in Afghanistan, much of it in Helman province, and neighboring Kandahar province to a lesser degree, those poppies in Afghanistan represent about two-thirds of the world's supply of opium and heroin in the world. So Afghanistan has long been a producer of poppies. But the system that has emerged and developed, we knew it then, we knew when we went in to liberate Afghanistan in the late fall or early winter of 2001, that the heroin trade from poppies was a significant component of the funding of our enemies, the funding of the Taliban.

Glad it remains that way today, and in some respects it may be worse than it was before. And yet there has been an effort under way to reduce the production of poppies in Afghanistan and thereby reducing the amount of dollars that go to the people that we declare to be our enemies. And these would be presumably the people who have attacked the United States, or plotted to do so.

I advocated, Madam Speaker, that on the day we went into Afghanistan, the time that American forces arrived there and became a predominant force there on the ground in Afghanistan was the time that we should have gone in and taken out the poppies. Just sprayed them. We can eradicate most any kind of foliage if we want to do that. And I've made this argument with every United States ambassador--and with one exception, their representative instead because the ambassador wasn't available--that we've had in Afghanistan since the beginning. And their response to me has been, We can't upset the economy in Afghanistan by taking them out of the poppy business. And besides, do I, as a Member of Congress, who advocates such a thing, understand the difficulty and logistics of spraying that many poppies?

And certainly I do understand the difficulty. I'm not sure the ambassadors do. They lay out a comparison that it would be something like four football fields wide, all the way around the Earth at the equator, the equivalent of taking out that much crop. Well, that's an awful lot of crop, Madam Speaker. But we sprayed almost the entire crop in Iowa on average more than once just last summer, and we have a few squadrons of spray planes in Iowa that have the capability of going in and taking out that poppy crop. And if we did that, that would shut down billions of dollars that go into the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda, billions of dollars that are used against the United States.

Now, some of these briefings will say it's somewhere between $70 million and $120 million. Well, if that's the case, I would ask the question, If it's $3 billion, $3.5 billion worth of poppies altogether, if that's what the crop is worth, how does only $70 million to $120 million get into the hands of the Taliban or al Qaeda, and where does the rest of the money go?

I'll submit, I think it's a lot more money than that. I don't think it's possible for us to track that money. And I don't accept the values that have been put on it with such confidence in places like Afghanistan when I can't, Madam Speaker, find out from the director of the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the United States how many dollars are spent on illegal drugs in the streets of America in a year.

When they tell me, We don't know; we don't know what the drugs are worth that are bought and sold and used and go in people's bloodstream and up the noses of Americans, we can't put a value on that within a billion dollars, how can the State Department tell me in a country that is that close to the Stone Age that doesn't have communications like we have, doesn't have a transportation network as anybody would imagine for any kind of a country, how can we get that estimate close in Afghanistan but we can't even guess at it in the United States?

So I will submit this: if they're right, the poppy crop is worth about half of the GDP of Afghanistan 2 years ago, may or may not be right, then we should be thinking of it in terms of roughly half the GDP in Afghanistan today.

In any case, it's lots of money. It's tens of millions at a very minimum, more likely hundreds of millions and maybe billions of dollars, and large shares of that go into the coffers of the Taliban and al Qaeda; and that money is used to pay the people that they recruit that plot and plan and train against us and to provide for them supplies, munitions, weaponry that get used around this world in terrorist plots.

So the number one effort to eradicate the terrorists that are in the breeding and training grounds in the areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan would be to shut off the money that comes from the illegal drugs that come from the poppy trade.

So instead, we have State Department personnel, USAID and USDA and other personnel that are seeking to negotiate with Afghan farmers to encourage them to raise pomegranates and fruits and nuts of all kinds, especially vines and trees, so they have to invest in longer than an annual crop, a perennial crop that makes them stick with that crop a little bit longer.

We're investing millions in that, and we're providing subsidies to Afghanistan of significant dollars. Now, here I will just pose this number: a billion dollars, a billion U.S. dollars invested in subsidies in Afghanistan to try to convince them that there are crops that pay better than raising the illegal poppy crop.

Well, I think a big degree of this is poppycock, Madam Speaker, to think that we can negotiate with people that are raising illegal drugs and convince them if we just gave them enough subsidy, they will stop doing that. They will always do what pays the best. That's the way things work.

And the world does have a free market economy. Can you imagine going down to pay the people in Mexico and Central and South America not to raise coca or not to raise the tree that produces cocaine, and can we convince them not to raise marijuana crops? Can we convince them not to convert the products that are now smuggled in from China or shipped directly into the United States into methamphetamines because there is something that pays better? It will always find its way to the market.

So we need to raise the cost of transaction. If we raise the cost of transaction, that means knock out these poppies. They will blossom. It's the nature of a poppy. They're easy to see from the air. I know we have poppies growing in places where we don't go with our military, and we're looking at perhaps as much as 90 percent of the poppies raised in Afghanistan, which is someplace two-thirds or more of the world production of poppies taking place in Helmand province down there where we are going to send reinforcements.

And, Madam Speaker, I applaud the President for finally making the decision after 3 months of--what shall I say--floating trial balloons and deliberating, and having discussions at the White House and deliberations. When the request that emerged in the public, a request that was submitted by General McChrystal--and if my date is correct it would be August 30 of this year--and by September 23, that report was leaked into the media. Who knows where it came from, Madam Speaker, and I'm generally a harsh critic of people inside the military system that would leak anything that's classified information.

Now, I don't know if this request was classified, but it was leaked. And I have not heard anyone report how it was leaked, but I suspect it was somebody who wanted the American people to know the request was made by General McChrystal. And I suspect that if that request of General McChrystal, at least the substance of that request that was leaked, that was put out into the press that was reported to be 40,000 troops necessary or risk failure in Afghanistan, if that report, if that request had not been submitted, Madam Speaker, I suspect that we would have never found out what General McChrystal's actual request was.

In fact, back channels tell me that was the lowest number that General McChrystal asked for. And back channels tell me that the number between 40,000 and 80,000 was incrementally dialed in so that if there were 80,000 troops sent rather than 40,000, the odds of success increased in proportion with the number of troops. Less than 40,000, we risk failure; and 80,000 troops would bring us to the highest probability of success. It could be dialed down from 80,000 and still have success, taking the risks, of course, in proportion. But dialed down below 40,000, I don't understand that General McChrystal entertained the thought that 30,000 troops would be enough to do the job.

However, our military, being the brave and noble warriors that they are, do keep a stiff upper lip, and none of them would not utter these things to me because they know what their orders are from the Commander in Chief by rights, by the rights of the Constitution, by the rights of the results of the election, the President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of our military; and implicitly in the Constitution, the President sets the foreign policy.

Our foreign policy now is 30,000 more troops deployed into Afghanistan starting sometime in January and then with a look at 18 months as a period of time to start to withdraw troops out of Afghanistan. And having achieved the goals that have been defined to the American people in the speech the President gave over a little over a week ago--and again, I would reiterate that I was part of the first delegation of Members of Congress to arrive in Afghanistan after the President's speech when he announced he would send an additional 30,000 troops--this deployment of 30,000 troops and the stiff upper lip that's being kept by our military requires one to read between the lines to draw conclusions of what their real judgment is because they have their orders, and they will make due.

But when I see that the lowest number--and again this is back-channel information to me; it's not classified and it's not a briefing. Back channel information to me says 40,000 was the lowest number asked for by General McChrystal. General McChrystal and our troops in Afghanistan got a number that was 75 percent of the minimum number I believe was offered as a necessary number of troops to conduct the operations in Afghanistan with prospects of, let me say, avoiding mission failure in Afghanistan.

So they will make do with what they have. And we have gone out and negotiated with some of our NATO partners; and I saw troops there from Germany and Great Britain and from Canada and a number of other countries that are part of our NATO partners. They are there. And they're working hand-in-glove with American troops.

So the additional anticipation of 7,000 or more coming from the NATO section will be very helpful, Madam Speaker. And it doesn't substitute for the request, I don't believe. I don't think we get to say now it's 37,000. I would have rather seen--if it's going to be the minimum number asked for by General McChrystal, I don't think his request was, Oh, by the way, you don't need to send me any if NATO will come up with 40,000. I don't think that was part of the equation at all because our commanders value--and they should--our American troops as being more effective than the troops that are put together in the coalitions from

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, December 8, 2009, at 9 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I'm privileged and honored to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I appreciate the opportunity to, I think, help enlighten you and the Members that are listening in and anyone who might be observing this process that we have in the House of Representatives.

In this great deliberative body, there is a limited amount of time that we can debate here on the floor. And as things churn through, sometimes we don't come back and revisit subject matter, but I think it's necessary to establish the perspective that fits into the broader picture.

The perspective that I intend to address tonight is the perspective of immigration, and that debate has gone on in this country for a number of years. It was brought up by Pat Buchanan as a candidate for President back in the 1990s. He said he would hold congressional hearings on immigration if he were elected President of the United States. He did a lot to help galvanize this immigration debate and bring the issues that are important to this country to the forefront. And since that time, people like Tom Tancredo, and probably before that time, actually, came to this floor and raised the issue of immigration and the rule of law over and over again.

Eventually, the American people began to look at the circumstances of millions of people that are in the United States illegally, their impact on this economy, this society, and this culture.

As intense as this debate got in 2006 and 2007, it got so intense, Mr. Speaker, that as the Senate began to move on a comprehensive amnesty bill that was bipartisan in its nature, however weak it was in its rationale, it had the support of the President of the United States at that time, George W. Bush, and it had the support of leaders of the Democrat and the Republican Party in the United States Senate, as well as here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. And yet the American people rejected the idea of amnesty in any form, whether it be comprehensive amnesty that was proposed and then the nuances that they tried to bring through or whether it would just be blanket amnesty.

Well, here we are again, Mr. Speaker. Here we are again with a transformational issue that is slowly being brought forward before the American people, and I'm here to say, let's pay attention. My red flag is up, and I have watched the transition of issues that have unfolded since, actually for years, but intensively unfolded since the beginning of the Obama Presidency.

And these issues unfolded in this fashion, and perhaps I'll go back and revisit them in some more detail. But the American people did go to the polls a year ago last November and sustained majorities and actually expanded majorities for Democrats in the United States Senate and in here in the U.S. House of Representatives, and they elected a President who fit their mold as a party member, a Democrat, a very liberal Democrat. In fact, President Obama, in the short time that he served in the United States Senate, had the most liberal voting record out of all 100 U.S. Senators. So they elected, I think it's not even close to arguable, the people in the United States elected the most liberal President in the history of this country.

And while there wasn't a legitimate debate in the Presidential race that had to do with immigration, because neither candidate really wanted to touch the issue, they knew that they were at odds with the American people on immigration. John McCain knew that, and he didn't bring up the subject after the nomination, at least not in a substantial way. I couldn't say that it never happened. And Barack Obama knew the same thing and didn't bring immigration up in a substantial way during the Presidential campaign after the nominations.

And so this Nation went forward with discussions about national security, about economic development, discussions about energy, but not discussions about immigration. Here we are today, a year and a month after President Obama was elected, and we have seen these big issues come through this Congress. And here is the sequence of events, Mr. Speaker, that has taken place, and I invite anybody to challenge me on the facts of these, but it is this:

During the Bush administration, we had the beginning of the first call for TARP funding. That was the beginning request that began by my mental marker here, chronologically, September 19, 2008, when Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Henry Paulson, came to this Capitol and asked for $700 billion. All of it, of course, would be borrowed money. All of it would have to be paid back, and the interest on it, by the taxpayers and their children and their grandchildren, presuming we would be able to retire our national debt in that period of time. Or it might take more generations, Mr. Speaker. $700 billion in TARP, this Congress approved half of it then, and I believe that it was actually into October, the early part of October 2008, delayed the other half, the other $350 billion to be approved by a Congress to be elected later and signed into law by a President to be elected later. That began September 19, 2008. $700 billion in TARP funding, partly before that, mostly after that, became the sequence of events then.

As the described downward spiral and threat of economic crisis of global proportions came at us here in this Congress and it was spread around the globe, causing nation after nation to react in one fashion or another, we saw most of it under the hand of President Obama, the nationalization of three large investment banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, the large insurance company, General Motors, Chrysler, all of that swept through in a period of

time of approximately 1 year. And at the tail end, framing the nationalization of those eight huge entities that represent about one- third of the private sector profits in the United States, framed on the other end of that nationalization effort on the part of the White House and those who supported that, was a $787 billion economic stimulus plan. All of this just raced us towards the nationalization of an economy, the socialization of our economy, Mr. Speaker.

The American people looked at that, and it went so fast that they didn't believe they had the expertise. They trusted Wall Street. They trusted Big Business in America, and they believed, as I did for a time in my adult life, that Wall Street was looking out for the foundations of free-enterprise capitalism so that over the long term they could continue to do business in a free-market environment to be able to buy, sell, trade, and make legitimate gain by creating real wealth that is rooted in the productivity increase of the American workers and the American economy. Well, it didn't turn out to be necessarily the case that clearly.

But while this was unfolding, $700 billion in TARP, the eight huge national entities of the private sector that were nationalized by the Federal Government, and the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, all of that came at the American people faster than they could react and faster than they could understand. And they were not simple enough in the foundational understanding of them that the American people could look at that, describe it in a bumper sticker and mobilize. It took too long to understand them. It took long to explain. It was harder for the American people to get caught up, and it was hard for Members of Congress in the same fashion to understand the nuances and the details with the level of confidence necessary to rise up and say, Hold it. That's it. We've got to stop. We cannot race down this path and leap off the abyss into the socialized economy. But that is where we have gone, Mr. Speaker.

The American people started to catch up when they saw cap-and-trade being pushed through this Congress. The cap-and-tax legislation that taxes every bit of energy in America and transfers wealth from one group of people in America to another group, they understood that. It came so fast they couldn't get mobilized very much.

Meanwhile, while this was going on, organizations across America were spontaneously growing up out of the prairie, out of the mountains, out of the western States and off the east coast. People that love this Constitution, love fiscal responsibility and free-market capitalism have risen up, and they have carried their flags into city after city, and they have jammed the capitals of the States, and they have jammed this United States Capital. And when you look out across that sea of people, you will see represented there, Mr. Speaker, American flags, one after another after another, patriotic Americans, any one of which I would expect to see at my own church picnic. And among those American flags, you will see yellow ``Don't tread on me'' flags. These are the Americans that will save us from the greed that is also political power greed as well as an economic greed in this country.

All of that has taken place. The American people have mobilized. By the end of July of 2009, this year, they had seen all of this come to pass, and they saw cap-and-trade, or cap-and-tax, pass off the floor of the House of Representatives and a hurry-up rush to judgment, a proposal and a model that cannot be sustained, debated, or argued in any logical fashion that has to do with economics, and neither can the science be defended, especially in light of the emails that have been dumped onto the Internet in the last week or two.

And we've seen at least one resignation, Phil Jones, one of the scientists promoting the climate change argument. The change actually went from the words ``global warming'' to the phrase ``climate change,'' because obviously they can't show the warming of the globe over the last decade in the fashion that they predicted at least.

All of this happened and we saw town hall meetings fill up all across America during the month of August and early September. Hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came up and filled those town hall meetings, and they filled up the public squares, and they stepped up and resisted the idea of a government-run health care system of socialized medicine in America.

Now the American people are starting to get some traction. They can see the pattern. They voted for change. They didn't know what the change was, Madam Speaker. And now they have a pretty good idea of that change that has been in store for us, and they reject it. It's why they filled up the Capital and filled up the town hall meetings.

But what we've seen so far is this intensity, this resistance to cap- and-tax, this resistance to a national health care act, the resistance that brought somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 people here to this Capital to be outside this west side of the Capitol on the Thursday before the final vote. And some of those people that came here on Thursday got on a plane and flew back to their hometown, landed, and they saw that they had a request to come back to the Capital to do this again on Saturday, to do our very level best to dump out all of our energy to kill this socialized medicine bill.

That's the American people mobilized, Madam Speaker. The American people have been mobilized in every State in this union and they came to this city just a few weeks ago to resist socialized medicine. They came from every single State, including Alaska and Hawaii. And that mobilization of the American people that are determined to defend this country and the values that made this a great Nation is only a smaller part of the energy that's out there if this President, this majority and this Congress, this Pelosi majority and the Harry Reid majority down the hallway through the center of the Capitol in the United States Senate, if they decide they want to try to bring comprehensive amnesty to overhaul the immigration laws in the United States of America, rather than enforcing them, we've seen nothing yet so far this year to what we will see if they try to bring amnesty and force that down the throats of the American people.

The lines have been drawn. The American patriots have stepped up. They understand what's going on. This is about the rule of law. At the core of the argument on immigration is the rule of law. A Nation cannot be a Nation unless it defends the rule of law. And we have been so proud of the rule of law in America. When I went home over Thanksgiving vacation, I arrived home, actually it was very early on a Friday morning and I went to Sioux City. One of the things I did that day was to go to a naturalization ceremony at the Federal building in Sioux City. I have spoken to the naturalized groups there a number of times. There were 37 new Americans that took the oath of allegiance to the United States on that day. They were from 11 different countries that I counted, perhaps a couple of more. These are people that today are as much an American citizen as the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or the residents in my house. I welcome the legal immigrants that come into America, that follow the law, that come here, lawfully, to have access to this American dream, because when they do, they will build this dream for others. The vitality that we have gotten from every donor nation is the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization. It's one of the things about being an American that's unique. We're not just an appendage of Western Europe or the other countries that have contributed people to come to the United States and become Americans. We have a unique vitality, Madam Speaker. It's rooted in a lot of things. It's built upon the foundation of the pillars of American exceptionalism. Among them are free enterprise, capitalism and property rights and freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press and the right to keep and bear arms; and also, the right to be judged by a jury of your peers.

And the rule of law, Madam Speaker. The rule of law says that if you are judged, and I said this to that group of newly naturalized Americans in Sioux City that day, some week and a half or so ago: If you come before a court of law in the United States of America, if you're the richest man in the world, you'll get the same level of justice that

you get if you're the poorest man in America. If Bill Gates comes before that court, before the Federal court in Sioux City, Iowa, he'll be judged on the same standard as the poorest person in that room that day, or the poorest person they could find off of the street, the same measure of justice. It's what we've pledged. It's one of those foundations of being an American, the same level of justice. Justice is blind. Equal justice before the law. That rule of law, that profound respect for the rule of law would be cast asunder if we grant amnesty to anyone, especially not 10 million or 20 million or more that have come into the United States illegally, demonstrated their lack of respect for our rule of law and, in many cases, demonstrated their contempt for the rule of law in America.

During the early part of July, I went down to the border, mostly in Arizona, and there I went into the border patrol station at Nogales. It's the busiest border patrol station in the country. It's part of that section of 2,000 miles of border from the coast of California all the way to Brownsville. There, as I watched what was happening, we went out and watched as some who were jumping the fence that exists there, it's not a good enough fence, but it's better than no fence. They couldn't control anything without it. And they monitor the fence. They picked up some illegals that had jumped the fence or otherwise broke into the United States. We also saw others on film that were picked up and they were brought to the center, the center at the border patrol station in Nogales. Good people work in there that do respect the rule of law.

If you watched the people that I'd seen arrested because of breaking our immigration law come waltzing into the border patrol station at Nogales, some of them just with a smirk on their face, Madam Speaker, some of them thought they had accomplished something again, that, well, so they got caught; they knew what was going to happen to them. I looked at that smirk, and that smirk on face after face, not every one of them and probably not even quite half of them, but the attitude of many of those who were picked up for unlawful entry into the United States was an attitude that allowed that smirk to be there, that they had tried to pull something off, so they got caught; and they knew what would happen to them. They knew that they would be released and released back to Mexico, and then they would have a chance in the next hour or the next day or the next week, whenever they decided to come back into the United States again. And they knew that they could keep trying over and over and over again until they finally got where they wanted to go.

Some of these questions come down to this. I posed this question, Madam Speaker. How often does one suppose that a unique individual is picked up at the border sneaking into the United States? We don't have to wonder; we don't have to ask the question because we have some data now that's more than a year old since we've been accumulating, fingerprinting and taking a digital photograph of each individual who is being processed for a voluntary return, or anyone who's been processed for violating our immigration laws, for that matter, those that are processed for voluntary return.

And so I asked the question, How many times do you meet a unique individual? What's the maximum? And we go back and look at the data. Anecdotally it goes to 37 or 38 times for one single individual that's been picked up and brought to the same station, printed, photographed; and then what happens? Oh, and by the way, Madam Speaker, the process is this: Border patrol picks them up, and when they're able to, let's say, interdict one or more individuals, then they call the contractor, a contractor who has a van and a couple of uniformed officers. The van is set up for security so they can haul inmates or those individuals in the van. The van comes, picks them up and two of these people that look like officers, I guess you'll say they are officers, but they're contractors, they load up the one or more illegals that have been interdicted by the border patrol, they take them up to the station where when they walk in, they already have their little plastic bag with their personal items in it. They sit down against the wall; they all get processed, fingerprinted, they get their pictures taken and then they put them in one of four different holding cells, and if they'll do a voluntary return, then they pick them up, it might be the same officers, it often is the same officers, that will take these illegals and haul them down to the border, turn the van sideways, open up the side door and they get out the side of the van and walk back into Mexico. The door gets closed on the van. This time I was watching, they squealed their tires as they turned around and went back to get another load.

The things that I saw in front of my eyes were not catch and release into the United States, but catch near the border and release at the border and direct them to go back to Mexico. No further questions asked. We just have your prints and we have your digital photographs. Anecdotal evidence says 37 to 38 times a unique individual--when I go back and look at the data, the data supports numbers that go up to 28 times that we process the same individual. That's part of the records.

What kind of a law enforcement, what kind of a rule of law would establish the law that says that it's illegal to come into the United States and violate our immigration laws, and then pick people up, run them through the process, and drop them back off at the border and just simply put them back in the condition they were in and very close to the place they were in before they broke the law and not at least have a limit? Voluntary return 28 times, no consequences?

So I asked those questions: What do you do when you have these numbers that run up, even a second time, even a first time? I'd say zero tolerance. Let's put the resources down there and have zero tolerance; punish everybody to the maximum extent of the law and see what kind of a deterrent effect we can establish. But that's not the case. And when they sometimes have moved people up the line for expedited removal and tried to get them a stiff sentence to punish them, at least in one case, the judge released the individual for time served.

What a demoralizing exercise to go to work every day, put on the uniform of the border patrol and go out and pick up individuals; you catch them and a contractor hauls them, they're processed through the station and hauled back to the border where they go back to Mexico to be caught again, around and around and around again, a never-ending circle, and we call that enforcement of immigration law.

But at least, Madam Speaker, we have immigration law. At least it's against the law to come into the United States in violation of the standards that we have; and at least we have penalties that we can impose against the people that do. But we're here in a Congress that looks like it has the will to start this idea again, this comprehensive amnesty argument again, that if people can get into the United States and they express that they want to stay here, that we should just say, We'll give you amnesty and we'll give you a path to citizenship because we don't have the will to enforce the law.

And this argument, this specious, baseless argument that's been made by this side of the aisle over and over again, and by some on this side of the aisle too, Madam Speaker, that somehow or another America can't get along without having immigrants, legal and otherwise, and actually they say especially illegal immigrants, to do the work that Americans won't do. What an offense to the people that are hardworking in America.

Americans are the majority of every single profession out there. And I mean Americans, legal workers in America, are the majority of every single profession out there with the exception of agriculture and farm workers. Everybody else is predominantly Americans. Yet they'll say there are jobs Americans won't do. Well, what jobs? Tell me what jobs?

John McCain said, well, Americans won't pick lettuce and offered $50 an hour. I'd have lost my whole construction crews. They'd have gone down there and picked lettuce for $50 an hour instead of haul dirt for the price we pay them, which isn't bad, by the way. That argument that there are jobs that Americans won't do and those are jobs that must be done doesn't have a foundation. Americans will do these jobs over and over again. And if there's a

job that Americans won't do, let me describe to you the most difficult job there is. The most dangerous, the dirtiest, the most stressful, the riskiest, hottest, dustiest, dirtiest, nastiest job to do is rooting terrorists out of places like Fallujah or Karbala or Ramadi, or Iraq, Afghanistan and the mountains in Afghanistan, for example. That's the most difficult job there is. It's the most dangerous. It's the dirtiest. You don't get to take a shower every day and sit down and take a coffee break when the bullets are flying or the IEDs are being detonated.

And what do we pay Americans to do that? The lowest ranking marines-- a couple of years ago I checked the number--about $8.09 an hour, presuming it is a 40-hour week, and it's not. Can you look those people in the eye that are defending our safety and our security, Madam Speaker, and say to them, There are jobs Americans won't do? That marine, that soldier, he's going to look at you and wonder, well, what's dirtier or more dangerous, what's nastier than this job that I'm doing for the love of my country? For the love of my country and $8.09 an hour? And we have to take this insult that there's jobs that Americans won't do.

Americans do every job. I look at my family. I look at my neighbors. It's hard to come up with a job that we haven't done. That includes processing meat. I've done a fair amount of it myself. But if I look at the meat processing around my neighborhood, 25 years ago, at about that era of time, if you wanted to get a job in the packing plant around my neighborhood, you had to know somebody to get in. These weren't union jobs, but you had to know somebody to get a job like that because they paid well. The benefits were competitive with anyplace else. I watched people grow up and maneuver and position themselves to go through school and get out of school so they could get a job working on the line at the packing plant, just the way a lot of miners got in line to go down and mine some coal or steelworkers lined up at the mill and generation after generation went to work at the steel mill. These are proud jobs, and there's dignity in every kind of work that's necessary to be done.

But at the time, 25 or 30 years ago, you had to know somebody to get a job to work in the packing plant, and the job paid about the same as a school teacher made then. Today, that same job is usually held by someone whom we suspect is illegal, and it pays about half of what a teacher is making.

So what we've seen is we've seen an oversupply of labor that has poured into these jobs because people can go in and do these jobs without being particularly literate or particularly educated, but you can't do it without being particularly ambitious.

And so the young American that grew up that really only wanted to go and do his 40 or 45 hours a week and go work in the plant and punch the clock and come home and raise his kids and play ball and take them fishing and modestly pay for a modest house and give an opportunity for his children and focus his life on other things other than always career advancement, that opportunity is nearly gone in America today because we have an oversupply of labor that's willing to work cheap and they can compete in these jobs because it doesn't take a long period of education to do some of the work out there where the wages have gone down.

The highest levels of unemployment that we have in America are in the lower-skilled jobs. That's to the detriment of the American worker. And, Madam Speaker, there are people out there today that are going to work in these jobs that are legal. They're legal immigrants or else they're natural-born Americans. And when they step up to the line, whether it's at the steel mill or whether it's the packing plant or food processing or whatever it might be, and if you look to their right and they see someone whom they suspect is illegal, and may well know that they are, and they look to their left and they see another person that they suspect is illegal, or know that they are, they need to understand that on their right and left likely are jobs that Americans would be doing if those positions weren't taken by those who broke into this country or those who overstayed their visas, Madam Speaker.

Here we are with the President of the United States tomorrow having his jobs summit at the White House. And there you will see a collection of Keynesian economists, the kind of brains that brought about all these things that I've talked about, from TARP funding to the nationalization of the investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and General Motors and Chrysler and $787 billion and an economic stimulus plan; the kind of brains that decided we should tax all the energy consumed in America and tell America that we're going to create green jobs; the kind of people that can't draw a distinction between the private sector and the public sector; people that don't understand that it's the private sector that produces all of the new wealth that's necessary--in fact, all of the wealth that's necessary to make this society work--and that out of that wealth that comes from the private sector is skimmed the funding that goes into the government machinery. It has been so convoluted over the last generation or so that economists can go through a college education and go off and get their master's and really not have much exposure to where the new wealth comes from.

I need to make this point, Madam Speaker, that the American people need to understand there's a distinction between the private sector-- the productive sector of the economy--and the public sector of the economy--the parasitic sector of the economy, the sector of the economy that comes from government that taxes production and punishes production and regulates production until it defeats the very spirit of the entrepreneurs that start the companies that create the jobs.

And these companies that come from the entrepreneurs, they aren't just based on some esoteric dream like we seem to be getting out of the White House economists that we will hear about tomorrow. The idea that we have out there, I can't draw a distinction very much between what is going on between the years of Larry Summers, for example, or someone who may believe that they can always keep pushing the system further ahead. We have heard of those people.

Madam Speaker, my news to the White House is this American economy is not just simply a large magic chain letter that you can stimulate some people to make another investment and send out another dozen letters in the chain and they would get theirs out of the next group of suckers. That's what a chain letter does. That's what a government-driven economy does. It always has to find another group of suckers. And the suckers today are becoming the ones that are producing some wealth in the private sector.

Now where does wealth come from? It comes from the production of goods and services, first, that are essential to the survival of mankind and, second, to the production of goods and services that improve the productivity of those goods and services that are essential to the survival of mankind.

So if it's food, clothing and shelter, the things that we must have if we're going to live, if you produce those things, you're at the foundation of the new wealth. If you produce those things that make us more efficient in producing those essentials for life, you're at the second level of the economy. The third level is the disposable income that comes that's in excess to the necessities that are required to replace your capital investment and the necessities that are required to continue the production of the necessities of life. And so that's the disposable income. That's the income we use to add those things to our quality of life that allow us to go to Disney World, to go on vacation, travel around. Those things that, when we buy nice things and sit them on the shelf, make us feel good. They're not essential. They're nice, but we can get along without them.

So those are the levels of the economy and all new wealth comes from the land or out of Mother Earth. And whether you want to mine some gold or some platinum or whether you want to raise some corn or soybeans or cotton or peanuts, all of these things add to our ability to provide for the survival of mankind and the production efficiency of mankind. And when we do that well enough, we've got disposable income and the Federal Government

and other political subdivisions come in and skim the cream off that production out of the private sector that I've just described.

And then you have people like those who have been appointed by the President, hired by the President, and the President himself, who sit back, get this thoughtful look on their face, and they think, Let me see, if I could borrow a few hundred billion dollars from the Chinese and promise to pay interest on that few hundred billion dollars, then I could drop this money in and I could do a few hundred billion dollars' worth of patronage--patronage jobs that will call for more political loyalty and the government jobs that are temporarily created by the taxation and the borrowing that takes place.

Never mind about 4 years from now or 8 years or a decade or two or a generation from now. We'll just borrow that money now and drop this into the economy and give this big, giant economic chain letter a spin. That's what's been going on, but it has gone into over-drive in the last year. And while this is going on, we have this immigration policy that's becoming more and more errant in its philosophy and its results.

I've talked about the lack of will to enforce immigration law just by illustrating what we're doing. We're doing catch-and-return as opposed to catch-and-release. We're just returning them to the border and releasing them there. So catch-return-release is a better way to describe what is going on with immigration law in the United States. We have a Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security that has essentially said, I'm not going to go out and do raids on employers, even if I know there might be thousands there that are working there illegally. She's essentially said that she just wants to go in and find the employers that are violating the law by hiring illegals.

Now, I think we should do that; but I think when we encounter people that are in this country illegally, whether they're working or whether they aren't, we have an obligation when we encounter people unlawfully present in the United States to take them back and put them where they're lawfully present. All we're doing is putting people back into the condition they were in before they broke the law. Deporting someone who's violated immigration law in the United States is the equivalent of catching--let's just say you catch a bank robber and he's got the money and you say, Hold it, you're going to have to give up the money and I'm going to take you outside the door of the bank and turn you lose again. That's the equivalent of deportation.

Any nation that doesn't have the will to put people back in the condition they were and the location they were in before they broke the law on immigration cannot sustain any kind of enforcement whatsoever. It's predicated on the ability to return them to where they came and keep them out. That's why. Not only do we need to use all levels of law enforcement; we need the 287(g) program to be refurbished again to what it was before it was distorted by the Secretary of Homeland Security for the purposes, I believe, of jerking the 287(g) local law enforcement cooperation memorandum of understanding rug out from underneath Sheriff Joe Arpaio down in Maricopa County. It was one of the strong motivations that took place.

We have to have, in a Nation with a rule of law, we have got to have cooperation at all levels of government with all laws. We cannot have local law enforcement take a position that they don't have the authority to enforce immigration law. Of course they do. The Attorney General should know that. There's an Attorney General's opinion that supports it; a previous Attorney General actually under Ashcroft. There are several Federal court cases that support the authority and the jurisdiction of local law enforcement to enforce Federal immigration law.

And I could drop those all into the Record here tonight, Madam Speaker. They are a matter of fact here in America, no matter how they have tried to distort this, because the open borders people don't want to enforce immigration law. They want to see a greater number of people come into the United States, and they want to empower themselves politically with the masses of those that are here illegally.

But they're running up against a little problem, Madam Speaker. This problem is the growing problem of unemployment in America: the pressure on our economy--the pressure on our economy that's watching us lose, over the last month, 190,000 jobs. We lost 190,000 jobs last month that were eliminated by the downward spiral of our economy. During the same period of time our Federal Government saw fit to approve permanent work permits--those are green cards--for legal immigrants of 75,000 per month.

Now, if you look at these numbers, these numbers work like this: there are approximately, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 8 million illegals working in the United States. I think the number is greater than that. These numbers can be verified, I believe, by solid analysis. It's not under that unless the suppression of the economy has reduced that number marginally over the last few months, and it may have actually dropped as far as 7 million. But their number is 8 million.

The second number is 75,000. We issued in October of this year, the Federal Government, 75,000 working permits for immigrants; 75,000 new illegal immigrant workers in just one month. Seventy-five thousand. That's an actual rate of 900,000 new working legals in the United States of America while we're losing 190,000 jobs a month. This works out to be, on an annual basis--and I'm just extrapolating over the last month because we don't know what the future is going to bring, Madam Speaker--but I extrapolate this. We lost 190,000 jobs last month. That's 2,280,000 jobs lost at that rate. Those jobs gone, disappeared. But at the same rate, 900,000 jobs taken up by legal immigrants, not to count the illegal immigrants that are there.

So we had a net annual loss of jobs of about 1.1 million, 380,000 net loss of jobs as a result of the 900,000 green cards. We have 8 million--perhaps as low as 7--but 8 million illegal workers in America. You add that to the number, and you have a pressure on this economy that is just an awesome thing to think that we have a President of the United States that declared that his stimulus plan was going to, Madam Speaker, he said--and I'm almost embarrassed to repeat this--save or create 3.5 million jobs by September of 2010. I believe that's the date that he gave in that. Save or create 3.5 million jobs by September, 2010, if we just put another $787 billion into the economy, which some of that happened. All of it was approved and authorized in one fashion or another. However it was used is another story.

So a government, led by the White House, that was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs now has to admit that, according to the CBO, you can't determine what number of jobs have been created, let alone what jobs have been saved. And I always knew that those were pretty slippery words. It's hard to pin down a definition when you say ``save or create.'' But on that day--in fact, that moment--when I heard the language from the President that he was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs with the $787 billion, my instantaneous response was, as long as there are 3.5 million jobs left in America, they will be the jobs the President points to and says, See, those are the jobs that I saved with the $787 billion stimulus plan.

That's how this language works. If you're going to create jobs, you should be able to quantify how you're going to do that, and you should lay out the cost per job to create them. If you're going to save jobs, how do you invest money in saving a job? I suppose you could go to a company and say, Listen, we're going to buy up all of this product that you're producing because you have got a 1,000 jobs here, and part of the money that we're contributing to buy this product we wouldn't buy otherwise is going to save these 1,000 jobs that you have. It is pretty hard to measure.

So the Federal Government didn't really do much analysis. They just set up this Web site. This Web site, Madam Speaker, is recovery.gov/ transparency/statesummaries, and the list goes on. Well, I didn't look at all 50 States. I went as far as Iowa before I actually learned all I needed to know at this point. This is the Web site. Not only does it create jobs that certainly don't exist, but it also creates congressional

districts that don't exist. Just for the State of Iowa, on this Web site, recovery.gov/transparency, for the jobs that were created in western Iowa, alleged by the White House's Web site, they spent $862,498 per job created. Now, get that, $862,498 jobs per job created in western Iowa, created a lot of these jobs in nonexistent congressional districts.

We have five congressional districts in Iowa. Some of these jobs were alleged to have been created. These are the district numbers. Seventh, Eighth, 16th, 17th, 19th, 24th, and 31st Iowa Congressional Districts, jobs created at the cost of $862,498, and that leaves off the double- aught district of the State of Iowa. That's zero-zero. That's double goose egg. That's nonexistent, if you could put nonexistent there without a decimal point and carry it out to infinity. There they spent $114,000 to create five nonexistent jobs.

This is what's going on with these Keynesian economics on steroids while they're propping up immigration, while we have Americans that need jobs, want jobs, line up for jobs. While this is going on, we have this kind of fuzzy math accounting and a complete misunderstanding of where wealth comes from, a complete misunderstanding of the foundation of our economy. And I know John Maynard Keynes had some ideas, and I know he has got followers, and I know FDR was one of them. But Keynes was also the guy who said back in the 1930s, I can solve all of your unemployment in America. Just take me to an abandoned coal mine, and I will go out and drill a bunch of holes out there, and I will bury American cash in there, and then I will fill that coal mine up with garbage--this was before the EPA was created, by the way, Madam Speaker--and turn the entrepreneurs loose to go dig the money up out of the holes that were drilled in the bottom of the coal mine that was filled with garbage.

That was Keynes' idea, and I know he was sounding facetious, but, giving a little bit for his sense of humor and for his sense of accuracy, because we have spent a lot of money in this country, dug holes and filled them back up figuratively without putting the money in it, just put money in the hole.

Do Americans want jobs? Absolutely they do, Madam Speaker. And here's what's taking place: Day labor centers are now seeing natural born Americans, United States citizens, line up at the day labor centers right next to illegals, competing for jobs that illegals were supposedly doing that Americans wouldn't do. Here is an article in my hand, USA Today, December 1--that's yesterday--titled ``Unemployed U.S.-born workers seek day-labor jobs.'' It quotes a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, Abel Valenzuela, Jr.--he is a professor of urban planning. To quote him, he says this:

``You had many, many unemployed construction workers who found themselves without any permanent or stable work. Some of them have gone on to seek employment by standing on street corners alongside immigrant workers.'' That's the professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. It goes on to say, ``Contractors and homeowners describe the jobs and negotiate pay on the spot,'' just like illegals have, for too long in this country. There are stories and narratives that come from Tucson, Arlington, Virginia, Los Angeles. Los Angeles, it says that ``Citizens are replacing''--citizens, Madam Speaker--``Citizens are replacing immigrant day laborers who had trouble finding work and returned to their home countries. These are people who used to have permanent positions. It's happening everywhere.''

That's the article from USA Today. Jobs Americans won't do? Americans are lined up to get jobs in day labor gatherings right alongside groups of illegals who have, some of them, decided to go back home because of the lack of opportunity here. The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent. Seven to eight million working illegals, as I said. That's about 15.7 million unemployed, and Madam Speaker, if you add to the list of that 15.7 million legitimate workers in America who are unemployed and, by definition, are looking for a job, there is another 5.5 million or more who have exhausted their unemployment benefits who don't quite fit the definition that are looking for a job.

There are more than 20 million Americans that want a job today. The American workforce, of 154.4 million of our total workforce, there are over 70 million Americans of working age who are not working. Over 70 million. We could tap into a workforce of more than 70 million people of working age that are just simply not working because the wages don't pay enough, the benefits don't pay enough. Maybe they're independently wealthy. Maybe they're in between jobs, but they're all hirable if you make a good enough offer.

These are Americans that will work. There are 70 million nonworking Americans of working age, 7 million to 8 million working illegals, and they tell us that they are jobs Americans won't do, and we won't possibly run our economy unless we have these millions of illegal workers that are here, but they want to give them amnesty and legalize them?

All we have to do, Madam Speaker, is hire 1 out of 10 of the Americans who are of working age and not in the workforce, put them into those jobs, and we could easily replace--by hiring 10 percent of the nonworking Americans of working age, we could replace every illegal in America, according to these numbers, that are produced by the Pew foundation. If it's double that, like I think it is, then we hire 20 percent, 2 out of 10 of Americans. We're looking at more than 20 million Americans that are looking for work. I think this is an easy solution for us. And by the way, we are wiping out 900,000 jobs a year because of legal immigration, green cards that we're granting at the rate of 75,000 per month. That number I believe is 780,000 so far this year.

``Federal records show that before the recession began, the Federal Government issued 830,000 green cards in the previous year. Last year, during the first year of the recession, the government granted 875,000 new green cards, and we're at the pace to go to 900,000 or more this year.'' There were 900,000 jobs granted to people who were--at the time the card was advanced--not Americans, while Americans are lined up 20 million deep. We're wiping out almost 1 million jobs a year because of the legal immigration, and we know that there are 7 million to 8 million or more jobs that are taken by illegals, and we know that if we enforce the job--if we enforce a law for every illegal that's removed from a job, it opens up a job slot for an American to step into.

Madam Speaker, any sane nation would go after this enforcement. They would adjust their immigration policy to reduce the legal immigration because of the recession that we are in. Here is what's going on in this chart, Madam Speaker. The workforce enforcement free-fall--what we've seen happen is, the unemployment has gone up 58 percent overall. At the same time that's happened, here is the enforcement that has gone down. Department of Homeland Security administrative arrests are down 68 percent; criminal arrests are down 60 percent; criminal indictments are down 58 percent, almost reflecting the same; criminal convictions are down 63 percent. This whole level is down roughly 60 percent or a little bit more in the enforcement of our immigration laws, while unemployment is up almost the same thing, almost 60 percent.

What nation that needs a sound economic policy would go down this path of reducing its enforcement of immigration law while it watched unemployment go up to 10.2 percent and rising to 15.7 million by definition unemployed, more than 20 million altogether, and still we grant green cards at the rate of 900,000 a year. And every one of them supplants--if they go to work, they supplant a job an American would be doing otherwise while we tolerate, I'll say, tens of millions of illegals in America who come here and--yes, I know everybody has a dream, but everybody can't live in the United States of America. That is the bottom line. We can't help the world if we sink the lifeboat. That's what will happen.

I'm for a tighter labor supply, Madam Speaker. I'm for the kind of labor supply that will allow that person who grows up in this country or comes legally to this country to go to work and earn a living and be able to claim a salary and benefits package that they can live on, that they can

raise a family on. And yes, today it takes two workers in a family to make this happen. Mom and dad to raise the kids, working together and making ends meet as best they can.

But that's not really possible today for the lower-educated Americans. Their dreams have been taken away by illegal immigration. And somewhere, somewhere in America thousands of times over, over Thanksgiving and coming up for Christmas, there will be a brother and a sister, or a brother and a brother, siblings sitting around the table, and they'll say grace and ask the blessings on their turkey, and they'll start to talk as they eat, and somebody will be unemployed. And their brother or sister will have a job, and they'll understand that there are people who are in the United States illegally that are filling those slots that they could have, and this discussion, which becomes a nationwide discussion, the rejection of amnesty starts to swell.

As the subject is brought forward here before this Congress--if it is--you will see the American people rise up, and their rejection of amnesty that we saw in 2006 and '07 will be child's play compared to the anger of the American people who now see themselves unemployed, 20 million or more, watching them being replaced by legal immigrants at the rate of almost 1 million a year and watching 8 million, or maybe twice as many, illegals working in America, taking jobs that Americans will do.

In fact, taking jobs, according to the USA Today article that I referenced, that Americans are standing in line to do right next to people that--if I needed to come and hand out the work permits, they would be compelled to deport many of these workers. This Nation does not have a logical and coherent enforcement of immigration law.

One of the things we need to do for a tool to enforce, Madam Speaker, is to pass my New IDEA Act. The acronym is this: The New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. It brings the IRS into this so that the IRS--it clarifies to the IRS that wages and benefits are not deductible for income tax purposes. It allows the IRS to do the audit and deny the business expense of wages and benefits paid to illegals, which takes-- when the interest and the penalty and the tax liability that accrues from that decision at a 34 percent rate, will take your $10 an hour illegal up to $16 an hour.

Employers will understand that they would rather go with the legal worker at $13 or $14 an hour than the illegal that could cost them $16 an hour, and we have the IRS into this. They love enforcing their work. I know that. So we bring the IRS into the mix, and they would be required under the New IDEA Act to cooperate with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. We can shut down this jobs magnet. We can control this border. We can reestablish the rule of law in America. We can reinvigorate this economy, and we can produce a tight enough labor supply that the wages and benefits paid to our workers, whatever their education level is--if they're willing to work, they need to be able to sustain themselves in this society.

We're moving away from it today. We can move this back. We can refurbish the middle class in America. That's one of our charges during this time. It's one of our opportunities during this time, Madam Speaker. And I urge that you and everyone in this Congress bring special attention to the preservation of the rule of law which is more important than our economy is today in this country.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 3, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Listening to the dialogue of the gentlemen in the previous hour, I generally have a pattern where I will discuss a bit of different viewpoints.

And returning to that subject matter, I understand their concern for military personnel and their families, for the lives and the health of all of our brave military personnel. In fact, I sympathize and support our military personnel and their families and the entire support network that is there. I've been six times to Iraq, twice to Afghanistan; and I meet with our military personnel as often as I possibly can. And, yes, like every congressional district--and perhaps every congressional district--we've lost soldiers and we've lost airmen and we've lost marines and we've lost sailors. And that has been the case, and it's ever been thus.

So as I listened to the gentlemen who argue that we should have a debate on the floor, it seems as though they come with a common purpose of arguing that we should not be in Afghanistan.

I would make the point, Madam Speaker, that they made the same argument when we were in Iraq. And the points that they made then were very similar to the points that are being made now and that is the position that it's not worth the price. It is a legitimate position to discuss, but I believe it is the one to have that debate before we engage in a war rather than when we're in the floor of it because the dialogue from the floor of this House echoes to our enemies; and they begin to wonder whether the Americans have the resolve to persevere and bring about the sustained effort that's necessary in order to win a war, especially a war that is protracted with an amorphous enemy that is scattered throughout the mountains that has sometimes the support of the network.

The Taliban is our enemy and al Qaeda is our enemy, and there are another six or seven organizations in that part of the world who are defined organizations that are our enemies, Madam Speaker.

But the position taken by these Members back during the Iraq war was to pull out, pull out at all costs, pull out immediately. Simply leave a rear guard to try to avoid being shot in the back as our troops loaded out of Iraq. Let it collapse, if that's what it would be. But they argued it wasn't worth the price--at least some of them, and I believe all of them, that were on the floor taking this position tonight.

And yet in spite of the naysayers, in spite of the distraction, in spite of the 45 votes that were brought to the floor of this Congress and led by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, those votes were designed to undermine, unfund, and to damage the resolve of our troops. Those votes that came to this floor--and I have a collected Excel spreadsheet that links to each one of those resolutions, each one of those votes, 45 votes and debates on the floor of this House--these Members can't argue that we didn't have the debate on Iraq. It was pushed by the Speaker of the House. And whatever the motives, it demoralized our troops and encouraged our enemies.

And the result of those resolutions and different acts that were brought to

this floor was that this Congress stuck together. This Congress didn't crack. We stood with our military; we stood with our troops. We're at a time of war. And a decision was made, and this Congress made the decision to go into Iraq and to provide for the authority for the President of the United States to command the military forces to do what was necessary to protect the American people. We were operating off the best information we had at the time. That's what any nation does at any time in any crisis. And I think at any time in history if there has been a question whether it was a right decision, there's always the question of what was the information they had to work with at the time.

Regardless, the situation remains this: the people that were here on the floor that would like to pull us out of Afghanistan immediately are the ones who also predominantly were for pulling out of Iraq immediately. We know that the President of the United States, the current Commander in Chief, as a candidate for the Presidency, argued that Bush had taken his eye off the ball, that the ball was Afghanistan and the target was Osama bin Laden and that he would bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Even denigrated Senator John McCain for saying he would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if necessary, but not being willing to take on some of the tasks that the President thought should be taken on.

And so our current President, our current Commander in Chief, as a candidate and United States Senator, continually made the speech that President Bush had taken his eye off the ball, if the ball was Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, and that we should immediately pull all of our troops out of Iraq without regard to those consequences, and diminished the calamity that almost certainly would have ensued.

And that calamity, just to paint that picture again, Madam Speaker, for the American people's benefit, the calamity that was pending in 2005, 2006, especially early 2007 and on into 2008, would have likely been this scenario: if we'd pulled out, the Kurds would have likely declared independence and found themselves in a two-front war: Iran on one side that had been throughout those years lobbing artillery rounds into Kurdistan, and war with the Turks on the west side who have gone in and done several raids against the Kurds there in the last few years.

So there's that open-arm conflict that exists on the east and west border of Kurdistan that likely would have swallowed up the Kurds that would not have had the help of the United States if we had pulled out of Iraq, and neither would they have had the help from Iraq because the Iraqis themselves were having significant difficulty in providing security for their own people.

Other problems that we had were militia groups that were warring against each other, Sunnis and Shias and the power vacuum that brought about this violence. There were neighborhoods that were purged and taken back over again. And we had, if not forgotten, the Mahdi militia and the other militias that had emerged within Iraq that were in the process of enforcement, and some might say ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence.

And al Qaeda was entrenched in the al Anbar province. Al Qaeda ruled al Anbar province. Al Anbar province was so bad that I could not go there during that period of time throughout all of 2006 and probably well before then. The cities of Ramadi and Fallujah had been fought over, and they needed to be fought over again before they could be liberated for the Iraqi people to take control of.

That was the scenario. And not only that, the great threat of the Iranians and their involvement and engagement in subversive activities across their border into Iraq was all part of this competition that was almost--almost--a military, political, economic conundrum.

And you have most of the oil in Iraq is over against the Straits-- very, very close to the oil that's in Iran. And then in the south where you had the Shias, the Shias had some affinity to the Iranian Shias.

So that entire scenario, the worst-case scenario that I can paint for this--and it's the one that actually looked like it was the most likely it would be if the United States had pulled out of Iraq and an instantaneous sectarian violence situation where the Shias and the Sunnis would go at each other in an unrestrained way, where al Qaeda would have continued to maintain al Anbar province and expand their hold and a base camp for the world, the predictions--and they still remain true--that there are significant oil reserves in al Anbar province that would have been the wealth of that oil that could have gone into the pockets and the treasure chest of al Qaeda and funded their global operations.

The only significant refinery--I will say it this way--the most significant refinery in all of northern Iraq is in al Anbar province where Saddam put it so he could bring the Kurdish oil down and control the oil from Kurdistan for political reasons. That could have all been an al Qaeda base camp with lots of oil to fund it.

And it could have been the Shias and the Sunnis and the remaining Shias at battle with each other, and the Iranians making common cause with the Shias and taking over the oil fields in the south of Iraq where about 70 percent of the oil is and having control of both sides of the Straits of Hormuz and control of a lot more of the oil in the world, and the ability to shut off around 40 percent of the world's oil while the Kurds find themselves in a two-front war having declared independence.

That's just part of what would have happened if we had pulled out of Iraq, Madam Speaker. That was the advice of the gentlemen on the floor that argue against our involvement in Afghanistan.

And today, today, due to a brave and difficult decision made by our then-Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, who ordered the surge, that the courageous notion of investing American might and preserving a victory that may have been achieved in March and April and May primarily in 2003 that needed to be reachieved in a number of the cities that were taken over by al Qaeda and other forces that were contrary and in opposition to the United States, that order for the surge and noble bravery of our military, of all branches of service, came together in Iraq and provided the kind of security that has allowed the Iraqis to develop their own security forces.

And those forces now exceed--by the time--if you talk all of their security forces, they meet and exceed a number in the area of 600,000 that are providing for the safety of the Iraqi people.

The stability in Iraq today? Even though there are flareups of violence and flareups of suicide bombs that take place from time to time, there is a control of that country that has been taken over by the Iraqi people exactly within the design of President Bush--but not something that the gentlemen that spoke ahead of me could actually admit to, I don't believe, the level of success in Iraq.

I did introduce a resolution in February of this year that declares that we have achieved a definable victory in Iraq, and it defines the victory and it lays out the milestones along the way. A definable victory and by measure of a civil government that can provide for safety and security for its people at a level significantly higher than it was. American casualties that went down to the point of where it was as likely that we would lose an American in Iraq due to an accident as to the enemy.

The civilian government establishments there, the distribution of the oil revenue, the list of accomplishments ratifying a Constitution far faster than we were able to do so in the United States when we established our first Constitution. The drafting and the writing and the passage and the ratification process in its entirety were quicker in Iraq than it was in the United States of America.

So of all of the milestones, of all of the benchmarks that were imposed by this Congress on the Iraqi Government and the Iraqi people and the responsibility of our President Bush at the time and the Commander in Chief of our military and our military personnel, of the 18 benchmarks, 17 of the 18 benchmarks--even as of last February--had been wholly or substantially achieved. And the 18th benchmark was an amorphous benchmark that is moving in that direction. What matters is how you define it.

That's what happened. We've achieved a definable victory in Iraq,

and that accomplishment was done not because of people who wanted to pull out, that didn't have the resolve, that didn't understand the price that America pays down the line for lack of resolve in this moment of history.

I would use an example, Madam Speaker, and that would be on June 11 of 2004, I was sitting in a hotel room in Kuwait City waiting to go into Iraq the next morning. And I was watching Al-Jazeera TV. And on Al-Jazeera TV, June 11, 2004, with the English closed-caption, Moqtada al-Sadr came on--the head of the Mahdi militia who gave us so much trouble. And he said--judging by the closed caption that I read, and presumably it was in Arabic--he said, If we continue attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. He was predicting that the Americans would not have the resolve to achieve a victory in Iraq.

And had that been the case, if the President of the United States, if the balance of the Republicans in this Congress and some of the national security Democrats had not had resolve, today we would be seeing the calamity in Iraq that I have just laid out as the likely scenario. And we would also be listening to Osama bin Laden and perhaps Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a courtroom in New York say, Well, the Americans left Vietnam, and they left Lebanon, they left Mogadishu, and they pulled out of Iraq. Americans don't have resolve. All it takes to defeat American might is persistence and perseverance and a willingness to fight a war of attrition and accept the casualties. And if you do that long enough, Americans will lose their patience and will lose their will. That was the message that Moqtada al-Sadr got. He said it directly into Al-Jazeera TV, June 11, 2004. It was the message that Osama bin Laden got when he was inspired to attack the United States because he didn't believe that we had the resolve to strike back or the resolve to keep the pressure on.

And because America sent a weak message--Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu--it inspired our enemies to take us on and challenge us because if they see a sign of weakness, that is where they would attack.

The Japanese didn't think that America had that kind of resolve when they attacked us on December 7, 1941. We did show the resolve when we were attacked, and we showed the resolve after September 11, 2001, and we need to show the resolve in Afghanistan, although it is a much more difficult nut to crack. To that extent, I will give my colleagues in the previous hour their due.

My first trip to Afghanistan, it was in the middle of the most difficult times in Iraq, when most didn't see a way out that would be victorious in Iraq. I came back and said, We will be in Afghanistan a lot longer than we will be in Iraq because Afghanistan is a lot closer to the Stone Age than Iraq. They don't have the transportation. They don't have the infrastructure. They don't have a modern education system. They are living closer to the Stone Age. There is only one highway that transfers assets across the country, and that is a highway that we turned into a paved highway. Other than that, it was a trail.

The Afghanis, many of them live up in valleys in the mountain, and that zone in a particular valley is where the tribe is. So it is much more difficult to maintain security in a country that has been at war and has been able to reject or eject any of its conquerors.

The difference is that Americans are not invaders and occupiers. We are liberators. Where we have gone, we have liberated people. And wherever American soldiers have gone, there has been a tremendous blessing that is left in the aftermath, especially if we stay and pass along American values.

Some few years ago, I was at a hotel here in downtown Washington, D.C., to hear a speech from President Arroyo of the Philippines, and I guess this was about 2004. She said, Thank you, America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to our islands in 1898, thank you for freeing and liberating us. Thank you for sending your priests and pastors who taught us your faith. Thank you for sending us 10,000 American teachers--and she had a Filipino name for them which I missed--and the American teachers and the priests and pastors and the soldiers.

She forgot to mention actually the Army, she said marines, they taught us the American way of life. You taught us the English language. You taught us the values, and I will summarize it in my words, not hers, the values of Western civilization. She said today, 1.6 million Filipinos leave the islands to work wherever in the world they want to go, and they send a lot of their money back to the Philippines, representing, and she gave the number, but a high percentage of the gross domestic product of the Philippines.

The benefit of having the American civilization arrive in the Philippines is evident more than 100 years later, and we are thanked for it by the President of the Philippines.

And now we look around the world and we see, is Japan better off or worse off in the aftermath of Imperial Japan, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Japan better off because the Americans went into Japan and helped set up a free market capitalistic system, a system of representative government that is no longer run by the Emperor that our Commander in Chief gave a 90-degree bow before a couple of days ago?

Madam Speaker, I wasn't particularly alarmed when I heard that the President had bowed to the Emperor of Japan until I saw the videotape of the President of the United States bowing 90 degrees. It was almost a genuflection before the Emperor of Japan, so far different than it was before the ceremonies of surrender on the USS Missouri. And never in the history of the country do we have the record of a President of the United States bowing before any foreign leader, and no President of the United States should ever bow before another foreign leader. And yet we have seen this happen and we have seen this unfold around the country, around the world, a global tour of contrition that has diminished the power and the influence of the United States.

Some Nation has to be the superpower in the world. We should have adjusted to this fairly easily. It was a struggle that we were involved in. At the beginning of the Cold War, and you can pick your date on when that starts. Was it the blockade that brought about the Berlin Airlift? Was it the 1948 speech at Fulton, Missouri, when Winston Churchill laid out the identification of the Cold War when he said an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe? But some place between 1945 and 1948, the Cold War began.

The Russians and the East Germans began building their Berlin Wall in 1961, and that wall stood until November 9, 1989. That period of time clearly is Cold War time, and you can expand onto that, back it up to about 1948 or earlier, and the Cold War wasn't quite over for some months after the Berlin Wall started to come down, about the time the Soviet Union imploded, and the date I will pick on that, the specific date, would be December 31, 1990. That is about as close a date as we can get to the end of the Soviet Union.

At that period of time, we could celebrate that the Cold War was over and that the United States of America had emerged as the world's only superpower, and that this contest, this struggle, that was between this communism, hardcore socialism, militarily imposed economies with a regime that believed that the person, the individual, the human being, God's unique gift of the now six billion plus of us on this planet, that people existed for the State. That was their position. That was Karl Marx's position, and that is what has evolved in the thought process of the utopianists for 150 or more years.

And yet we saw the Soviet Union implode after we saw freedom echo across Eastern Europe in nation after nation. We just celebrated yesterday or the day before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, where thousands and thousands of Czechs stood in the square in Prague peacefully and held their keys up, Madam Speaker, and rattled their keys for hours on end, rattling their keys for freedom. We can hear what that is like. That echoes back 20 years, and we saw Vaclav Havel step forward and become the leader of that nation, and they divided it into the two separate parts also in a peaceful way.

A little bit of violence along throughout Eastern Europe, but from the

standpoint of the hundreds of millions of people who became free in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and part of that was the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the maximum number of people breathe free air for the least amount of blood I believe in the history of the world, and that freedom echoed, I would argue then, all of the way across Eastern Europe, from the wall in Berlin, all of the way across Eastern Europe, all of the way across Russia, all of the way to the Pacific Ocean, at least for a time.

And the optimism that I had, and that hope, that faith, that belief that the Cold War was really over and that then the free market capitalism and the freedom that we have that the rights--our rights come from God, and they are enumerated in our Constitution, but they are God-given rights, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that the image of that, the inspiration of our freedom and the power of the free market system had set aside, had pushed away, had defeated every competing model for a civilization that had been designed by the world, Madam Speaker.

I have to characterize this another way, more succinctly in the words of another, and that was Jeanne Kirkpatrick who in the early part of the Reagan administration was the ambassador to the United Nations. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, as she stepped down as ambassador to the United Nations to pursue other endeavors, she said, What is going on in this Cold War is this: That the Soviet Union and the United States of America, these two superpowers clashing in this Cold War, are the equivalent of, the contest is the equivalent of playing chess and monopoly on the same board. With our free market economy and monopoly, and with the Soviet Union's massive buildup in military ability, she said playing chess and monopoly on the same board, and the only question is will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the Soviet Union checkmates the United States militarily. Chess and monopoly on the same board. Do the Russians go bankrupt before they checkmate us with their ICBM missiles and their other military equipment and hardware, the massive military that they were developing?

We know the answer to that now. That was about 1984 that Jeanne Kirkpatrick made that statement. And November 9, 1989, and the ensuing months up until the last day in 1990 when the Soviet Union was I think officially imploded, we saw that free market capitalism, freedom, the inspiration of the rights that come from God that are enumerated in our Constitution and that flow, that the government is of, by, and for the people, and that the people grant the authority that comes from God to their legitimate elected representatives to govern them in an orderly fashion, that that system of government, our constitutional Republic prevailed, prevailed over the utopian mistake, the colossal error that cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Karl Marx's approach to utopianism. That is what we saw happen, Madam Speaker.

I believed then, in 1989, in the early winter of 1989 and throughout 1990, 1991, through the early part of the 1990s until the late 1990s some time, I believed that it was clear to the rest of the world that freedom had won, that free market capitalism had won. I didn't think it was arguable, and I thought somehow that those leaders in the world would realize the reality that they couldn't compete with a system that tapped into the vitality of the inspiration of every individual who had their own franchise and their own opportunity and their own rights to engage in making their lives better for themselves and their family, and to do so in a moral and ethical fashion within the framework of the rule of law. I believed the rest of the world would see that clearly.

Look at Eastern Europe, the region that so recently had won its freedom: How could they begin to think in this myopic, utopian fashion of, let's say, of Marx and Hegel and others that are part of the utopian philosophers in that part of the world. How could they think that? So they went underground for awhile and they drifted away and they became this amorphous, loosely and most often disorganized group of people who were still Marxists, they were still Communists, they were still believers in a managed society, a managed economy, a utopian world, the kind of world where liberal-thinking elitists would manage the resources of humanity and that every human being was a tool of the state and you were there to glorify the state.

And so they emerged again, Madam Speaker. And as they emerged, they began to form alliances against the United States. And those alliances that were formed brought about these alliances that we are faced with today.

I mean, it wasn't unpredictable that the Islamic fundamentalists would rise up and begin to attack the United States. That wasn't unpredictable. In fact, it was predicted, not by me, but by other people who had an insight into human nature and history that went beyond the things that I could sense at that time at least.

And so we have seen the philosophy of ``the enemy of my enemy is my friend.'' There is a certain factor, and I will just called it national jealousy, that envy factor that comes into play. Europe had lost a lot of its glory. They had formed in the 1970s, at least, and perhaps earlier than that, the European Union. The goal of the European Union was to establish the United States of Europe, to establish the United States of Europe incrementally by a common currency and opening up borders and providing for open and free trade in the European Union.

It was designed and it was in print as a policy position and objective and a goal. And the mission statement was to shape the European Union into the United States of Europe and to provide, quote, ``a counterbalance to the United States of America,'' close quote.

You can see where Europe didn't like the idea that the United States of America--the progeny of Europe is what we have been--could become the unchallenged superpower in the world. So that resistance and objection emerged from Western Europe, the Western Europe that represents, I think, the ancestors to modern day Western civilization. But there is a little nation envy that goes on, and there is an aspiration of a wannabe in trying to make the world a better place.

In Eastern Europe they hung onto their freedom a little bit more, and I have observed that those people who have most recently achieved their freedom are the ones who protect it and guard it the most jealously. That has been the case with the Eastern Europeans who remember what it was like to live under the yoke of communism who celebrated in this month, and will celebrate every November 9 of every year from here on, the fall of the Wall, the literal crashing of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War and the beginning of freedom that echoed across Eastern Europe, and by some estimations all of the way across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, until the utopianists, the control people, the dictators began to emerge and to take away the freedoms.

We believed, I think, for some time that in Russia, the remainder of the old Soviet Union, that they had that level of freedom that the people in Russia wanted. We believed they had free elections and freedom of press and a free market economy. At least it was emerging, and people were willing to learn how to compete in a free market economy. But today we see that Putin has diminished that dramatically, that the elections are not the legitimate elections that we had hoped we would see in Russia, that free market capitalism is instead controlled often by a Russian mob, a Russian mafia, and favoritisms that take place and the payoffs that go on within indicate a corrupt society that's now run for the glorification and the power and the enrichment of the rulers. That's the case in a number of other countries in the world.

But we're unique here in the United States of America. Madam Speaker, we're a unique people. And, yes, we are the progeny of Western Europe, and we are the progeny that came from primarily Western European stock. And at the time that we received the best that Western Europe had to offer, we also received a fundamental Christian faith as the core of our moral values.

This is a Judeo-Christian Nation, Madam Speaker. The core of our moral values is embodied within the culture. Whatever church people go to or

whether they go to church, wherever they worship or whether they worship, we still have the American people who, as a culture, understand Christian values and Christian principles, the Judeo- Christian values that are timeless.

So I would illustrate that, Madam Speaker, in this way. An example would be this: Let's just say if an honorable man from Texas were to pull into his driveway and his neighbor's dog had gotten loose and had run underneath the tire of his car. If you're in Texas or Iowa or most of the places in the country, if you run over your neighbor's dog, what do you do? This is how I'm going to illustrate this is a Christian Nation. You go over and knock on your neighbor's door and you say, Well, Joe, I just killed your dog. I'm sorry.

Well, there are two things that happened there. One of them is confession, I just killed your dog. I'm sorry, his repentance. The third thing you say is, Will you forgive me? I didn't mean to. It was an accident. So you would have confession, repentance, and you ask for forgiveness. And the neighbor, Joe, will say, Well, it wasn't your fault. Of course you're forgiven. And that is the path of Christian forgiveness that takes place even when we run over our neighbor's dog.

This is a Christian Nation, and the foundation of Western civilization are those kinds of values. And this is rooted going as far back as the Age of Reason in Greece where the foundations and the principles of logic and reason and science were developed, and it flows through Western civilization into the division of the Age of Enlightenment that took place, the English speaking half where we got our free enterprise and our freedom from and the non-English-speaking half of the Age of Enlightenment where we got a lot of these utopian ideas that flowed down here. And some of them have polluted the thought process, and they clearly pollute the thought process here in the United States Congress where many have suspended their ability to reason.

I recall even this week being criticized by a professor of political science who assigned me a belief system and then attacked the belief system that he assigned to me. You wouldn't have gotten by with that in front of Socrates or Milton Friedman, for example, and you shouldn't get by with that in this society either. If person after person in this Congress takes the posture that we should be legislating in part by anecdotes and by feelings and by emoting, by something sympathetic so that no one falls through anything, that we create a sieve that there are no cracks in, truthfully, Madam Speaker, society doesn't work that way. There is good and there is evil in all of us.

We're predominantly good. We have to punish the evil and reward the good. And our job in this Congress is to enhance and increase in public policy, to the extent we can, the average annual productivity of our people. And if that is brought about in a moral fashion, that improves the quality of life, the standard of living of everyone in the United States of America, and it strengthens us from a military, economic, social, and cultural standpoint. And we are being weakened by people who undermine our national security, by people who are constantly assaulting free enterprise, capitalism, by people who are constantly assaulting the rule of law. And the rule of law does apply and it applies in securing our borders.

I see my friend from Missouri has arrived on the floor, and whatever is on his heart at the time, I'd be so happy to yield to the gentleman. The gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin).

It could be anarchy.

I thank the gentleman from Missouri for coming in to add that.

The components of this freedom that seem to be completely disregarded over on this side of the aisle and the debate that we've gone through on health care and the argument that there are certain freedoms in that fashion, I recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech. And if you go down to the memorial down here at FDR's memorial, you can walk along and look at the display. He's the longest serving President of the United States. He had some ideas. I think he was very strong in leading this country through victory in World War II. I think that his economic leadership throughout the Great Depression extended and made the Great Depression greater than it might have been if we had allowed free market capitalism to prevail.

But Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the famous Four Freedoms speech, and the four freedoms were painted and drawn by Norman Rockwell on the cover of Life Magazine, as I recall it. And the four freedoms were freedom of speech, good. Freedom of religion, also good. Both of those are constitutional freedoms. They are protected in the Constitution specifically. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion. The other two were freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Now, if any people can be free of want, that means that they don't have any desire to get up and go do anything. They don't want for anything. We know back during the 1970s when the American people were worried about the economic juggernaut of Japan swallowing our free market up because Japan was growing so fast and they were such intense competitors and they had cash left over and they were buying into the United States and competing directly, and I remember this from being a little boy.

We first started getting products from Japan that were little New Year's toys like the little whistles and those that spring out like that when you blow it. I don't know what you call those. I think the Japanese made the Chinese handcuffs we had to play with, too, if I'm not mistaken. Little paper products that came from Japan. And then things got a little better, and I can remember about the time I was in junior high school, I had a little Toshiba transistor radio where you could listen to a radio with a battery in it and walk around. That was a pretty neat deal. And as things went on, we started to see the Japanese make optics, and so the optical equipment today is state of the art. Very good. Very good recording, a very good electronic device.

The quality of what they were doing was pretty primitive just after World War II, which one would expect, and it got better and better and better. And by the 1970s, the Japanese were doing many things better than we were here in the United States. And we were worried that Japan was going to take us over, defeat us economically and eclipse the American economy because our production, our export markets were diminishing and theirs were increasing, and that was the first time, I think, in my lifetime we were worried about the balance of trade.

I said then and I will say today that if you wanted to destroy a culture, a free enterprise culture, a dynamic culture and civilization, the United States has a simple solution. What we would do is we would just go in and airdrop money over in Japan, and as long as they didn't work, we'd fly them in money. If you drop money down in the streets of Tokyo and if people could gather that up every day and spend it and buy what they needed, they wouldn't want for anything and they wouldn't work for anything. It would destroy the work ethic of a culture and a civilization. That's how you would do it. If you want to create a socialist state, I can tell you how to do that, too, Madam Speaker.

And that is, go out into the middle of the Sahara Desert, where there isn't a soul, not even a camel, for 100 miles, and hang a pipe there from a sky hook--that's our expression for when you don't have anything to hang it to, you just hang it to a sky hook--and hang a pipe there and drop Federal dollars down out of that pipe, let them billow out onto the sand in the desert; and pretty soon somebody would find that money and they would go there to grab that money and somebody else would come, somebody else would come. It wouldn't be earned income. That would just be something free that comes from the sky.

Federal money comes from the sky. It's been dumped all over America by this President: $787 billion in the stimulus plan; $700 billion in the TARP fund. And when you give people something for nothing, they lose their desire, they lose their want. They have freedom from want as long as they're dependent upon the benefactor. We could create a socialist state in less than a generation in the middle of the Sahara Desert if we just dumped money out there and gave it to people, and they would become dependent upon it. That is how you destroy a culture or a civilization. We've got to have want. We've got to have desire. I think Milton Friedman talked about how greed was a good quality. As long as it is a greed that's built upon a moral foundation and aspiration. And aspiration is a good thing.

And why anybody would think that greed doesn't exist in a socialist state is amazing to me. The people that are advocating for a socialist state, don't tell me you aren't. You are. You've taken all kinds of steps to move this Nation into a socialist state. If anybody wants to step into that debate, just stand up, I will yield right now; but I don't think you believe strongly enough to take me on.

You're moving us towards a socialist state. The people in this Congress on the left side have nationalized eight large entities: three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler. $787 billion in the stimulus plan. They have nationalized several congressional districts in my State. They don't exist, but they must have nationalized them. They've dumped money in there now and created these jobs where districts don't exist, where jobs don't exist, but it's put out here.

The freedom of the free market system has been dramatically diminished. And the people that advocate for this socialist state, this freedom from want, simply create a dependency class in America. FDR's inspiration is not a right. You don't have a right to not wanting for something. The heart of the American people, the heart of free people, has to want for something. We've got to desire for something. We've got to desire that the next generation lives better than we do. We've got to desire that we live in a moral and virtuous and a faithful society. We've got to raise our children that way. If we tie this together, then the world is a better place, and more people succeed and more people live better. And the harder we work, and the more we produce, it raises the average annual productivity. But if we don't want, we don't produce and, therefore, our productivity diminishes, and the sun sets on the American empire. That's freedom from want's mistake.

FDR's other mistake is freedom from fear. Freedom from fear. Now, if we don't fear anything, we don't move away from anything or we don't face those fears either. How can any government guarantee that you have a right to freedom from fear? Yet the belief over here, on the ever- encroaching socialist side of the aisle, is that we have a right to be free from want, free from fear, a right to health care, a right to your own personalized health insurance program, a program that will be delivered to every American human being, probably to the chimpanzees too like they want to do in Austria and have tried, but to every American human being a health insurance policy of your very own. That's what's in the bill; for illegals as well.

Here's how it works, Mr. Speaker. It works in this fashion. They have now covered every possible scenario of someone who is illegally in the United States and made sure everybody's covered if this bill finally becomes law. First of all, they undermined the proof of citizenship requirements in the Medicaid language and did so in the SCHIP rewrite, where they expanded health insurance for children and families of four, for example, in my State, making less than $75,000 a year, and providing that health insurance at 300 percent of poverty. In that bill, which, by the way, provided health insurance premiums for families that were also paying the alternative minimum tax; they had to pay the rich man's tax, then we had to subsidize the health insurance premiums for their children. And in that same bill, they wiped out the proof of citizenship requirements, the requirements for a birth certificate and other documents that are the foundation of verification for Medicaid eligibility so we are not providing Medicaid to illegals. That got wiped out.

Now an illegal person in the United States just simply has to attest to a Social Security number. Here's a number. It's mine. Fine. Here are your benefits. There are 9.7 million people who, in the United States, don't bother to sign up. They're here in this list. I won't go into that so far, Mr. Speaker, except to say, now, here, they want to give health insurance policies to every illegal in America. I've just talked about those that now just have to sign up for Medicaid. But some of them have jobs. Those that are working, the employer will be required to give them a health insurance policy, legal or not, and prohibited from verifying whether they are legal because E-Verify doesn't allow an employer to check their current employees; only new hires.

So under these scenarios that are there, and, by the way, if they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and the employer doesn't provide that health insurance, then the alternative is we will just cut them a check. We'll give them a refundable tax credit and say, take that and buy your health insurance, and they can go to the exchange that's created by this bill and they can buy health insurance from there. There is no scenario that can be contrived, Mr. Speaker, that an illegal in America would be denied, conceivably, a health insurance policy, much of it, we might even go so far, I'll say almost all of it, funded by the American taxpayer.

That's how far out of touch with reality the people over on this side of the aisle are. It is a lust for political power, and it's a direct assault on the rule of law in the United States of America, an assault on the producers in America, and it undermines the core of our character and who we are, and it dispirits the patriotic Americans. It undermines and erodes and corrodes our soul. That is what's at stake here.

I would yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

I just would inject this into our discussion. This was what James Russell Lowell had to say, a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln's, by the way. This is what he had to say about compromise: Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof. It is temporarily expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship. That's James Russell Lowell's statement on compromise. A good umbrella but a poor roof.

I would yield back to the gentleman from Missouri.

I would just reclaim my time. You've inspired a recent recollection. I believe it was just yesterday when the Federal Government panel came out and said to women, You no longer need to start getting mammograms when you're 40 years old. Wait till you're 50. You no longer need to get them every year. You can wait 2 years and space them out for a 2-year period of time. This is the precursor of the panels that we're likely to see if this bill that's before this Congress becomes law.

I will put the diagram of these 111 new agencies up here just so we have a little bit of an image of what is coming at us in America if we're not able to kill this bill. In any case, the advice that came from the panel on breast cancer is the kind of advice you'll get from a death panel.

The freedoms have been dramatically diminished here in the United States of America. There's been an assault on them. The vigor and vitality of the United States is under assault from the liberal socialist left. This is socialized medicine. We've seen the nationalization of a third of our economy and we need to get it back. The President needs an exit strategy from the nationalization of our economy. We need to kill this bill, Mr. Speaker, and we need to reach out and grasp American freedom, American liberty and American vitality.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, November 19, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman from Ohio.

I just recall that we were here together when we passed the litigation lawsuit abuse reform out of the House and it got stalled up in the Senate. That would be one thing I would point out that I think is important from an objective standpoint.

If the gentleman would yield, $54 billion was the score on the bill introduced this year.

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my privilege to be recognized to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives here tonight along with my colleagues that I have had this great honor and privilege to serve with throughout these years and this 111th Congress. I sat and listened to my friends on the other side of the aisle as they began to talk through this health care debate, which we have addressed, I think, quite a great deal over the last couple of months. No longer is it a legitimate point that we haven't had an adequate time to debate, although I don't know that there is anyone in this Congress that can read and digest 1,990 pages and then read the amendment that was 40 pages long that turns this into a 2,030 pages national health care act that affects every aspect of our lives.

This is not just nanny state, cradle to grave. This is conception to natural death or euthanasia, depending on which component of the bill one chooses to apply. There are carve-outs for euthanasia. There is at this point a Stupak amendment that is part of the bill, a Stupak-Pitts- Chris Smith amendment that is a pro-life amendment and is very valuable to me and many others.

However, there are grave concerns about the broad implications of this bill and the components of it that run anathema to the American Dream.

I will just address some of the things that the gentlemen spoke of in the previous hour. One of them is that Republicans allegedly sat around and did nothing while they were in the majority. We had a narrow majority, and we did something. We pushed an agenda that was seeking to improve health care in this country and reduce or eliminate the necessary burden on health care.

I made the point that we passed lawsuit abuse reform in this Congress. I believe the year was 2005. The lawsuit abuse that was passed was worked through the Judiciary Committee where I sat and where I participated in that language, and we modeled this after, of all places, a California initiative. Since that time, Texas has taken up the charge of reducing lawsuit abuse on medical malpractice in Texas. The doctors that were exiting the State have now turned around, and many of them have moved back to Texas and started their practices and other medical providers and practitioners have come into Texas.

Now they do have an adequate supply of doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners that are there. But the cost that was diminished by the gentleman from Ohio, the cost of lawsuit abuse, even though the bill that was offered by leadership scored at only $54 billion, to the gentleman from Ohio--1 percent, he said, of the overall health care costs--I don't know about that number. I didn't run those numbers. It doesn't seem to me, Mr. Speaker, that $54 billion is a minuscule amount. It doesn't seem to me that $54 billion is loose change. It doesn't seem to me that $54 billion is pencil dust.

Mr. Speaker, $54 billion is real money, and $54 billion is, though, a small percentage of the overall cost of lawsuit abuse when it comes to providing health care in America. Here are the numbers that emerged when one looks into the underlying costs of the lawsuit abuse. And the score that could come from the Congressional Budget Office cannot include all of this because they simply can't score some of the actual costs that don't index directly into the lawsuits themselves.

It works like this: there are high costs in premiums that doctors and providers are paying, especially OB/GYN doctors, and access to those doctors and services is getting more and more limited. There are also costs involved with the litigation, costs involved with the settlements, whether they are in-court or out-of-court settlements.

One might think that that's all the costs of the lawsuit abuse that is part and parcel of the overall costs of health care. But an even greater cost is the cost of unnecessary tests and procedures that are undergone by patients in this country directed by doctors in this country to avoid lawsuits, to protect themselves in the event of lawsuits, to minimize the risk and to also hold down their premiums for malpractice. So the cost overall of medical malpractice, the abuse of lawsuits for medical malpractice in America, the cost of the malpractice premiums coupled with the cost of the litigation, coupled with the cost of settlements both in and out of court, coupled with the unnecessary test tests, the defensive medicine that nearly every practitioner practices, whether it is something they can actually identify or whether it's a subliminal shift in their policy, all of those things together, the lowest number that can be applied is not 1 percent, to the gentleman from Ohio. The lowest number I can find out there by anyone's logical representation is 5.5 percent. The number that I trust the most is the 8.5 percent number that comes from the health insurance underwriters representative. And 8.5 percent is a low number.

Some of those numbers go up to 10.1 percent and on up into the 20s, 24, 25, 28 and even 35 percent of overall health care costs. Now I won't range up in there into that one-fourth to one-third of the overall costs because I think that's a harder number to defend, although it may be true. But I do believe that I'm on very solid ground defending 8.5 percent of overall health care costs going to either premiums for malpractice, trial lawyers, those settlements or defensive medicine. Out of the overall costs of providing health care to America, 8.5 percent comes to $203 billion a year. That's only 1 year. This bill gets scored over 10 years.

So, that $203 billion over 10 years exceeds $2 trillion, $2 trillion in the aggregate costs of premiums and litigation and settlements, unnecessary settlements. We're going to keep everybody whole. Those who are the unfortunate who are, I'll say, victims of medical malpractice, we're going keep them whole. We're going to make sure that their medical costs are paid for and their loss of income are paid for and there's pain and suffering there, but not the noneconomic damages, not that component that goes off into $7 million for spilling a cup of coffee on one's lap at McDonald's as happened, and I understand that that was negotiated down and reduced after the fact.

So, 8\1/2\ percent of our overall health care costs going for lawsuit abuse. And we can reform a lot of that. We can reform a lot more than $54 billion of it, and it totals in its aggregate over $2 trillion, which in and of itself is enough to, according to the CBO, pay for Nancy Pelosi's socialized medicine plan, Mr. Speaker.

I think this puts it in a perspective that's far more legitimate than was offered by the previous gentlemen in the

previous hour, who also announced that if you make less than $89,000 a year, you're going to get a subsidy for your health insurance; $89,000 a year. And we're going to subsidize health insurance for people making $89,000 a year? Are they also going to be paying the alternative minimum tax, I wonder, Mr. Speaker? I suspect there will be many families if that is the case.

We saw what happened when the majority sought to change the SCHIP legislation, that State Children's Health Insurance Program that provides health insurance premiums for low income--kids in low-income families. That passed in about 1997. I remember implementing it in about 1998, when I was in the Iowa State Senate, at 200 percent of poverty. The States could have adjusted that to some degree. Two hundred percent of poverty is the part that I supported. And I come to this Congress and the first effort on the part of Speaker Pelosi was to change the SCHIP program to 400 percent of poverty, to fund health insurance premiums for children in families of four that are earning at 400 percent of poverty in my State, with the exemptions that were directed by Governor Culver, that meant that families of four making $102,000 a year could have their health insurance paid for by the taxpayers, the taxpayers who presumably, many of them are making less than $102,000 a year.

And that seemed to me to be an outrageously high income to have the health insurance premium subsidized by the taxpayers and the Federal Government. Since that time this voracious appetite to share the wealth, to take from those who have earned and invested and established capital, those, a lot of them whose investments are the investments that facilitate the creation of jobs, or they create the jobs themselves, scoop from that capital and distribute that to those who make less, takes away the incentive from those who make less to make more.

Why would anyone go out and take a risk and invest capital and start a business and employ people and create goods and services that have value to this economy, if they're just going--the Federal Government's just going to go in and tax your income, keep you from establishing a capital base so that you could grow that kind of a business and grow the jobs and take the money that you earn and funnel it over here, and to take the position that if you make $88,999 a year, Uncle Sam will cut you a check. And that check will go to--as long as you invest it in health insurance for your family, health insurance for your kids-- they're already covered, aren't they? Because this Congress passed ultimately at 300 percent of poverty, so that lowered that number down to $70,000, something like that, in my State.

But speaking of 70,000, that happens to be exactly the number of families in America that would qualify for Federal funding for the health insurance premiums for their children who also paid the rich man's tax, the alternative minimum tax; 70,000 families in America would have health insurance premiums for their children paid for by the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, they're writing an extra check for the alternative minimum tax because they make too much money in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Seem a little paradoxical, Mr. Speaker? Does it seem a little bit inconsistent? Does it seem a little illogical? Well, it is government, after all, and it's getting more and more illogical as time unfolds. But the statement that Republicans did nothing is not a factual statement. It's not even an opinion. It's a fact that Republicans in this House passed reform legislation in several different categories, and it was fought every step of the way by Democrats.

And by the way, when it did get out of this House, in spite of them, then it was blocked in the Senate. I said at the time on the malpractice, the lawsuit abuse reform, that the block that took place in the Senate was the result of the Senate being a wholly owned subsidiary, presumably, of the Trial Lawyers Association in America. Since that time, that investment seems to have paid off in the House of Representatives, and today, we have a House of Representatives that does not have one dollar worth of lawsuit abuse reform in a 1 to $2 trillion socialized medicine plan.

Now, how could any group have such influence on the House of Representatives and presumably still, and I think even more so, in the United States Senate, that $2 trillion in the aggregate of abuse and cost in our health care in America, over this period of 10 years, more than $2 trillion, and we can't find one dollar worth of savings in lawsuit abuse reform, not one dollar in this bill that is a bill that was sent to this floor by Speaker Pelosi. Not one dollar. And yet, the same people can advocate for cutting Medicare reimbursement rates by half a trillion dollars, almost $500 billion, taken out of our Medicare reimbursements, Medicare reimbursements that only pay 80 percent of the cost of delivering the services.

And the cost of delivering the services is not a cost that's calculated by the providers, by the health care practitioners, by the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the clinics. No, this cost of delivering the services is a number that's produced by Medicare itself. And then it gets a .8 multiplier across that number, and that's what they pay at Medicare. And so the White House has taken the position that there is waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare, and they're going to ferret that out. And they found some 10s and 20s and more billion dollars they've said of savings.

These billions of dollars of savings that they can provide to reduce and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare seem to be a bit amorphous. It's hard to identify this and, in fact, the White House has said, well, we know it's there. We are going to go in and help pay for socialized, I put that in quotes when I say it, Mr. Speaker, ``their socialized medicine plan,'' by reducing and perhaps eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare reimbursement.

So what do they do? They cut $500 billion, a skosh less, but $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, out of Medicare reimbursement rates, and then have not put their finger on where the abuse is, where the fraud is, where the waste is. It's just, trust us, we know what we're doing.

It reminds me of a Saturday night sitcom that I used to watch occasionally. And it was called Sledge Hammer! Sledge Hammer was a detective, and he had a sidekick named Dori Doreau. And they would go through a half-hour routine of criminals doing bad things, investigating them, and near the end of the show, something would happen such as Sledge Hammer would fall down the escalator, something would go up the escalator, tip off the railing, and it would go through this Rube Goldberg menagerie of calamities, and when the dust had settled, somehow Sledge Hammer was laying on top of the criminal and somehow there was a miraculous ending. And he would get up and say, Well, I told you, trust me; I knew what I was doing.

Well, I have about that level of confidence in an administration that would tell us they're going to find tens of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse, but they can't point their finger at it. And they just simply say, Trust us, we know what we're doing. And if you pass this national health care act then we will go into action and save this money to pay for it. But if we don't, do we actually have an administration that's willing to tolerate tens of billions of dollars on their alleged waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare? Are they holding the right to a legitimate integrity and fiscal responsibility in our government? Are they holding that right to a legitimate responsible government hostage to a bill, a bill that's socialized medicine?

And so if we pass this socialized medicine bill, the Senate and the conference report, and it goes to the President, whom I believe will sign anything that says national health care in the title--if we do all of that, then we get to find out this great secret in the White House: Where is all this waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare? I can tell you it's not in any significant amount in my district, Mr. Speaker. And I can tell you that because the providers that I have are getting significantly less than it costs to deliver that service.

In Iowa, we not only are the lowest State in the union in Medicare reimbursements rates, but we also provide consistently some of the highest quality outcomes by the consistent measures that come out. Iowa ranks in the top five time after time after time in

practice after practice and then in the aggregate and the composite. Often number one, more often number two. But we're in the top five consistently in the outcomes, medical outcomes.

And yet, we're the lowest in the Nation in reimbursement rates. And Iowa is, and I can say this with great confidence, the very best combination of cost and quality of health care delivered in the State, but the lowest reimbursements rates in the Nation. And now the White House wants to cut half a trillion dollars from Medicare reimbursement rates. And my State, I believe, is the most senior State in the union. We have the highest percentage of our population over the age of 85 of all of the States in the union. That includes my mother.

And in my district, the 32 counties in western Iowa, of the 99 counties in Iowa, and among the 32 that I represent, 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa are in the Fifth Congressional district, the district I represent. And so I believe I represent the most senior congressional district in America. Punished, presumably, by a half a trillion dollar cut in Medicare, based upon the very questionable and doubtful allegation that there are tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare.

I'm convinced it exists, Mr. Speaker. I think it exists in some of the large cities in the country, and I think it should be relentlessly and persistently rooted out. And we should take those criminals and we should do the perp walk with them, and we ought to get them locked up in prison where they belong. But you don't hold a principle that the American people have a right to, which is legitimate law enforcement and the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse, you don't hold that hostage to an ultimatum that we've got to pass a national health care act, socialized medicine, in order to have good government.

Good government is a right of the American people, and the American people need to demand that right. With the promise that, or the allegation, made by the gentlemen in the previous hour, that Republicans don't have any solutions--in fact the President himself has said Republicans don't have solutions. That statement was never supportable by fact. There have been at least 42 pieces of legislation, some of them comprehensive, introduced by Republicans in this 111th Congress alone. And the difference is we have logical, rational, free market freedom solutions that do not interfere and, in fact, heal up to some degree, the relationship between doctors and patients.

And here are some of them. I talked about ending lawsuit abuse. The next one is to provide for people to buy health insurance across state lines. For example, a young man, 25 years old in New Jersey, would pay approximately $6,000 for a health insurance policy that, if he could buy it in Kentucky, across the state lines, would cost him around $1,000. And yes there is a difference in mandates. And that's part of the difference. But they have put so many mandates on the health insurance premiums in New Jersey that you don't have those kind of options. And because of the regulations and the burden and the cost, and maybe, just maybe, the White House could be right on some waste, fraud, and abuse up there. I'm looking forward to working with their Governor-elect as he becomes Governor and maybe we can help root out some of the waste, fraud, and abuse. And I'd like to see New Jersey rewarded for doing that.

But, if people in America can buy insurance across state lines, and that $6,000 policy for the 25-year old man in New Jersey becomes a $1,000 policy for the 25-year old man in Kentucky, that dramatically reduces the cost of health insurance premiums in America.

Another thing that dramatically reduces the cost of health insurance premiums in America is when people have access to, and can afford to purchase safely, catastrophic health insurance. Catastrophic is an essential component of health insurance, and that works in this way, especially when we have health savings accounts. Those health savings accounts that when we passed the HSAs in 2003 in this Congress, and it was enacted into law, if a young couple--and I did this in round numbers--so at age 20 had invested the maximum amount into their HSA for that annual year, $5,150 for a couple, say, at age 20, and they maxed out each year--it's indexed to inflation--and spent $2,000 in real dollars out of that in legitimate health care costs and accrued that at 4 percent, and when I did this math it was a logical thing, and it will be a logical thing again to accrue those investment HSAs at 4 percent.

Throughout the 45 years of their working life when they arrived at Medicare eligibility rate having invested the maximum into the HSAs for that period of time and spent $2,000 a year out, they arrive at retirement with a health savings account of $950,000. Maybe it accrues it a little bit better. Maybe they spend a little bit less. But I am thinking in terms of well, sure, $1 million; a million dollars in an

Reclaiming my time, I would like to pose a question and ask your response.

In the previous hour, the gentleman from Ohio alleged that that $54 billion that would be saved by the lawsuit abuse reform would only be 1 percent of the overall cost of our health care; therefore, it's of small consequence and apparently not worth the trouble to take on the trial lawyers for that 1 percent. And I've made a response to that, but I would offer to the gentleman for his viewpoint since that is a field of your expertise.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas.

In the minute or so that we have left, I have in here in my hand a list of the new Federal agencies that are created by this bill.

This is the old chart for H.R. 3200. That's pretty scary. This is the new chart, and in the middle of that is the old chart. Now, here are all the new agencies that are created. Well, actually maybe not all of them. I've just highlighted a few of them on the front.

The program of administrative simplification, I think they know they've got something complicated. Health choices administration, that is the scary part, this guy right here. That's the new commissar- isioner, referenced by the gentleman from Texas. The qualified health benefits plan ombudsman, which tells you no one can deal with this bureaucracy so you have to have an intermediary already written into the bill. I don't know if you have to have somebody to deal with the ombudsman.

The health insurance exchange, where all of these policies and insurance companies would have to be approved. The State-based health insurance exchanges as well. Public health insurance option, well, that's the one that will squeeze out the private insurance companies.

The list of the colossal magnitude of this socialized medicine bill goes on and on: 111 new agencies, 2,030 pages altogether, and the bottom line of it is, Mr. Speaker, the dramatic reduction of Americans' choices and thereby our freedom and liberty under assault by people who believe that we have to have a nanny state and live under socialized medicine. And I stand in opposition and I will fight this all the way. And I do believe the American people will rise up and kill this socialized medicine bill.

Kill the bill, Mr. Speaker.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I would first say, as the gentleman from Georgia stated, all Americans deserve health care, that all Americans have health care, every single one. Eighty-five percent of us are insured and 85 percent of us are happy with the policy that we have.

The President has made two arguments. One of them is that health care in America costs too much money. What's your solution? Spend another $1.5 trillion. Too much money, throw another $1.5 trillion at it. That's upside down. What is the simplest part of logic that you don't understand?

Second thing, too many people in America are uninsured, 47 million. Well, subtract from that 47 million illegal aliens which will be funded under this bill, immigrants, those that qualify for Medicaid and other government programs, employer programs that make over $75,000 a year, now you're down to really only 12.1 million Americans who are without affordable options. That is less than 4 percent of America. And for that you would throw out the liberty of America, throw out the baby with the bathwater of the best health insurance industry in the world, the best health care delivery system in the world, destroyed by a desire to create a dependency society to steal our freedom.